_______________________________________________________________________________
Vol. 49, No. 7 July 2006
Barbara Pierce, editor
Published in inkprint, in Braille, and on cassette by
THE
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
MARC
MAURER, PRESIDENT
National
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THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND IS NOT AN ORGANIZATION
SPEAKING FOR THE BLIND--IT IS THE BLIND SPEAKING FOR THEMSELVES
ISSN 0006-8829
____________________________________________________________________
Vol. 49, No. 7 July 2006
Who Says
You Can’t Go Home Again?
Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Louisiana Center for the Blind
by Chris Danielsen
The Kurzweil–National Federation
of the Blind Reader
The Revolution Is Here!
by James Gashel
Reflections on Mentoring
by Gary Wunder
Let’s Lift Him Up Where
He Belongs
by Deborah Kendrick
Rediscovering Independence
A Look at Eight Months of Training at the Colorado Center for the Blind
by Klaus Zechner
Changing the Public's Attitudes:
Signs of Inevitable Success
by Sheri Wells-Jensen
Confessions of a Sighted
Cane Travel Instructor
by Caroline Rivera Coon
The Scenic Lighthouse Walk
by John G. Paré Jr.
Meet the Boy Scouts
by Tracy Soforenko
Handmade Music
by Rusty Marks
Seven Proven Steps to Effective
Network Building
by Olegario “Ollie” D. Cantos VII
Good Neighbor in Houston
Ask Miss Whozit
The Impact of the Americans
With Disabilities Act
Research Results
by Dr. John Frank
Recipes
Monitor Miniatures
Copyright 2006 National Federation of the Blind
by Chris Danielsen
From the Editor: Chris Danielsen is the member of the national staff who edits the Voice of the Nation’s Blind, the Federation’s online magazine <www.voiceofthenationsblind.org>. He recently traveled to Ruston, Louisiana, to take part in the twentieth anniversary celebration of the founding of the Louisiana Center for the Blind, the first privately operated training center for blind adults that is grounded in and conducted according to the positive philosophy of the National Federation of the Blind. For almost a generation now the Louisiana Center has been graduating blind people with high expectations for themselves and a determination to contribute to their home communities and the blindness community. Here is Chris’s report on the festivities and the institution they celebrated:
The novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote a book titled You Can’t Go Home Again, suggesting that we can never recapture the past. But rock and roll singer Jon Bon Jovi has recently countered that sentiment with his song “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?,” in which he sings about the joys of returning to his hometown, “the only place they call me one of their own.” A recent experience has inclined me to agree with Bon Jovi. That experience was returning to Ruston, Louisiana, for the twentieth anniversary celebration of the establishment of the Louisiana Center for the Blind (LCB), held in conjunction with the state convention of the NFB of Louisiana. The LCB opened in October of 1985, and the celebration event was originally to have taken place last October. Sadly, however, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated parts of the state, and the LCB premises themselves became an impromptu shelter for blind refugees from the storms and their families. So the celebration was postponed to April 7 to 9 of this year.
I graduated from LCB in December of 1992 after undergoing six months of training there. At that time the center had been in existence for only eight years. Although it had moved from a small gray house on Bonner Street to its current location at 101 South Trenton, it was a smaller facility than it is today. Nonetheless, the experience of being there changed my life, and although I had been an NFB member before going to Ruston, I left knowing, at least at a subconscious level, that I would devote my life to the organization that had, through LCB and its students and staff, given me so much.
I first became acquainted with LCB in the summer of 1991, when I attended my first NFB national convention in New Orleans as a scholarship winner. Until that time I was accustomed to thinking of myself as some kind of super blind guy. I received my education at a series of public schools and at a small university, where I was the only blind student, so naturally all of my accomplishments amazed my teachers and peers. I was a little intimidated by the idea of going to a strange hotel in a strange city and participating in the convention, but I thought this anxiety was a natural state of mind for a blind person.
Boy, was I wrong! I quickly discovered that I couldn’t keep up with many of the blind people I met at the convention, who walked with such speed and confidence that I was often left far behind, trudging along with what I later learned was a cane far too short for me. More than once I found myself (rather sheepishly) taking the arm of a blind person, much as I would have done with a sighted guide. My fellow conventioneers were uniformly understanding and patient, but in the middle of the week, when I was being mentored by an extraordinarily lively and capable young woman named Melody Lindsey, I found myself seated with and introduced to her friends Joanne Wilson, Louisiana state president and director of the Louisiana Center for the Blind, and Jerry and Merilynn Whittle, two staff members there. Joanne was blunt in her assessment of my travel skills: “You’ve got guts, but your skills need some work.” She encouraged me to consider coming to LCB. I promised her that I would give the matter due consideration, but even then I was not fully convinced that I needed what the center had to offer.
In the spring of 1992 I had no thought of attending the center; instead, I was focused on trying to obtain an internship opportunity in Washington, D.C., in pursuit of my bachelor’s degree in political science. I began to experience doubts about the venture, however, when I learned that, although we would be provided dormitory rooms at American University, we would be on our own for meals and transportation. Quite abruptly I realized that I was not prepared for such an experience. I decided to spend my summer in Ruston instead of Washington. After a bureaucratic tussle with the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, I was on my way to Louisiana.
What I planned as a summer vacation brushing up on my blindness skills turned into a six-month course of study at the LCB. During that time I met people whom I am fortunate to call my friends and colleagues to this day, including Pam and Roland Allen, the Whittles, Karl Smith, Jesse Hartle, Melody Lindsey, Ollie Cantos, Jeff and Zena Pearcy, Ruth Sager, Joanne and Harold Wilson, and many others. In addition to learning to cook, improving my cane-travel skills (with a much longer cane), and significantly improving my proficiency with the slate and stylus, I got up on water skis for the first time and went rock-climbing in New Mexico. I visited soon-to-be President Bill Clinton’s hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and got to shake his hand at a political rally there.
I participated in a Toastmasters club that Jerry Whittle organized. I cut down a Christmas tree and walked seven miles to Grambling University. I spent many afternoons in seminar class and many late nights with my fellow students discussing our developing philosophy of blindness and our plans for the future. Despite my mother’s constant worry that I would starve, not knowing how to cook, I ate very well but also exercised regularly. I lived in and maintained my own apartment for the first time in my life. I prepared a meal for all of the staff and students, got dropped off at an undisclosed location in Ruston and found my way back to the center, and took a Greyhound bus to the nearby town of Monroe to find a building I’d never been to before. I had access to more Braille books than I had ever seen in my life, and read as many of them as I could. On a trip home to South Carolina to attend the NFB state convention there, I navigated an airport unassisted for the first time. I sang in a local church choir in Ruston and learned to play hand bells.
I experienced some frustration as I worked to acquire new skills, but Joanne and her capable and compassionate staff were always there to encourage me, and I experienced many more highs than lows. I was surrounded by people who had complete confidence in me, and in the end I could not help absorbing that confidence. I left the center with new skills, but, perhaps more important, I left believing in myself and in my ability to cope with any challenge that confronted me, whether it was directly related to my blindness or not.
An unexpected illness and the pressures of law school kept me from returning to the LCB when its facilities were expanded in 1994 or 1995, so I did not return to Ruston until this past spring. Nonetheless, once I had taken a cab from the convention hotel to the area of Ruston where the center is located, I was surprised at how familiar everything seemed, even with the changes to the original Trenton Street building and some of its surroundings. I toured the expanded facility, including the new woodshop, housed in what used to be Hinton’s Feed and Seed Store, directly across Railroad Avenue from the center and hard by the railroad tracks. The assistant shop instructor, James Mays, gave me an extensive tour of the shop and showed me the many projects students were working on.
I wish the shop had been in operation when I was a student because I would have loved to make a handsome mantel clock for my final project, as some students were doing. In fact, the lobby of the center is graced by a grandfather clock that a center graduate named Jonathan Cagle built. I was also pleased to see the expanded kitchen and dining facilities, and I rejoiced with Braille instructor Jerry Whittle over the fact that he now has more room for his beloved collection of Braille books, which are also now meticulously organized. I saw many old friends and met many new people during my tour of the center, but all of them greeted me like one of the family, and I felt throughout the experience that I was in a place where I very much belonged. My old friend Melody Lindsey showed me around the expanded facilities, and this time I had no trouble keeping up with her at all.
Not only have the facilities of the Louisiana Center for the Blind expanded, the programs have broadened as well. A career center, where students can take job development classes or work to complete their GED, is housed a few blocks away from the Trenton Street building. The staff of LCB works closely with the faculty and staff of the Professional Research and Development Institute on Blindness at Louisiana Tech University, directed by Dr. Edward Bell and staffed by many LCB alumni. Students now occupy two blocks of apartments on Mississippi Avenue, about a half mile from the main LCB building. In addition to the Buddy Program for preteens and the STEP program for teenagers, which were in existence when I was a student, LCB now conducts programs for infants and toddlers and for senior citizens.
I am not the only person with fond memories of the LCB. Many people I know and others who are part of my extended LCB family shared their reminiscences during the convention. Connie Connolly explained that she believed she would never resume her career as a nurse when she became blind but was able to do so after becoming one of the first graduates of the center. Jesse Hartle, who now works in the governmental affairs department at the National Center for the Blind, told the story of a camping trip he took while a student in the LCB’s Buddy Program for preteens, which was rudely interrupted by a fierce thunderstorm. Jesse recounted how, even with lightning striking all around a picnic shelter at an Arkansas campground, Joanne Wilson instructed him to grill a hot dog for himself. “The lady is totally nuts,” Jesse said he thought at the time, but realized later, when he became a Buddy counselor, that it was important to take every possible moment during the four-week program to influence the lives and attitudes of the students in a positive way.
I have my own memories of that camping trip. All of the students, from nine-year-olds to adults, were to spend the weekend learning outdoor skills, but after the thunderstorm soaked our tents and supplies, the youngsters were sent home, and several of us adult students and staff dismantled the campsite. The project and the van trip back to Ruston, including a very late meal at a truck stop in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, took the rest of the night, but it was an opportunity for me to bond with fellow students and staff that I remember with pleasure.
The history of LCB was celebrated in other ways besides the many speeches and panel discussions. Jerry “Regis” Whittle quizzed random members of the audience, including me, about Federation and LCB history throughout the sessions and banquet in a simulated game show called Who Wants to Be a Federationist? Karl Smith and a choir of banquet attendees performed Federation songs, including “Happy Home for the Blind,” a ditty composed by LCB students and staff and set to the tune of “Home on the Range,” about the kind of rehabilitation center that LCB most certainly is not, where blind rehabilitation students “sit around on their behinds” and learn nothing more complicated than punching talking clocks for the time and taking sponge baths.
Jerry and Merilynn Whittle and Neita Ghrigsby, affectionately known to students as “Miss Neita,” were given special recognition during the banquet as staff members who had been with the center since its inception. Jerry Whittle kept his speech short and summed up the feelings of many, saying: “In everything that matters, we are one.” NFB President Marc Maurer introduced Joanne Wilson and shared the story of how the Louisiana affiliate was organized in 1973.
Joanne emphasized the importance of seeing the possibilities of the future and then making them come true in her keynote banquet address, citing the LCB’s rapid expansion as only one example of the kind of thinking that had built the Federation and improved the lives of the blind throughout the years. She told the story of a magical spyglass that allowed the king and subjects of a declining kingdom to see the bright possibilities for its future and, having seen and believed, to make them come true. She emphasized that it is important for each of us as individuals, as well as through entities like the Louisiana Center for the Blind, to pass that magical spyglass on to each blind person and to each generation of blind people in order to make the future brighter and more full of promise. I am grateful to the LCB staff and students, who passed the spyglass on to me, and I will attempt to pass it on to others. I am glad I paid a return visit to my home in Ruston and got another dose of the rejuvenating spirit that makes the National Federation of the Blind so special.
by James Gashel
From the Editor: Jim Gashel is the executive director
for strategic initiatives for the National Federation of the Blind. He has been
as involved as anyone in the planning and development of the Kurzweil–National
Federation of the Blind Reader. Now that the beta testing period is drawing
to a close, it seemed appropriate to ask him to make the announcement of the
extraordinary results of the collaboration between technological genius and
the knowledge and expertise of blind people. This is what he says:
In 1975 Ray Kurzweil invented the first multi-font optical character recognition (OCR) technology capable of converting printed characters into full-word synthetic speech. This system, which was about the size of a small dishwasher, was called the Kurzweil Reading Machine. Joining with Ray Kurzweil to test and launch this product, the NFB secured financial support to purchase six preproduction units at a cost of $50,000 each. This technology was unique and revolutionary in its time.
Personal computers were not widely available and were not a mass-consumer product in the 1970's, so the original Kurzweil Reading Machine was a stand-alone, dedicated reading system with its own internal computer and built-in scanner. Today the more modern version of the same technology--the Kurzweil 1000--is computer software running on a standard desktop PC connected to a scanner.
Although a certain amount of competition has developed over the last thirty years, the Kurzweil Reading Machine and its offspring have been widely regarded as the gold standard in text-to-speech conversion technology. However, having this technology in a completely portable form has been an unrealized dream. That was true until March 2006, when blind people throughout the United States started to learn about and use the world's first handheld, text-to-speech electronic reading system for the blind. This is called the Kurzweil–National Federation of the Blind Reader.
The name says it all. Unlike the Kurzweil Reading Machine, named for Ray Kurzweil as its inventor, the portable Reader has been designed by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation of the Blind. Therefore this device bears both names. This name also symbolizes the fact that the blind themselves have played a leading role in making the world's first completely portable reader a reality.
The Reader combines the latest state-of-the-art digital camera technology with a powerful personal data assistant (PDA). These components are housed in a custom-designed vinyl case that also contains internal circuitry to connect the camera and PDA to operate as a single system. Aside from this hardware, the software is completely new in blindness technology, with several features especially designed for this unique device.
Here are some of the vital statistics: the Reader is 6 inches
long, 3 inches wide, and 2-1/2 inches thick and weighs 15 ounces. Although the
Reader is about a thousand times smaller than the original Kurzweil Reading
Machine, the PDA in the portable Reader is two thousand times faster. In fact,
the portable Reader can execute about 500 million instructions per second as
compared to 250,000 instructions per second for the Kurzweil Reading Machine.
It also has a thousand times more memory (64 megabytes as compared to 64 kilobytes).
But the real difference is to have the power of reading in the palm of your
hand. Here are a few reactions from early users known as "Reader ambassadors"
and "Reader pioneers":
Dwight Sayer: I have a neat story. Last week my BrailleNote rep came over to
bring my GPS unit and some software. She had gotten the disks mixed up, and
no one sighted was around. She couldn't tell which one was mine. I said, “Wait
a second . . .” I picked up a disk and shot a picture just pointing the Reader
straight at it. . . . In a few seconds the Reader just rattled off the text
on the CD, and I found I had my software right in my hands. The rep, who was
drooling by that time, spent the next hour or so testing the Reader on everything
from her checkbook to a receipt she had in her purse. By the way the ATM receipts
that pop out of our great ATM machine at the National Center were read with
ease as I was wondering what my balance was. . . . This little machine is a
keeper!
Ron Gardner: The first thing I did with the Reader was go around
my home snapping photos of the wall hangings. My grandchildren have given us
some very precious quotes which are contained in framed hanging art. The quotes
are covered with glass, and I wondered if the glass would reflect too much light.
I am happy to report that the Reader worked with or without the flash, and the
glass did not prevent a great job. It was terrific to be able to read these
things from my grandchildren!
Ramona Walhof: I demonstrated the Reader at my Lions Club this morning. I started
with the Idaho Potato Cookbook, which it does very well. It also read
the restaurant menu quite well, although it was green print on white inside
plastic. The Lions were more than astonished by its performance.
Amber Chesser: After over a month of anticipation and after a week of reading about everyone's experiences, I finally began using my Reader on Friday afternoon. What a wonderful beginning it was, and what a wonderful weekend of reading I have had! The Reader exceeded my expectations from the moment I took it out of the box. It looked completely different from anything I had imagined. . . . The unit is not bulky or too large; I definitely plan to carry it to all of my university classes as well as to concerts, meetings, and anywhere else I go every day.
I was also quite surprised at the accuracy with which I took
the pictures from the start. . . .I could write a lengthy post brimming with
enthusiastic descriptions of everything that I read over the weekend. . . .
I recognize that there are definitely developments to be made, but at this time
the marvelous designers and developers have hit the nail on the head. Thanks,
National Federation of the Blind, for the honor of being a tester and for such
an exciting creation!
Karl Smith: I just had to write one more time about my experiences at CSUN with
the Reader. This morning I attended a session discussing the future of accessibility
for portable computer platforms. This was more or less a discussion session
with not a whole lot of substance. During the presentation the presenter mentioned
that the NFB was about to announce the new Reader. Being much like a proud grandpa
with new pictures of his grandkids, I pulled my machine out and waved it over
my head. The presenter acknowledged that someone in the room actually had one.
The fun started after the end of the presentation. I was suddenly surrounded
by a large group of people wanting to see the Reader and know how it worked.
Someone gave me a legal-sized piece of print to read. . . A short time later
my trusty Reader began reading information on augmentative communication. Everyone
listened very quietly because of the low volume of the PDA speakers, while the
reading kept going and going with pretty much flawless results.
It was then that the man who gave me the paper admitted that
he had purposely given me what he considered to be a particularly awful piece
of material to scan. It was a printout of a half dozen or so PowerPoint slides
from another presentation. For me it was another one of those dream demos. It
went perfectly, and everyone was very excited. . . . Several of the people said
that this was the best part of the session. Folks, this thing is . . . the beginning
of a revolution. Rarely does a piece of technology by itself really represent
the beginning of an entirely new era for the blind. This one does just that
. . . man, this thing is fun.
Vickie Saucier: I have now had my Reader for three days, and I agree with Gary.
You're not getting it back except for repairs, if needed. I've experienced all
the problems and limitations that everyone else has mentioned. When Jim first
demonstrated it, I was in tears, and I still feel that way. At the first brief
demonstration by my representative, I was terrified and thought that I'd never
be able to use it. Changing that battery seemed difficult: remembering the commands,
focusing, flash cards, etc. really caused me some alarm, since I am not a teckie
like some of you. However, I mastered all those things except for the flash
card (I just have to read the instruction manual, and I'll know how to do that
too). I even demonstrated how to do all those things to another pioneer who
didn't attend the demonstration. I am looking forward to all the future improvements,
but for now I'm happy reading those Jell-O boxes and cleaning a bookshelf in
my office without sighted assistance. It goes everywhere with me, and next week
it's going to see Mickey with me and my grandson at one of my favorite places
on the planet, Disney World.
Juliett Cody: Yes, the Reader is good on bulletin boards. I did it on campus
today, and I was pleased. I was looking for scholarship applications, so the
postings were as large as a regular page. I must admit it was wonderful to walk
into the scholarship office and not have to wait until someone could help me.
I love the Reader, and, like I said before, I am not returning it.
Ron Brown: On April 22 the Indiana State Library held a technology fair. The
NFB of Indiana was invited to show off NEWSLINE, so I decided to take the Reader
to the technology fair without any forewarning to the host. I charged up my
Reader, got together some prearranged documents to read, and went to the fair.
When I got to our booth, I set up shop and waited for the participants to come
by. It took only a few minutes for word to spread that the Reader was there.
Needless to say, the Reader was a big hit. Ours became the most popular booth at the fair. Not only did the participants stop by, so did the other presenters. The Reader and I worked from 10:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. nonstop. It worked this long without my having to charge the battery. I had to change the camera battery only once. Some of the people that gathered around started handing me other documents to read. I took those documents and shot pictures of them, and the Reader performed like a champ. I started grabbing Kernel books off the table and any other document in sight to read. Yes, I threw caution to the wind and went for it. When I opened a Kernel Book and held it away from me up in the air; one guy from the crowd stated, "He's holding the book upside down," and I shot the picture anyway. The Reader read the page about Mount Everest being the tallest mountain in the world. I guess the Kernel Book story I grabbed was "The Summit." The crowd went wild. I was told three people asked how they could join the NFB.
All in all it was a beautiful day, and the Reader was a big
hit. I have the sore feet and the loss of my voice from talking so much to prove
it.
James Solem: Recently I passed my prelim exams for my Ph.D. Needless to say,
the work has just begun. Yet the Kurzweil–National Federation of the Blind Reader
is making it possible. With the use of the Reader I was able to complete the
proposal, research prospectus, human subject review summary form, and the informed
consent form. Before having access to the Reader, I was unable to read italics.
The Reader does an outstanding job of enabling the blind to complete legal documents.
I am currently scanning research information that I have pulled
from numerous libraries. I can read it remotely at the university library, study
hall, gym, or home. This has freed me from having to need a reader to complete
my dissertation. I finally feel like I have a tool that has made me independent
and equal with my sighted peers.
These comments indicate an overall positive response among early users of the
Kurzweil–National Federation of the Blind Reader, and we are only at the dawn
of this exciting new technology. Imagine what the future has in store for us
with this technology we have created to meet our needs. Now that the Reader
we have dreamed about is real, we have the opportunity and the ability to build
upon this new beginning and make our Reader an even more powerful tool in the
months and years ahead.
Even with its present capacity, however, the Kurzweil–National Federation of the Blind Reader reads most printed documents, from letters and memos to pages in a book; reads address labels and instructions; reads an entire page or just a few lines of text for identification; and provides easy access to restaurant menus. The Reader even reads play or concert programs, instructions for appliances, and numbers on lottery tickets--the possibilities are endless.
There are hundreds of uses for the Reader every day. No other device in the history of technology for the blind has provided quicker access to more printed information than the Kurzweil–National Federation of the Blind Reader. The world of the printed word is about to be opened to the blind in a way it has never been before. Get ready; the revolution begins today!
For more information contact the National Federation of the Blind Reader information and sales line at (877) 708-1724. A limited number of Readers are available at a special inaugural discount of $200 below the expected retail price of $3,495.
by Gary Wunder
From the Editor: The National Federation of the Blind has received a grant from the Rehabilitation Services Administration to conduct a mentoring pilot project. For almost a year now about twenty mentoring pairs in Louisiana and Nebraska have been spending time together. Four more states will soon be added to the project. It is impossible to predict what the benefits of this effort will be as measured in the coin of human experience and changed lives, but mentoring is a bedrock element of this organization of ours, so we can say with confidence that it will undoubtedly make a difference to everyone involved.
On February 17,
2006, the following article was posted on the NFB’s Web magazine, Voice
of the Nation’s Blind, <www.voiceofthenationsblind.org>. Its author
is Gary Wunder, president of the NFB of Missouri and secretary of the National
Federation of the Blind. He is also a marvelously evocative writer and, contrary
to what he suggests in this reflection, a thoughtful and patient mentor to many
of us in the Federation. This is what he writes:
Nothing has helped me become the person I am today more than the mentors I’ve
had along the way. Some have been encouraging and have said, “Follow your dreams.”
Others have said, “Go beyond your wildest dreams and be surprised at what you
can accomplish.” But a very important few have said something infinitely more
important: “You’ll never do big things if you keep considering the normal things
you do to be extraordinary and looking for praise when you do them.”
My first mentor was my father, a man I now absolutely love and adore, but for the first five or six years of my life I regarded him as little less than my enemy. To me he was a loud, rude, and compassionless bully. He was always talking about how I’d have to grow up like other people, how the women in my life were too soft on me, and how I was taking advantage of all the coddling and playing it for all it was worth. I remember hearing him get up at five in the morning in preparation for work, and pretending to be asleep until his truck roared out of the driveway. Then I would bound from my bed to deal with the civilized people in my family, the ones who would feed me breakfast and tell me what a wonderful boy I was and how miraculous it was that I knew every tune on the Forty Star Survey, the lingo for the popular radio tunes on our local rock and roll station at the time. My father didn’t even appreciate the precocious genius under his roof, for he listened to country music and had little patience for songs that had words like “ding dang dong” and “She loves you! Yah, yah, yah!” He thought with the money those boys were making, they could at least afford to cut their hair, and besides, what respectable group of four men would call themselves “The Beatles”? Now Chet Atkins, Hank Williams, Jim Reeves, and Marty Robbins--these were men with talent and names they weren’t afraid to use!
Sometime around age seven or so, I learned that all this coddling from family and friends came with a price, and that when it came to being allowed to do things with some risk, things that were really fun, my father suddenly became my greatest ally. My sighted friends were riding bicycles; I thought I should too. My protectors said that this was foolish, but my father said, “You’ll have to pay attention to where you’re going, so go fast enough that you don’t fall over, but slow enough that you can avoid hitting the things you know are in the yard.” With every scrape and bruise I was encouraged by my loving protectors to give up on piloting any kind of a moving vehicle and to realize that trying to do so was just plain reckless. My grandfather called his son a damned fool for encouraging me to do something that would get me killed, and when that day came, he’d be the first to go to the prosecutor to provide the needed evidence. But within a few weeks I was riding that bike, and every member of my family rejoiced in how each and every one of them had always told me I could do anything other people could do if only I’d dare to try.
The time came in my development when my father could still be the guiding force in my life, showing me what it meant to be a man, to have integrity, to realize nothing was more important than my honor and my word; but despite all his fatherly advice he couldn’t tell me much about what it would mean to be a successful blind man. “You can do anything you set your mind to do” goes only so far when there are clearly things one can’t do without sight. Oh, I could work in the hay fields throwing bales onto a moving truck, I could stand atop that truck and deftly stack the bales thrown up to me, but I couldn’t drive the tractor to cut that hay or rake it into rows or pull the baler behind me pumping out those bails, which got ever heavier as the day grew longer. I could do odd jobs my father found for me around the farm, everything from feeding pigs and cleaning stalls, to rehabilitating old bricks that had been used in the construction of a schoolhouse by knocking off the mortar so they could be sold and used for new projects, but how I could sell another person on hiring me, how I could get to the job, and how I could ever hope to work in a setting not specially created for me all waited to trip me up as I thought about the next steps I was to take.
One of my childhood interests was radio, and soon I wanted to do more than just listen--I wanted to talk. First it was the walkie-talkies that were all the rage when I was a child; then came CB radio, which truckers would one day make popular in the lyrics of country songs. Inevitably I came to be an amateur radio operator, more commonly known as a ham radio enthusiast. To get that license meant learning the International Morse Code, the basic principles of radio theory, and the regulations governing the operation of a ham radio station.
The books providing this information were readily available on the shelves of electronics stores and the public libraries we visited, but where could they be gotten in a form a blind kid could read? The term “accessible materials” still hadn’t been invented, or if it had, certainly it was not a phrase that graced my ever-growing vocabulary. If you could find books you could read, they were something for which you were grateful, not something you thought you had a right to demand. Mostly they weren’t produced by institutions but by volunteers whose payment for their hard work was that they got to meet and follow the progress of the blind student they had informally adopted.
Finding books in Braille and on tape inevitably brought me into contact with blind people who shared my interest in radio. One of them was a man named Carl Slavens. His name probably does not appear in any Federation document at the National Center for the Blind, and I doubt any Missourians still remember him. Carl was not a public man--a facial birth defect and fruitless attempts at plastic surgery limiting his exposure to the public to what was absolutely minimal to get along in the world. So badly deformed was he that one day he took a bus trip, and, upon boarding the bus, he heard screams and witnessed a frightened woman hurriedly disembarking. Unsure what all the fuss was about, Carl went on his way, but when night came and he tuned into a local late-night talk show called Night Beat, a distraught woman called to complain that there ought to be a law against monsters being allowed to roam free in the city. She described her trip on public transportation and the hideous creature who had boarded the bus at the location where Carl had entered, and complained that as a pregnant woman she now feared her child would be deformed. Carl understood independent mobility for the blind, the use of the long white cane, and the traffic patterns which, when observed, made it safe for him to walk, but he never again traveled the streets alone.
My friend and first blind mentor worked every day at the Kansas City Association for the Blind and hired his brother, who was a cab driver, to take him to and from work. He made $64 a week and, of that amount, paid $25 in transportation. His brother also did Carl’s shopping as time allowed, and this too was a paid service.
He made and kept friends through the safety of the telephone, but Carl’s telephone and friendship provided much more than a friendly voice for me. That phone guided me to an experience which forever altered my life. I had always considered learning, teachers, and books just a part of what I did at my stage of life, in much the same way as my father worked for a living. But through our shared interest in ham radio, Carl showed me that I had the capacity to take a subject few people knew anything about and master it with nothing more than a book and my own persistence. No outside force would make me do it. No one would grade me on my performance except the government officials administering the ham radio license exams, and there was no accounting to Mom and Dad for whatever grade I received. This learning was done by my own initiative, and Carl convinced me that I could learn not only radio and electronics, but any number of other things I set my mind to learn. The world expanded, and never was I so proud of an academic accomplishment as when I gained my first, second, and third amateur radio licenses and eventually obtained the highest license offered.
Carl and I shared much more than radio. To some extent Carl lived beyond the walls of his house through me: my stories of horseback riding, figuring out how to ride a bicycle along our country road, and watering an eleven-hundred-pound bull without getting gored in the process. But the street ran both ways, and I learned a great deal from Carl. I learned that being a blind kid wasn’t all about romantic stories of Gary the Super Hero doing things no other blind person had ever attempted. Once I told Carl I thought I’d write a book about my life, and with his words, “Yes, I’m not at all surprised you would want to do that,” I enjoyed all of three seconds of glory.
“You know,” he continued,
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a blind person who didn’t think his life was so
fantastic that he should write a book about it. Some have, and some sell, but
mostly they’re pretty boring stuff. Do something in the world that’s really
worth writing about, and you’ll probably be so busy doing it that writing will
be the last thing you have time to do.” Feeling kicked in the gut, I told my
friend I was talking on my father’s business phone and probably should clear
it for other calls, and I went away about half mad, half broken-hearted, and,
just the least bit grateful for a message I thought I heard in Carl’s rebuke--perhaps,
just perhaps, a blind person could do something worthy of the world’s notice,
not just because he was blind, but because he had talent and worked around his
blindness.
When I regained some of my lost courage, Carl and I again talked about other
careers. “Maybe I could be a preacher,” I said.
“Well, you sound like a believer, but I’ve never had the impression you’ve been called to the ministry. Now if you’re not called, and if you’re not a huckster, maybe we should look at your motives. I bet you’ve also thought about being a disk jockey.”
“Yes, I do like radio.”
“I like baseball, but I make a better fan than a third baseman,” he said. “Next you’ll be telling me you’re thinking about becoming a psychologist because, you see, the only thing you’re really convinced you can do is talk.”
“So what are you trying to tell me, that I have no talent?”
“No, I’m trying to suggest to you that you’re not looking for something you love and figuring out how to do it, but looking for something you can do and then trying to figure out how to love it. You’re asking yourself what a blind man can do, when you should be asking yourself how you, as a blind man, will do whatever you are called on by talent and temperament to do.” I wasn’t mad or hurt that time, but I needed a while to think about what he had just said, so again I told him how mad my father got when I tied up his business phone and I’d call when I next could.
Without trying in any way to push me away, Carl began to direct me to other people I could talk with who could tell me what it was like to be an honest-to-goodness blind man. I was afraid of that term, actually hated it, and somehow was convinced that, though I was blind, I’d grow up to be something different. The blind man was the beggar my folks saw when we drove the streets of downtown Kansas City. A blind man was the guy in the shop like Carl--making pens, putting washers on bolts, making brooms, working only around other blind people. Now that was fine for Carl, a person with physical deformities and challenges I could only imagine, but I didn’t want to live alone in a rundown house on $64 a week, and I was afraid this was what the future held for me.
There was more to my mentoring than Carl’s shooting down my ideas for making a living. “Pay attention to your education,” he said. “Learn from history, read the classics, and don’t confine yourself to fiction. Fiction is fun, but people are generally paid based on the facts they know. Your family does physical work, and they do very well at it, but it’s not something you’re likely to be able to do. You’ll make more money if you can discipline your mind and make it work for you. I’ve got a fellow I want you to read--he’s a fellow from Tennessee who grew up as poor as a man could, and he’s done everything from caning chairs to directing one of the most successful state agencies for the blind in the world.”
“What if I don’t want to direct an agency for the blind?” I asked.
“Read him anyway. He knows how to write, he knows how to speak, and he knows how to be an administrator. All of those are skills you may find handy some day.”
“Okay, I can do that, but is this really relevant to me?”
“You’re always telling me that people make you do things that aren’t relevant--I guess that’s the big word for your generation today--but take my word for it: you haven’t a clue what is relevant to you now and what will be relevant to you later on. One thing is relevant to you right now, and it isn’t the self-actualization or any other such nonsense they talk to you about these days--it’s getting skills and the proper mindset, and once you’ve got those, you can work on self-actualization and deciding what is relevant.”
“Okay, so let’s say I read this Jernigan fellow, and what after that?”
“Then you can read some tenBroek, a college professor from California. If you’re college-bound, as you should be, listening to a few lectures will do you good.”
As you can see, my conversations
with Carl always started off better than they ended, but one does not ignore
what is clearly said in love and sincerity, and for every one of those lectures
I got, my friend endured hour after hour of my talking about me, me, and only
me.
Eventually through Carl I met other people who were more involved in the Federation
than Carl felt his physical deformity and limited contact with the public would
allow him to be. When I wanted to know more about guide dogs, Carl sent me to
a fellow named Jim Couts. Jim would talk with me a bit about dogs and then slowly
drift off to talking about this blind group. Jim was an older fellow, and I
foolishly assumed he simply couldn’t stay on task. After a time I thought perhaps
I could trick him into leading me to a person who would talk more about guide
dogs and less about the NFB, so I said in my politest tone that I really didn’t
want to bother him excessively and perhaps he knew of someone who would also
be willing to talk about his experience with these wonderful animals. Unsuspecting
as he was, he gave me another name and even encouraged me to call this fellow.
I did, we talked about dogs, and what do you know--he started down this same
road, talking about the opportunities to be gained by associating with this
blind Federation. You see, Jim wasn’t fooled in the least. He was glad to refer
me to someone else, someone closer to my age, who might get across a message
he was sending but I was rejecting. The new messenger, thanks to my sneakiness
and Jim’s cleverness, was Melvin Lewis, the president of the Kansas City Chapter
of the NFB, and the man who took every excuse I could throw at him as to why
I could not attend a meeting and shot it back to me with a solution for which
there was no argument. Did I mention that this Melvin Lewis was a college student--a
law student, to be more exact, and one who knew how to make a case and make
it stick?
In my time in the Federation I’ve had many mentors. One fine man named John Cheadle told me I had the ability to lead people and that I should. If I was going to lead, however, I should dress like a leader. He said I should be wearing a suit to Federation events to show respect for the people who had elected me and for the office in which I served. So I bought that garment, a leisure suit as I recall, and another fellow named Tom Stevens taught me to tie a tie on the two-hour trip to a legislative dinner. Until that time I thought the only tie I could use was the kind with the clips one inserted under a shirt collar and clipped on the top button. Proud as punch, I tied my tie, elated at the knowledge that, besides my father, no one in my immediate family knew how to tie a necktie. So off to another meeting I go, this time riding with John Cheadle, and when I give him the opportunity to admire my handiwork, he says that the bow tie I am wearing is a definite improvement over the clip-on, but it doesn’t quite fill out the space over my throat, that there is a fancier way to tie a tie, and that he can teach it to me if I dare unbutton my collar. So, with both his hands on the steering wheel and using only words and his occasional glances, I learn to tie what he calls a full Windsor, and true to his word, the new knot does fill up that gap under my throat.
I’ve since had the pleasure of teaching a number of people to tie their own ties though never have I done so while driving down the road at seventy miles an hour. Some have been glad to learn the skill, others reluctant to admit they didn’t know how to do it, and some arguing that their way, which was to have someone else tie the tie and just loosen and hang it between uses was quite sufficient, but the end result is that all have said they now feel better for learning this simple skill.
Any list thanking all my mentors is bound to be flawed and incomplete, because I’ll leave out people who have served in this role and leave out important things they’ve taught me. The first article I ever had published in the Braille Monitor was begun and written in major part by Dr. Maurer and later read by telephone to Dr. Jernigan, who had me correct the grammar on the spot. That article came out under my name with nary a hint it had been crafted primarily by people trying to reveal a talent they thought they saw in me. My friend Bill Neal taught me how to shave with a regular blade, all previous teachers believing that an electric razor was the only safe way for a blind person to shave. Mrs. Jernigan so praised a pair of shined shoes which I had gotten done at an airport that I took up the task of learning to shine them myself, and she continues as my harshest shoe critic. Melvin Lewis told me that, if I had trouble staying awake while listening to boring textbooks on tape, I should study while standing, and if that didn’t work, find myself a space and pace. Seldom now do I employ this technique while reading, but lengthy meetings still find me taking to my feet. Now I use the excuse that sitting for prolonged periods is just too hard on a fifty-year-old back.
In reminiscing about the people who have done so very much for me, I’m saddened by my own shortcomings in really being there for others. I don’t have those two-hour chats that drew me into this wonderful Federation family. Oh yes, I spend the two hours doing Federation work, but my responses are too often contained in terse little email answers or in my participation in a conference call to map out some strategy for how we’re going to accomplish this or that organizational task. I’m too much a volunteer administrator and not nearly enough of a friend providing some direct service and encouragement. To the extent that I work with people directly, my not-very-subtle message really is, “Okay, I’ve helped you now, so get to work! Write those letters, make some trips, raise some money, and give what you can to this wonderful movement we share.”
There’s nothing wrong with that message, but I fear the timing is all wrong. I am here, not because I instinctively understood the value of the work we do, but because people demonstrated their friendship for me, caused me to feel friendship for them, and over time caused me to want to be like them. My initial assignments were few and far between. When completed, they were praised lavishly and their importance was probably overrated. When I exercised initiative, it was rewarded, and I came to see that opportunities I had were purchased by a lot of folks I had considered stodgy old codgers who talked way too much about reading minutes, selling candy, and finding places where we could place fruitcakes on consignment.
This initial treatment I received as a yet-uncommitted newcomer contrasted greatly with the one I later received in our Federation. The message soon became, “Now that we know you have some capabilities, you’ll get praise when you meet or exceed them and not before. We appreciate what you do, but you’re getting to be an adult now, and you won’t survive very long on faint praise. We love you, but love isn’t always gentle, and it isn’t always kind.” Now there’s a message that sounds remarkably like the one my father repeated over and over again, to which I so strenuously objected as a young child. Federationists went on to say, “You can make it in the world, and if you’ll take our help, we’ll see that you do. In turn, take stock of what you have been given, and don’t consider for a moment how you will repay us as individuals. Instead, think about how you will give to others what we freely give to you.”
A burden? You bet! A joyous burden? Absolutely. A gift worth repaying--without a doubt. My mentors have helped me live a life that would be the envy of any sane human being. I have a family, a job, and causes aplenty in which I can make my small contribution to this world we share. Will my name go down with Lincoln or Kennedy or Reagan or Asimov? No. But maybe, if I do the very best I can, it will live for a time in the hearts of others and be reflected in every step they take as my steps are a reflection of John Wunder, Carl Slavens, Tom Stevens, John Cheadle, Melvin Lewis, Marc Maurer, Kenneth Jernigan, Mary Ellen Jernigan, Jacobus tenBroek, and the countless other men and women who have cared about me and have done what they could to give me this rich and wonderful life I now enjoy.
by Deborah Kendrick
(Review of Louis Braille:
A Touch of Genius by C. Michael Mellor, National Braille Press, 133 print
pages, 439 Braille pages, four volumes; $25 softcover Braille or electronic
edition; $35 plus $5 handling hardcover print; $50 hardcover Braille.)
From the Editor: I cannot recall another instance in which the publication of
a book simultaneously in print and Braille has caused such a stir. Perhaps the
first time that National Braille Press (NBP) pulled off the miracle of getting
out a Harry Potter book in Braille on almost the same date as the print edition
hit the bookstores made a bigger splash, but this time the story is of interest
exclusively to admirers of Louis Braille. Several years ago the author, C. Michael
Mellor, discovered a cache of hitherto unknown letters written by Braille and
wrote his biography around them. The print edition is truly a coffee table volume,
with a number of line drawings, pictures, and reproductions of the newly discovered
Braille letters with translation. The Braille edition includes exhaustive descriptions
of the visual elements of the print book as well as the complete text.
The NBP staff’s dedication to the memory and legacy of Louis Braille and their determination to do this project right are truly laudable. This book is a must read for everyone who loves Braille.
Deborah Kendrick
is a professional writer and journalist, a lifelong user of Braille, and a member
of the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio board of directors. Here is
her review of the Braille edition of A Touch of Genius:
It’s a powerful moment at any gathering of the National Federation of the Blind
when a thousand or more voices begin chanting, “We know who we are, and we’ll
never go back.” Indeed the solidarity of any community is reinforced by the
knowledge of its own history and roots. To know “who we are,” in other words,
we must also know from whence we have come and who has gone before us.
With that basic tenet in mind, it is with a blend of incredulity and gratitude
that I read these words on the National Braille Press Web site: “Louis Braille:
A Touch of Genius is the first-ever full-color biography to include thirty-one
never-before-translated letters, some written by Braille’s own hands,”--incredulity
that it has taken some two hundred years since the birth of the man who gave
us literacy for his story and voice to come together in this new book, and gratitude
to C. Michael Mellor for recognizing the magnitude of what he was seeing when
he first laid eyes on these wonderful letters.
In A Touch of Genius the story of Louis Braille’s life is recounted with more fact and less sentimentality than in most accounts. Born in 1809 in Coupvray, France, Braille was the last child of adoring parents. Had they been less so, in fact, it is reasonable to speculate that he might not have gone on to become the exceptional teacher, musician, and inventor that he was. At age three, imitating the work of his harness-maker father in the shop, the little boy injured his eye with a sharp instrument. Again the what-if’s sing out since, if he had received better medical treatment, he might not have had the sympathetic reaction in the other eye that led to total blindness. But the child did become totally blind and fortunately for all of us of ensuing generations around the world, his parents continued to adore and nurture him.
Unheard of in those days, Louis Braille actually attended regular school with sighted children in Coupvray for a time, his intelligence shining among sighted peers. At age ten he was accepted into the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, the Paris school for the blind founded by Valentin Haüy. There, in his midteens, he recognized the value of the “night writing” code brought to the school’s attention by Charles Barbier. Louis Braille rebuilt that code from the ground up, so to speak, tweaking and perfecting it for years. A gifted musician (he not only taught at the school but served as organist in churches and performed solo and with others for the entertainment of those in France’s upper social echelon), he also devised the first code for Braille music notation--the same code used by blind musicians around the world today.
Mellor provides clear accounts of the individuals, political climate, and social attitudes of the era that together had an impact on the life of Louis Braille and the progress of his brilliant invention. We learn of a great humanitarian who founded the school, a somewhat cruel ophthalmologist who exploited blind children for his own agenda, and Braille’s beloved teacher, Alexandre François-René Pignier, who directed the school for some twenty years and remained Braille’s lifelong treasured friend.
Where the book is at its best, however, is in the words and voice of Louis Braille himself. Through his letters we see a gentle, brilliant, and devout young man, a man who, in genuine modesty, gave credit at times to others for his own work, who was profoundly appreciative of the gifts of family, friends, and nature. Although many of the letters reproduced in the print edition (and described in detail in the Braille edition) are written in Braille’s own hand, in straight legible lines, he sometimes apologizes in them for his “scribbles.”
Through his letters we also get a small sense of the physical suffering Braille endured for much of his life. Mellor writes that Braille’s father, a master craftsman, must have been appalled at first sight of the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, when he delivered his ten-year-old son there for the first time in 1819. The 200-year-old building, a former seminary and prison, was dilapidated outside and clammy, dark, and dank with narrow, rickety stairways inside. “The school piped in filthy, untreated water from the nearby Seine for cooking and washing,” Mellor writes. Children were allowed one bath per month.
Thus, like many children and adults at the school, Braille contracted tuberculosis in his teens and lived with the ravages of the then untreatable disease for the rest of his life. What comes through in his letters, however, is a simple gratitude for the restorative qualities of country air when he returns to Coupvray for visits, and an occasional sadness that might well have been triggered by his knowledge that his life would not be a long one.
Although we know him for
inventing the foundation of literacy for the blind throughout the world, Louis
Braille made other significant contributions. Among them was the first means
by which blind people could communicate easily in writing to those with sight.
Mellor writes:
“Until the appearance of a practical typewriter in 1867, the raphigraphe was
the most user-friendly piece of equipment available to blind people who wanted
to write to those who could see. It is a largely forgotten product of Braille's
genius. Ironically it was a young blind man who first invented a means of representing
visual information by means of dots in a matrix. Louis Braille used only one
hundred dots at most but employed the same principle as do modern electronic
devices--television screens, computer displays, digital cameras, cell phones--though
they use millions of dots, or pixels.”
With regard to studying “who we are,” Mellor provides a fascinating cast of
other characters whose names deserve to become familiar ones on our tongues.
Valentin Haüy, of course, the founder of the school and humanitarian who
wanted to educate blind children, train blind people for some means of employment,
and put an end to relegating all blind people to poverty and begging. Better
still, we read of other blind people--people before Louis Braille--who were
high achievers and revered for their contributions. (Do the names Nicholas Saunderson
or Maria Theresia von Paradis mean anything to you? If not, you’ll enjoy making
their acquaintance in this book.)
National Braille Press is not usually in the business of producing print books. In this instance, however, the book as been published in hardcover print, hardcover Braille (called the library or school edition), and softcover Braille. Because much of the book’s appeal is, in fact, the reproduction of handwritten letters, engravings, lithographs, photographs, and other artifacts of a visual nature, professional describers were hired to write detailed descriptions of every visual image in the book. The Braille copy is four volumes. Close to half of each of those volumes, however, is devoted to a section of endnotes and another of the detailed figure descriptions. While I would rather have these descriptions than not, they did grow a bit too detailed at times, and the flipping back and forth of pages--from text to descriptions and back again--became tedious. About halfway through the book I admittedly skipped over references to descriptions, opting later to zip through them quickly as a group.
As I read of blind people
begging and in poverty, of little blind children astonishing sighted audiences
with their brightness and newfound literacy, of this remarkable genius himself
relentlessly perfecting his code that is the foundation of everything I do,
I am struck with wonder, gratitude, and something else. We need to know this
man, memorize his story, have his name on our tongues, and bring his name and
our literacy into the foreground of mainstream recognition. Michael Mellor has
written a good book about a great man--and because that man is Louis Braille,
we should be putting copies into the hands of every blind and sighted person
we know. We should spread his story because we know who we are.
by Klaus Zechner
From the Editor: Some readers may look at the title of this article and write the story off as one more in a predictable string of autobiographical pieces in which someone reports on exciting adventures at an NFB adult training center that result in his or her becoming completely capable and confident as a blind person. Since most of us have secret pockets or vast prairies of insecurity in our personalities, it is easy to brush off such glowing stories of success as fiction or at least an experience light years different from anything we might experience.
Klaus Zechner approaches
his story as an everyman. He is bright; he has earned a Ph.D. and is working
in a demanding job. But he is not a natural cane traveler or an expert Braille
reader. Still his eight months at the Colorado Center for the Blind changed
his life, not because of the skills he learned, though he is justifiably proud
of those skills, but because of the transformation in his fundamental attitude
toward blindness and living life as a blind person. In short, he has experienced
the miracle of what an NFB training center—staffed by dedicated NFB members
and predicated on the philosophy of the Federation—offers its students. He presented
parts of his story on November 12, 2005, at the NFB of New Jersey convention.
Here is his story in his own words:
My name probably tells you that I am not from the United States. That’s right.
I was born and raised in Austria and came to the U.S. for graduate studies in
language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University ten years ago. At that time
I had been diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) for eight years, but, as
often happens with mid-stage RP, my eye problems were for the most part limited
to the night time. I was fine during daylight hours and had no problems writing,
reading even fine print, or working on a computer.
I was an independent person, took care of my bachelor’s household myself, and
did my studies, all without any visual aids or assistance. My wife can attest
to that since we met in those early years in the U.S.; we both lived in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, at that time.
I soon began having some difficulties seeing during the daytime as well, and then, about five years ago, I started using a short cane, but not with much skill. (I received some orientation and mobility training from the Pittsburgh Guild for the Blind.) As time passed, I became less and less independent as I shied away from activities that used to be so easy for me, including cooking, going to the store on my own, taking the bus to an event, and many others.
In 2001 I received my Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, and a challenging year of job search followed. It was often hard to say if I didn’t get the job because of other more qualified competitors, the tight financial situation of the company (a recession was going on) or discrimination because of my visual impairment. Eventually I received multiple offers for good jobs in May of 2002 and accepted a position as a research scientist in speech technology at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey.
When we moved to Lawrenceville,
New Jersey, in the summer of 2002, I felt even more disabled because no businesses
were in close walking distance, and only one bus went to work and back, which
was a good twenty minutes away. I was too afraid to go that way on my own for
fear of getting lost. My blindness was turning out to be an ever larger burden
on me and was causing a major depression.
It was at this point that I attended the NFB of New Jersey state convention
in Princeton and heard someone give a motivational speech about going to the
Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB) in Denver and learning many blindness skills
there, foremost being independence and self-confidence. I felt that I should
do that for myself. After all, despite the inconvenience of being far from my
home and wife and having to take a leave from work, being so dependent on other
people, particularly my wife, was not a good feeling. Our affiliate president,
Joe Ruffalo, supported my plan wholeheartedly, so we eventually visited three
adult rehabilitation training centers: the Joseph Kohn Center in New Brunswick,
the Blind Industries and Services of Maryland program in Baltimore, and the
CCB in Colorado. Baltimore and Denver were almost tied, but Denver had a little
edge, so I decided to apply there--I just had to convince New Jersey that I
needed out-of-state training because it would meet my needs much better than
the local center and that they should provide the funding. After I submitted
a letter detailing my reasons for choosing the CCB and another letter from the
Colorado Center on my behalf, in July of 2004 my stay in Denver was approved.
I had heard that Denver
was a tough program. Some people even claimed that the staff was radical and
extreme in stressing independence, but nothing prepared me for the real experience.
Students at the CCB are required to wear sleepshades from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30
p.m. every weekday. This was not an easy thing to do in the beginning because
I still had a little residual vision but had to get to places and do things
without being able to see anything whatsoever. A nice aspect of the CCB is that
almost all the teachers are blind themselves, as is the director. This kind
of role modeling has a good effect on the students. We were about twenty-four
students altogether, with constant change in the identity of the student population
because of graduations from and entries into the program.
We had four main classes: home management (which I call cooking), Braille, cane
travel (O&M), and technology (computers). We also had classes in philosophy,
in which we sometimes had guest speakers and discussed a wide variety of aspects
of being blind; home maintenance, in which we learned some useful skills such
as using an electric saw, hammer, and nails; and jobs, in which we explored
potential job possibilities and how to get there. Since I was already employed--ETS
had given me a leave of absence for these eight months--we looked for other
blind scientists and researchers so that I could network with them.
In addition to these classes we took part in a number of extracurricular activities, some of which were intended to challenge us and push us beyond our comfort zone. For me this included four days of downhill skiing (which was lots of fun, except maybe for that close encounter with a tree), Christmas tree cutting, visits to local museums that had accessible exhibits, participation in community events such as the Martin Luther King parade, and driving lessons at the steering wheel of real cars. I can honestly say that I drove a car with sleepshades on. Other center activities included rock climbing, whitewater rafting, canoeing, and even sky diving (this last activity was optional).
As it turned out, Braille and cane travel were the hardest classes for me. While most students learn their way from the apartments to the center in a couple of days, after two or three months I was still getting lost regularly on my way to and from the center. Here is a short passage from my diary:
Problems [on the way to
the mailbox]; after wandering around for a while, I almost land in front of
the mail room when someone offers me help to get there. Afterwards I want to
go to the bus stop and back--my dad recommended a walk, and the weather is sunny
and nice, but on the way I get lost again and then fall into a pit on the edge
of a parking lot. No major injuries, fortunately, but some real bruises on my
right side… another nice person volunteers to guide me back to my apartment.
I am probably someone who has innate difficulty getting oriented, and my Boy
Scout years did not help much. Additionally I have two further handicaps besides
the vision impairment that interfere with travel: my hearing loss results in
problems picking up auditory cues from the environment, particularly determining
the direction of sounds. Also my concentration and focus are impaired because
of some medication I have to take. Particularly because of my hearing problem,
my travel instructor decided that I should use an Access-Ride bus service to
get to places instead of public transportation; that way I would not have to
cross busy intersections, which would require much more practice than could
be provided in these eight months at the CCB. I first felt a little bit sad
and inferior since almost all the other students used public transportation,
but eventually I understood that this was a good idea for me—travel was still
hard enough, despite an easier way of getting to places.
At the end of the program I successfully completed all three travel requirements: the monster, which is a route to multiple self-selected destinations in one day and accomplishing certain tasks there; the scavenger hunt, which is like the monster, but the instructor chooses the destinations; and finally the most feared, the drop, in which you get dropped off--of course blindfolded as always--at some unknown location and have to find your way back to the center by asking only one question. I was dropped in a quiet residential neighborhood, and it took me quite a while to find a busy street with a bus stop. This bus took me to the light rail, which in turn took me to a station close to the CCB, from which I knew the route back. I was proud of myself to have accomplished all of that without using any eyesight.
In Braille I struggled quite a bit but completed uncontracted Braille by the end of the program. As my graduation project, I labeled my CDs in Braille because it does get harder for me to figure out with my eyes what’s on a CD. Technology was probably one of the most important classes since I use the computer for almost all my work at ETS. I feel much more confident using JAWS than before, but I still need more practice.
Finally, in cooking I saw a transformation from someone who is afraid just to put a pot of water on the stove to someone who is able to cook a complete graduation meal for fifty people, independently and wearing sleepshades. I stood in the kitchen for three days, but it was worthwhile; the all-Austrian menu consisted of cream of garlic soup, beef goulash with spaetzle (German egg noodles), and Sacher cake with whipped cream (a famous cake from Vienna, Austria). Again I was proud of my accomplishment. Before the actual cooking I had to find the recipes, translate them into English, convert the measurements, calculate the amount of ingredients needed, and do the grocery shopping on my own.
For my graduation my wife came to Denver from New Jersey, and the director of the CCB gave me the Freedom Bell symbolizing the limitlessness of the possibilities for blind people.
When I look back at my time in Denver, I see many challenges and hard, frustrating times, but also many positive success stories, caring teachers, great classmates, and an antipathy to cleaning my apartment. But more important than all the little things I learned is the big change of attitude that took place from someone afraid of challenges, giving in, relying on being taken care of by others, to someone who is confident in himself and not afraid of taking on any challenges that he may face. I am most grateful for this change of attitude, and in my opinion this should be the main reason and motivation for anyone to undertake such training.
In the days, months, and years ahead my challenge will be to work continuously on and improve the blindness skills I learned in the program. I am currently working on all four main components, but there will always be more to do.
In closing I want to say
that this blindness training experience in Denver was deep and fundamental and
has had a very positive effect on my current life and the way I see my blindness.
I recommend it to anyone who is ready to be challenged in order to gain independence,
self-confidence, and a positive outlook on blindness.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the New Jersey Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired and particularly my counselor, Mary Ann Maysonnett, for their personal and financial support. My deepest thanks also go to the staff of the Colorado Center for the Blind and in particular to its director, Julie Deden, for creating a loving and caring environment and for their dedication and professionalism. I also want to express thanks to my fellow students with whom I had lots of fun and in particular to my roommate Glenn. Last but not least, my thanks go to my wife Michelle, who remained loyal and supportive through very hard times of separation and repeated good-byes and who accompanied me every step of the way to my new independence.
by Sheri Wells-Jensen
From the Editor: Sheri Wells-Jensen has appeared before in these pages. She teaches linguistics as a member of the English department at Bowling Green State University. She is also a lifelong Braille user. Here is a fascinating little report in unacademic language about a small experiment that she and a colleague recently conducted. The full report, titled “Changing the Public's Attitude Toward Braille: A Grassroots Approach,” by Sheri Wells-Jensen, Jason Wells-Jensen, and Gabrielle Belknap, appeared in the March 2005 issue of the Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, Vol. 99, No. 3: 133-40. Here is the report Dr. Wells-Jensen prepared for Monitor readers:
I've read that the Braille literacy rate is somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent. I've also read that the unemployment rate in the blindness community is around 80 percent. If these numbers are correct, and we have no good reason to suspect they are not, we have a lot of work still ahead of us. What can any of us possibly do to make a difference? It feels overwhelming. Some days it feels to me as if the social patterns that created and reinforce these situations are carved in unyielding stone and I am powerless to change them. But there are things--important things--we can do.
I am not here to offer the usual encouragement: steady on, do what you know is right and have faith; we're in this together. I'm here to tell you about tangible scientific facts that demonstrate that you already do make a difference, probably every day of your ordinary life. You alone, without any organized program, without public funding, without even thinking about it make significant, measurable differences in how people feel about blindness, Braille, and blind people. Here's how I know:
My training is in linguistics, and I teach at a large public university in Ohio. I like my job. I meet a startling variety of people, and lots of them are very interesting indeed--like the colleague (from another department thankfully) who came into my office one afternoon to wax poetic about how blessed the university was to have me and how inspirational I must be to my students. Besides wishing she'd write all that down in proper academese and maybe send it to my future tenure committee, I started wondering about her remarks after she left. I sat at my desk, looking for the pieces of the good mood I'd been in before her visit. I wondered grouchily if there were any way of defusing people like that before they got into my office. If I set up some kind of maze in the hallway? Maybe a series of really rude cartoons on my door. Then I wondered, trying desperately to be fair, if there were anything at all to what she'd been saying. Clear hyperbole aside, does my presence in the classroom actually do something to change the way people feel about Braille and about blindness?
Every semester my students do see quite a bit of Braille. I Braille their names on the corners of their quiz papers so that I can return them efficiently in class. I use a Braille notetaker (voice turned off) to read my lecture notes and write reminders to myself. Those who are paying attention will have noticed me consulting the Braille room number on the door of the classroom as I enter. If they come to my office, they will notice the Braille display on my computer and see any number of untidy piles of Brailled material and print material sporting Braille labels. In my work Braille is as omnipresent and as necessary as gravity or oxygen. I don't make a point of talking to my students about it any more than a sighted professor would expound on all the print material in an academic setting, but it is everywhere. Does it make a difference? I wondered if there was some way I could really find out.
The very next semester I suddenly found myself in exactly the situation to address this question scientifically. I have a colleague at work who went to the same graduate school as I did. We took the same classes and read many of the same books, and we share a perspective about linguistics and how to teach it. That semester we each had a section of the same introductory linguistics course. We used the same book and gave many of the same assignments, and our students came from the same cohort: all future public school English teachers. One difference you could note however is that while I used significant amounts of Braille all the time, my colleague, who is sighted, did not.
That semester we went about business as usual. And, about two-thirds of the way through, we both handed out a survey on attitudes toward Braille and blindness. We didn't ask them questions about how competent or self-reliant blind people are, since my students might have been afraid to answer honestly. We kept the questions about Braille and about blindness in the abstract or about the students themselves. Although under ordinary conditions you might expect differences like the gender of the instructor to be important, it was my supposition that blindness is a much more salient factor. We hypothesized that differences between attitudes toward Braille and blindness in our two classes might be traceable to the presence, or absence, of a blind, Braille-using instructor.
If you want to read the whole set of results--with five-part harmony and feeling as it were--it was published in the Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness in March 2005, but here's the short story. Students in my class had significantly better attitudes about Braille. They viewed it as easier to learn and less complicated than did their peers. Perhaps even more important, they were much more likely than their peers in the other section of the same class to say they would make learning Braille a priority if they lost the ability to read print and that they would be able to learn it. They also had more positive perceptions of blind people, and many of them were strong advocates for Braille signs and Braille menus. Significantly more of my students were indignant about the lack of Braille signs in parts of the university.
We ran the appropriate
set of statistics on our findings, generating lots of printouts and little boxes
with asterisks in them. The statistics told us that there was less than a one
out of one hundred chance (in some cases) that these numbers were some kind
of fluke. Although we can't prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the differences
were real and that they were caused by the presence of a competent blind person
in the classroom, the results stood up to the standard tests of significance
used in psychology today.
If these numbers are correct, and we have no good reason to suspect that they
are not, we have been making some excellent progress. Every day, walking, reading,
talking, working, interacting, all of us incrementally change perceptions of
blindness and about Braille. So social patterns may be carved in stone, but
if they are, each of us is a little drop of water, slowly, inevitably doing
what water does to stone. We always felt this way: now we have a few figures
to back us up.
by Carol Sliwa
From the Editor: Many of us have heard vaguely that the National Federation
of the Blind was suing Target because of accessibility problems with the company’s
Web site. On May 8, 2006, the magazine Computerworld published an article
about the case and the frustrating problem that underlies it. The reporter did
an excellent job of getting the story and presenting it both clearly and fairly.
To see the photographs that accompany the article and to read the sidebars,
go to the following Web addresses: <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111219>,
<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111221>,
and <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111220>.
Here is the text of the article:
Bruce Sexton Jr. wants to be able to access the same Web content that anyone
else can. Because he can't, he now finds himself at the center of a potentially
precedent-setting legal fight over Web site accessibility.
Sexton, who is legally blind, relies on software that reads his PC's screen from left to right and top to bottom, skipping ahead when he uses keyboard-based shortcuts. When he visits Target Corp.'s Web site, a robotic voice announces staccato-style the presence of alternative text to describe images of the retailer's logo and its "Target dog" mascot.
But the screen-reader software doesn't read the weekly list of special offers on Target's Web site, Sexton said. He can't tell whether the numbers he hears on other parts of the home page correspond to products, files, or something else. Deeper into the site he doesn't know which item goes with which price.
"It's difficult to find anything," Sexton said. As a result he no longer tries to buy goods from the Target site, which for a long time he couldn't do anyway because, he said, it required the use of a mouse.
Sexton has joined the National
Federation of the Blind (NFB) as a plaintiff in a lawsuit that charges Target
with violating the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California's
Unruh Civil Rights Act and Disabled Persons Act. The lawsuit, scheduled for
a hearing next month [June] at U.S. District Court in San Francisco, could have
a broad impact because Target's site is hardly the only one that could be accused
of having access barriers, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs.
Web 2.0 Challenge
The move from text-based to visually oriented Web content has been tough on
the blind, and now there's a new threat on the horizon. The shift to dynamic
Web 2.0 technology, which Gartner Inc. predicts will be pervasive by the end
of next year, could exacerbate the problem of inaccessible sites.
A Web 2.0 application might make use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Dynamic HTML to update information in a table without having to refresh an entire Web page. But screen readers, magnifiers, and other assistive technology may not know which parts of the page have changed unless developers take steps to make sure the tools can glean that information.
"It's very, very, very scary," said Jeff Bishop, an application systems analyst at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Before, so what? You had a missing [alternative-text] tag, but at least you knew there was an image. You could click on it, and maybe you could figure out what it was. Now you don't even know where to click. You don't know how to interact."
Bishop, who is blind, and other advocates for people with disabilities aren't expecting an immediate fix. "We want to make sure companies are at least hearing what our concerns are," he said. "I'm not looking for a solution tomorrow. Even if it takes two years, that's fine with me, as long as I know they're working on it."
But it's unclear whether many companies are doing so. IBM, joined by other vendors, is leading a dynamic accessible Web content initiative within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). One proposal outlines a development syntax for mapping information about the elements of Web applications to an operating system's accessibility API so screen readers and other assistive technology will know what has changed on a Web page. A second proposal details the means for adding semantic role information to a Web application so screen readers can identify rich objects, such as menus and tab panels, on pages.
But the proposals are still in draft form, and adoption remains uncertain. The Mozilla Foundation added support for the technology starting with its Firefox 1.5 browser. Microsoft Corp., however, has said its upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0 release won't support it, and the company has made no commitments for future editions of the browser.
Gartner analyst Ray Valdes has found that Fortune 500 companies have a very low level of awareness about making their public Web sites accessible. Most haven't modified their Web design and production methods and aren't thinking about fixing their current sites because they assume that doing so would be too costly, he said. They also haven't bothered to buy tools that could help them improve accessibility, Valdes said.
The W3C released accessibility
guidelines for Web-authoring tools more than six years ago, and it isn't aware
of a single product that is fully compliant, said Judy Brewer, director of the
consortium's Web accessibility initiative. But Brewer added that many of the
newer authoring tools do have features that provide more support for producing
accessible content. "And users should demand even better," she said.
Slow Demand
There are also evaluation tools that can assess a Web site's accessibility.
One of the leading vendors of evaluation tools, Watchfire Corp., has no more
than seventy U.S.-based corporate customers and thirty international users,
largely from the governmental and financial sectors, for its enterprise-grade
tool, according to Mike Weider, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company's chief
technology officer.
"We've long expected the accessibility market to grow more than it has. It really hasn't taken off," Weider said. But the NFB-Target case could change that, he added.
The allegations made against Target by the NFB and Sexton have set the stage for a court showdown that could finally clear up the murky legal question of whether the ADA, which was enacted in 1990, before the dawn of the Internet era, applies to Web sites. The lawsuit claims that, because Target's site is difficult if not impossible for the blind to use, the retailer is denying them equal access to the goods and services it provides to customers without disabilities. The NFB this week plans to file a motion for a preliminary injunction, asking the court to order Target to make its Web site accessible promptly.
Target two weeks ago updated
a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the laws in question don't apply
to Web sites because they aren't "physical" places of public accommodation.
The Minneapolis-based retailer further claimed that applying the California
statutes to its Web site, which is accessible to consumers countrywide, would
violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Mazen Baswari, a lawyer at Berkeley, California-based Disability Rights Advocates,
a co-counsel for the plaintiffs, contended that the ADA applies to any public
place where commercial activity occurs--including Web sites. And even if the
law didn't provide such blanket coverage, it would apply to Target's site because
www.target.com is integrated with the retailer's brick-and-mortar stores, Baswari
said.
Secil Watson, senior vice
president of customer experience for the Internet services group at Wells Fargo
& Co., said a good time for a company to think about making its site accessible
is when it's planning a major redesign. It's "the right thing to do,"
she said.
San Francisco-based Wells Fargo four years ago began its accessibility push
for people who are blind or visually impaired by making improvements to its
most popular pages. But Watson said it was a major restructuring a year later
that produced the most critical improvement: template-based pages that helped
to enforce design and development consistency. "What was good for the people
with disabilities was good for everybody," she said.
Wells Fargo used the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but Watson said the Web team didn't stop there. It added site-specific details to the more general WCAG directive and created a training document for the company's designers and developers to apply to both internal and external sites.
In addition, some of the bank's user-interface designers have been trained in the use of screen readers so they can see the bank's external site from the perspective of a blind customer. "We're not just trying to make the site accessible," Watson said. "We're trying to make it a decent experience."
Like other companies Wells
Fargo is interested in exploring the use of DHTML and AJAX to create Web-based
applications that could offer an even better online experience to end users.
But Watson said that first the bank will have to figure out how to make the
new technologies accessible.
Finding the Time
Nate Koechley, a senior front-end engineer at Yahoo Inc., which has already
taken the AJAX and DHTML plunge, said learning to build accessibility features
into applications developed with those technologies is mostly an issue of finding
enough time, given the intense, almost frantic atmosphere of Web development.
"Preserving and enriching accessibility is just another constraint of Web
design and engineering," he said.
Koechley added that the development team at Yahoo has a great in-house resource--Victor Tsaran, the company's accessibility program manager, who is blind himself. "Now we can go over to his cube and say, ‘Hey, does this work for you? Check it out,'’” Koechley said.
Mike Paciello, founder of the Paciello Group LLP, a Nashua, New Hampshire-based consulting firm that works to enhance the accessibility of software, said he is optimistic that the process of making applications accessible won't lag with technologies like AJAX and DHTML to the degree that it has with other technologies in the past.
"Technology that supports people with disabilities is so far behind," he said. "Whenever they start to get caught up, they get thrown back another five steps. [But] with AJAX I don't think it will be five steps back because we already have a handle on it. We're probably one or two steps back."
For Paciello, the lack
of a dynamic leader to raise awareness about the need for increased accessibility
remains the larger problem. And there's still much more work to be done, according
to advocates for people with disabilities. Sexton, for one, said that he still
can spend hours trying to figure out whether a Web site is just difficult to
navigate or not accessible at all. "It frustrates me no end," he said,
"and it makes me feel that I'm not able to do something that everybody
else can."
Copyright 2006 by Computerworld, Inc., One Speen Street, Framingham,
Massachusetts 01701. Reprinted by permission of Computerworld. All
rights reserved.
by Caroline Rivera Coon
From the Editor:
Ms. Coon recently applied for National Orientation and Mobility Certification
(NOMC) from the National Blindness Professional Certification Board. The following
comments are based on her essays in the application. They illustrate again that
our positive outlook and high expectations can make sense to committed sighted
professionals in the blindness field. This is what she wrote:
Over the thirteen years I have been a teacher of the blind with the New Mexico
Commission for the Blind, I have learned much about blindness. At first I was
guided by the coaching, instruction, and correction of my blind supervisors.
I also learned firsthand from other blind people.
I have held the hand of weeping seniors dealing with the double complications
of getting old and becoming blind, heard the angry storms of consumers who had
someone else to blame for their blindness, and chased blind youth who wanted
to get to the donut shop before me.
I have learned that the personalities, comprehension levels, and abilities of blind people are as varied as those of the sighted population, that blindness is truly just one characteristic of the many characteristics of an individual. In short, I have learned that, if there is one characteristic that will keep people from leading a successful life, it is not blindness but a pessimistic attitude about their blindness. This negative attitude is the liability, not the blindness.
Growing up with two blind sisters, Mildred and Eileen Rivera, our family always talked of them as amazing. It was not uncommon to hear a relative go on and on about my sisters doing as well as they did with so little sight. Today one is an attorney, the other a Wharton-trained marketing manager raising a family with a husband who is also blind. After attending a national conference on cutting-edge practices in training the blind, I called up my Federationist sisters and told them, “You aren’t amazing anymore. You are awesome sisters, but not amazing.” And they were glad to hear it. Today I know that to believe my successful blind sisters are amazing is to believe that blindness should have kept them from being successful. I now understand.
My sister Eileen first experienced the white canes in college. One Christmas she came home to Puerto Rico with her cane. She was getting around nicely with it and explained that it helped her move about more comfortably. My family accepted this because it seemed to work. My sisters no longer took someone’s hand to get from the car to the house or wherever we were going. I no longer felt responsible for their safety.
Before I worked in the blindness field, my job was coordinating recreational activities for seniors at a nursing home in upstate New York. I called my blind sisters on several occasions and complained that if someone had shown some of the ladies how to use canes and read Braille, they would be much better off.
When opportunity knocked, I came to work with the New Mexico Commission for the Blind, then under the direction of Dr. Fredric Schroeder. My sister Eileen assured me that it was “one of the most progressive in the country,” a belief I share to this day. Still I knew little about mobility and how it was successfully accomplished. In New Mexico I learned the alternative skills of blindness while blindfolded for a few months. Then I went out as a field teacher to blind adults and seniors.
My first mobility instructor, Doug Boone, taught me that when phoning new referrals, I was to ask them their height. By subtracting about four inches from this number, I could bring them a long white cane on my first visit to their homes.
At first I convinced my
students to use the cane by explaining that drivers would know they were blind.
Over time my philosophy and methods have progressed. Today I teach that the
long white cane in the hands of experienced blind persons promotes independent
travel and helps avoid hazards—that listening, focusing on one's surroundings,
and knowing how to cross intersections keep one safe.
In addition to my usual work with adults, I work with teens during our Students
in Transition to Employment Program (STEP). Most blind adults I work with are
cooperative and unquestioning. In working with partially blind teens, I have
learned that students need to be convinced of the value of learning and properly
applying the most reliable alternative mobility techniques. The teens who had
learned other ways of doing things want to know why these techniques are best.
From them I learned the importance of explaining the techniques of structured-discovery
cane travel. I have been busily learning new ways to illustrate these principles
and incorporate them along various travel routes.
With both teens and adults I have learned that I need to keep my expectations high for my students. This is a continuing process because I sometimes realize I did not believe my students could do what they just did. When I recognize these thoughts as a hindrance to progress, I begin to weed them out. Although I would like to think that I have weeded out all my subconscious low expectations, it is probably not true. This kind of thinking is too prevalent in our society not to affect me. That is why I enjoy attending the National Federation of the Blind conventions with my sisters. I think of it as my annual tune-up.
I wholeheartedly concur
with the writings of Dr. Jacobus tenBroek, founder of the National Federation
of the Blind. This wise leader said, “Given proper training and opportunity,
the average blind person is able to perform in the average job in the average
way.”
How do we provide proper training at the New Mexico Commission for the Blind?
To begin, we apply the structured-discovery method. As Jeffrey Altman and Joseph
Cutter wrote, "Structured Discovery is more than a collection of instructional
methods and strategies. It is a philosophical view of blindness—a view which
regards the major barrier to independence to be misconceptions about blindness
manifested through low expectations and internalized by the individual."
We assess blind clients' strengths and weaknesses and develop plans to address these areas. The plans include instruction in the alternative skills of blindness, such as Braille and cane travel. In addition students and teachers collaborate with blind role models during training, which is carried out for the most part or entirely under sleepshades and using a long white cane.
To succeed, this rehabilitation must include confidence-building exercises as well as seminars that deal with society's attitudes: exercises that enable blind individuals to apply their knowledge and skills in a society that often doesn’t believe that blind people can do much with their lives. Proper training enables a blind person to live a quality life and compete alongside the sighted population in the world—in other words, to pursue happiness along with everybody else.
I firmly believe that what our graduates are doing should be comparable to what their sighted peers are doing. Once our graduates complete their adjustment-to-blindness training with long white canes in their hands and new-found independence in their hearts, they have no trouble confidently advocating for themselves and following their dreams.
by John G. Paré Jr.
From the Editor:
John Paré is a member of our national staff. For several years now he
has directed the NFB-NEWSLINE® program. Like all of us he is still growing
in his understanding of what blind people can do. In the following story he
describes one of his most recent adventures in learning what Federationists
mean when we say that we are changing what it means to be blind. This is what
he says:
I recently attended the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically
Handicapped national conference in Portland, Maine. I was there to meet with
all of the regional librarians as well as to do a formal presentation on NFB-NEWSLINE®,
the National Federation of the Blind’s digitized newspaper-reading system. My
wife Cindy had come along to help with driving and take pictures and to enjoy
Portland. On the second night the group went to an organized dinner at a local
college, right on the Atlantic Ocean. It was a beautiful spot, and after dinner
about half the group (approximately fifty people) began walking towards a lighthouse.
The state of Maine is known for its scenic lighthouses, which help keep the
fishing ships away from the rocky coast.
As we proceeded down a smooth path, Cindy described the manicured landscaping. It was dusk, and the air was cool and damp. We had walked faster than most of the others, so we were among the first to reach the shore. I knew that the lighthouse would be located some distance out into the ocean. I expected that we would soon get to a large boardwalk with railings and benches or, if not a fancy boardwalk, at least a smooth path to walk along.
But as soon as I took my first step, I realized that this was not a pier. I wouldn’t even have dignified it by calling it a walking path. It was a series of huge boulders that had been pushed together to form a jetty. We were eight to ten feet in the air, and the distance between boulders ranged from one foot to two and a half feet. The top of each boulder was about four by four feet and mostly flat. The first few boulders were reasonably close together, and I was able to step from boulder to boulder. We were all dressed in business attire, so I was wearing dress shoes. The rocks were damp and a little slippery. Our casual after-dinner walk had suddenly turned from a stroll to a major orientation and mobility test. To be honest, I was caught completely off guard. I asked Cindy how much farther we had to go to get to the end of the jetty. She said we had only gone about 20 percent of the way. I estimated that I had successfully crossed about ten boulders. This meant that I had forty transitions to go, and that didn’t even count the return trip. The distance between boulders was getting wider, and what had started as a step and then a hop was becoming more of a jump.
I wasn’t too concerned about falling as long as I stayed on the boulders. But if I fell off one of the boulders, I would fall eight to ten feet onto jagged rocks and would then roll into the ocean. I didn’t want to be reckless; I still had to give my NFB-NEWSLINE® presentation the next morning.
I decided just to keep taking the crossings one at a time. I used my long white cane to find the end of the current boulder and the beginning of the next. I then used it to find the left and right edges of the next boulder. Finally, I used my cane to check the length of the next boulder since I didn’t want to jump too far and accidentally jump right over it and land in one of the crevasses. Then I placed my cane at the point where I wanted to land and jumped to that spot. As I have mentioned, some of the transitions were just a step, while others required a jump. A couple of the final boulders demanded more of a leap.
Cindy was of course carrying her camera, so we got one of the other attendees to take our picture. As I moved from boulder to boulder, I contemplated the many reasons why it would be sensible to turn back, but I wanted to continue. After I returned to the mainland, I was happy that I had challenged myself to complete this walk.
Blind people encounter such situations all the time, not necessarily walking out on a rocky jetty, but something much more important. The question is how much we are going to let blindness change or limit the things we really want to do. At that moment in Portland I really wanted to walk the length of the jetty. Several years ago I would have turned back, but the National Federation of the Blind has taught me that blind people can do whatever we want to do. We just have to have confidence and courage in our own abilities. Using my long white cane, I was able to travel across the jetty safely and enjoy the lighthouse trip just like the more adventurous of the sighted people at the conference.
We all encounter these decision-points, and, like that moment for me on the jetty, they often occur unexpectedly. When it happens to you, remember to take one step at a time, and, most important, remember the confidence and courage you have learned from the National Federation of the Blind.
by Tracy Soforenko
From the Editor: It may be high summer as you are reading this issue of the Monitor, but before you know it October and Meet the Blind Month will be at our door. Every chapter should be planning right now for every opportunity that members can dream up to entice members of the community to meet blind people and get to know what the National Federation of the Blind is doing to change what it means to be blind. The following article first appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of the Vigilant, the publication of the NFB of Virginia.
Tracy Soforenko is a rather new member of the National Federation of the Blind of Virginia and already is president of the Potomac Chapter. As part of last October’s Meet the Blind Month, Tracy organized a program in which Boy Scouts were introduced to blind people and the techniques they use to do everyday activities. Here is his report of the event; it can serve as an example to all of us as we plan our 2006 Meet the