A total solar eclipse is usually described as something to see. At Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, working with the Evansville Association for the Blind, the Park Service set out to make it something people with limited or no vision could follow, understand and share — in the spirit of Universal Design, where what works for them widens the experience for everyone.
Following it without seeing it
- A live audio description of the eclipse streamed to visitors' phones through an app, and visitors talked by phone with other people watching it.
- The crowd itself was a narration: visitors heard others describe the sun's crescent shrinking and growing as the moon crossed it, react to the corona appearing around the sun, and cheer at totality, when the moon covered the sun completely and it went as dark as night.
- Their own skin told them too: they felt the temperature drop as the sun's light was blocked.
- Staff of the association and the memorial talked the event through with them.
Three models to hold
| Model | How it works |
|---|---|
| Table-top sun, moon and Earth | A large beach ball is the sun; stick pins, set some distance away, are the Earth and moon — so the difference in size can be felt |
| Walkable line on the lawn | The beach ball sits on the grass, with the Earth and moon placed along a string at their relative distances. Walking it shows where the moon sits, to scale, between sun and Earth when it blocks the sun's light |
| Hand-held ecliptic plane | A round wooden ball is the sun, with a black half-circle mounted at an upward slant around it for the ascending side of the ecliptic plane — the imaginary plane of Earth's orbit. Visitors worked out that the descending side runs below the sun at a similar slant |
The table-top model of the sun, moon and Earth. NPS / Schier.
The walkable model of the positions and distances of the sun, moon and Earth. NPS / Schier.
The hand-held model of the ascending and descending ecliptic plane. NPS / Schier.
Sources
Based on "Eclipse Experience through Tactile and Participatory Learning Models," National Park Service, Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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