_______________________________________________________________________________
Vol. 50, No. 10 November 2007
Barbara Pierce, editor
Published in inkprint, in Braille, and on cassette by
The National
Federation of the Blind
Marc Maurer, president
National
Office
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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. 50, No. 10 November 2007
Lead Photos
We Want Cars that Sound
like Cars
by Daniel B. Frye
First Step in Adding Accessibility
to Google Books–Was It Enough?
by George Kerscher
Reflections on Becoming
Blind
by Rebecca Atkinson
Work, Instruction, and
Community Activity
at the Seattle Lighthouse for the Blind
by Kirk Adams
Blind and a Peer of the
Realm
by Colin Low
A Day in the Life of My
Homeschoolers
by Konnie Ellis
Taking up the Braille Challenge
by Leslie Stocker
$150,000 for Blind Students
The 2008 National Federation of the Blind Scholarship Program
Braille Readers Are Leaders
2007-2008
by Barbara Cheadle
Martinez Aims at Para-Olympics
An Open Letter from Kevan Worley
Recipes
Monitor Miniatures
Copyright 2007 National Federation of the Blind
by Daniel B. Frye
A hundred and fifty members of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland and neighboring East Coast affiliates assembled in front of the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) on Wednesday, October 3, 2007, to protest the agency’s failure to incorporate blindness-specific modifications in the manufacture of hybrid cars and other low-emissions vehicles in regulations pursuant to the Maryland Clean Cars Act of 2007. Highlighting the real dangers of unmodified quiet vehicles to blind pedestrians, Federationists marched, chanted, and carried signs on the public sidewalk in front of the MDE, in plain view of passing traffic. Shouting slogans like “We want cars that sound like cars,” “Quiet cars give me a run-down feeling,” and “Environmental not detrimental,” protesters made it clear that the NFB, while valuing the environmental benefits of hybrid vehicles, also wants these ecologically friendly products to make a sound sufficient to alert blind—and indeed all--pedestrians of their presence.
Our protest garnered significant press coverage, including an exclusive Associated Press national print article; coverage on WYPR, the Baltimore-based National Public Radio affiliate; and local television coverage from all of the major networks. Jay Leno of NBC’s Tonight Show even made mention of our concerns about quiet vehicles in his monologue of Thursday, October 4, 2007.
By way of background, the NFB of Maryland was the first Federation affiliate in the United States to have language adopted in state legislation requiring an appropriate administrative agency with responsibility for regulating hybrid vehicles to take into consideration the needs of blind pedestrians. Section 6-C of the Maryland Clean Cars Act of 2007 directed the MDE to “consider the needs” of the blind in relation to quiet hybrid vehicles. When the proposed regulations implementing this law were released for public comment, however, they contained not a single word addressing this critical issue. In view of the MDE’s flagrant disregard of their legislative mandate to consider the potential impact of quiet hybrid vehicles on blind pedestrians, the NFB of Maryland determined to make its concerns known to both policymakers and the general public. Having been exasperated by this total disregard of the importance of the quiet car issue, Maryland affiliate leaders decided both to provide public comment on the absence of blindness-specific considerations in the regulations and to escalate the visibility of the organization’s concerns to the general public through a protest.
After demonstrating for almost an hour, designated speakers for the public hearing addressing the pending regulations filed into the auditorium to sign in and take their seats. The balance of the protesters gathered for a little street theater designed to dramatize the potentially deadly threat that hybrid vehicles pose to blind pedestrians. The driver of the silent Toyota Prius, rented especially for this occasion to illustrate the car’s stealthy characteristics, pretended to hit and kill Rosy Carranza, coordinator of program services in the National Federation of the Blind’s Department of Affiliate Action. While onlookers mourned her untimely death, her body was recovered from the street, gingerly placed in a coffin, and loaded into a hearse. Protesters lined up behind the hearse to circumnavigate the MDE parking lot before entering the hearing. MDE security personnel initially declined to admit the hearse to their property (the MDE offices are on privately leased property), but they eventually yielded in response to chants of “Let us in, let us in.” Once they had paid appropriate respects, all demonstration participants entered the building to attend the hearing.
The text of
the Associated Press article about the protest dated October 2, 2007, which
was reprinted with minor variations in at least fifty newspapers across the
country, follows:
Blind People Say Hybrids Are Hazard
by Ben Nuckols
Gas-electric hybrid vehicles, the status symbol for the environmentally conscientious,
are coming under attack from a constituency that doesn't drive: the blind. Because
hybrids make virtually no noise at slower speeds when they run solely on electric
power, blind people say they pose a hazard to those who rely on their ears to
determine whether it's safe to cross the street or walk through a parking lot.
"I'm used to being able to get sound cues from my environment and negotiate accordingly. I hadn't imagined there was anything I really wouldn't be able to hear," said Deborah Kent Stein, chairwoman of the National Federation of the Blind's Committee on Automotive and Pedestrian Safety. "We did a test, and I discovered, to my great dismay, that I couldn't hear it."
The tests--admittedly unscientific--involved people standing in parking lots or on sidewalks who were asked to signal when they heard several different hybrid models drive by. "People were making comments like, 'When are they going to start the test?' And it would turn out that the vehicle had already done two or three laps around the parking lot," Stein said.
As gas prices continue to rise--along with concern about harmful emissions--hybrid cars are increasing in popularity. New hybrid vehicle registrations grew more than 49 percent nationwide in the first seven months of 2007 compared with the same period in 2006, according to R.L. Polk & Co., an automotive research firm. Toyota Motor Corp. has sold nearly four hundred and sixty thousand of the most popular hybrid model, the Prius, since it hit the market in 2000, according to the company, which pegs total hybrid sales at just over nine hundred thousand.
Officials with the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind are quick to point out that they're not advocating a return to gas guzzlers. They'd just like the fuel-efficient hybrids to make some noise. NFB President Marc Maurer said he received an email from an environmentalist who suggested that the members of his group should be the first to drown when sea levels rise from global warming. "I don't want to pick that way of going, but I don't want to get run over by a quiet car either," Maurer said.
The NFB--the leading advocacy group for 1.3 million legally blind people in the United States--made pleas to the auto industry and to federal and state agencies, with little concrete success so far. On Wednesday the president of the NFB's Maryland chapter planned to present written testimony asking for a minimum sound standard for hybrids to be included in the state's emissions regulations. But those regulations are crafted by the Maryland Department of the Environment, which has no oversight of auto safety, said Robert Ballinger, a spokesman for the department. He said the department would work with the NFB to press the issue with auto manufacturers and federal transportation officials.
Manufacturers are aware of the problem but have made no pledges yet. Toyota is studying the issue internally, said Bill Kwong, a spokesman for Toyota Motor Sales USA. "One of the many benefits of the Prius, besides excellent fuel economy and low emissions, is quiet performance. Not only does it not pollute the air, it doesn't create noise pollution," Kwong said. "We are studying the issue and trying to find that delicate balance."
The Association of International Auto Manufacturers, Inc., a trade group, is also studying the problem, along with a committee established by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The groups are considering "the possibility of setting a minimum noise level standard for hybrid vehicles," said Mike Camissa, the safety director for the manufacturers' association. Officials with two separate arms of the U.S. Department of Transportation--the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Federal Highway Administration--said they are aware of the problem but have not studied it.
While Stein said she would prefer that hybrids sound similar to conventional engines, other blind people said they'd be fine with any sound that was inoffensive but easy to detect. Both sides agree that it wouldn't be prohibitively expensive to outfit cars with an adequate noisemaking device. "It's cheaper than an air bag or other safety devices," Kwong said. "Any kind of audio device is going to be relatively inexpensive."
The blind, however, will have to win over some hybrid owners as well as advocates for reduced noise pollution. Some think that making hybrids louder won't solve anything. "To further expose millions of people to excessive noise pollution by making vehicles artificially loud is neither logical nor practical nor in the public interest," said Richard Tur, founder of NoiseOFF, a group that raises awareness of noise pollution. Others believe that distracted pedestrians are at greater risk than blind people from quiet cars.
"The only way to function driving any car, forgetting the fact that it's a Prius, is to just be very careful and see who's around you," said George Margolin of Newport Beach, California, who runs a club for Prius owners with his wife. "We have to be as careful as anyone else and perhaps even more so."
Blind people
are not the only ones who've had close calls. Linda Murphy, fifty-seven, a personal
administrative assistant from San Marcos, California, has 20/20 vision when
she wears her glasses, but she's almost been hit twice by hybrids. "I'm
walking right in back of it and it's moving and I didn't realize it until it
nearly touched me," Murphy said, describing the first of her scares. "I
never realized how dependent I was on my ears until I almost got hit."
At the beginning of the hearing Shari T. Wilson, Maryland’s secretary of the
environment, offered a sympathetic and conciliatory statement in general support
of the NFB’s identified concerns about hybrid vehicles. Secretary Wilson offered
to work with the Maryland affiliate to convey our concerns to hybrid car manufacturers.
While experienced Federationists remained skeptical about promises of continued
dialogue with traditionally nonresponsive hybrid vehicle manufacturers, it was
good to know that our message was hitting home with somebody in a position of
authority. The public and political pressure applied in this instance clearly
attracted Secretary Wilson’s attention, and to her credit she remained throughout
the hearing to listen to the concerns of all twenty-six Federationists who offered
testimony condemning the absence of blindness-specific considerations in relation
to the manufacture of quiet hybrid vehicles.
Sharon Maneki,
legislative chairperson for the Maryland affiliate, was the first person to
address the hearing panel. In addition to delivering the written remarks prepared
by the affiliate and submitted under the name of Michael Gosse, NFB of Maryland
president, she supplemented these comments with technical information on the
ability of blind people to interact with quiet hybrid vehicles provided by Dr.
Lawrence Rosenblum, professor of perceptual psychology at the University of
California, Riverside. Dr. Rosenblum has conducted substantial research on quiet
cars and the blind, and his observations offer a compelling reason to take heed
of our adopted policy positions on this issue. Following is the prepared text
of the testimony submitted to the MDE from the NFB of Maryland:
Ms. Rabin:
My name is Dr. Michael Gosse, and I am the president of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland. My address is 603 South Milton Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland 21224, and my telephone number is (410) 558-0616.
The National Federation of the Blind of Maryland, one of the fifty-two nationwide affiliates of the National Federation of the Blind and the largest organization of blind Marylanders, is pleased to have the opportunity to comment on the proposed regulations to implement the Low Emissions Vehicle Program mandated by the Maryland Clean Cars Act of 2007. The National Federation of the Blind of Maryland does not oppose the Low Emissions Vehicle Program or its objectives. But we did call to the attention of the General Assembly an unintended consequence of new low-emissions vehicles: they are silent. At present the most popular low-emissions vehicles are gas-electric hybrid cars. When hybrids run on battery power, they make no sound detectable to the human ear. Hybrids are dangerous enough, but it can be assumed that in the coming years even stealthier low emissions vehicles, which may not use gasoline engines at all, will come on the market. Unless steps are taken now to reverse the trend toward vehicles that are silent when operating on the roadways of our state and nation, the blind will lose the only source of information we have about the flow of traffic, resulting in injury and death to some of us and difficulty in traveling safely to work, to school, and to church for many more. Cyclists, runners, walkers, and small children are also rendered vulnerable by the inability to hear the approach of these vehicles.
The National Federation of the Blind has been concerned about the proliferation of silent vehicles since 2003. To address our concerns, we created a Committee on Automobile and Pedestrian Safety. This committee conducted numerous tests with blind volunteers to ascertain if there was any way a blind person can reliably detect these vehicles. The tests, however, repeatedly showed that blind people cannot hear these vehicles until they are far too close. Had any of the test subjects actually attempted to cross the streets or parking lots we employed in the test when they thought it would be safe to do so, they would have been crushed and killed by a Toyota Prius or Honda Civic.
The Committee on Automobile and Pedestrian Safety of the National Federation of the Blind held a conference to determine the best solution to this problem and carefully considered whether there were viable solutions that did not require a continuous sound generated by the vehicle itself. Ultimately, however, the committee concluded that alternate solutions were either too technologically complex (and expensive), difficult to implement, or unreliable to ensure pedestrian safety. Members of the Committee on Automobile and Pedestrian Safety and other officials of the National Federation of the Blind attempted to speak with the manufacturers of these vehicles in hopes of reaching a solution, but the blind of America were rebuffed at every turn. Most of the car companies have simply ignored us; Honda initially agreed to meet with us but canceled the meeting in response to pressure from the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers.
When the Maryland Clean Cars Act was proposed, the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland saw an opportunity for our concerns to be enshrined in the laws and regulations propagated by a state and at least to protect blind Marylanders while the National Federation of the Blind continued to work on the issue at the national level. As I said, it had become clear from our conversations with manufacturers that no action was likely to be taken in the absence of government regulation, so the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland petitioned the General Assembly for a remedy. Pursuant to our request, the Maryland Clean Cars Act specifically required this department to “consider the needs of individuals with visual impairments” when propagating regulations pursuant to the act. This was a step in the right direction, and we eagerly awaited this department’s draft regulations. The draft regulation being considered today, however, contains no mention of our concerns. In fact, the draft states that the only impact of these regulations on persons with disabilities is positive. But while this may be true of persons with respiratory problems, it is certainly not true of the blind, as long as these vehicles continue to operate soundlessly. The Maryland Department of the Environment must comply with the specific direction of the Maryland General Assembly and address the problem of silent vehicles immediately.
We who are blind use the sounds of passing vehicles in a number of ways to help us travel safely, efficiently, and independently in our communities. By listening to cars as they move or idle, we determine whether lights have turned red or green and set our direction as we cross streets with rounded curbs. Sound from traffic tells us how many vehicles are near us and how fast they are moving; whether they are accelerating or decelerating; and whether they are traveling toward, away from, or parallel to us. With all of this information we can accurately determine when it is safe for us to proceed and when we should stop and wait. The sound of vehicles is helpful even when we are walking in relatively quiet residential areas where the streets are not busy, since the sound of a car’s engine alerts us when a driver is leaving the driveway of a home or turning into or out of a side street or parking lot.
Based on the experiences of individual blind people and tests we have conducted at our national conventions, the National Federation of the Blind has proven that hybrid cars (particularly the Toyota Prius, which is currently the most popular of this new family of vehicles) are not audibly detectable when their combustion engines are turned off. This makes these vehicles, as currently designed, dangerous not only to the blind, but to cyclists, runners, walkers, and children. If these vehicles proliferate (as Maryland law now requires) and no action is taken to address the risks to life and limb created by their soundlessness, blind people will not only find our lives routinely threatened but also our ability to travel independently severely curtailed. The problem will only grow more acute when automobile manufacturers produce vehicles that eliminate the use of combustion engines entirely.
The best way
to guarantee the safety of the blind and others is for these vehicles to produce
sound at all times when they are running. We are not demanding increased noise
pollution; we simply demand that vehicles produce enough sound to warn of their
approach in time for us to make intelligent judgments as to whether we should
proceed, or, if necessary, to take evasive action. Toward that end the National
Federation of the Blind of Maryland requests that this department immediately
adopt the following regulatory language:
Motor vehicles must be designed to maintain customary internal combustion engine
acoustical characteristics. Accordingly, vehicles shall emit an omni-directional
sound with similar spectral characteristics to those of a modern internal combustion
engine.
In the event that this sound is artificially generated, the sound and pitch should exhibit distinct variations to indicate whether the vehicle is idling, traveling at a constant speed, or accelerating, to wit:
Idling vehicles shall produce a continuous sound not less than 45 dBa as measured from 10 feet.
Moving vehicles shall produce a continuous sound not less than 53 dBa as measured from 20 feet when traveling less than 10 miles per hour, not less than 60 dBa measured at 60 feet when traveling between 10 and 30 miles per hour, and not less than 65 dBa measured at 60 feet when traveling over 30 miles per hour.
Accelerating
vehicles must conform to the requirements above at the relevant speeds, plus
3 dBa. For these purposes dBa shall mean A-weighted sound level in decibels,
as measured by a general purpose sound level meter complying with the provisions
of the American National Standard Institute, "Specifications for Sound
Level Meter (ANSI SIR 19711)," properly calibrated, and operated on the
"A" weighting network.
The specifications outlined in this regulatory language have no effect on the
environmental benefits of gas-electric hybrids or any other low emissions vehicle.
The language does not require that cars use internal combustion engines, only
that they be made to sound as if they are using them. It does not require that
cars become louder, but only that they emit the sounds to which the blind, and
all other members of the public, are accustomed. In other words, the language
we have proposed simply requires cars to sound like cars.
Opponents of this proposed regulation will no doubt assert that no deaths or injuries are directly attributable to silent automobiles. I submit to the department that it is simply too early to know whether any vehicle-on-pedestrian accidents have been caused by silent vehicles, since the technology is relatively new and accident reports do not usually denote whether the vehicle involved was operating with or without a combustion engine. Anecdotally we know of blind people who have experienced very close calls because of these vehicles, and those of us who have attempted to listen for them in tests conducted by the National Federation of the Blind have, to our own shock, been completely unsuccessful. It is likely that injuries or deaths have already occurred. Even if the pedestrian population has been lucky so far, I hope and pray that this department, as well as other regulatory agencies that will consider this issue in the coming months and years will decide that a proactive response is preferable to waiting for the inevitable tragedy involving a blind person, a cyclist, or a child to shock this state and the nation.
In conclusion, the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland urges the Maryland Department of the Environment to follow the directive of the Maryland General Assembly and to adopt the regulatory language we have proposed in this statement. I thank you again for the opportunity to come before you and speak to this critically important issue.
Renee West,
editor of the Braille Spectator, the publication of the NFB of Maryland
and a member of the board of the Greater Baltimore Chapter of the NFB of Maryland,
also offered comments for agency consideration. Her remarks were representative
of the vast majority of the statements delivered on this occasion, and they
thoughtfully reflect and elaborate on many aspects of the hybrid-vehicles-policy
discussion. The complete text of her testimony follows:
My name is Renee West, and I am a member of the National Federation of the Blind.
My address is 3924 Yolando Road, and my phone number is (410) 243-1818. I very
much appreciate the opportunity to speak today on behalf of my organization,
and I thank you for your time.
As a blind person I hold my independence in great esteem. Having been taught to use a long white cane and listen to the sounds of traffic as my guide, I have been able to traverse the globe, confident in my ability to travel safely. My confidence is waning, however, as an increased number of low-emission vehicles fill the streets. Many other blind people are likewise afraid of the dangers these quiet cars pose to our safety, so we as a group have taken to the streets to alert governmental bodies and the public at large of our alarm at these risks. I ask that in determining regulations to implement the Low-Emissions Program mandated by the Maryland Clean Cars Act of 2007 you give consideration to our deeply felt concern about this issue and act in a manner in accordance not only with our request but also with the directive of the Maryland General Assembly.
Blind people seek freedom unencumbered by fear. The freedom to travel to and from work and play, to visit friends and attend our houses of worship is enjoyed and valued by most ordinary blind citizens as a natural part of our lives. Because we have learned the alternative skills of blindness, we are unafraid of our environment; we rely upon these tools to allow us independence in our travels and expect them to serve us well. We are not afraid to go down stairs because we use our canes to feel the ground as we walk, and we expect that our canes will alert us to the presence of stairs. We are not afraid to cross the street because we have become attuned to the sounds cars make in their traffic patterns and expect that we will be alerted to the presence of a car in or near our path by the sounds it makes. If an approaching car is operating on battery power, however, we are utterly unable to hear its advance and are most likely to begin to walk across the street or intersection believing it is clear. This lack of audible cues to the presence of traffic leaves us without any means by which we can use our skills and safely cross the street, and this inability to expect safe crossing effectively shackles our freedom. We are not free when we fear for our lives and the lives of those for whom we are responsible in our travels. We are not free to become the first-class citizens we know we can be, when factors in our environment put us in jeopardy, so we decide it’s best just to stay at home.
As we become more aware as a citizenry of the benefits of environmentally responsible forms of energy for automobiles, an increased number of cars without the benefit of audible signals will be in use. This increase in quiet cars will serve to further compromise our safety and increase our fear. For a blind person, traveling to work in the morning would be dangerous and terrifying. Walking your small child to visit a friend would be unthinkable. The Maryland Department of the Environment has the authority and the obligation to demand vehicles in our state possess the characteristics we need to ensure that we maintain our independence and our current level of safety.
The Committee on Automobile and Pedestrian Safety of the National Federation of the Blind has determined that low-emission vehicles, which create sounds like cars with a traditional combustion engine, are the best means by which blind people can maintain our current level of freedom. It is important that regulatory language stipulate that the sound emitted by the automobile be akin to the sounds cars currently make when in motion and idling, uniform across make and model, and, critically, that it be intrinsic to the car and not turned on or off by the operator. Drivers distracted by cell phones and other vehicles often don’t signal their intent to turn; often drivers ignore traffic lights and stop signs as well. It would be unwise to ask drivers of quiet cars to bear responsibility for making a sound at a crossing, given such a pattern of unreliability. Neither can we assume the creation of consistent sound is unnecessary, that drivers will simply stop at the sight of a pedestrian, given that drivers of cars with a traditional fuel source hit pedestrians with unfortunate regularity. Some may think that blind people can rely upon audible traffic signals for safe crossing, so the sound of traffic is superfluous in light of these devices. Such audible crossing signals are relatively rare and costly to implement, and the usefulness of such signals is debatable. For blind people the most effective means by which we can safely cross streets or parking lots is listening to the sound of the cars around us.
It is worth noting that the Maryland General Assembly stated in the law that regulations addressing our concerns about the potential risk of quiet cars are of benefit to all Maryland citizens. Most means by which the environment has been altered to assist the disabled have in fact been of use to the general populace. Noises signaling the approach of an elevator or the end of a moving sidewalk alert distracted people to these important factors. Singular taps in sinks originally designed for people with impaired motor skills assist mothers holding babies in one arm. Moms also benefit from wheelchair curb cuts when pushing strollers. In like manner the sound a car makes helps alert everyone to a possible danger. While we of course should be fully engaged when crossing streets, people are often distracted, so the sound of an oncoming vehicle serves as a necessary additional cue when they don’t see the car. Quiet cars not only jeopardize blind individuals, who rely on car sounds as our sole cue for safe crossing, but are highly detrimental to all who use sound as one cue among many.
As people
we appreciate the goals expressed in the Maryland Clean Cars Act. As blind people
we urge the Maryland Department of the Environment to help make certain that
creating laws that benefit Maryland doesn’t harm our ability to enjoy all that
our state has to offer. The language we propose for inclusion in the Low-Emissions
Vehicle Program regulations would serve to ensure that blind people could rely
upon our skills to travel and thus to restore our freedom of movement. It would
indeed be a shame to curtail the progress of blind people who have only just
begun to advance.
Finally, the brief but powerful comments of Maya Redfearn, a recently blinded
woman and new member of the NFB of Maryland, served to capture succinctly the
overall spirit of the day’s message. She said in part:
“We’ve all heard of the old phrase, stop, look, and listen. Look has been taken
from me. Listen may be taken from me. If this happens, all I’ll have left to
do is stop. And I don’t want to stop. I want to keep on going, keep on traveling,
keep on living.”
The protest and hearing were finished by just after noon, and Federationists left the MDE offices contented in the knowledge that they had done everything possible to raise awareness about the dangers of quiet hybrid vehicles. The complementary remarks, ranging from polished to plain, delivered by the twenty-six speakers, identified the kernel of our concern and reflected the diversity of the Federation’s membership. The humanity of the Federation and the earnestness with which those present were prepared to advocate on this topic reflected creditably on our movement.
Now NFB of Maryland leaders and members must wait to see what impact their efforts will have on the MDE. To be sure, this state initiative, with implications for the entire nation, must be resolved to our ultimate satisfaction, either as a direct result of this campaign or through continued advocacy on this topic. The collective voice of the blind of Maryland and America on the issue of quiet vehicles must ultimately prevail. Our cause is just. Our message is simple. We want cars that sound like cars.
by George Kerscher
From the Editor: On July 5, both George Kerscher, senior officer accessible information, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, and Dr. T.V. Ramen, a research scientist with Google, Inc., addressed the 2007 convention of the National Federation of the Blind. The topic was online access to books for blind readers. Following the convention Mr. Kerscher wrote an article describing the brave new world of Google Books and explaining where the problems still lie. This is what he says:
On July 3, 2007, Google quietly made what may seem to be a subtle change to Google Books. However, individuals who are blind or have a print disability are going to be both very excited and disappointed. For them it is not a subtle change. A very special hidden link was added to Google Books in the "full view," which is exposed to assistive technology (AT) such as screen readers used by people who are blind or have a visual impairment.
Google Books has been of huge interest to those in the print-disabled community ever since it was announced. It is estimated that fewer than 5 percent of books published in print are ever produced in an accessible format. This scanning project has the potential of being an unparalleled source of books and will be a huge improvement over what is available in the mainstream for people who are blind or print disabled. The DAISY (www.daisy.org) standard, which provides structured and multimedia access to a book, still provides the ultimate in accessibility. Other disability groups as well as the educational community are just now learning about the benefits of DAISY and the multiple projects funded by the DAISY Consortium. Google technology so far does not compete well with the accessible features of DAISY books, but the scanning of millions upon millions of books from libraries around the world marks the serious start of the digitization of the world's print heritage. Now, with Google Books, not only is the Web indexed by the Internet giant, but the wealth of knowledge stored in our libraries can be found and accessed. The search function in Google Books returns titles that have a match in the text of the book. Words found are highlighted on the image of the printed page from the original book. If the title is in copyright, a snippet is visible, but, if it is out of copyright, the full view of the page is displayed.
The very special hidden link available from the full view now allows people who use access technology with their computers to read the text. Before this change it was not possible; the views were images, not text. On July 5 at the National Federation of the Blind's annual convention, Dr. T.V. Raman, who is himself blind and who works for Google, said, "Consider this to be step zero of many steps that will benefit blind and print-disabled persons throughout the world." Indeed this is a significant step; having hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of books available to a population that thirsts for information but is blocked from using traditional mechanisms for reading is without precedent and of extreme importance.
How does the accessible version work? Google inserts a hidden link to the OCR view of the text. With assistive technology in place, it is prominently presented as the first item in the full view. This link takes the reader to a completely accessible interface to the book. Normal keyboard commands that screen readers typically use are all present in this interface. A person with a disability using assistive technology can read the OCR text, move to the next or previous page, go to pages, and use the table of contents.
If sighted users have the loading of images turned off, the link is exposed, but it is very difficult to find. Sighted users have the better option, to "view plain text," which substitutes the scanned text for the image view. The presentation from the new hidden link provides the same functionality but in a much more screen-reader-friendly approach.
However, one inequality must be addressed immediately. Reading off-line is supported by Google Books. There is an option to download a PDF version of full-view books, but because these are only images of the pages, assistive technology can not present the information to the blind reader. This functionality is therefore available only to the sighted community. At present readers who are blind or have some other print disability have no option to download an entire book as a Zip file for off-line reading. Most people who use alternatives to print books use some kind of portable reading device. Very few people do their reading online, and without a download feature we face a glaring inequality between the reading options for sighted users and users who are blind or print disabled. I trust this is one of the many improvements that Dr. Raman referred to.
In addition,
those unable to see the screen cannot access the limited (snippet) view, and
there are no links to sites where someone who is blind or has a print disability
can go to get an accessible commercial version or a high-quality version with
figure descriptions and other important features from a library serving people
with disabilities like Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D) in the
USA or one of the many other libraries that make up the DAISY Consortium and
serve the blind and print-disabled population around the world.
Raman believes that the Google Book search is tremendous for research purposes
but that it is not intended to replace traditional libraries or bookstores.
Nonetheless, sighted people can download the whole book free of charge. Raman
said, "As a blind person I want the same access as anybody else. I hope
eventually we can link to a place where blind people can get the accessible
version in the format they want with figure descriptions and all, like from
Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic." Indeed once commercial digital publications
become accessible through assistive technology, the Google Book search should
lead the reader using assistive technology to a site where the book can be purchased
or to a library site that provides the book in the high-quality DAISY format,
Braille, or large print, just as it does for sighted readers.
Nevertheless it is a fact that the Google collection contains more titles than are in all the libraries serving the blind throughout the world. One must recognize that the Google content may be the only source for accessing many of these titles. It is not perfect. The OCR errors are quite obvious. These are not normally apparent to sighted readers because they are looking at the image of the page rather than the plain text view. The Google Book search, optimized for scanned materials, still yields outstanding results with the searches. Raman said, "The OCR errors are there, but this will get better over time." By this Raman may mean that the OCR-recognition approaches will be improved by Google and the errors will be corrected through an automated process. I agree that we will have an ongoing need for the alternative versions that have figure descriptions, tactile graphics, and the other important enhancements that the libraries serving the blind provide.
Google is seeking input from blind and disabled users. Raman suggests that people with disabilities sign up for an account on Google (blind people will be able to use the accessible audible Captcha they have developed). They should then sign up for the "accessibility" forum. In this forum you can post messages to accessible@google.com and share your thoughts about the many accessibility features that Google is introducing, including Google Books.
I applaud the first step that Google has taken. I trust that it is indeed Google's first step toward full access to the information in Google Books. I understand that Google believes in the iterative software-development process. As such this is the first iteration of their accessibility developments in Google Books. I personally believe that in the information age access to information is a fundamental human right. Any newly developed information technology must take into consideration the needs of blind and print-disabled readers from the beginning; doing anything less is simply wrong and a violation of our human rights. Nobody benefits more from Google's first step than readers who are blind or have a print disability. Now let's take more steps towards equality, starting with the download of the full book, just as a sighted reader can do.
by Rebecca Atkinson
From the Editor: On July 17, 2007, the Guardian, one of the most prestigious newspapers in the United Kingdom, published an essay by a woman who is losing her sight from retinitis pigmentosa. In some ways her assumptions and experience of blindness depart startlingly from the American, or at least NFB, presumption that a trained blind person can travel as rapidly and cross streets as efficiently as sighted pedestrians. Yet by and large her experience and attitudes are healthy and articularly expressed. This is what she says:
Rebecca Atkinson is going blind. An experimental therapy could offer her the chance to see again, but would she take it?
Earlier this year doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, began the world's first gene therapy trials to treat twelve patients who have Leber's congenital amaurosis, a condition that causes progressive sight loss. Following successful animal trials (said to have restored the vision of blind dogs so they could navigate a maze without difficulty), it is hoped that the technique, which involves injecting working copies of faulty genes directly into the retina, will prove equally effective when carried out on humans. The results will not be made public for a year, but, if the technique works, scientists hope it could eventually be used to treat a wide range of inherited sight disorders affecting up to 30,000 visually impaired people in the UK and potentially millions more worldwide.
The first viable treatment for blindness is twinkling on the horizon, and, as one reader said on a national newspaper message board discussing the trials, "The possibility of being able to give improved sight to people with visual impairments is a great development for the human race."
But what of the people we seek to repair? Those who have been born blind and those, like me, who are losing or have lost their vision. Is this what we have been waiting for? Is it "a great development for the human race," or a step forward in the eugenic quest for an über race, free of imperfection and rid of the unease about disability that nestles quietly in society's pocket?
For the past thirteen years I have been losing my sight, due to a genetic and incurable condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP). RP causes the photoreceptive cells on the retina to die off, causing, in my case, tunnel vision. I liken it to looking at the world down the middle of two toilet rolls. My central vision remains intact, but where once was peripheral vision, now float only my thoughts. In time these loo rolls will shrink to knotholes and then pinholes and then possibly nothing.
In the early years after my diagnosis, blindness remained a repulsive and terrifying concept. Every year I would visit the doctor, and he would say the same thing--that I must live and plan my life with the certainty that blindness was inevitable. And so, slowly over time, that is what I learned to do.
But now the advent of gene therapy has pushed open a chink in the door. Disabled people have long asked themselves the hypothetical "would you be cured if you could?" question. Now for the first time there is a chance, albeit very small, that maybe one day I might actually get my sight back. Hurrah, you cry. I must be thrilled.
Actually I am a bit confused. It is easy to assume that all visually impaired people will be hammering down the doors should gene therapy prove successful. But to say this is to assume that a blind life is lesser and that all blind people really want to be sighted. They don't.
The first blind man I ever met, who also happened to be my boss at the time, is one of them. I recently asked him if he would have gene therapy if he could. No, came his reply. Because, he tells me, regaining sight is more than just seeing again. There are issues of identity and culture at stake too. "As the blind-from-birth son of blind parents, I am, in part of my soul, defined by my blindness," he explains. "It directly equates to ethnic or racial origin. If you give a black person the choice to be white, there may well be significant advantages in such a deal: more access to better jobs; freedom from the shackles of ignorant prejudice; in short, a step closer to equality. But I'd bet most would turn the offer down flat."
But what if, unlike my old boss, you haven't always been blind? What if, like me, you grew up with full vision and have seen all the cliché-ridden things that those born totally blind are pitied for never having seen--the sunset, your own reflection, the look in your lover's eyes. What if your soul is sighted, and then you go blind? You will cry and wonder why. You will hope and pray. You will wish it would all go away. But the longer your sight has been on the slide, the more it seeps into every crack of your psyche until one day you are no longer the "sighted person" who can't see anymore. Somehow, strangely, in the dead of night your identity has rolled over in bed, and you wake up and get out the other side a "visually impaired person," and it feels like part of you.
It doesn't happen overnight, and perhaps it doesn't happen to all who sail the strange seas of sight loss with me. But for me there came a point when impending blindness was no longer my alien, but my friend. I had had my time as a sighted person. I had seen the world through my eyes. Now it was time to touch it and smell it and hear it. When you lose your vision, you have to relearn the sorts of things that will allow you to survive on the planet, such as crossing the road without being flattened. Next you must tackle the real problem and learn to deal with the attitudes of others as they morph around you. Misconceptions start to spout from even your oldest friends' mouths because negative attitudes about blindness permeate us all. You are about to cross over into the dark side and see what wriggles and writhes on the underbelly of society. Folk will see you as the sufferer, the pitiful, the afflicted, the subhuman--that's you, yes, you. If you use a cane or a dog, people will stare as you walk down the street. People will assume you are more lacking in intelligence than your sighted counterpart. People you have never met before will ask if you want children, and if you do, they will ask if the kids will have the same condition that you have, and whether that is right or wrong. Welcome. Your reproductive autonomy is in the docks of the moral courts of the nation's minds.
So if this underbelly is so wretched, surely if the time comes when the doctors are looming forth with a needle containing the working version of my faulty gene and heralding the promise of a new day, one with a bright sunset and me at the wheel of a fast car, I'll take it, right? Anything to escape? No.
Saying yes to seeing again, even for someone who wasn't born blind, isn't easy. The repercussions would ripple beyond my eyes into my friendships, my work, my relationship. Would I retain the unity I have with my disabled brethren if I could see? Or would I have different friends, the type who fall by the wayside now because they are not aware or empathetic, or are too aesthetically obsessed? Would I lose the friends with whom I have nothing in common but who remain in my phone book because they get the blindness thing? And would it be right to dump them just because I can see and don't need their empathy anymore? If I stepped into the pool of "normal people" again, where would my identity go? The kernel of who I am has been sucked into a new body; now it would have to be sucked back into the old one. And what of my relationship? Would we stay together, or would I run off to do all the things I never got to do before? There is a high rate of separation among couples where one person gets a guide dog for the first time. Why? Because suddenly they can do things on their own again. This new-found independence shifts the balance and cracks appear. If this can happen with a dog, think what could happen with a pair of fully working eyes and a car.
Going blind isn't a smooth ride, though. It comes down and squishes you under an insurmountable weight of grief and disbelief. It is limiting and frustrating and changes the way you do many of the things you used to enjoy--now you must dance with the light on and drive from the back seat. But like the affirmation of near death, it affects more than just your physicality. It gives you a unique perspective. It is a grand experiment that most don't get to try: to observe as your brain rewires and watch as the human body adapts in infinite ways. When my vision began to get worse, I bumped into everything in my path because I was still careering down the pavement at the speed of someone who could see. As my mind caught up with my eyes, I changed the way I walked, with more caution and less speed, and the perpetual bumping and tripping stopped. Losing your sight is not like just shutting your eyes.
The loss is so gradual that, as one sense dies, others grow. Suddenly you can smell the world and sense when someone is standing out of your line of vision. Your brain grows on the inside, and things on the outside start to matter less. I get to live my life twice over, in two different bodies (the sighted one I used to have and the partially sighted one I now have), and with that comes the privilege of spying on the world and its intricacies from multiple vantage points. It's a cliché to say that disabled people are nicer. It is incorrect, in fact. But for me vision loss has made me more empathetic and more openminded. I have to take so often that I give more freely. When you rely on friends to take you down Oxford Street or a stranger to get you across the road, you think more consciously about what you give back and battle with the feeling that you need them more than they need you.
But, strangely, I am happier like this than if I had carried on down the middle lane to mediocre city, never having seen or felt real loss and known how to appreciate the good things around me. I have met people I would never have met had I been sighted, and we have been joined together by the common bond of disability (and there is no glue that sets as hard as that squeezed from the pores of a minority). When part of your body starts to die, you feel what it is to be human. You wake up from the slumber of being just another idiot with an iPod because you are forced to work out the bigger questions. Or at least ask them. Why am I here? Why is this happening? You are alert to the immediacy and fragility of your life. You know that the choices of the modern age do not and can not extend into every realm of your life. You can't choose to see (at least not yet). This is it. The upshot? You live in the moment. You settle for your lot and love it.
The concept of sight loss as a positive thing is an elusive one. It is hard to grasp when you have experienced it, and even harder to grasp when you haven't. It is not something I would have chosen, but it is not something I wish hadn't happened.
Would I like to stop it getting worse? Yes, because I'm only human and, sometimes I lie awake worrying how I'll cope when it's all gone. But would I like to have gene therapy and see perfectly again? Five years ago I'd have said yes. Now I'm not sure, because if this experiment of going blind has taught me anything, it is that what you lose in one place, you gain elsewhere, and while a blind life is different from a sighted life, it is not lesser. And ultimately it is better than having no life at all.
by Kirk Adams
From the Editor: We have always maintained that things would be different
for blind industrial workers in specialized facilities if those who ran the
organizations were themselves blind and committed to demonstrating that blind
people can compete. Kirk Adams, incoming president of the Seattle Lighthouse
for the Blind, confirmed this conviction when he addressed the NFB convention
on Wednesday, July 4, 2007. This is what he said:
Good morning. Thank you, Dr. Maurer, for inviting me to speak to the Federation
this morning. I would like to talk a little bit about myself; would like to
describe the Seattle Lighthouse that currently exists; would like to talk a
little bit about the future of my organization and, in particular, technology
and Braille; and would like then to speak about the Javits-Wagner-O’Day program,
which is undergoing a name change, by the way, to the Ability One program. So
if you hear that, that’s the JWOD program.
Myself, my retinas both detached when I was five years old. I became blind very, very quickly over a couple of weeks. My family moved to the state of Oregon, where I attended the Oregon State School for the Blind for first, second, and third grades. If anyone here from Oregon remembers Mrs. Summers, she was my teacher, and she taught me how to read Braille and write Braille, and type, and I learned how to travel independently using a white cane. I began attending the public school in my hometown in fourth grade, where I continued. I was usually the only blind student in my school settings for the rest of my educational career.
I am married. My wife Roz is here. We have a son who is twenty. We have a daughter who is seventeen. When I graduated from college with a degree in economics, I was a Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. I had a little trouble finding a job. I had lots of interviews. I took the first job I could get, which was working as a stock broker on commission selling stocks and bonds. I did that for ten years. I decided I wanted to do something else with my life. I checked out the Braille copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? from the Talking Book library. I noticed in the Braille Book Review that there is a revised edition. I found it very helpful, and after doing all of the exercises and following the instructions in the book, it told me that I should follow the path to be the CEO of a nonprofit serving people who are blind located in Seattle, Washington. So fourteen years later here I am, and I am doing that.
In 1998, as Dr. Maurer mentioned, I earned a master’s degree in not-for-profit leadership from Seattle University. I received a very generous scholarship from the NFB of Washington, which I greatly appreciate. I have been at the Lighthouse seven years. I was hired originally as the development director to do fundraising and have received four promotions over that seven-year period.
I’d like to talk a little bit about the organization. If anyone in the room flew to the convention on an aircraft made by Boeing, would you give me a little applause? [Applause] Since 1953 every Boeing commercial aircraft has had hundreds of parts made by blind machinists at the Seattle Lighthouse for the Blind. We currently employ eighty-five blind and deaf-blind machinists in a thoroughly modern computerized machine shop. We make 60,000 parts for the Boeing Company every month. They are incorporated in every Boeing aircraft.
Of our 185 blind employees, thirty-five are deaf-blind, mostly with Usher’s syndrome, born deaf and with retinitis pigmentosa, and we are a leader in employing, training, and supporting people who are deaf-blind. We are a manufacturing company. We have a precision machining operation. We do plastic injection molding. We do assembly. We make eighty-five different products. As Dr. Maurer mentioned, we have about $35 million in sales, so there are lots of different kinds of jobs available in an organization of that size. There’s marketing. There’s IT. There’s quality. There’s production planning. And we strive to have blind people employed at every level of our organization. Talking about wages, we are proud in our state to have the highest minimum wage in the country, $7.93 an hour. Our starting salary for entry-level production is $8.50 an hour. Our average production wage is about $11 an hour. We have twenty-eight blind people currently employed in jobs that are called indirect. They are computer trainers, IT, HR manager, president elect; and the average wage for a blind person in an indirect position right now is at $20.02 an hour, so we are headed in the right direction.
We have a number of supports in place. We have three O&M instructors on staff. We have a Braille production department, which I will talk about later. We have sign language interpreters. Benefits: medical, dental, 50 percent tuition reimbursement, a defined benefits pension plan fully funded by the company, and a 403B (like the 401K).
My job, as I see it, is to create jobs by being the most efficient, effective manufacturing organization we can be, to make sure that every job is accessible for a blind person to perform successfully, and to make sure that we have qualified blind applicants for all of our jobs. In the future I can see us continuing to build on our core capabilities. In the realm of technology we currently have a hundred or so adapted work stations in the building. That includes the machine shop. Manufacturing is becoming computerized. All the machines are controlled by PCs, but we’ve been able to adapt all of the off-the-shelf computerized manufacturing equipment with JAWS so that blind and deaf-blind machinists can be fully independent in doing their work. We see technology becoming increasingly important, and one of our strategic objectives is to raise the general level of technology competence throughout the organization. So we’ve developed a partnership with Carroll Tech out of Massachusetts, that has distance learning programs developed specifically for blind computer users. We offer our employees the opportunity to spend three hours per week of paid work time in our computer lab to increase their technology skills.
Equally important to increasing our competency in technology is increasing our level of Braille literacy throughout the organization. I saw on the agenda Dr. Ruby Ryles had a program for parents of blind children, I believe last evening, entitled “Beating the Odds.” It was about the importance of Braille in employment, and we all know that to be true--that Braille skills are essential to successful employment. Braille is beautiful, and, as an aside, we are a large purchaser of the NFB Braille Is Beautiful kit. For the last three years we have purchased twenty Braille Is Beautiful curricula. We’ve given them to fifth-grade classes in the Seattle public schools, where they work with Braille for a month; then they come in and take a tour and meet some successfully employed blind adults who use Braille in their everyday work. It’s been a great program. There was an article in Future Reflections about that last summer, if anyone wants to reference that.
Among our 185 blind employees, I’d say about fifty are strong Braille readers. Mary Helen Scheiber, who is a longtime Federationist, was recently promoted to become our Braille production specialist. She produces Braille for all our Braille-reading employees. Our blind employees receive their Braille paychecks at the same time that sighted employees receive their print paychecks. So everyone gets to see how much is taken out at the same time. Benefits information, agendas, work orders, anything that a sighted employee would see in print, our blind employees can receive in Braille. Now that I’m in charge, there’s a new rule, and it goes like this: no Braille, no meeting! [Applause]
So we are working to put together a pilot program which will begin October 1 with our new fiscal year. It’s designed to increase Braille literacy skill for all of our employees who are blind. We’ve consulted with a number of people around the country. I’ve talked with Jerry Whittle at the center in Louisiana, and we’ll begin that pilot in October. We’ll be keeping in touch with Mark Riccobono and others at NFB as you move towards your Louis Braille coin program of funding Braille literacy programs. We hope to partner with you at some point. Congratulations, by the way, on the Louis Braille coin. That’s tremendous.
Before I turn to talking a little bit about the JWOD program, Ability One, I just want to make sure people can get ahold of me if you want to. Our Website is <www.seattlelighthouse.org>. My email address is <kadams@seattlelh.org>. My telephone number is (206) 436-2110. I’d like to talk a little about the Javits-Wagner-O’Day program. In a resolution passed last year, July 2006, the NFB called for modernization of the JWOD Act, and you mention in your resolution the original promise of good work, good paying work, respectable work for blind and disabled Americans. I personally, and the Seattle Lighthouse as an organization, fully concur with the need to modernize the JWOD Act. It was passed in 1938, two years before the Federation was born, and 1938 is long ago and far away, and it’s long overdue that the act be modernized. We are working very closely with Jim Gibbons, another blind guy, who is the CEO of National Industries for the Blind (NIB). I believe he is here with us today. So the Seattle Lighthouse is working closely with Jim so that we’re prepared when the opportunity to modernize the program arises. The opportunity is going to take the form of some sort of congressional action. There’s lots of common ground between the Seattle Lighthouse, NIB, and the NFB, where the JWOD Act and modernization is concerned, and I am looking forward to us all working together to advance the opportunities for blind people in our country.
Our focus as we move forward in modernization is four things: to encourage and reward upward mobility, to advocate more effectively on behalf of the blind employees, greater accountability throughout the entire system, and to focus on results, which is namely good jobs for blind people.
Again, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. My wife and I will be here through the end of the convention. I hope to talk with many of you in person. Enjoy the rest of your convention. Thank you. [Applause]
by Colin Low
From the Editor: One of the high points of last summer’s convention
was the address delivered late on Tuesday afternoon, July 3, by Lord Low of
Dalston. The audience was exhausted after the early-morning March for Independence
and a full day of convention presentations, but these remarks at the close of
the afternoon session were delightfully warm and witty and full of information
unknown by most of us. The result was a very attentive and responsive audience.
This is what Lord Low said:
I've only ever been to one NFB convention, and that was over twenty-five years
ago, in 1979. It was a truly memorable experience. The electricity generated
by the largest gathering of blind people anywhere in the world was, and is,
palpable--though registration can prove something of a challenge! Anyhow, it's
great to be back.
I may not have been back in twenty-five years, but in truth I've felt that the Federation has never been far away. I've made periodic visits to the National Center--to attend Dr. Jernigan's memorial and for the opening of the Jernigan Institute for example. I have maintained regular contact with friends amongst the Federation's leaders, and its work and example have been a constant source of inspiration. I may not always have agreed with it, but five things have ensured that the Federation stood out for me amongst organizations of the blind worldwide.
First there is its philosophy. Everything the Federation does is thought through and solidly grounded in principle. Did not Dr. Jernigan say, "Philosophy bakes no bread, but without philosophy no bread is baked?" and Dr. Jernigan's speeches surely are a wonderful corpus of writing and thought about blindness.
Second, there are the Federation's powers of communication. The Federation has always been extremely good at getting its message across. I am always recommending the Kernel Books, not just for their message, but for the beautifully honed quality of the writing they contain.
Third, there is the caliber of the Federation's leaders—Dr. Jernigan of course, but before him there was Dr. tenBroek, and Dr. Maurer is a worthy successor in this tradition.
Fourth, there
is the premium which the Federation places on independence and blind people
learning to stand on their own two feet.
And fifth, flowing from this, the Federation has not made the mistake made by
disabled radicals in England of assuming that society is the source of all the
problems. The Federation is clear that the demand for equal treatment from society
places an obligation on the disabled individual to contribute to the maximum
of his or her ability. It is because blind people are capable of making a full
contribution that a mean-spirited response from society is so discriminatory.
In the meantime blind organization in the United Kingdom has undergone a lot of change. We haven't followed quite the same course as you. Because of the size and diversity of the USA, services for the blind are that much more fragmented. The dispersion of government amongst the states means that there isn't the possibility of any one service organization coming to the fore and assuming a dominant position in the way that RNIB has done in the United Kingdom. Because that's what RNIB has done, it has been very difficult for blind people to organize with the same effectiveness as in the USA. So we followed a different strategy. We took over the RNIB. This had already started by the time I came to Miami Beach in 1979, but it took some time to come to full fruition. From the mid-1980s all of RNIB's top trustee leadership was blind, but the revolution could not be said to have been completed until the year 2002 when we adopted a new constitution changing the name of the organization to the Royal National Institute of the Blind and requiring that a majority of RNIB's board, assembly, and membership must be blind or partially sighted. We are now embarked on recruiting a mass membership of blind people, but this is proving to be far from easy. This is where a few lessons from the NFB would probably come in very handy.
But to the title of my talk. I will start with the peerage and begin by introducing you to a few of the mysteries of the British peerage. On learning of my appointment, your president wrote to me saying: "We in the United States have a prohibition in our constitution against titles of nobility. This is one of the reasons that we value them so much.” For both reasons I figured I had better give you a quick crash course on the British peerage.
First then, the pecking order: Under the sovereign and any princes of the blood royal you have, in descending order, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons. The wife of a marquess is a marchioness and of an earl a countess, and they may also be peers in their own right.
Next we come to modes of address: A duke, and an archbishop for that matter, is addressed as "Your Grace," as in "yes, your Grace," "no, your Grace," "three bags full, Your Grace." If you are speaking to him, he remains "Your Grace," no matter what part he is playing in the sentence. So we have "Will Your Grace be taking tea today?" "Sometimes I would dearly love to murder Your Grace," "Shall I fetch Your Grace's slippers?" "Too much whisky will give Your Grace a hang-over," etc. If you are speaking about His Grace it would be "His Grace" rather than "Your Grace" in all the above sentences. Thus, when we are talking about RNIB's president, the Duke of Westminster, we might say, "Do you think His Grace would be willing to do so-and-so?" unless of course we simply refer to him as "The Duke."
All other peers are addressed as "My Lord," so if you're in any doubt how to address me, "a glass of Whisky, My Lord?" might be a good way to start. However, if you're feeling less generous, plain "Colin" will do. The equivalent of "Your Grace" and "His Grace" in the previous examples would be "Your Lordship" and "His Lordship"--"Your Lordships" and "Their Lordships" in the plural. We need to remember these forms of address when speaking in the House of Lords--you begin with "My Lords" and continue with phrases like "your Lordships will be aware," "I would remind your Lordships," etc.
Because peers were originally landowners of some sort, you are usually Lord so-and-so of somewhere, and you have to choose a place for your title. I chose Dalston because it’s the part of London where I live. If you want to write me a letter, put me on a program, introduce me, or refer to me for some reason, "Lord Low of Dalston" will do, and that's what to put on the envelope. You can give me the CBE there too after all the rest if you want. I'll explain that presently. Some people say "The Lord," but that's entirely optional. I don't.
Knights, known as Sir somebody something, are not members of the British peerage, but because they are sometimes confused with the peerage, I'll just mention them. They were also originally landowners, small ones, who would contribute some horsemen to the king’s army. They are now one of the most senior ranks in a number of orders, many based on ancient orders of chivalry, which are used to confer an honor on someone and acknowledge his or her achievement, distinction, or service in some walk of life. The commonest, the Order of the British Empire, which came into being in Victorian times, is not however an ancient order of chivalry. This order, the Order of the British Empire, or should I say the "Most Excellent Order of the British Empire," contains various gradations: so you get Members, MBE; Officers, OBE; Commanders, CBE--I got one of those at the turn of the millennium; and Knight Commanders, KBE. Other orders are the Order of the Bath (that's an older one, usually given to civil servants); the Royal Victorian Order, for courtiers; and the Order of St Michael and St George, which is used for diplomats, generals, and the like. They all have similar gradations--Commander, Knight Commander, and even Grand Commander. Thus, in the case of the Order of St Michael and St George, you have Commanders, denoted by the initials CMG, popularly referred to as "call me God"; Knight Commanders, KCMG or "kindly call me God," and Grand Commanders, GCMG or "God calls me God." But none of these, as I say, are part of the British peerage and should not be confused with it. I hope you're remembering all of this as there's going to be a short test at the end.
All this is of course highly arcane and archaic. It's a load of mumbo-jumbo really, and I would strongly counsel you not to get too hung up on it. The hereditary peerage is a quaint relic of the days of feudalism, of which only a vestige survives. You can see why the Americans wanted to have done with it. It may be of local interest to some people in some rather rarefied circles, but it has largely ceased to signify as a working part of the constitution. In 1958 life peerages were introduced, and now virtually all peers are appointed as barons, the lowest degree of the peerage if you remember, for their life only. In 1999 all but a compromise 10 percent of hereditary peers lost the right to sit as legislators in the House of Lords. Now reform is in the air again, and I do not think the remaining 10 percent can survive much longer.
How do you become a peer? Traditionally you were appointed by the sovereign on the recommendation of the prime minister. He appoints senior politicians--people who have retired from mainline politics or been defeated in an election but still have a contribution to make--recommendations may also come from the leader of the opposition; persons of distinction in their chosen career; or, more murkily, people who have been of service or even given money to the party. In 2000, as an innovation, an appointments commission was introduced with a view to getting greater diversity into those appointed to the peerage. That's how I became a peer. Applications are invited. Some three thousand were submitted when I applied. The great majority were not pursued, including some very good ones. A small number were interviewed, and only about forty people have been appointed via this route to date. It's a very long, drawn-out process. It took me six years and the announcement of at least three lists before the list on which my name appeared. They just rang up one day in November, but I wasn't appointed until the following May because of the desire to avoid the announcement’s being contaminated by allegations of money changing hands in return for peerages, which were being investigated at the time.
What are the criteria of appointment? In actual fact they are rather vague. You have to be able to demonstrate you have a contribution to make. You need to have the time--you can say that again. I'm sure that my position as a leader of the blind who is himself blind had a lot to do with it.
What is the process following your appointment? First of all, you go to see an ancient official called Garter King of Arms to fix your title. After about a month Letters Patent are issued. That's a summons from the Sovereign to attend Parliament as a peer. From that point on you can use your title. During this time you go to the House to be welcomed by the speaker and briefed by more people with fancy titles like the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, known for short simply as Black Rod, who looks after the Parliamentary Estate, and the Clerk of the Parliaments, who is effectively the chief executive of the place. As this official showed me out after one such meeting on 15 May, he asked if I had any further questions. I said, "Well there is one question to which I'll obviously need to know the answer sooner or later: where's the loo [men’s room]?" He replied, "I'll be able to show you that when you come for your briefing on 14 June." I'm afraid I had to say I wasn't sure if I could wait that long.
After about another month, as soon as they can fix a date, you are formally introduced into the House of Lords. You process into the Chamber escorted by a couple of sponsors and take an oath of allegiance to the sovereign. Some time after that you need to make a maiden speech, and then you are off.
A word about the composition of the Lords. Before the 1999 changes, the House of Lords had a membership of over a thousand. It currently has a membership of around 740, 92 of whom are hereditaries--you remember the compromise 10 percent. This is larger than the House of Commons, which has 646 MPs and is one of the largest parliamentary chambers in the world. It is highly unusual for a second chamber to be larger than the first. However, not all members of the Lords attend on a regular basis. For instance, taking the 2005-06 session, the average attendance was around 408, which better reflects the working size of the House. The 740 peers are split roughly equally between government, opposition, and those who sit on the crossbenches, or independents, as I do, having been appointed by the Appointments Commission.
How do things work in the House of Lords? What's it like being a blind peer? The first thing to say is that there are precedents. It was suggested that I was the first, but this is not the case. Lord Kenswood, an early president of the National Federation of the Blind of the United Kingdom, and Lord Fraser of Lonsdale, the chairman of St Dunstan's for many years and founder of Talking Books, both sat in the House of Lords within living memory, and I have been able to trace four more blind peers going back to medieval times, including Lord Lyndhurst, the nineteenth-century Lord Chancellor who faked his own death so that he could read what the obituaries had to say. On the other hand, most of these people seem to have gone blind in later life, so I may be the first peer who was blind from birth.
There have been and are quite a few wheelchair-disabled people in the House of Lords, so I am proud to be able to raise the profile of blind people. I spoke about the need to raise blindness higher up the political and social agenda in my maiden speech, and I make it my business to do that on a regular basis. On the other hand I hardly stick out like a sore thumb. There are so many walking wounded there as the result of strokes and other infirmities of old age that I just feel one of the crowd. On the other hand again, I make it my business to get involved in things other than blindness issues. Disabled politicians sometimes get criticized for not identifying sufficiently with their disability, but I think that's wrong. I suppose it's a matter of degree, but I don't think you want to get typecast as a blind peer. I don't think that does much for your overall credibility.
What of the practical working arrangements? I'm afraid they leave a lot to be desired. I visited the Texas State Legislature the other day, and their working conditions are vastly superior. They sit at an ample desk in an opulently upholstered armchair with all mod cons--phone, mike, voting buttons, buttons to summon messengers, and a place to put your computer--and that's before you get to their offices. We have none of that--just a bench to sit on, which gets very overcrowded when the Chamber is full. I have four other peers in my office plus my Parliamentary assistant, provided by RNIB.
I have a place reserved for me in the Chamber, which is easy to get to. I can write there easily with my BrailleNote on my knee, but standing up to speak from it is more of a problem, so they've constructed a little wooden flap on the back of the bench in front, which I can let down to rest my BrailleNote on whenever I want to speak. I said I hoped that this was something which could be considered as a practical and harmless adaptation and not an act of wanton vandalism in a hallowed place.
How do you know when to speak? Unlike the House of Commons, people are not called by the speaker when they manage to catch his eye. The whips produce a speakers list, which you need to get hold of so that you can get up when it's your turn without being called. Access to the paperwork hasn't proved to be much of a problem either. It's mostly ephemeral, and you can get most of it from the Internet.
I thought identifying who was speaking was going to constitute more of a challenge. They all sounded the same at first. But you soon begin to recognize quite a lot of them, many of whom are well-known figures in British life anyway. As often as not, when I ask someone who is speaking, they don't know either, and I've been able to pick up brownie points for referring to people by name to general amazement.
It may seem rather self-regarding and vainglorious to apply to be honored in this way, but if you think of it as a job rather than an honor, it puts a slightly different complexion on it. And even if you think of it as an honor, a number of people have said to me that it's the only one worth having. I tend to agree with that, as it's an honor you can do something with. It's not really the speaking. I often wonder what difference that makes. But the access and what you can do behind the scenes is phenomenal. Government departments are supposed to reply to peers' letters within two weeks. I will get a side and a half of explanation, where others receive a bare acknowledgement. I was able to get in to see Gordon Brown with David Blunkett, which I think would have been very difficult otherwise. You can personally put a letter into a minister's hand. I did that the other day only to find that he'd been moved a couple of days later. But I was able to do this when the Customs and Excise people threatened to send RNIB a bill for £100,000. I put the evidence into an envelope, sat the relevant minister down, talked him through it, put the letter in his hand, and invited him to go away and sort it out. I hope that's the last we will be hearing of that.
I expect you're beginning to hope that's the last you'll be hearing of me, so I'll stop. I haven't got on to reform, but someone said you should always leave them wanting to hear more. All I'll say is that it is a fantastic honor and a recognition not just of me but of blind people generally--someone said "of every blind person in the world." That may be going a bit far, but I hope you feel able to share in a bit of it with me. I certainly feel I'm working for you. It's also incredibly interesting and a fantastic opportunity, which I'm determined to make the most of for all my brothers and sisters in the worldwide movement of blind people.
Thank you very much.
by Konnie Ellis
From the Editor: Konnie Ellis is a busy wife and mother living in South Dakota. She and her husband Bob are the parents of two active children, Karissa and Justin. Konnie is a trained elementary school teacher. Not only is she homeschooling her own two youngsters, she is teaching four others. In the following article Konnie describes a typical day in her happy and very busy home. This is what she says:
This will be my third year of homeschooling six kids full-time. I thought that Braille Monitor readers might like to know what a typical day is like at my house.
"Miss Konnie, I think I need help with this problem," Auston called from where he sat at the kitchen island.
"Okay, just one second," I replied as I gathered up the papers from the table in the front room where I do most of my teaching. "Roan, you can keep reading on your own for a few minutes while I help Auston," I instructed the seven-year-old girl who was reading on the couch.
"I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, but my answer doesn't make sense," Auston told me in frustration as I entered the kitchen, abacus in hand. We'd begun a unit on fractions just a couple of days before, so a few snags were to be expected.
"Okay, just tell me what you have written so far, and we'll see what the trouble is," I said, placing the abacus in front of me so that I could do the problem along with him as he described his work to me.
"The problem is 2/3 plus 9/16," he answered. "So first I need to figure out the least common denominator."
"That's right. And how do you do that?" I questioned.
"Well I have to ask myself what the lowest number is that 3 and 16 both go into."
"Good. And did you figure out what that is?"
"I think it's 48," he said hesitantly.
"Yes, it is. So what do you do next?" I asked.
"I say how many 3s are in 48, and then how many 16s."
"And how many 3s are there?"
"Let me see.... Are there 16?"
"That's right. And how many 16s?"
Auston and I continued to work through the problem together until he suddenly stopped himself and said, "Oh, wait a minute! I think I just figured out what I was doing wrong. I didn't multiply by the numerator! All I was converting to 48ths was 1/3 and 1/16 for some reason. Now I get it, though--You have to take the 2 times 16, which is 32, and the 9 from the 9/16 times 3, which is 27. So it's 32/48 plus 27/48, equals 59/48, which is one and 11/48!" he exclaimed triumphantly.
"Good job!" I praised him. "And I didn't really have to help you at all. Now see if you can get the rest of them done before lunch time. Then afterward you can read me your answers, and if they're all correct, I'll be able to send this paper home with you tonight so that your mom will be able to see the great work you're doing with your fractions."
As Auston continued with his work, I couldn't help reflecting on the fact that my students very often catch their own mistakes, just by thinking out loud. They are much more articulate than many of their peers, who are often unable to express themselves without pointing or using other visual cues to demonstrate a point. Even my most visual learners need to be able to describe what they're doing verbally, which ultimately benefits them as much as it does me.
Before returning
to Roan, I decided to grab an extra minute to be sure my preschoolers were still
engrossed in the Noggin channel on TV. One of the older kids was usually free
to help keep an eye on them, but everyone was occupied at the moment, so I wanted
to be sure the little boys weren't getting up to any mischief. Fortunately all
was peaceful in the living room. Nathan had even fallen asleep on the couch,
and Justin has been given strict instructions not to wake him up when this happens.
Seeing that all was well, I quickly stepped into my daughter's room to find
out how things were coming along with Luke's handwriting. Karissa is nine, and
she loves helping me with the younger kids. Today she was working with Luke
on how to form some of his letters correctly, and I asked how it was going.
"He's doing a really good job with his H’s," Karissa informed me.
I pressed the button on my talking watch and realized that the morning had flown by as usual. "You might as well stop there for now, then," I told Luke, "And you can finish the paper later if there's time."
"I just finished reading the story,” Roan told me as I got back to the front room.
"Great. Tomorrow I'll ask you some questions to see how well you remember the story. Right now, though, it's time for lunch."
"I just have one problem left," Auston said. "Can I try to finish it real quick before we eat?"
"Sure. I'll just have Karissa pour the juice this time, and Roan can set the table."
Anticipating that this morning would be an extra busy one, I had put a casserole into the oven earlier, so no additional preparation was needed on my part now. I pulled the fish sticks from the bottom rack and instructed the kids not to touch them until they'd had time to cool a little. Then I took out the stew and began dishing it into six bowls.
"Whose turn is it to pray?" Nathan asked in a sleepy voice.
"Can Nathan say the prayer today?" Auston asked. "I'm starving, and his prayers are usually the shortest."
I smiled and told Nathan to go ahead. When the amen was said, I reminded everyone that this was chore day and that my husband Bob would be conducting a visual inspection of the house and yard when he got home as he usually did every Friday.
As soon as Auston had put his empty dishes into the sink, he took down the hand-vac from the wall and began cleaning the dining room floor. Karissa got a cloth and started wiping the table. It was Roan's and Luke's job to pick up toys, and they enlisted the help of the little boys in this endeavor as well. (Since toys were scattered throughout our yard and in the playroom downstairs, as well as in the living room, putting toys away was a big job indeed.)
While the chores were being done, I grabbed a few minutes to catch up on some tasks of my own. I ordered a couple of textbooks from Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, a lending library in New Jersey, so that I could have the cassette version for myself to go along with the printed books that my students used. I also spent a few moments at my computer going over my to-do list so I could be sure I wasn't forgetting anything. A reminder for the upcoming field trip to the Children's Science Center popped up, so I wrote myself a note to email a couple of the homeschooling moms in my area to see if they were going and whether they'd mind taking some of my kids with them. I feel blessed to live in an area that has an active homeschool group with folks willing to help each other in ways like this so that the kids in my care can have a well-rounded education in every area of life.
Figuring it was time to round up the troops again, I laid my laptop aside and headed in search of them. The preschoolers were having a great time out in the yard, so I wouldn't disturb them just yet. There was still an hour before nap-time, so I might as well let them enjoy the warm weather while they could. I found the older kids downstairs, where my daughter was teaching the others what she had learned at her jujitsu lesson a couple of days before. The kids had converted the playroom into a gym of sorts, complete with weight lifting, a place to do chin-ups; an obstacle course; a fort made of blankets, boxes, and chairs; and, last, but certainly not least, an adjustable high-jump bar made with a jump rope which they tied to various other items in the room, depending on where they wanted to set the height.
"Okay you guys, time to get back to work," I told them. Auston, your English worksheet is on the island, Roan, you can work on your typing CD on Karissa's computer, and I'll work with Luke in the front room on his Reading Blaster. Karissa, you can use the computer in Justin's room to work on your Spanish CD."
The next hour went by in a flash. Afterward we all gathered in the living room for our Bible story time. After everyone had gotten an apple and was seated comfortably on the couch and love seat, as well as on my lap, I turned on the tape player, and the story began. Today I had selected a story as told by Dan Betser and his puppet Louie. I had enjoyed those tapes as a little girl and was now passing them on to the next generation. This time our story was about Gideon. Everyone listened attentively, and I paused the tape periodically to ask questions in order to be sure that everyone was paying attention. Even the little ones were engrossed in the adventure. I saved the concrete quizzing for them, while reserving the more abstract questions for the older kids. I wanted Auston and Karissa to be able to apply what they were hearing to everyday life, so I asked them things like "Do you think we should ever put out a fleece as Gideon did?" or "Why do you think God used such a small number of Israelites to win the battle?"
After the story ended, I put the younger crew down to rest and worked with Karissa on her AWANA Bible memory and on her piano lesson, while Auston did some keyboarding with the Mavis Beacon typing program.
Before I knew it, Mr. Randolph was knocking at our door, and I quickly woke the little ones with the news that their dad was here to take them home. Hardly were they out the door when my four-year-old, Justin, asked whether they'd be back again tomorrow. He was disappointed when I told him the next day was Saturday, but I assured him they'd be back again the following week. Another wonderful day of school had drawn to a close.
by Leslie Stocker
It is a distinct honor to be invited to address you today, because of a very special partnership the Braille Institute enjoys with NFB. And I do not speak at this moment of the direct relationship we have with the NFB of California [cheers from one corner of the ballroom]--I don’t know what you guys did that you have to sit off in a corner (the California delegation is in the far upper left corner as you face the stage) especially in recent years with the leadership of Nancy Burns and her husband Don, and now with Mr. Robert Stigile. But the partnership I am talking about occurred to me about a week and a half ago at the Sheraton Universal in Los Angeles, Universal City. We were at a banquet honoring and giving out the awards for the 2007 National Braille Challenge. As the winners were being introduced, they were working their way up to the stage to receive the prize. The MC was reading a biographical sketch about each young champion, and I kept hearing one term come back: that this person was a participant in the Braille Readers Are Leaders program of the National Federation of the Blind. Later I asked our vice president of programs and services about that because it hadn’t occurred to me to hear it so often. She said, “Oh yeah, when we get all of these applications, you would be surprised at how many of these contestants have their roots in the Braille Readers Are Leaders program.”
That leads me to conclude an unusual partnership, and I would like to tell you more about it in a moment but, in so doing, tell you about the Braille Challenge. First, very briefly, for those who are not aware, Braille Institute of America was founded in Los Angeles eighty-eight years ago by a totally blind man who developed a Braille publishing house and then later a Braille educational system along with rehabilitation. His name was Robert Atkinson. He was also one of the influential people in bringing about the founding of the National Library Service back in the 1930s. You can find that Robert Atkinson is enshrined today among other great leaders of our field at the Hall of Fame for Leaders and Legends at the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville.
Suffice it to say that Braille literacy has been a part of the warp and weave of the fiber of Braille Institute since its beginning. That’s what we were about. In recent years in our strategic planning we have rededicated ourselves to Braille literacy. Now in this instance I have to explain the Braille Institute has grown over the years, and we are one of the largest direct service organizations in the nation. We serve about 55,000 people annually, primarily in Southern California from our five campuses there in Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Rancho Mirage, and Anaheim. But when it comes to Braille literacy, we decided, wait, with our resources and the fact that so much can be done by distance, we want to have an impact on a national and even international basis. So we created two new programs, and I will share them very briefly with you and then draw to a conclusion what we are talking about today.
Back in 1999 we created a program called Our Braille Special Collection. And the premise behind this is that blind kids who are learning their Braille need to have more than just textbooks to read. They’ve got to have great children’s literature. Now I know there are sources for great literature, and NFB has been instrumental in making that happen as well. But we felt we’ve got to put more out there. We’ve got to flood these kids with stuff to read that they want to read. So we started, and, incidentally, our publishing house is entirely digitized, so all the titles that are in Braille in this children’s literature collection are filed on a major file server, and we have a bank of embossers. When a family calls in from anywhere in the nation or emails in, or however they get to us, and their student is qualified (they have to be registered as a reader with us), we simply, if they want Harry Potter, Volume 2, somebody pushes a button here, and it goes over to the embosser, and it is spun out, and it goes out in the mail that day. It is published on demand.
All of these books, incidentally, are free of charge to the recipients because again our theory here is (and there are pros and cons as to whether you charge or give it away free) our notion at this moment is we’ve got to flood these kids with stuff to read, and our experience shows, when we charged the fee, the use went way down. While sighted kids can go to the library to get a book, the blind kids don’t. So our notion is, give them books. Put books in their hands.
Since 1999 the number of books in that collection on that big file server available to readers anywhere in the U.S. now numbers 994. Those are books from the very modern Harry Potter style to Alice in Wonderland and Charlotte’s Web, and all those great things that we all read one way or another as we grew up. Today we have 3,274 registered readers throughout the United States. These are kids. That’s a big number. I’m especially grateful for that number, given the fact that APH’s registration of Braille readers age eighteen and below numbers only about 4,000. But therein is one of the biggest challenges we have, and that is there should be a whole lot more than 4,000 kids reading Braille.
This past year we sent out about 8,500 titles, and some were multiple volumes, of course, of Braille books to kids throughout the United States. That includes Dots for Tots. I don’t know if you have little kids, but Dots for Tots is a program where we have a Braille book with audio, but also with manipulatives, toys that go along with the storybook. So that’s a Braille Special Collection, and that brings me to the second program. Then we can tie this together. Braille Challenge is really a Braille literacy contest. It’s made up of five grade categories, and I’ll name them for you. The apprentice are little guys that are in the first and second grades. The freshman category are in grades three and four. Those two youngest categories have three contests they compete in. Number 1 is spelling--I bet you enjoyed that when you were in the first grade--reading comprehension, and proofreading. When you get to the third group, we call it sophomores. That’s grades five and six. Junior varsity is grades seven, eight, and nine; and varsity is grades ten, eleven, and twelve. Those three older categories have four contests: reading comprehension, proofreading, spelling, and speed and accuracy. Oh, that’s one they really love--speed and accuracy. They have to get ready for that.
The way the contest works--and this has been evolving--but we began it in the year 2000. Early in the year we send out a preliminary test to any child in the United States who is a Braille reader for their teacher to administer to them. The results of those tests are sent back to us. We grade them, and we end up inviting the top twelve contestants in each of those five categories. This past year--we’ve just completed the 2007 contest--those top twelve in each category, a total of sixty children, are invited to come to Los Angeles to compete for some really neat prizes in a bigger contest. I’ll tell you about those prizes in a moment, but let me give you some numbers. This year in the preliminary contest we sent tests out to a little over nine hundred children throughout the United States in thirty-five states and three Canadian provinces. That number is getting larger each year. Only about half of those students send the completed tests back. At first I was disappointed, but then I realized when we called and queried, we discovered, “Well, Johnny can’t read that well.” At least we have set the bar for them. We’ve shown the parents and the teachers what he or she should be doing. So there is incentive.
When the sixty finalists come to Los Angeles, we have a very festive occasion, and we have the contest itself. The winners receive some really cool prizes. The first-, second-, and third-place winners in each of the categories win U.S. savings bonds ranging in size from the third prize in the apprentice category of $500. The top prize in the varsity is $5,000. But that is not the most significant thing. To me the most significant prize is the awarding to the first-place winner in each of those five categories of a PAC Mate by Freedom Scientific. Now I have to tell you that I cannot be more elated with the partnership we’ve enjoyed with Freedom Scientific, because there’s a very special reason behind it. And it’s not only to have the preeminent access technology companies in the world as a part of this program, but we’re trying to make a statement that there is a direct connection between Braille literacy and technology. To a large extent the future is defined by our ability to interact with technology; there is a direct connection.
Freedom Scientific has been generous in providing these gifts. In fact, after they did this a couple of years, they called us and said, “Well, here’s the deal. We’re going to send you six PAC Mates next year, and we want you to award one to the teacher of the year.” My immediate reaction was, “Great, now how am I going to figure out who the teacher of the year is?” Here’s the secret. We’ve got a national advisory committee made up of some prominent educators throughout the United States and Canada. I flung it to them. I said, “You figure it out.” And they did. They came up with a very creative way of determining who is the teacher of the year. This year the winner of the PAC Mate and a trip to California to receive her award and recognition was a lady named Sandy Serventi, a longtime teacher at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. When I met Sandy and talked to her, she said, “Oh you don’t know this, but this is the fourth time I’ve been here to the Braille Challenge. I’ve come four years in a row accompanying my students.” She said, “I’ve had eleven students make it to the finals now.”
We actually have, I believe, at least two winners of this year’s Braille Challenge in their categories with us here today. Ms. Kyra Sweeney is here and also, Megan Bening from Minnesota. I don’t know, maybe we have more winners in the audience that I don’t know about, certainly with the kind of support NFB has given to Braille literacy over the years.
This brings me to the partnership. When I think about it and I look at what you have been doing with your Braille Readers Are Leaders program for some twenty years, when I see the inter-relationship with the kids we are now connecting with, I cannot miss the partnership. Number one, Braille Readers Are Leaders is a focus on volume reading, and that creates incentive and self-esteem. I am a sighted person, but I think back when I was a boy growing up, I learned how to read by reading, not just by studying about it, but by doing a lot of reading.
The second part of this partnership is the Braille Special Collection and other sources throughout the U.S. for children’s books. We’ve got to flood these kids with books and keep them reading. Number three in this tri-part partnership is our Braille Challenge itself. It has grown and taken on a life of its own. I could not be more elated with it. It has far excelled our expectations, and probably, because many different organizations are now participating, it’s not just Braille Institute. This last year we had seventeen regional contests in the spring leading up to the main contest. They were staged by different organizations, state schools, and even a program up in Calgary, Alberta. They are smaller versions for which we provide testing materials. We provide everything, the rules, all that goes to help prepare these kids to become real finalists. In fact, two winners from Iowa this year, who had never competed before, had a preliminary event in their state that really did a great job.
I kind of feel like, I know Dr. Maurer will share this feeling, like my fellow Californian, General George Patton, in World War II, standing on the shores of Tripoli on the Mediterranean, looking northward to Europe, which at that time was under the complete control of fascism. He was a reader of classical literature, and he mused, “The Elysian Fields lie before us.”--meaning the task has no end. It’s out there. Folks, there are so many kids in this country who need to be learning their Braille, who need to be learning the intellectual skills that are developed through the process of becoming literate. We don’t function without that. It is so important.
I would like to suggest and propose that we do something proactively here. Number one, we need to spread the word more. After I was invited to this occasion and I started going back over the history of how we’ve developed the Braille Challenge, I realized that we have some common resources here. I told my staff from now on we need to tell the growing network of people using our books and participating in our Challenge about the Braille Readers Are Leaders program from NFB. I would hope that NFB will also be advertising books available through the Braille Institute and the Braille Challenge. We need to spread the word as far as we can.
Also I mentioned that we have these regional challenges throughout the U.S. and one in Canada this last year. I offer this to any of you state chapters of NFB. If you would like to participate in something like that in your own state or region, we would be