Physics without sight

Abstract

As recently as ten years ago blind students in colleges and universities of New York City were excluded from natural science courses because of the belief that they would not be able to handle the laboratory work. The writer has personally known of many similar occurrences in other places and of even more recent origin. The notion that blindness necessarily bars an individual from any discipline involving laboratory work is, for the most part, a pure fallacy, and this is certainly the case in the domain of physics. During the past few years enormous strides have been taken toward making practically all physical data directly available to the blind, and it now seems highly appropriate that these advances should be made a matter of record, readily available to all who might be concerned.