Games Have The Right Touch Parents Create Board Games For Their Visually Impaired Daughter, Friends And Classmates
Imagine playing checkers, Candyland, Scrabble or any other board game in total darkness.
How would you know where to move a game piece? What good would dice be?
Why even bother?
Welcome to 8-year-old Jessica Cummings’ world.
While other kids her age have any number of games to pick, Jessica’s selections are limited by her blindness.
Determined their youngest girl would not be isolated because she couldn’t see, Mike and Joan Poirier aggressively sought out activities for her to share with her sighted siblings and friends.
But many board games they found were of poor quality, required the help of someone who can see or were not designed to be played with seeing children, her parents discovered.
So they invented their own games and built them on a workbench in the garage.
As a toddler, Jessica lost her sight to retinoblastoma, a rare hereditary condition involving abnormal tissue growth in the eye.
A blond-haired, blue-eyed bundle of giggles, Jessica shows guests around her home with authority, happily demonstrates her Braille typewriter and shows off other prized possessions.
One of those is an early game-board attempt with puff-up paint on a small square piece of particle board. Jessica proudly pulled the crude creation from under her desk in her bedroom to show a visitor.
“That’s just some squiggles on a board,” her slightly embarrassed, inventive stepfather said.
“But I still like it,” said Jessica, running her fingers over the brightly colored lines.
One of Jessica’s favorite games is Shape Up, a game of competing shapes that she keeps in her third-grade classroom at Westview Elementary School.
“Our idea was if other kids are going to want to play with Jessica, it would have to be visually appealing,” her mother said.
When Jessica and her best friend, Meaghan Goodwin, brought out the game during a recent class, they drew the interest of half their class.
The white board is crisscrossed with yellow circles, green triangles, blue squares and red hexagons. Each player has a distinctive token that fits over the game board’s spaces.
The idea is to move a token from one corner of the board to the other. Turns are taken by spinning an arrow that points to the shape to which a player can move.
Sometimes Meaghan would guide Jessica’s hand as the girl’s pale blue eyes focused on nothing.
But she didn’t really need the help.
The protruding shapes on the game board and spinner told her all she needed to know as she explored with perceptive fingertips.
“Liner!” she called when she felt the spinner had landed between shapes. She spun again.
When Meaghan had the winning move, she gently pulled Jessica’s hand to the corner of the board to show her.
“You Bing-Bong,” Jessica called her friend, erupting into giggles.
“She laughs all the time,” said classmate Stephanie Hare, who was eager to play the next game.
The Poiriers launched a business called FunSense (their business card also is in Braille) a few years ago to market and sell their inventions.
In addition to Shape Up, they created and sold a counting game called Encounter, and a modified version of checkers.
They sold about 50 games a year for a couple of years, but this year they did not renew their post office box.
“We feel kind of sad about that,” Joan Poirier said. Because she and her husband work full time, “there’s no time” for manufacturing games.
“We’d almost regret getting an order,” she said.
The Poiriers still get some requests for games, but now they’d rather sell the rights to their creations, and let someone else make them.
And judging by the interest Jessica’s friends and classmates have shown in Shape Up, a market could exist for attractive games that can be played by touch.
“It’s good for kids who can’t see,” said Stephanie, Jessica’s classmate.
And after a thought, she added that it’s also good for those who can see: “You can have the same fun that people who can’t see have.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)