Basic Indoor Cane Travel Techniques

National Federation of the blind livethe life you want I'm Georgie and I'm going to talk about some of the different types of cane techniques and the ways you can practice using your cane while you're in your house so just because you're in your house doesnt mean you shouldnt be practicing your cane you don't have tobe outside to practice and one great thing you can practice inside is youractual cane technique which is how you hold the cane and how you use the cane makingsure you're holding it correctly so there's two we're going to go over thetwo different types of cane techniques and how they're usedso the first one is the open palm technique so with open palm you'll hold your cane at thevery very top so its at its full length you've got your arms so I'm right handed so its in myright hand arm relaxed at your side and you've got your palm that's called openpalm because your palm which is the you know flat part of your hand should befacing up to the ceiling and you should be holding it pretty loosely and youwant to make sure that when you're doing it that you're using your fingers to moveyour cane and not your wrist so open palms kind of hard to show inside so open palms is reallybetter for outside little little strange indoors so the thing with the it isreally good though when you're going outside it's great for walking quicklyand when you're in big open spaces nobody around you because your canes is reallyfar out in front of you and you don't if you're with other people you knowyou can trip them up so you don't want to be using it when you're in a crowdedplace I know it is a little more awkward indoors than the other group I'm about to show you but you can still practice it inside Iwould say maybe practice that one some outside as well just outside in yourbackyard maybe you don't have to goanywhere so that's open palm the other grip is pencil grip so thepencil grip you hold it you hold your cane much further that's still in my righthand but you want it much much further down actually hold mine underneath likebelow the grip at the top so below that and basically what you do is youwa nt to hold it like a pencil so if you are not a big pencil user just think of putting it in your hand as a fist and getting as many of yourfingers behind the cane as possible so you really want it to be resting mostlybetween your thumb and your pointer finger and this one you're keeping it soif you go really close to your body and you don't your cane is going out as farso this is much more for with other people or in my case being inside it's a lot morecomfortable for indoors so one thing we're yeah so for indoors mostly do pencil grip butlike I said you can practice either of them so another big big big thingwith your cane is whether or not you're doing so you know you got open palmversus pencil grip and then you've got whether or not you're doing constantcontact versus two-point touch versus tap slide so those are the threedifferent sort of ways that you move the tip of the cane so constant contact iswhen you're not lifting the cane at all you're just running it along the ground so youcan hear actually when I do it you can hear the little where the tile is in myfloor are connected a little lines between the tiles so constant contact is great forthat kind of stuff like picking up on like texture changes in the ground so lets seeyou got this carpet here and you've got.

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a dog toy and you can feel all those things because you are just running it along you're not missing any info by lifting it up so you got two point touchis when you're tapping it lifting it up slightly and hitting it on either side so you're getting two taps in which is why its called two point touch and that one's really great for picking up on echoes soyou know you can hear a lot of what's around you can do it in the hallways picking up on the echoes so two point touch is better for that kind of stuff for listening where you're doing more oflistening skills versus actual like texture tactle feeling skills the onethe very very best in my personal opinion is tap slide that kind of takes the best of both so with tap slide you do similar to 2 point touch you're doing 2 taps but you're going to kind of drag your cane tip a little bit at the end of the tap this ones probably the toughest to fully master but you get a little bit of drag at the end of your tap so that you're getting the best of both so you get the echoes from the 2 point touch and you getthe little bit of the texture feeling that you get from the constant contactbut what happens is you definitely want to use you want to get both sides ofthings you want to hear you want to get some of those that you're hearing and those you're feeling out of your cane I would say practice this around your houseespecially as far as if you're doing say two-point touch and listening for echoeshallways can be really really good like I said I'm not sure from show on the videobut you can definitely hear more echoes in hallways if you're practicing feelingtexture changes maybe find a place in your house like mine here where I havethe rug and things on the floor like the dog toy you can use you know justpractice and be feeling around for those things for those differences and you cando it all over your house I mean there's you know you don't have to be outside Iguess to practice your cane so thats sort of what I wanted you guys to get out of thisso yeah go practice and try you're open palm and pencil grip two point touch andyour tap slide and your constant contact and go out and do your cane Thanks guys! connect with us follow us on twitter and instagram @ NFB_voice and like us on Facebook by searching for National Federation of the blind visit our website at nfb.

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