One might think that the visually impaired would have a difficult time navigating Second Life, but Louise Later, an SL developer and a person who is legally blind, is not one of them.

Working with the Colorado-based Virtual Ability, Louise took the challenge of overcoming the obstacles in Second Life head-on. She recently presented her inspirational experiences at the ITSE Speaker Series, as reported on the SLED blog.

Louise found a sled dog inworld called Max. From there, she wished to transform the sled dog into a guide dog: the problem was building the script. Judging from this photo, she was more than successful:

But even more amazing than this – and this should go somewhere in a list of amazing digital innovations – Louise and her technology partners (including Simon Stevens along with Virtual Ability) were able to create an item that can read braille-encoded objects:

The script takes the braille and translates it using the inworld voice chat.

SLED write a summation that is worth repeating:

This is a great example of what I find most fascinating about Second Life; here, educators are literally part of cutting-edge research and development in virtual worlds, dreaming, designing, testing and using tools that may, some day, change the way millions of others interact in virtual space. It was a truly humbling, empowering, exciting hour.