The Art and Science of Teaching Orientation and Mobility 2013 Edition made Screen Readable for Blind and Visually Impaired Persons by Professor T K Bansal.

The lessons on the room-familiarization procedure are the first to put the onus of learning the environment directly onto the student. As the student gains human guidance, self-protection, and some basic cane skills, he is concurrently developing rudimentary orientation skills. Until this point, however, he has moved through the environment with his specialist’s guidance and tutelage and hence has not had to understand fully all the intricacies of the building in which he has received instruction. As he learns the room-familiarization procedure, he will discover the basics of acquainting himself with any room or floor of a building, an entire building, or any outdoor travel area. Therefore, the specialist should help the student to learn this procedure thoroughly and to transfer the skill to numerous other environments.

To teach the self-familiarization process, the specialist first uses a small room containing only a few pieces of furniture. After the student has used the procedure, he explores rooms containing a variety of types of furniture, shapes, and configurations to ensure that the skill can be transferred to other unfamiliar environments. The specialist observes the student during these later lessons and provides less and less verbal feedback while the student explores the areas.

The student's transfer of skills to other rooms can be documented in several ways.
First, the student can be asked to walk through a room and point out its various characteristics.
Second, the student can make a tactile or low-vision map of the room to demonstrate knowledge of its contents. (A low vision map illustrates the layout of a room, building, or outdoor area in a manner that can be perceived by a person with low vision, for example, by using ink that contrasts with the paper, avoiding the burden of too much information, and using fonts that are bold and large enough to be seen by the person with low vision).
Third, the student can make an auditory map of the room or a verbal, digitized description of the layout of the room.

The specialist is responsible for teaching the student how to make such maps. (Maps are discussed further in Chapter 11; for information on constructing tactile, low vision, and auditory maps, see Edman, 1992, and Bentzen & Marston, 2010.)

As a general rule of thumb, O&M specialists ought not to expect their students to be able to do what they have not yet been taught. This rule of thumb should be applied to every situation in which the student interacts with the environment and should guide the specialist's determination of when to intervene during a lesson. If the student has not yet experienced a situation that occurs in a lesson, the specialist should not expect him to use acceptable skills or procedures. It is up to the specialist to judge whether to intercede or not, and if so, when, and how. These decisions are at the core of guiding the student toward independent travel skills.

The room-familiarization procedure is usually introduced after the specialist judges that the student has gained the necessary requisite skills, which include the human guide, self-protection, and long cane techniques described to this point, along with an understanding of laterality, directionality, and the five-point travel system. Because the room is “unfamiliar" to the student, technically the student should already have learned the two-point-touch cane technique, since using this skill first assures that the student will be adequately protected while moving through an unfamiliar environment. If at first, the specialist thinks the cane might only get in the way, she may wish to introduce the process before the student has learned any cane skills but has adequate self-protection skills. The room- familiarization procedure applies to any room and is learned in the sequence of perimeter familiarization and the use of the grid pattern that follows.

5.5.1 Perimeter Familiarization

Room familiarization begins with an exploration of the perimeter of a room in the following way:

• The specialist guides the student into the room and closes the door behind them, and the student places his back on the closed door. The specialist explains the reasons for learning to become familiar with a room and the procedures that will be followed.
• The student uses the door through which he entered the room as his home base, or reference point because it is the only known component of the room as yet. He then explores the door with his hands to find recognizable features, since there may be numerous other doors in the room, and he must be able to discern his home base from the other doors. Therefore, he explores the door frame, jambs, and knobs or push bars, then he searches for windows or other identifiable markings and identifies the material from which the door is made. He then explores the area right next to the door for light switches or any other identifying characteristics.
• With his back again to the door, the student determines the true compass directions. If they are unknown, it is possible, for the sake of this procedure, to use contrived compass directions (discussed in Chapter 2) until the true ones are known. That is, the student can arbitrarily decide that the north will be in front of him with his back to the door and thus home base will be on the “south” wall. For the description of this procedure, it is assumed that the reference door is on the south wall. After the student has explored the walls, he can decide to name them after some distinguishing landmark; for instance, the south wall could be called the “door wall' if there are no other doors in the room, or “wall 1,” if the student has difficulty using cardinal directions (i.e., north, south, east and west).
• The student trails along the south wall first to one end of the wall, then returns to the home base. He then goes to the other end of the wall, always returning to the reference door before exploring farther into the room. He begins to catalog in his mind (or on a digital recording device, mobile, or another note-taking device) the location of furniture, bulletin boards, blackboards, windows, and whatever else he finds along the wall and the order in which he finds them.
• The student begins exploring other walls in no particular order but from one adjacent wall to another, always retracing his steps back to the reference-point door. For example, he travels from the door to the east wall (in the southeastern corner of the room) and trails the east wall north until he finds the north wall (in the northeastern corner of the room). He then retraces his route back along the east wall south to the southeastern corner and the south wall to the reference-point door.
• He then trails back along the east wall to the north wall, turns west, and trails to the west wall (in the northwestern corner of the room). He reverses the route back along the north and east walls to the door.
• He follows this process until he has thoroughly explored all the walls in the room (see Figure 5.5). He then points to various objects along the walls from his reference point to show that he understands the relationships of the objects to each other and the reference point.
• He walks routes to and from various objects along the walls and occasionally points to objects in the room from different reference points. His ability to do so shows both the specialist and the student that he has begun to develop a mental or cognitive map of the room.

Having the student always retrace his steps back to the reference door accomplishes several things simultaneously.
First, it allows the student to come in contact with the numerous objects along the wall many times, so their locations will less likely have to be memorized.
Second, objects missed for whatever reasons will probably be contacted after several trips along the same wall.
Third, the student's trailing skills are reinforced in practical situations, and his motor skills are paired with cognitive skills. And
fourth, the student learns that he is never in danger of losing his orientation if he always returns to his familiar home base after branching out into unfamiliar territory.

Figure 5.5 Steps in perimeter familiarization to all four walls of a room.

5.5.2 The Grid Pattern

After thoroughly learning about the walls of the room, the student is now ready to explore the interior of the room. As he does so, he learns three things about the room.
First, he learns about the objects in the center of the room.
Second, he reaffirms the relationship of objects along the walls; that is, he learns which objects are opposite each other on opposite walls. And
third, he reaffirms the shape of the room by walking in the open space to opposite walls by using the procedure known as the grid pattern.

The grid pattern is used in the following way to explore the interior of a room:

• With his back to the door, the student squares off protects himself by employing the upper or alternate protective technique, and crosses from the south wall to the north wall. To facilitate a straight crossing, the specialist stands at the north wall and has the student come to her voice at first. If there are any objects in the student's path, he explores them, goes around them, and continues on his way across the room.
• Upon reaching the north wall, the student puts his back to and squares off with the wall and faces south. He then takes several steps either to his east or to his west, depending on the location of the reference door, and crosses back over to the south wall.
• Depending upon the location of the reference door along a particular wall, he continues this procedure either easterly or westerly until he has crossed over the entire width of the room. If the reference door is located in the southeast corner of the room, for example, he would start by crossing north to the north wall and then proceed a few steps west and cross back over to the south wall, take a few steps farther west, and so on. If the door were located in the center of the wall, he would cross over and then go all the way either east or west, return to a reference point, and then do the other half of the room. He may choose to follow the same procedure going north or south along the east and west walls until an imaginary grid pattern has been formed with the “lines” of his route, as illustrated in Figure 5.6.

Figure 5.6 The Grid Pattern used in familiarization to the interior of a room.

On completing the grid pattern, the student should be completely familiar with the configuration of the room and all the objects in it. As he explores, he will occasionally locate numerous objects along the walls and the center. If he encounters many objects when trailing a wall, it will take him longer to travel, and he may erroneously conclude that this wall is longer than its opposite counterpart, which may have fewer objects. The specialist should discuss this with her student and practice walking along walls with objects so that he can correctly judge the lengths of the walls when he implements the grid-pattern procedure and can walk an entire length of a wall unobstructed.

If the student encounters objects in the center of the room, he must negotiate them while maintaining the desired direction of travel. He can do so by pretending to “walk through” an object. For instance, if he encounters a rectangular table in front of him, he first explores it to determine where along that table he is, and then he trails to its opposite side, squares off to it, and continues crossing forward until he locates the opposite wall. The specialist teaches him how to do so and provides verbal feedback as he attempts to do it on his own. He may encounter the table during many trips across the room. In each instance, he uses the walk-through technique to trail around it in the same direction each time (from the familiar to the unfamiliar). Round tables are more difficult to “walk through” than rectangular tables, however. At first, the specialist can stand at the opposite side of a round (or rectangular) table and have the student come to her voice as he trails to develop a kinaesthetic memory of the experience for later use.

5.5.3 Sequencing of the Room-Familiarization Procedure

The room-familiarization technique can be introduced at several points within the curriculum, depending on the specialist’s desires and the student's needs and skill level. It can be learned, for instance, immediately after hand trailing has been introduced and learned, to avoid having the student manipulate the cane in and around objects in the room. As an alternative, it can be introduced after diagonal cane skills are learned as a way of reinforcing those skills and cane manipulations, as described earlier in this chapter. In addition, the technique can be introduced after the student has learned to trail using the two-point-touch technique, which is described in the following chapter. The specialist choosing this last option has made the decision that because the student is working in an unfamiliar room, he should, be using this cane skill, which is designed to be used in unfamiliar areas.