Located in the state of Hesse in southwestern Germany, Marburg is proud of its unofficial name, Blindenstadt, which translates to “city of the blind. Of course, this does not mean that there are many of them in Marburg’s population of 73,000. But the blind and visually impaired live there more easily and comfortably than anywhere else, thanks to a single innovative school.
At the age of eight, Leon Porc began to lose his eyesight – later discovered to be a congenital condition that only manifested itself when the boy was allowed to use a computer. A year later, he began to have difficulty reading from the screen. To get information faster, nine-year-old Leon learned to speed up a voice application that reads aloud the content of Web pages and other electronic text. (Currently, it works five times faster than normal on his computer. An untrained person would not understand such a tongue twister).
Leon Porz was able to realize his scientific abilities when he moved from his hometown to Marburg in central Germany and enrolled in the German Center for Education and Rehabilitation of the Visually Impaired and Blind (Blindenstudienanstalt), commonly referred to as Blista. This unique educational institution has transformed the old green city, previously known only for its university, into a center of innovation that promotes inclusion.
The Blista Center has a rich tradition. It was founded in Marburg during World War I to provide education to young front-line soldiers blinded by the effects of chemical weapons. Since then, teachers and staff have become the authors of a number of inventions, including a collapsible cane and a tactile mathematical font. But it didn’t stop there: Blista has created an entirely different environment around itself, transforming the entire city into a place where, according to Leon Porz, everything is perfectly adapted for the blind.
Some of the innovations used in Marburg can be found in other places, but their combination is unique, say Porth and other visually impaired residents. The tapping of canes used by blind people can be heard with every step. Sound-activated traffic lights, fenced sidewalks, and “sleeping policemen” in pedestrian zones help them navigate the city and warn of dangers or obstacles ahead. Many buildings are equipped with relief maps of the premises, and installed miniature bronze models of Marburg Castle and other city landmarks allow you to feel what they look like.
A blind person can touch the model of the cathedral from all sides to understand what this impressive building looks like. Nature also helps. Marburg is hilly, which makes it easy to navigate in different directions depending on whether you are going up or down. There are many accessible entertainment and sports facilities for the blind in the city, including riding and climbing schools, rowing, football and skiing clubs.
Marburg University, founded in 1527 as the first Protestant educational institution in Germany and known as Philip’s University in honor of its founder, the Hessian Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous, has the highest percentage of blind students and graduates in the country. They mainly choose law and psychology because they are mainly text-based, but recently science has also become popular, although there are more obstacles for visually impaired people to study it. Blista is constantly working with the university to make all faculties as accessible as possible for the visually impaired.
After graduating from Blista, Leon Porth enrolled not at the University of Marburg, but at the University of Düsseldorf, where he is studying biochemistry and computer technologies. “I don’t feel like a pioneer, although I am,” he says. Leon is the first blind biochemistry student at the University of Düsseldorf, and as far as he knows, there are only a few people like him in the whole of Germany. Chemistry has always been considered an unsuitable profession for the blind because it involves working with reagents and a large number of drawings, graphs, and tables. But Tobias Mank, a chemistry teacher at the Blista School, which is part of the Karl Schweitler Center, who taught Porz, disagrees. “Even sighted people cannot see molecules and atoms,” he says.
Manke, who is sighted, started working at Blista in 2013. Before him, chemistry was taught at a basic level. Manke and his colleagues have developed a set of tools and methods for teaching science to the blind. The University of Marburg’s Faculty of Chemistry and the Reinhard Frank Foundation helped them. Mank’s master’s thesis is dedicated to this topic. The textbooks used in Blista differ from others in that they are comprehensive and show phenomena in their completeness and interdependence. For example, a three-dimensional model of a water molecule created by specialists from several universities can be flattened by hand so that a blind person can imagine what it looks like in a two-dimensional image.
Marburg is a hilly city, which makes it easier to navigate up and down hills. We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what happens next. Episodes The end of the story: Advertising podcasts. The plastic model of a meandering river channel, made by colleague Manke Tanya Shapat using a 3D printer and placed under a faucet, allows students to physically feel how water flows at different speeds depending on the relief of the bottom and the contours of the banks. Then the teacher explains that where the bottom is flat, the depth is shallower, the water warms up better, and there are more fish and algae in it. Instead of Bunsen burners with an open flame, electron heaters in perforated metal housings are used for chemistry lessons at the Blista Center. Heat-resistant paper that swells at elevated temperatures demonstrates how bodies expand when heated. The sound sensor emits a high-pitched signal when the liquid lightens during a chemical reaction and a low-pitched signal when it darkens. “We conduct experiments in a way that does not require vision,” says Tobias Manke, showing me these video communication devices. “The students tactically feel heat and cold, hear and smell, and if it’s edible, they taste it. In a normal classroom, I could show an experiment in five seconds and 30 people would see it. It would be faster and easier, of course, but it’s not suitable for our students. In 2017, the school offered an in-depth study of chemistry for the first time, and the number of interested students was so great that in 2019 it was necessary to register two classes. During the pandemic, Mank (presumably a teacher) told his students about Covid-19 using convex tables for the visually impaired. When the school was closed for quarantine, he sent each student home with appliances and visual aids, and some of the students improved them with their own hands. Recently, the Karl Strela School has accepted a number of sighted teenagers to study with blind students and use the same multisensory teaching aids. Research shows that both children and adults learn better when they use other senses in addition to their eyes. Tobias Manki, for example, has confirmed this through his own experience.
School was not the only thing that helped Leon Porz explore and navigate the world. He fondly remembers how safe he felt on the streets of Marburg, thanks to audible traffic lights, “talking” bus stops, and friendly people. City bus drivers are trained to stop for blind passengers, and store clerks are trained to serve them. Restaurants offer menus printed in Braille. Porc says that such things exist in other cities, but nowhere are they so widespread and comprehensive. “In Marburg, the individual elements are well connected and almost nothing is missing,” he says. “There is a special mentality. Blista works, many of its graduates go to the local university, so there are many blind people, and all the city organizations and services are used to dealing with them.”
The blind soccer team from Marburg is considered one of the strongest in Germany. Uwe Boyzen, a retired judge and former president of the German Association of Blind and Visually Impaired Students and Professionals, which was founded in Marburg, graduated from the Karl Strehl School and then studied law at the University of Marburg in the late 1960s. The most important thing, he believes, is the sense of community and mutual support that has developed in Marburg. “It gives you courage and encourages you to try something new,” he says. This spirit determined Boijen’s destiny. In his day, there were fewer career opportunities for the blind in Germany than there are today, although there were about the same number of visually impaired judges, about one hundred, mainly because of the disabled from the relatively recent war. While in law school, Boizen and other blind law students traded tapes of lectures and textbooks, and then used their professional knowledge to advocate on behalf of people with disabilities.
Bagauddin Batmaz, a blind computer programmer and inclusive technology instructor from Marburg, Germany, claims that many of them are useful for everyone. For example, at “talking” bus stops, you can press a button to hear information about the arrival time and route of the next bus. Many visually impaired people also use this convenience. And when he made his website more screen-readable, the number of visitors skyrocketed – presumably not just from the visually impaired. “The combination of technology and human factors is very effective,” he says. “When a blind person isn’t constantly struggling to cross the damn street, they have time to think about something useful, and they become friendlier to those around them.”
Dago Shelin, a visually impaired cameraman and mass media researcher at the University of Marburg, Germany, comes to similar conclusions in his work on Marburg as a model for implementing inclusive technologies. He and his co-authors describe Marburg as a “smart city for the blind. The idea of a “smart city” usually focuses entirely on computer technology. According to Shelina, Marburg offers an alternative concept in which the human factor, interaction and support play an important role. According to Shelin, the accessibility of urban spaces for people with disabilities should become a mandatory criterion for evaluating the level of progress of any city, and Marburg serves as an example for everyone in this regard. Shelin, who moved to Marburg from Brazil in 2014, met many blind people there who were interested in filmmaking and developed an original multisensory teaching method for them. “This strengthened my belief that film can do anything,” he says.
Blind programmer Leonora Dreves, who lives in Heppstadt in southern Germany, heads a subgroup of the German Association of Blind and Visually Impaired Students and Professionals in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Most of its members work in the field of information technology, which is sufficiently accessible to people with disabilities. But there are also obstacles for them. The main thing is to change people’s consciousness, Drevs believes. “I think the most difficult obstacles are the ones in our minds. As a blind woman, I had to prove for a long time that I was not weaker than others in my field. Blind scientists and inventors around the world are beginning to break down these barriers. Mona Minkara, a professor of bioengineering at Northeastern University in Boston, is using computer models to study chemical processes in the human lung and developing ways to teach science and math to the visually impaired. The Japanese Tiako Asakawa is involved in the development of low-cost interfaces and systems for narrating computer pages. Astronomer Vanda Dias-Merced of the European Gravitational Laboratory in Pisa has invented a way to convert large amounts of space data into audio format.
Meanwhile, in Düsseldorf, Leon Porz continues his education. His sighted friends help him cope with the visually rich course material by describing the contents of the tables and illustrations in words. While in quarantine, he listened to taped lectures at double speed, slowing down at difficult points. Porc discusses scientific ideas with his former teacher Manke, and the work of the Blista Center continues to inspire him. “He gave me a tremendous push,” says the blind student. “It made me realize what was possible for me and what could become possible if I tried.”