Tag Archives: blindness

Getting To Know You

Posted on by John

I have always found it interesting the ways in which we become aware of those around us. I think especially among those who are blind, we are often not fully aware of the degree to which others watch, perhaps learn from, and become familiar with us from afar.

I especially noticed this this past week. I had to miss a day of work, because my left ear, the good one, decided to ring really loudly and make it difficult for me to function. This usually happens when we experience drastic swings in temperature, but for some odd reason it occurred on the day before said temperature changes took effect. It ended up being a plus, as it created an opportunity for me to go grocery shopping during the day. Less crowds, easier to get in and out, etc.

When I returned to work the next day, I was somewhat amused by the number of people who came up to say they’d noticed my absence and missed me. They knew my name, but I couldn’t really tell you who they were. In addition to my blindness, I am also atypically quiet in there. I’ll speak when spoken to, but generally I remain lost somewhere in my thoughts. I suppose this also explains how so many end up just getting to know me in a hands-off sort of way.

The phenomenon of knowing starts long before we even begin to speak. I’ve had the pleasure of participating in many of my twelve nieces and nephews’ upbringing, and was always amazed by how attached to me they became. They each seemed to have their own ways of preferred connection: one I could lure into a calm state by using a strap, another liked to listen to me whistle a tuneless melody as I walked him up and down the hall, and a third just needed to know I was in the same room as he was. This last one left me feeling like perhaps I could actually hypnotize him, as I could say “you’re getting sleeeepppy,” in that funny, dragged out voice and he would indeed quiet.

They would also, I believe, demonstrate that they knew I was unable to see them. Whether they thought this by choice or fully understood that my eyes didn’t work, who knows.

My niece, for example, would make a humming sound as her little legs propelled her along the floor and to me, until she was able to tap my leg.

And once, the strap-loving nephew decided I needed assistance into the laundry room to put my clothes into the hamper, and then back into my mom’s room where he knew I liked to watch sports with my dad. He may not have even been a year old then, and hadn’t really developed speech yet except for the ability to make a sound that approached “here”. Then he grabbed one of my fingers and led me around the house. I guess he’d seen enough of me nearly tripping over his and others’ toys. It was cute.

Even nonhuman animals are capable of getting to know from afar, of course. I think primarily of the little toy fox terrier that my sighted cousin had when he moved into our Charlotte apartment in 2008. I have never become as close to any living creature as I did her. Sad? Perhaps.

She especially enjoyed interacting with me when I sat in the big, comfortable swivel chair I had at my heavy oak computer desk. She’d tap her little head on the side, stand back a few inches, and watch me turn to face her so she could then leap into my lap. Then she’d lay there, picking her head up if I began to talk to her or demanding attention occasionally with her paws.

She most showed her understanding of my likely limitations once when I’d taken her out for relief. I guess I’d gotten lost in my thoughts, and she decided we’d go for a longer walk. She probably had tried to get my attention somehow, but I didn’t notice. Next thing I knew, we were on the other side of the street and behind that set of apartments.

“Look what you’ve done!” I yelled as I tugged on the leash. “Now how on earth am I gonna get back home?”

She then slipped through a narrow fence, causing her collar to pull hard and come off of her neck. Now if she’d done this with my sighted cousin in tow, she’d think “freedom!” and “game time!” and take off. However, she probably knew that I couldn’t catch her, so she sat down a couple of feet in front of me and waited for me to reattach the collar. Then, she got ready to cross the lot and, probably, correctly head for home. I didn’t fully trust that we could do this safely though, so I pulled back on the chain. I believed she then deferred to plan B, which was to find an apartment with a human inside that I could ask for help. I did this, and an old man who walked with a rather pronounced limp assisted us back to the right place.

I’d guess that getting to know one another, and discern likely motives, has significant survival advantages. And, of course it helps us get whatever it is that we want from another, as well as to give to others what they might enjoy. I’m not sure blind folk will ever be really good at fully understanding tendencies, since there’s so much we miss by lacking observational abilities at least from a visual standpoint. But, I certainly do pick up on and have an uncanny memory for voice, smell, and other odd quirks. Just something I’ve been pondering all week. How much do you pick up from others as you go about your day? Are you always watching as a new individual comes into a room? What about other kinds of sensory information.

On Healing

Posted on by John

A series of recent events have me thinking about how I feel about life with dual disabilities. Specifically, to what degree would I want to mitigate or perhaps eliminate at least the medical component of said disabilities, should that become more possible in the future.

I suppose because I wasn’t born with significant hearing loss, but have had to adjust to it over the lifespan, I would definitely opt into something that promised to correct my hearing. I’m pretty sure now though that I’ve had some loss in that area even before I had become aware of it.

Certainly the technology to enable one to hear, at least in an electronic way, has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent years. Many see this in the existence of the Cochlear Implant. One thing that gives me pause in goingfor a CI though is that I’ve heard it can throw off sound localization, making it difficult for someone who is also blind to navigate safely around his or her environment. I think one could adjust to this, but I know not how long that might take.

I recently met an individual who is a mental health advocate, writer, and one who has assisted many people with disabilities in learning the social landscape. This person shared with me a video in which a woman hears sound for the first time via a cochlear implant.

I’d heard of this video before, and its attendant controversy. I guess people’s biggest concern had to do with the notion, right or wrong, that it would serve to enhance the public’s idea that perceived disability must always be a bad thing and should thus be dealt with. Some were also not sure how to take having such a private, emotionally jarring moment aired online. My position on that is it was her personal decision to do this, and should be seen as such.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that deafness doesn’t get quite the social taboo that blindness does. I mean I suppose most wouldn’t actively choose to be without hearing, but many individuals who are deaf only can get good jobs and do things where their competence is questioned a little less. Are they discriminated against in some ways? I’m sure of it, and especially when attempting to communicate with others who are not deaf and don’t know sign language, or take in programming that isn’t properly captioned.

But when many see an individual who is blind, they automatically assume that some sort of sin has stained their soul. Some of the braver folks figure that God has actually appointed them to lift that sin, as a person tried to do this morning.

I’m strolling along, enjoying the birdsong and wind that finish waking me up as I head toward the bus stop. I get to the street corner, and over the sound of a roaring machine of some sort, maybe a lawn mower? I don’t know, I hear someone calling, maybe my name?

Are you talking to me?” I ask, turning to face the voice.

“Yes,” she replies. “God says he wants me to touch your eyes.”

And before I can stop her, she has practically smacked me in the face! She pounds my eyes a couple of good times before I softly remove her hands and push them down.

“Um,” I say: “I’m just trying to cross the street, an now I’m distracted. Can you tell me when to go?”

“Yes, but you gotta feel what happened! You have to believe! God’s gonna open your eyes in a week!”

I just say ok, and thank you, and shuffle on down towards the stop.

Because I’ve never seen before, I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to suddenly have working eyes in a week. I guess it would be like that woman’s reaction times 100, as I’d be bombarded with stimuli that I couldn’t make sense of without the proper context and training. I wonder if people who hope for such things to happen to a totally blind stranger have even stopped to consider the ramifications of the situation?

Second, I think I’m made just the way I’m supposed to be. As with hearing, I don’t begrudge anyone who wishes to be able to see after having been totally blind whenever it becomes feasible to do so, but I definitely don’t. I guess in many respects, I would feel like I’m giving up my “self” as I currently know it.

These are certainly interesting and complicated issues, and I know many who are working to find their own answers as they deal with one, both, or some varying combination of them. I guess what it comes down to in the end, as I said when someone at a small church I went to thought of trying this same sort of intervention, is to respect the person’s humanity. Ask them questions about what they might want you to pray over, or if they’d just prefer to be left alone. Because what you think you see in someone else is not always what is.

My Tech Experience, 1987-1997

Posted on by John

I had written an entry like this in my previous blog, but it got sucked down the drain in the great Spam attack of mid-February. Ugh. So, I shall try again. Also, this’ll be more comprehensive. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll make at least two and perhaps three entries out of this, so as not to go entirely too long. Plus, it’ll give me some days and topics in this challenge.
Now, this topic is going to be more of interest to the sighted people who may know little or nothing about the kinds of soft and hardware that blind folks are able to use. I’m writing it specifically because someone I came across in the #31WriteNow challenge asked questions about this, and hey what am I if not a divulger of information? So, why don’t we start from what I think is the beginning.
My first interactions with technology came about in approximately my third grade year. This means 1987-88.
I’m not savvy enough to know which kind of computer we were using, other than that it was one of those big, clunky Apple machines with attached monitor and on which you had to flip a switch on the back of the unit to power up.
Remember those loud six-inch floppy disk hard drives? One had to insert a disk in order for the system to work, and if you popped it out prematurely it sounded as if an electric shock was being delivered! Even though that sound terrified me I couldn’t get enough of it, having to be admonished repeatedly by my teachers to “cut that out!”
Attached to our unit was a specialized external synthesizer that we could adjust and turn off and on independently of the computer itself. I believe at first, the synthetic speech may have been generated by whichever program ran on the disks we used, but I’m not entirely sure about that. Anyway, by today’s standards the voice was rather annoying. I wonder how I even understood it.
We primarily used the computer at this time for gameplay. My favorites were Space Invaders, one that asked you to listen to an ascending tone and whack the space bar whenever the tone matched where you were on the screen, supposingly causing you to hit the invading alien ships. This tone would get faster and faster until eventually you misfired. I could spend hours with that one.
Another favorite was the Math Olympics, a fun, multiplayer game that had a series of problems to solve in order to take home the medal. Each player selected a country to play under, and the winner would have its national anthem played. Ah, the sneaky ways to educate children without them even being aware of it.
Most of my typing skills were actually acquired on a typewriter, though. We had a big, electrical thing, and I loved feeling like an officeworker as I struck the keys rapidly, enjoying that sound and making no doubt countless errors. In 1992, I used that thing to nervously hammer out a Valentine’s note to one of my first crushes.
By about that year, technology took a considerable leap forward for blind individuals. I think it had existed in some form prior to that period, but that was the first year my school system got access to what were called Braille ‘n Speak machines made by the company that would eventually become Freedom Scientific but was then known as Blazie Engineering. These things were amazing to us, because for the first time we had a really portable device on which we could write Braille quickly and efficiently. They also had somewhat boring synthetic speech voices by comparison to today’s technology, but my cousin, a number of friends and I never tired of playing with the speech rate and pitch and doing such silly things as making it read a long string of A’s, variably punctuated sentences, and any other thing that would make the voice react oddly.
I have a synthesizer on my machine called eSpeak as part of another software application that I will profile in a later entry. While not exact, the uninflected eSpeak voice nearly approaches that of the Braille ‘n Speak. Listen to a short sample.
From my technological point of view, not much really changed up through 1997. They did eventually create a better version of the Braille ‘n Speak, called a Braille Lite, that had a refreshable Braille display. This is a device that uses little pens to simulate the dots one would feel on a Braille page. Some, like the Braille Lite’s, are built entirely into the machine, although it is more common for the units to be detachable these days. They are fantastic pieces of equipment, however the price of these is prohibitive for most would-be users.
This had sadly been the case for most all blindness-specific technology, but fortunately those old barriers are being bulldozed. In subsequent entries, I will detail how some of this has occurred. From 1997-2007, the rise and proliferation of the personal computer, still dominated by two or three screen-reading products. From 2007-present, the introduction of cheaper, effective screen-readers, and the rapid accessibility gains made with smartphones.