[Brl-monitor] The Braille Monitor, January 2013
Brian Buhrow
buhrow at lothlorien.nfbcal.org
Fri Jan 4 14:04:01 PST 2013
BRAILLE MONITOR
Vol. 56, No. 1 January 2013
Gary Wunder, Editor
Distributed by email, in inkprint, in Braille, and on USB flash drive
(see reverse side) by
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
Marc Maurer, President
telephone: (410) 659-9314
email address: nfb at nfb.org
website address: http://www.nfb.org
NFBnet.org: http://www.nfbnet.org
NFB-NEWSLINE® information: (866) 504-7300
Letters to the president, address changes,
subscription requests, and orders for NFB literature
should be sent to the national office.
Articles for the Monitor and letters to the editor may also
be sent to the national office or may be emailed to gwunder at nfb.org.
Monitor subscriptions cost the Federation about forty dollars per year.
Members are invited, and nonmembers are requested, to cover the
subscription cost. Donations should be made payable to National Federation
of the Blind and sent to:
National Federation of the Blind
200 East Wells Street at Jernigan Place
Baltimore, Maryland 21230-4998
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND IS NOT AN ORGANIZATION
SPEAKING FOR THE BLIND--IT IS THE BLIND SPEAKING FOR THEMSELVES.
ISSN 0006-8829
© 2013 by the National Federation of the Blind
Each issue is recorded on a thumb drive (also called a memory stick
or USB flash drive). You can read this audio edition using a computer or a
National Library Service digital player. The NLS machine has two slots--
the familiar book-cartridge slot just above the retractable carrying handle
and a second slot located on the right side near the headphone jack. This
smaller slot is used to play thumb drives. Remove the protective rubber pad
covering this slot and insert the thumb drive. It will insert only in one
position. If you encounter resistance, flip the drive over and try again.
(Note: If the cartridge slot is not empty when you insert the thumb drive,
the digital player will ignore the thumb drive.) Once the thumb drive is
inserted, the player buttons will function as usual for reading digital
materials. If you remove the thumb drive to use the player for cartridges,
when you insert it again, reading should resume at the point you stopped.
You can transfer the recording of each issue from the thumb drive to
your computer or preserve it on the thumb drive. However, because thumb
drives can be used hundreds of times, we would appreciate their return in
order to stretch our funding. Please use the return label enclosed with the
drive when you return the device.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Palm-lined drive leading to front entrance to Rosen Centre
Hotel]
Orlando Site of 2013 NFB Convention
The 2013 convention of the National Federation of the Blind will take
place in Orlando, Florida, July 1-6, at the Rosen Centre Hotel at 9840
International Drive, Orlando, Florida 32819. Make your room reservation as
soon as possible with the Rosen Centre staff only. Call (800) 204-7234.
The 2013 room rates are singles, doubles, and twins, $79; and triples
and quads, $85. In addition to the room rates there will be a tax, which at
present is 13.5 percent. No charge will be made for children under
seventeen in the room with parents as long as no extra bed is requested.
The hotel is accepting reservations now. A $90-per-room deposit is required
to make a reservation. Fifty percent of the deposit will be refunded if
notice is given to the hotel of a reservation cancellation before May 13,
2013. The other 50 percent is not refundable.
Rooms will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Reservations may be made before June 1, 2013, assuming that rooms are still
available. After that time the hotel will not hold our room block for the
convention. In other words, you should get your reservation in soon.
Guest-room amenities include cable television; in-room safe;
coffeemaker; hairdryer; and, for a fee, high-speed Internet access. Guests
can also enjoy a swimming pool, fitness center, and on-site spa. The Rosen
Centre Hotel offers fine dining at Executive Chef Michael Rumplik's award-
winning Everglades Restaurant. In addition, there is an array of dining
options from sushi to tapas to a 24-hour deli. The hotel has first-rate
amenities and shuttle service to the Orlando airport.
The schedule for the 2013 convention is:
Monday, July 1 Seminar Day
Tuesday, July 2 Registration Day
Wednesday, July 3 Board Meeting and Division Day
Thursday, July 4 Opening Session
Friday, July 5 Business Session
Saturday, July 6 Banquet Day and Adjournment
Vol. 56, No. 1 January 2013
Contents
Illustration: Parents and Blind Children at an Adventure Camp
Ten Million Books and Counting
by Gary Wunder
Serving in His Shadow
by Anil Lewis
A Colleague's Salute to Jim Omvig
by Jim Kesteloot
Life-Changing Events
by Bob Deaton
Crying My Eyes Out
by Kate Smith
Do Diabetes Companies Have a Blind Spot?
by Mike Hoskins
Equal Access for the Blind: Airfare, Hotels, Cruises--Savings With
Travelocity
by Steve Dumaine
Court Orders DCA to Accept Prisoner's Braille Filing
by Jan Pudlow
Bitten by the Space Bug
by Chelsea Cook
The Secret to Winning a National Federation of the Blind Scholarship
by Patti S. Gregory-Chang
Ask Miss Whozit
Newel Perry: Teacher of Youth and Leader of Men
by Jacobus tenBroek
An Appeal from the Past
by Anna Kresmer
Convention Scholarships Available
by Allen Harris
Recipes
Monitor Miniatures
Parents and Blind Children at an Adventure Camp
Believing as we do in shattering the limiting conceptions about what
blind people can do, the National Federation of the Blind of Missouri
periodically sponsors a weekend-long adventure camp. Mission Believe brings
together children and their parents for concurrent sessions featuring
educational activities for the parents and fun and adventure activities for
their children.
In August of 2012 students experienced the necessity of teamwork;
learned to walk on a plank bridge; felt the exhilaration of rock climbing;
and thrilled at the challenge of traversing ladders, climbing poles, and
walking along a thin wire, all for the joy of getting thirty-five feet
above ground, then gliding back to earth on a zipline.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Amber Attaway, above it all, walks along a bouncy skybridge
made of planks and wires.]
[PHOTO CAPTION: Seven campers, age nine to eighteen, practice teamwork on
long skis made of two by fours.]
[PHOTO DESCRIPTION: Seven young people stand in a line, left feet on a two-
by-four plank, right feet on a parallel two-by-four plank, each side
controlled independently by ropes held in the students' hands. The object
is to walk forward by picking up each side in turn, which requires
concentration and much cooperation.]
[PHOTO CAPTION: Neil Grunig scales a rock wall.]
Ten Million Books and Counting
by Gary Wunder
When I was growing up, one thing that irritated me about being blind
was that I could not pick up the newspaper delivered to my father or the
magazine that came for my mother and just read them. I loved reading
Braille, but it was in short supply, and what I got through my fingers was
far from current news or celebrity news that provided for good
conversation.
Even today, with all of the technology we have to make more books
accessible, what is readily readable by blind people is about 7 percent of
the material available to the sighted. We now have a better chance of
getting a best-seller before history decides it is a classic or a trashy
fad, but ninety-three of every one-hundred books are impossible for us to
read without some significant effort on our part, such as hiring a human
reader; scanning the book; or asking that some agency transcribe, scan, or
record it.
In 2004, Google, the company best-known for its search engine,
declared its intention to digitize every book in the world. This mammoth
undertaking required taking a picture of each page, storing the image, and
then extracting and storing the text. Only if the text has been extracted
from the picture of each page can the material be searched electronically
for words and phrases.
Google began by building partnerships with publishers and libraries,
predominantly university libraries. What Google offered was to digitize
every book in the library's collection, provide the libraries with a
digital copy, keep another copy on Google's own computer equipment, and
return the original print volume.
So how did this lofty goal of digitizing every book in the world
benefit the various stakeholders? The advantage to Google was that people
could use its search tools to locate material heretofore available only on
paper and therefore not searchable electronically. Although the Google
project did not envision providing a link to the material searched, it
could give the location of the book, the library where it could be found,
and the pages on which the search terms were found. Google's search engine
would be enhanced by having searchable material no one else in the industry
could match.
The libraries had much to gain by partnering with Google. The dream
of digitizing books has been widely shared, but the physical task of doing
so ensured it would remain only a dream for some time to come. The
University of Michigan, with a longtime commitment to digitizing books for
its blind students, estimated it would take well over a thousand years to
scan all the books in its collection with the current technology and staff
available. What Google offered was the resources to see this project
completed, not in ten centuries, but in less than ten years.
Other advantages accrue to the libraries. While we usually think of
what is written as timeless, books are printed on paper, and paper
degrades, ink fades, and important works disintegrate. Controlling
temperature and humidity helps to slow this process, but the acidity of
paper means that even in the most suitable environment, age will destroy
the best-kept papers and books.
If a work is rare, a library may have only one copy. If it is handled
and used, there is always some risk it will be damaged-a torn page or pages
that come lose from their binding. As reprehensible as it is, competition
to get into and do well in medical school and other competitive fields has
sometimes meant the willful destruction of required reading. Digitization
does away with the problem of having only one fragile copy, and the ability
to store several digital copies at different sites further protects against
the loss of a work due to a natural or man-made disaster.
Libraries also realize that having lots of information is of little
value if it is hidden away where people can't find it. What pearls of
wisdom were offered by Benjamin Franklin? If something he said has been
captured by a popular biographer in a best-selling book, many know about
it, but what about the quotation that made its way into a scholarly book
long since published but never embraced by a large segment of the reading
public? Digitization allows for searches, and these can identify the
location of long-hidden treasures.
When Google made its offer, several interested libraries partnered to
create a repository for the digital treasures they would soon inherit. They
created the HathiTrust, an organization charged with collecting material,
working out procedures for its secure storage, and devising policies for
the way the digital books would be used. A good deal of the material
digitized is covered under the copyright laws of the United States and
other countries. Protecting the rights of publishers and authors and the
reputation of the institutions making contributions to the HathiTrust is of
the utmost importance. In Michigan procedures to comply with the spirit and
letter of the copyright laws were so strenuous that, when someone borrowed
a digital copy of a book, the physical copy would be removed from the shelf
until the electronic copy was returned. This ensured that, when only one
copy of a work had been purchased by the library, only one copy was being
used.
In response to the creation of the HathiTrust, the Author's Guild,
Inc., similar associations in other countries, and a dozen authors filed
suit in the Southern District of New York. Defendants included the
HathiTrust; Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan (UM);
Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California; Kevin Reilly,
president of the University of Wisconsin System; Michael McRobbie,
president of Indiana University; and Cornell University. The case was
assigned to Judge Harold Baer Jr.
The claim of the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs was that
digitization by Google was unlawful because it created at least two
additional copies of each book held by the libraries and that digitization
posed a substantial risk to authors because their intellectual property
would be shared in ways that would prevent them from being compensated. The
cooperating university libraries and the HathiTrust countered by saying
that materials were stored securely, that institutions and even individuals
have the right to make a copy of materials they own, as long as the copy is
not used commercially, and that, in making the copies, Google did not
intend to share the digitized texts but only to search them and point
interested people to the location of the books they might need.
So how do blind people emerge as interested parties in this struggle?
When a book is digitized with text extracted, it is readable using devices
that convert information into Braille, large print, or audio. The work done
by Google and the HathiTrust in creating the Hathi Digital Library (HDL)
would make millions of books available and would create a unique
opportunity for the blind. Typically, a blind person had to request a book
and then someone had to find the resources to transcribe it, usually with
significant delay; the mass digitization project (MDP) by Google would mean
that these books would be available when we wanted them and not at some
time in the future after we had requested their transcription. This would
bring us one step closer to the immediate access sighted people enjoy when
using a university library. The operative word in the last several
sentences is "would," for, if the Authors Guild and the other plaintiffs
had their way, the digital copies made by Google would be impounded and
perhaps destroyed.
It is possible for interested persons or organizations to ask the
court for permission to intervene by filing a friend of the court brief as
a way of getting the court to take notice of information the organization
considers important. In the action between the Authors Guild and the
HathiTrust, the National Federation of the Blind did not ask to submit a
brief as a friend of the court but to become involved as a defendant. This
is rather bold and unusual because filing as a friend of the court does not
make one liable, but being a defendant certainly does. If the Authors Guild
prevailed, they might be awarded attorney's fees, for which all of the
defendants would be liable. On the other hand, the NFB's intervening as a
defendant meant the court was required to decide the arguments made on
behalf of the blind and print-disabled, and submitting the Federation to
this risk indicated to the court the importance we attached to this matter
and strengthened our ability to ensure that our arguments would be heard
and could be forcefully advanced.
An argument that proved central in this case was that blind people
and those who are print-disabled have a right under the fair use provisions
of the Copyright Act to have access to print information that is digitized.
Moreover, the court held that under the Chafee Amendment, the universities
can choose to make their digitized copies available to all blind Americans,
not just the students and faculty at that institution. Federationists will
remember that in 1996 an amendment was made to the Copyright Act, allowing
authorized entities to make copies of copyrighted material in formats the
blind and print-disabled could use. The Chafee Amendment, as it was known
when we fought for its adoption, was revolutionary because if someone
wanted to reproduce and distribute a book in an accessible format
exclusively for the blind and not take the risk that a court might not call
that fair use, the entity would first seek permission from the copyright
holder before printed material was converted into an accessible format.
Sometimes, though, the copyright holder could no longer be identified. The
Chafee Amendment freed up entities like the National Library Service and
Bookshare to provide accessible copies without fear of being sued. When a
case is filed, much of the preliminary paperwork focuses on whether the
court has the right to make decisions about the issues under discussion. If
it decides it has jurisdiction, it then must decide whether the parties
bringing the case have standing. If someone steals a dollar from me, I have
standing to sue that person to reclaim my property, and he has standing to
make arguments asserting he didn't steal it. If a friend sees a dollar
being taken from me, the court considers her an uninterested party in as
much as she cannot bring suit to recover my dollar. I may call her as a
witness, but she cannot initiate activity the court will consider. In lay
terms, she has no dog in the fight.
Once the court concludes it can decide a case and the parties that
will be involved, the participants file briefs with the court outlining
their arguments. Responses from each side to what the other has written are
advanced. Before a trial is scheduled, one or both sides may make a motion
for summary judgment. In this request the court is told that the case made
by one side is so persuasive that the outcome of the trial is a virtual
certainty. The argument is also made that the evidence offered by the other
side is so wanting that the court will reach the same decision. The motion
for summary judgment suggests that the court may as well save its time and
the time of the plaintiffs and defendants by making a ruling on what has
already been submitted.
The language used isn't anything like what you see here. Instead,
both sides outline their arguments, relying heavily on previously decided
cases. The plaintiffs, the persons or organizations bringing the suit,
argue that a case similar to theirs was decided in the affirmative and
assert that the cases cited by the defendants are different from the
defendant's interpretation of them. The defendants make the same claims
about the arguments advanced by the plaintiffs. After a review of the
motions and arguments submitted, a judge may set the case for trial or may
award summary judgment.
In the case of the Authors Guild vs. the HathiTrust, the judge ruled,
among other things, that the Americans with Disabilities Act and the United
States Copyright Act certainly permit the digitization of books for the use
of the blind and print-disabled. The arguments supporting the requirements
of the ADA relating to access to information will be straightforward to
most readers. Arguments supporting the mass digitization project under the
laws governing copyright protections may be less clear. At the heart of the
copyright argument is the concept of "fair use" and whether the books
digitized represent a "transformative use" of the works. Making digital
copies to share with those able to read the printed volumes would not be
transformative because the copies would serve the same purpose as the
original volume. Making a copy available to the blind and otherwise print-
disabled is transformative in that the material as created was not intended
to serve this population. Similarly, the intent of the hardcopy books was
not to make possible an electronic search or to allow data mining, an
interesting concept that explores the use of words and the way phrases and
concepts evolve over time. An example of data mining cited in the judge's
opinion would be searching texts in order to compare the use of the verbs
"is" and "are" when used to refer to the United States-one nation or a
group of states which, for specific purposes, are united.
Returning our focus to concerns of the blind, the judgment further
stipulates that university libraries are authorized entities which can
convert and distribute digitized information in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright Act. Although many if not all universities have
realized they have an obligation to convert print to something that can be
used by the blind, many were uncomfortable assuming that the library might
undertake digitization beyond the specific and identifiable needs of blind
students matriculating there.
In his ruling Judge Baer singled out George Kerscher, Dan Goldstein, and
Marc Maurer for convincingly describing the essential role of information
in the lives of the blind and their struggle to get meaningful access to
printed materials. Short excerpts from his opinion, edited to remove
citations and other material relevant only to the court, follow:
In an eloquent oral argument by Mr. Goldstein as well as in Mr.
Kerscher's declaration, Defendant Intervenors spelled out where blind
scholars stood before digitalization: Prior to the development of
accessible digital books, the blind could access print materials only
if the materials were converted to Braille or if they were read by a
human reader, either live or recorded . . . Absent a program like the
MDP [Mass Digitization Project], print-disabled students accessed
course materials through a university's disability student services
office, but most universities are able to provide only reading that
was actually required. Print-disabled individuals read digital books
independently through screen-access software that allows text to be
conveyed audibly or tactilely to print-disabled readers, which permits
them to access text more quickly, reread passages, annotate, and
navigate, just as a sighted reader does with text. Since the digital
texts in the HDL became available, print-disabled students have had
full access to the materials through a secure system intended solely
for students with certified disabilities. Many of these works have
tables of contents, which allow print-disabled students to navigate to
relevant sections with a screen reader just as a sighted person would
use the table of contents to flip to a relevant portion. In other
words, academic participation by print-disabled students has been
revolutionized by the HDL.
This is what the judge came to understand as a result of this case
and a part of what he recorded for the legal practitioners who will further
clarify how technology, with its ability to copy and transform material,
will shape copyright law. The part played by the National Federation of the
Blind is unquestionably significant, given how much of the judge's decision
relies on fair use, the transformative nature of the digitized material,
and its value to the print-disabled. The University of Michigan's
leadership in asserting the rights of the print-disabled is impressive, and
the work of Jack Bernard, their counsel, is courageous and significant.
George Kerscher's longtime leadership in creating electronic books readable
by the blind is a testament to his exceptional work to address the
deficiencies he found in the books available to him in the pursuit of his
graduate degree, and his service in the cause of making the printed word
accessible is nothing less than stellar. All of the libraries,
universities, and those who lead them deserve credit for their commitment
through participation in this project to meet the spirit and the letter of
the Americans with Disabilities Act.
This judgment has been appealed, but the arguments articulated in our
filings and in the judge's decision will serve us well. We know that the
distance traveled on the road to equality is seldom traversed in one step.
We have been a part of a marathon that began in 1940 and will continue
until blindness becomes as insignificant as the color of one's hair or the
length of one's stride.
Through this case the National Federation of the Blind has made it
clear that, not only do we insist on the same book at the same price and at
the same time it is available to others, but we also insist that the
libraries of the world be open to us, that our access to information be
timely, and that one day soon we live in a world in which we no longer have
to ask for a book and wait for its transcription but can decide to read it
and then check it out just like anyone else.
We know that poor design can sometimes result in technology that
limits our independence: household appliances that are unusable unless one
can see a visual display provide just one example. But we also know that,
when designed creatively and with the needs of the blind in mind,
technology can transform the way we interact with the world. On both
fronts, expanding access when information is not accessible and preserving
access when someone tries to take it away, the National Federation of the
Blind continues to be the strongest force pressing for equality of
opportunity and the recognition that we are and shall be treated like the
first-class citizens we are. We should demand nothing less from our
society, and it should demand nothing less from us. This is the contract we
share, the blind and those who help us, and this is the way we will make
the future we dream of become reality.
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Mary Ellen Jernigan hugs Jim Omvig at his birthday
celebration at the Center.]
Serving in His Shadow
by Anil Lewis
>From the Editor: Anil Lewis is director of strategic communications at the
Jernigan Institute for the Blind. Recently his efforts have focused on the
rights of people who work in sheltered shops and specifically on the fact
that it is legal to pay them less than the minimum wage. His work has
earned him a seat on the federal AbilityOne Commission, where he follows in
the footsteps of another Federationist we commemorate in this issue. Here
is Anil's tribute to a colleague, a friend, and a loyal soldier in our
movement:
Every day members of the NFB formally and informally contribute their
time and talent to assist others in reaching their full potential. One man
who has committed his life to this service is a man it has been my pleasure
to know and work with now for several years. I am proud to have gotten to
know one of our most outstanding members, James Omvig, and to follow him in
a part of his work that has meant much to him and to blind people
throughout the nation and the world.
The author of Freedom for the Blind: The Secret is Empowerment, Mr.
Omvig has helped me to understand that I must recognize that it is OK to be
blind; I must master the alternative skills of blindness; I must
effectively cope with public attitudes about blindness; I must successfully
blend in as a productive member of society; and I must freely and
generously give back to others. He has integrated these five elements of
success into the core of his being, and as a result he is a recognized
trailblazer in securing the rights of blind people throughout America. I
am honored to serve in his shadow, embracing these elements of success as I
continue blazing the trail toward our full participation in society.
A longtime leader of the National Federation of the Blind, James Omvig
was Dr. Kenneth Jernigan's student at the Iowa Commission for the Blind in
1961. He has amassed a legacy of personal and professional accomplishments
and has dedicated his life to fighting for equality and full participation
of the blind. The first blind student ever accepted into the Loyola
University of Chicago School of Law, Mr. Omvig was the first blind attorney
ever hired by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). He worked for the
NLRB, where he learned about and became expert in the federal processes of
employee unionization before becoming deeply committed to vocational
rehabilitation and residential orientation and adjustment centers for the
blind.
Today we take for granted that a blind man like Jim Omvig has capacity
and is able to compete on terms of equality with the sighted. However,
despite personal and professional success, Mr. Omvig has never been a
stranger to the plight of those paid subminimum wages. In 1964 he was paid
75 cents an hour as a production-line worker at the Chicago Lighthouse for
the Blind. Without acquiring the essential elements of success, James
Omvig could have spent his remaining years toiling away at pennies an hour,
and the Federation would have lost a champion for justice. Fortunately,
with his personal experience of the way that limited opportunities, lack of
training, and managerial perceptions of incapacity can lead to the
overwhelming underemployment of the blind, Mr. Omvig accepted the challenge
of improving the work environment of blind workshop employees. As a member
of the NFB, he fought from the outside to change the discriminatory
practices of the sheltered workshops for the blind. He was instrumental in
the efforts of blind sheltered shop workers to unionize. The following is
an excerpt from the June 2009 Braille Monitor article, "More Progress in
the Javits-Wagner-O'Day Program." That briefly describes, in his own words,
how dogged persistence and collective action secured rights, privileges,
and protections for the blind workers of the Chicago Lighthouse:
On the issue of unionization in Chicago, I told the blind employees
that the struggle would be hard and long and that it would also be
complicated. They would first have to select a union to represent them.
Then they would have to request a National Labor Relations Board election
so they could vote as to whether or not they wanted union
representation.... The sheltered shop employees did decide to form an NFB
Division, and the Chicago Lighthouse employees did decide to seek union
representation. And, happily, in late June of 1976, the ruling came. The
Board overturned the old 1960 decision and ruled that, henceforth, blind
workers would enjoy the same rights, privileges, and protections as those
enjoyed by sighted workers [working for the same lighthouse]. The Chicago
action also encouraged blind workers across the country, and before long
several of the agencies were unionized. I believe it is fair to say that
from then on management began to view blind workers differently.
Not only did management begin to view blind workers differently, blind
workers began to view themselves differently. More and more blind
supervisors, managers, and executives obtained employment through the
AbilityOne program than ever before. Through persistent advocacy by the
NFB, blind workshop employees made significant progress toward the goal of
equal employment, but many hurdles remained. Mr. Omvig realized that in
order to effect systemic change, a blind person must be at the table where
policies are created. So in 2002 he accepted a presidential appointment
and took his seat at the table of the Committee for Purchase From People
Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled.
Known today as the AbilityOne Commission, this fifteen-member,
presidentially appointed committee administers a program under the Javits-
Wagner-O'Day (JWOD) Act, in which specific products and services are
procured by federal agencies from businesses in which 75 percent of direct
labor is performed by qualified people with disabilities. The nonprofit
agencies of the National Industries for the Blind (NIB) and NISH (formerly
National Industries for the Severely Handicapped) manage the activities
between the federal agencies contracting for supplies and services through
the program and the community rehabilitation programs employing workers
with disabilities to produce the products and provide the services.
Mr. Omvig eventually became the vice chair of the AbilityOne
Commission, and in that role, through a strategy of rational
instrumentalism, he has been able to effect significant positive change in
the program. Along with the development and implementation of several
management training programs, he has been a champion in the development of
the quality work environment initiative that improves working conditions,
job opportunities, and wages for employees with disabilities under both the
NIB and NISH programs. His success was chronicled in the February 2007
Braille Monitor article, "It's Not Your Grandfather's NIB Anymore," in
addition to the June 2009 Braille Monitor article, "More Progress in the
Javits-Wagner-O'Day Program."
James Omvig has left his mark on the JWOD program and has the respect
of every member of the AbilityOne Commission, the AbilityOne Commission
staff, and the staff of both NIB and NISH. Now, as his term on the
AbilityOne Commission comes to an end, he will pass the torch on to another
to continue his good work. I am honored and a little intimidated to have
been chosen.
Both my personal and professional lives have allowed me to focus on
the competitive integrated employment of people with disabilities. I have
come to know that, when provided the proper training, opportunity, and
support, people with all types of disabilities can be competitively
employed. In my current role as director of advocacy and policy for the
NFB, I am primarily responsible for our efforts to repeal the unfair,
discriminatory, immoral provision in Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor
Standards Act that allows employers to pay workers with disabilities less
than the federal minimum wage. I am grateful to have a mentor like James
Omvig in this work.
My personal experience with the subminimum wage workshops is through
my brother and sister. They both worked for the Georgia Industries for the
Blind (GIB) and were paid subminimum wages. In fact, when I became blind,
I thought that would be my future as well. Although my brother and others
were successful in their efforts to require GIB to pay their blind
employees a competitive wage, he never received the training and
encouragement to secure gainful integrated employment in a career that
capitalized on his unique skills, talents, and abilities. I often consider
the impact he would have had on the self-esteem and self-confidence of
students if he had capitalized on his athletic talents and people skills to
become a coach or physical education instructor. I also think of how many
more otherwise successful individuals we have lost to the disabling low
expectations of the subminimum wage workshops. I am thankful that my
sister was successful in her career transition and is currently working as
a supervisor for the General Services Administration. However, far too
many others have been unsuccessful, and as a nation we are diminished as a
result. Think of how much we would have lost if Mr. Omvig had succumbed to
the workshop's claim of incapacity masked as compassion and therapy.
Mr. Omvig and others have provided me encouragement and support.
President Obama recently appointed me to serve as a member of the
AbilityOne Commission. This is a five-year-term, part-time position that
allows me to maintain my dream job as a member of the staff of the National
Federation of the Blind. Now it is my turn to sit at the table, and,
thanks to the National Federation of the Blind, I know that I am well
equipped for the challenge. As Jim Omvig's term as a member of the
AbilityOne Commission ends and mine begins, I take great honor in serving
in his shadow. I will work to usher the JWOD program into the new era of
Fair Wages for Workers with Disabilities. We work diligently in the shadow
of many leaders in the Federation, and, although they have made our path a
little easier, we must work just that much harder to be sure that our own
light shines bright.
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Jim Kesteloot]
A Colleague's Salute to Jim Omvig
by Jim Kesteloot
From the Editor: Jim Kesteloot, a former director of the Chicago
Lighthouse for the Blind, made a presentation at the 2011 national
convention of the National Federation of the Blind in Orlando, Florida. He
spoke about the need to change the law permitting payment of less than the
minimum wage to people who are blind or otherwise disabled. He also talked
about his service on the AbilityOne Commission and about the fine work of
one of his colleagues, James H. Omvig. In July of 2012 Mr. Omvig retired
from the AbilityOne Commission, and here, lightly edited, is what Mr.
Kesteloot had to say in honoring James Omvig at that ceremony:
When I think of Jim, I think of three things: he's tall, handsome,
and brilliant. Jim, did I say that the way you told me to? Seriously, the
three things I think of are: 1. Here is the AbilityOne annual report that
was just handed out this morning. Its front cover says "National
Treasures." On the cover is a picture of the Statue of Liberty. When I
think of Jim, I think of Jim as a national treasure; no one knows more
about adjustment to disability, rehabilitation, and motivation than Jim
Omvig. As he leaves AbilityOne, he will be hard to replace. Oh sure,
another good person will be appointed, but there will be only one Jim
Omvig. In our industry, he's like a priest, minister, and rabbi all rolled
into one. In my own service I have always sought his counsel and guidance.
My wife Barb told me that Jim is like the Dalai Lama. Jim has wisdom.
He is a philosopher. You know, Barbara Walters interviewed the Dalai Lama
in early July on ABC's 20/20. Walters asked the Dalai Lama whether he
thought he was God. The Dalai Lama said, "No. I don't think I'm God. I am
not God. I'm a teacher." That's Jim, a teacher. In my service here I have
so often found myself thinking, "What would Jim do; what would Jim say; how
would Omvig handle this?" Jim Omvig, a teacher and national treasure!
2. When I think of Jim Omvig, I think of QWE, a Quality Work
Environment: CRP employees being paid not just minimum wage but living
wages, employee satisfaction; a safe and comfortable working environment;
opportunities for advancement/upward mobility; employees provided decent
benefits; having opportunities for a career rather than just a job; access
to further training and so much more.
You know, in the late nineteenth century and twentieth century there
were some great civil rights leaders: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and
others. In our industry Jim Omvig is this caliber of leader-Jim Omvig, a
national treasure!
3. When I think of Jim, I think of love. Jim loves Sharon. Sharon and
Jim love each other. In our industry you need to know how to love. If I
have learned anything over my forty-five years in the field of
rehabilitation, it's that love is the most important ingredient in
rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is gaining or regaining the capacity to live
independently: independently to one's maximum potential. It's hard enough
to adjust to the onset of a severe disability. How can you adjust if you
are not loved and lacking such support? I always feel this sense of love
when I'm around him. Jim Omvig, a national treasure!
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Bob Deaton]
Life-Changing Events
by Bob Deaton
From the Editor: This article originally appeared in the fall edition
of Expressions in Independence, the newsletter of the Nebraska Orientation
Center for the Blind. Bob Deaton, an assistant director of the program,
offers real insight into his adjustment to blindness. Here is what he says
about losing his self-worth, his struggle to regain it, and his journey in
coming to see himself, not as a broken person, but as a person with much to
give:
I was twenty-two years old when an ophthalmologist told me that I had
retinitis pigmentosa (RP). I was slowly going blind, and probably in
another fifteen years or so I wouldn't see at all. I knew that I had tunnel
vision and couldn't see well at night, but I had no idea that my vision was
slowly changing for the worse. All at once my world changed and the future
looked bleak and uncertain.
The year was 1972. I thought I was the only blind person or going-
blind person in all of northern Wisconsin. What I thought I knew about
blindness was frightening and disturbing. Blind people were helpless,
unable to do anything for themselves; they certainly didn't work. Blind
people were to be pitied and taken care of. That's how I thought others
would come to regard me.
I look back on those times with considerable detachment now; it's as
if it happened to someone else. There was the feeling that everything was
changed forever, my personal self-concept shattered. At first I dealt with
it by not dealing with it. I could still read with the central vision I
had, recognize faces, and get around pretty well, at least during the day.
Most people didn't realize I had problems seeing, or so I liked to think.
Maybe the doctor was wrong. Maybe my vision wouldn't get any worse. I could
deal with that.
Before long reality intruded. Things that were once easy for me became
more difficult. Traveling at night or in dark places provoked anxiety.
Things looked blurry, particularly at a distance. Colors were not so
bright. It was with great dismay that I finally gave my tennis racket away,
realizing that I would never play the game again.
By the time I finished college and began working towards a graduate
degree in social work, life seemed pointless. I was working toward a career
with no confidence that I could make it work. I suppose I felt some anger
with my situation. Maybe I considered medical solutions; I think that there
was supposed to be some remarkable treatment for my kind of problem in
Russia. What I clearly remember is sinking into a deep depression that
settled in for the long haul.
I don't believe anyone who has been spared chronic depression can know
what it is like. The sense of powerlessness is pervasive, persistent, and
relentless. Each day is as empty of purpose as the day before, and there is
no reason to believe that things will get any better. I couldn't
concentrate on graduate school, dropped out, and went to work in a local
factory. If you ever want to stop the world and get off for a while, try
working on an assembly line. As long as you show up for work and do your
job reasonably well, you don't have to engage your mind much. That's
exactly what I wanted, but the depression continued. I was drifting with no
destination in mind.
After a couple of years the oppressive, unchanging regularity of what
had become my life proved too much for me, and my thoughts turned to
suicide. It seems incredible to me now to think that I once had a suicide
plan, but it's true. For me that was the low point of my life. As I thought
about how I would end it all, I scared myself badly enough to want to do
something about it. Life was pretty bad and didn't look much better down
the road, but I wasn't ready to give up yet.
I had slowly withdrawn from most of the people I knew, but
fortunately a few friends wouldn't let me slip away. One in particular
helped me get back on track. He convinced me to join him on a ten-speed
bike trip through northern Wisconsin and Michigan. The bike trip lasted
seven weeks. It was an amazing experience. Each new day had to be
negotiated. What did we want to see? Where did we want to eat? Should we
find a campground, or did we want to stay in a motel? Everywhere we went
people were interested in who we were and where we were heading. For the
first time in a long time I had the sense that I was in control of where I
was and what I did.
In many ways that bike trip never ended. My life opened up to
possibilities I had thought unthinkable a short time before. Instead of the
day-to-day decisions of the trip, I began to consider longer-range
perspectives. I decided then that I would never again let circumstances
dictate my course in life. And just what did I want out of life? I decided
that I did still want to work with people. I resolved to finish my graduate
degree in social work, and I did, earning almost straight A's in the
process. I was still not sure about how I would deal with future vision
loss, but until that happened, I would do the best I knew how.
The job search came after I graduated. In the late 1970s it seemed
that every social work position I applied for required a driver's license,
to say nothing of experience. I had no driver's license, of course, and the
internship and practicum experiences during graduate training were my only
experience. But more than that, I really did not believe in myself. When I
interviewed for a job, I did not project the kind of confidence employers
expect of job applicants. I knew that I was visually impaired and would
only become more so. I saw myself as damaged goods. If I was truthful, I
would not have hired myself.
It is said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again,
expecting a different result. After two years of a fruitless job search, I
enrolled in a graduate program of vocational rehabilitation counseling with
a focus on vocational evaluation and work adjustment. This time I chose a
field of study in a career that was less likely to require extensive
driving. I was determined to graduate at the top of my class and did pretty
well, getting nearly all A's once again.
My vision continued to worsen, of course. In fact I knew I should
have started using a white cane long before I did. The decision to begin
using the cane was not easy. I did not look forward to explaining to
everyone why I was using the cane when I was "not blind." The day I started
using the cane was the same day I started graduate school. My classmates
and instructors did not know me from before and so acceptance was
immediate. I still had to deal with my family and friends when I went home
on weekends, but this was manageable. Before long everyone seemed
comfortable with the new order of things.
I was using a magnifying glass to read regular print, but I started
thinking about what I would need as a blind person, not a high partial with
pretty good functional vision. I wanted to prepare for what was sure to
come. My vocational rehabilitation counselor referred me for a week-long
assessment at the Visually Impaired Program (VIP) at the technical college
in Wausau, Wisconsin. From the start I said I wanted to prepare for
blindness, and I wanted to know how I could engage in a professional career
as a blind person.
To assess my cooking skills, I was given a TV dinner. I read the
instructions on the box (without the magnifying glass), put it in a
microwave, and set the controls. After removing the cooked meal from the
microwave, I ate it. My skills in this area were deemed adequate for
survival, and no training in compensatory skills was indicated. Braille was
not recommended since I could read print with magnification if needed. For
mobility I was taught to hold the cane diagonally in a fixed position
across the front of my body. I was advised to travel at night only in well-
lit areas or with assistance. Essentially the instructors at VIP believed
that compensatory skills training would be a waste of time since I would
only have to be retrained later when I experienced more vision loss.
Needless to say an assessment like that was not only a huge disappointment,
it was an abysmal waste of my time. It also made me think that there was
not much I could do to prepare for the future until I actually lost more
vision.
When I got my graduate degree in vocational rehabilitation
counseling, nine years had passed since I had learned of my eventual
blindness. It pleases me to say that I took the white cane with me to my
first job interview after graduation. I got that job, and I worked there
for nearly three years. Let me say that self-confidence goes a long way in
a job interview. I knew that all sheltered workshops in the state of
Minnesota had three years to become CARF (Commission on Accreditation of
Rehabilitation Facilities) certified. I knew that the Achievement Center
(TAC), where I interviewed, was not CARF certified. If TAC did not achieve
standards acceptable to CARF, it would not receive state funding. This
knowledge served me well in the interview. I said that I could help TAC get
ready for CARF and that I knew what would be required. Later on I learned
that I was the only applicant who knew anything about CARF, and that was
why I was hired.
I did well at TAC; my graduate training was put to good use. Still
vision loss continued inexorably. I went through a series of different
devices with higher magnification and lighting. I thought I might prepare
for encroaching blindness while still on the job. I became a client of the
Minnesota Services for the Blind, and a mobility instructor came out to
work with me using the white cane. She thought my method of holding the
cane diagonally across my body was fine; that didn't need to change.
However, she thought impaired hearing created a safety problem. I have 50
percent bilateral hearing loss, and I was advised not to cross any busy
streets, except intersections with traffic lights. She also recommended
that I not travel unattended at night or in dark places. She thought I
would do well to make more use of sighted guides. I listened to what she
had to say; she was the expert after all.
The time for making decisions was not far off: visual ways of doing
things were breaking down, and it was taking longer and longer for me to
get things done. I asked my VR counselor what I should do since I didn't
believe visits by my O&M instructor would be enough. He told me about the
Minneapolis Society for the Blind (MSB), and I sent away for more
information. I also inquired about training programs in other states such
as Lions World in Arkansas and a new program in Idaho. My VR counselor,
however, did not encourage this exploration. If I pursued training anywhere
outside the state, I would lose any assistance I might otherwise get. In
other words, it was MSB or nothing.
I met the newly hired director of an independent living center for
people with disabilities during this time of uncertainty and indecision.
She was totally blind and the first positive role model I had met since
being told that I would be blind myself. This was not because I avoided
contact with blind people; in fact my VR counselor in Wisconsin knew I
wanted to meet other blind people and arranged for me to meet some of her
clients. There was the man who had lost all his vision in a plane crash
three months before. He was very angry and believed life was over for him.
The strength of his despair blew me away. Then there was the blind
housewife. She also had RP and was totally blind. She had a woodshop in the
basement of her home, and the tools she showed me for measuring were
intriguing; however, she did very little outside the home. She gave
effusive thanks for her husband, without whom she said she would be
completely lost. These encounters did not encourage me, and I didn't ask
for any more introductions.
My new friend was a member of the National Federation of the Blind of
Minnesota (NFBM). With her encouragement I attended an NFBM state
convention in Minneapolis. The experience was stunning. More than a hundred
blind people were at that convention engaged in all manner of endeavor. I
heard the message that blindness was in fact manageable. If I wanted to
continue my career in rehabilitation, there was no reason why I shouldn't--
provided I had the proper training and opportunity. I asked about MSB and
heard very little positive about it.
As it turned out, my friend was once employed as the home management
instructor at the Nebraska Orientation Center for the Blind in Lincoln. It
sounded like just the sort of program I was looking for. My friend and I
arranged for a tour, and I quickly concluded that this was where I needed
to be. I told my VR counselor of my plans, and my case was closed. My
resignation from TAC was bittersweet, but I knew it was time to move on. By
the way, TAC earned CARF certification the month before I left.
The training at the Orientation Center for the Blind was without a
doubt a life-changing event. After years of experience in the field, it is
now possible for me to compare the Orientation Center with other training
centers for the blind. Many training centers provide basic skill
instruction in the alternative skills of blindness over a period of three
months or so, but that is as far as it goes. If the purpose of training is
simply to teach the basic alternatives needed for travel, communication,
and activities of daily living, the case can be made that three months of
training is enough. It is my contention, however, that many graduates of
centers like this do not go on to complete vocational training or obtain
high-quality employment. In fact many return for more training in the
skills of blindness, particularly if they lose more vision.
Center training is successful if the trainee has gained the basic
alternative skills of blindness, problem-solving skills adequate for
managing situations faced by blind people every day, and a positive
understanding of blindness and belief in oneself as a blind person. The
approach to training is called "structured discovery." Through exposure to
a series of gradually more complex learning situations, trainees develop
confidence in their ability to apply the alternative skills of blindness
and come up with solutions. Seminars during center training provide
frequent opportunities for trainees to examine their personal attitudes and
beliefs about blindness. As skill levels rise, trainees often change their
ideas about what is possible after center training.
To realize success, training is longer than it is at most other
centers. It has to be. If alternative skills are to be applied with
confidence in a way that promotes full participation in the life of our
communities, more time is necessary. An intellectual understanding about
what blind people can do is not enough; it needs to be experienced at a gut
level; it needs to be lived.
I could go on about the value of each class I participated in during
my center training, but I won't. Suffice it to say that every class
contributed significantly to my personal growth. I was finally getting what
I needed in preparation for life as a totally blind person. At that time I
was still what some people referred to as a "high partial." As such, my
training was completed under sleepshades. Sleepshades were never a problem
for me. There were enough times when my diminishing vision simply did not
work well, and nonvisual alternatives were the way to go. I could still
read print with a magnifying glass, and I could still recognize faces, but
I knew that wouldn't be the case in another few years. As long as my vision
worked for some things, I used visual strategies, but I didn't want to
repeat center training if my vision got worse, as I knew it would.
Sleepshades made sense.
I quickly got with the program, as my fellow trainees would've said
back then, and my progress was rapid. The ten months I spent in training in
1984-1985 were the most important time of my life. I owe the center a great
deal, but center training was not the most important thing that happened to
me then. The connections I made with other blind people, at the center and
through the NFB-Nebraska local chapter, did more than anything else to help
me realize my own potential and grow as a blind person.
Fourteen years had passed before I could connect with positive blind
role models, something that should have happened when I first learned I was
becoming blind. I can't say enough about how important this was to me. In
fact, even though I had been a client of two different state vocational
rehabilitation agencies, my real rehabilitation as a blind person did not
begin until I came to Nebraska and joined the society of other blind
people, people who were not extraordinary or exceptionally advantaged,
people I could relate to. The range of possibilities became much wider, and
I came to feel more secure about myself and where I was going.
I want to say one other thing. During the years I struggled with
blindness, my family and friends felt my pain, sometimes more than I did
myself, or so it seemed. They wanted to help but didn't know how. Since I
hated the idea of being dependent on others, I resisted any of their
attempts to do things for me. This created an awkward situation. Whenever I
was clearly experiencing difficulty, no one knew exactly how to act. At
other times I would begin some undertaking only to encounter expressions of
disapproval or even fear. That was the situation I faced when my family
learned of my plans to begin the bike trip mentioned above. They thought I
would have an accident for sure, probably on the first day-never mind that
I had been biking around town for years.
After center training I was much more relaxed around people-family,
friends, or strangers. I conducted myself differently, and those who knew
me appreciated the difference. I had more confidence, more self-assurance.
Once my family realized that I was not an accident waiting to happen, they
relaxed and became less nervous. My relations with friends also improved.
Not everyone I thought of as friends stuck by me; some bailed out pretty
quickly, and that hurt. Maybe that was for the best. The friends that hung
in there, however, will be dear to me for as long as I live.
I didn't really think about how my relationships with the people
closest to me would change as a consequence of training. It was a benefit
totally unexpected. In fact, I didn't anticipate just how much training
would change my view of the world and what it had to offer. It came as a
pleasant surprise-and a revelation. What we do in life is up to us. That's
true. But we are social animals after all. My journey would not have been
possible without the people I met along the way. I owe a lot to a lot of
people.
I worked a temporary position as an outpatient social worker at a
Veterans Administration Hospital in Wisconsin after my center training.
That might have led eventually to a permanent job in the federal
government, but then a position for a vocational rehabilitation counselor
opened at the Nebraska Services for the Visually Impaired (now the Nebraska
Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired). That was twenty-five years
ago. I am totally blind now, but that's okay. I am comfortable with who I
am and where I am. More important, I can now give back to others as others
gave to me when I needed it most.
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Kate Smith sits in the dining room of the Louisiana Center
for the Blind reading a Braille book while wearing the sleepshades used in
training.]
Crying My Eyes Out
A Chronicle of My Experience with Structured Discovery
by Kate Smith
From the Editor: Kate Smith is a middle-aged woman from Alabama who
is currently receiving training at the Louisiana Center for the Blind.
Here is her story about what many experience in making a successful
adjustment to blindness:
Anyone who has experience with visual rehabilitation as a
rehabilitator or a rehabilitatee knows that professionals disagree about
whether people with low vision should be trained to use methods to optimize
their vision or trained to do what they have to do without vision. I think
the person who is living with low vision should be the one who makes this
choice. But many people with low vision resist training methods that
require them to wear a blindfold and work without sight. I am here to
convince everyone with low vision to try training under a blindfold a few
times before making a decision.
I have struggled for many years with fading vision. Like most people
I know with low vision, I mostly tried to ignore my limitations. Whenever I
found a task that I could no longer do efficiently or optimally, I searched
for magic glasses or a magic surgery or a magic machine that would allow me
to keep on pretending that I was still able to function visually in a
visual world. My method worked for quite a while. But then it didn't. At
some indefinable point I crossed a visual line and stepped into a confusing
world of shifting shadows, glaring light, and fuzzy, diffuse edges. I
started having conversations with coat racks. I visited men's rooms. I
spilled fine wine in posh restaurants. I tripped and fell too many times to
count. In short, I lost control of my life.
So by the time I recognized I needed vision rehabilitation, I was fed
up with my vision, and I was fed up with vision aids. I was desperate to
learn how to get along without my eyes. I eagerly accepted the opportunity
to work with a blindfold. I was ready for the darkness-or so I thought. I
cried uncontrollably the first time I put on a blindfold; I cried the
second time too. I was surprised the first time I cried, and equally
surprised the second time. Now, knowing what I know, I think the most
surprising thing is that I actually thought I wouldn't cry. You see, I
thought this was a rational decision, and I am pretty good at rational
decisions. I am a rational, educated woman. So, once I had accepted that I
needed to learn how to function without my vision, the next rational step
was to blindfold myself and get a teacher to show me how to function that
way. Isn't that the rational thing to do? But the rational, educated woman
had failed to consult the rebellious, terrified child within; I had been
ignoring her for years. She was still sure she could see if she tried hard
enough. She was pretty sure there were monsters in the dark. She was
scared, and she was having none of this blindfold business.
So there I was, educated woman and terrified child, crying in front
of my brand-new cane travel instructor, crying on a public street, crying
my eyes out. This wasn't new-this public humiliation--I'm the woman who
hangs out in men's restrooms--but it was still surprising. Because this
time I had decided; I had taken control of my destiny. Me, the grown-up-
rational, educated woman-and I couldn't figure out why I was crying. My
instructor, Chantal, allowed me to continue my first cane travel lesson
without the sleepshade. But the second time, when the tears surprised me
again, the sleepshade stayed on. We both just pretended the tears weren't
there. By the third lesson the tears were gone and the grown-up was firmly
in control. The worst was over, or so I thought. I started a new phase of
rehab training-the independent living class. The teachers, Carol and Sue,
told us we would spend part of each class day working under sleepshades. I
smugly informed them that I had already worked under a blindfold and I was
comfortable with the experience. I grandly announced to the class at large
that, in my opinion, structured discovery was the best form of rehab and
the blindfold was the best teaching practice available. We were lucky, I
said, to have teachers willing to guide us through the process. I assured
everyone who could hear me that the fear would subside quickly. And then
another student, Janet, started to cry, and then I cried-again. So much for
the grown-up, rational, educated woman.
But, as I write this, we are almost finished with the independent
living class. Janet and I don't cry anymore. We ironed shirts under
sleepshades, and we didn't cry. We cooked spaghetti under sleepshades, and
we didn't cry. We have even been able to laugh some days-almost every day.
So here's what I learned under the sleepshade: I learned to walk with a
cane; I learned to eat without spilling; I learned how to cook spaghetti.
The blindfold helped me to turn off my eyes and learn things in a nonvisual
way-important stuff.
But even more important was the stuff my terrified inner child
learned from the blindfolds. She learned that I can still do the things I
need to do; she learned that I am still going to laugh; she learned not to
be afraid of the dark; and she learned that sometimes you just have to cry
your eyes out.
----------
Consider a Charitable Gift
Making a charitable gift can be one of the most satisfying
experiences in life. Each year millions of people contribute their time,
talent, and treasure to charitable organizations. When you plan for a gift
to the National Federation of the Blind, you are not just making a
donation; you are leaving a legacy that insures a future for blind people
throughout the country. Special giving programs are available through the
National Federation of the Blind (NFB).
Points to Consider When Making a Gift to the National Federation of the
Blind
. Will my gift serve to advance the mission of the NFB?
. Am I giving the most appropriate asset?
. Have I selected the best way to make my gift?
. Have I considered the tax consequences of my gift?
. Have I sought counsel from a competent advisor?
. Have I talked to the NFB planned giving officer about my gift?
Benefits of Making a Gift to the NFB
. Helping the NFB fulfill its mission
. Receiving income tax savings through a charitable deduction
. Making capital gain tax savings on contribution of some appreciated
gifts
. Providing retained payments for the life of a donor or other
beneficiaries
. Eliminating federal estate tax in certain situations
. Reducing estate settlement cost
Your Gift Will Help Us
. Make the study of science and math a real possibility for blind
children
. Provide hope for seniors losing vision
. Promote state and chapter programs and provide information that will
educate blind people
. Advance technology helpful to the blind
. Create a state-of-the-art library on blindness
. Train and inspire professionals working with the blind
. Provide critical information to parents of blind children
. Mentor blind people trying to find jobs
Your gift makes you a part of the NFB dream!
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Eileen and Tom Ley, with their children, JonCarlos and
Maria]
Do Diabetes Companies Have a Blind Spot?
by Mike Hoskins
From the Editor: On September 27, 2012, Tom Ley, a former president of
the Diabetes Action Network of the National Federation of the Blind, was
interviewed by Diabetes Magazine. The interview set the stage for him to
attend a summit in November when he would pose the question "Do Diabetes
Companies Have a Blind Spot?" The magazine staff appeared to be delighted
with Tom's message and his hope that the industry would wake up and take
notice that blind diabetics have needs that their products should address.
The questions asked by Diabetes Magazine are prefaced with DM and Tom Ley's
answers with TL. We hope to follow up after the summit to report on Tom's
progress to eliminate this blind spot. Here is the interview:
Welcome to the latest in our series of interviews with the ten
winners of the 2012 DiabetesMine Patient Voices Contest, who were announced
back in June. This time we're chatting with Tom Ley, who has a unique story
in that he's not only been living with type 1 diabetes for most of his life
but has also been blind for much of his life. Despite his inability to see,
Tom's visionary thinking on D-innovation has the potential to impact many
in the diabetes community. Not only is Tom a PWD [Person with a Disability]
himself, but he also has a young son who was diagnosed at age four.
His winning contest video was titled "Access Denied" to illustrate
how PWDs with vision impairments aren't offered the same access to tools
like insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) as everyone else.
To Tom these twenty-first-century D-devices should be offering the same
availability to the blind as ATMs and blood pressure meters. A catchy line
in his video that we can't get out of our minds: "Do diabetes technology
companies have a blind spot?" Great point, Tom. Now we're wondering that
ourselves...
Before we get to the DiabetesMine Innovation Summit in November,
where we can ask vendors that question directly, Tom takes a few minutes to
share his story and what's led him to this point in his life:
DM: Tom, can you start by sharing your unique diagnosis story?
TL: Actually my diabetes story consists of one diagnosis after
another. I developed diabetes when I was seven, lost my vision from
diabetic retinopathy during my senior year of high school, experienced both
kidney failure and a successful kidney transplant while in college, and
developed mild gastroparesis in my mid-twenties. Thankfully my heart,
hands, and feet are great.
DM: What was it like being diagnosed so young?
TL: I think my T1D [type 1 diabetes] diagnosis story is typical. I
first learned that I had diabetes in July 1974. During that spring my
second-grade teacher complained to my parents that I was leaving class
frequently to go to the bathroom. The first time I recall realizing
something was wrong was during a family day trip to Toledo Bend. I was
incredibly thirsty. I can remember gulping down large glasses of lemonade
and still being thirsty. I had to ask my dad to stop the car several times
so I could go to the bathroom. Of course it was summertime in Shreveport,
Louisiana, so no one was surprised or concerned about my thirst. But my
parents noticed my dramatic weight loss. They could literally see my ribs.
Finally, I was so weak, tired, and nauseous that I could hardly move, so my
parents took me to the emergency room. By then I was in ketoacidosis; my
blood sugar was 550 mg/dL.
Back then diabetes management was rather minimal. My pediatrician's
goal was that I never experience hypoglycemia. I would go to the
pediatrician twice a year for glucose testing and insulin adjustment, and I
monitored my urine daily for sugar. I never experienced low blood sugar as
a child.
DM: You mentioned in your video that you are completely blind and
that your wife has low vision. Can you tell us more about how your
blindness affects your life with diabetes?
TL: Blindness doesn't really change the tasks one does. Rather it
changes how one goes about accomplishing them. I have a wonderful family
life and professional career because I got the training I needed to succeed
as a blind person. Shortly after losing my sight, I received world-class
blindness rehabilitation from the Louisiana Center for the Blind. There I
developed the inner confidence and practical skills of blindness, skills
like Braille literacy and independent cane travel. These allow me to live a
full and productive life. I have a challenging and rewarding career as a
business analyst at UPS. I am married and have two children. I met my wife
Eileen at the National Federation of the Blind annual convention. She was
born blind but has low vision. Together we work on diabetes and disability
rights advocacy and consult on the development of the only completely
accessible and affordable glucose meter for the blind-the Prodigy Voice.
In my video I explain some of the challenges blind diabetics face. In
diabetes self-management the biggest obstacle I have is insufficient access
to information. For example, consider food labels. When I need to calculate
carbs, I either have to have someone read a food label to me, or I need to
check an online resource using assistive technology like an accessible
computer or my VoiceOver-enabled iPhone.
(DM Editor's Note: Eileen also submitted a great video for the
Patient Voices Contest, but alas, we could only choose one from the
family.)
DM: Besides the Prodigy, are there other good diabetes tools designed
for the blind?
TL: Most diabetes technology is not particularly accessible to blind
users. Sometimes I can access a limited set of features nonvisually. But,
so far the Prodigy is the only meter I can use. For dosing insulin there
are a number of accessible methods for those not using a pump. Insulin pens
are accessible, and there are gadgets that allow blind people to fill
insulin syringes from a vial.
Consider my insulin pump. I can't use the meter remote for my pump
because it is not accessible. I have learned to change my pump set
independently: I can prime the pump, use the audio bolus features, and even
suspend my pump. But I need a sighted person to change my basal rates, set
a temporary basal, use the built-in bolus calculator, determine IOB
(insulin on board), check the battery status, read error messages, figure
out how much insulin remains in the cartridge, or take anything other than
a simple bolus without sighted assistance. Basically the advanced features
that make pumps so wonderful are not accessible to me.
The same goes for my CGM. I can insert and start the sensor. I can
hear the alarms, so I can take action when I rise above or sink below
targeted ranges. However, I cannot independently enter the twice daily
calibration BG readings. Nor can I access my current CGM BG reading or
determine if my numbers are rising or falling. Nor can I enter events into
the CGM (ate 25g, exercised, etc.) or access any of the trend graphs
without sighted assistance.
DM: There have been some exciting new advancements in diabetes
technology overall, like the iBGStar, which you received. What did you
think of the iBGStar?
TL: I think the iBGStar is a brilliant innovation. I gave mine to my
eleven-year-old son, JonCarlos, who developed diabetes when he was four
years old. (Like other parents with diabetes I watched for diabetes
symptoms like a hawk, so we caught his diabetes fairly quickly.) He loves
the meter because of the coolness factor. He also likes the app for logging
his numbers.
DM: How accessible is the iBGStar for you?
TL: So far the iBGStar is not particularly accessible to blind users,
but it has great potential. Obviously I cannot use the iBGStar at all as a
standalone device. I did, however, test the iBGStar for several days in
conjunction with my CGM. The iPhone has built-in accessibility features
such as VoiceOver, so with enough persistence I was able to test my BG with
the meter when it was attached to the phone. I was also able to enter some
data into the meter when it was connected to my iPhone, but as a blind
person I found the meter rather tedious to use. The interface for the
iBGStar iPhone app leaves much to be desired in usability for someone using
the iPhone's accessibility features. However, these are likely software
barriers that an accessibility consultant could help the company
effectively address quite quickly and cost-effectively.
DM: What kind of diabetes device would help you the most as someone
with vision loss?
TL: Like most every other diabetic, I am looking forward to using the
artificial pancreas currently under development. As a blind diabetic I long
for equal access to the same state-of-the-art technologies sighted
diabetics are using and will use in the future. In my mind, separate is not
equal. The only cost-effective way to create access for everyone is to
build it into the products as they are developed. This principal is called
"universal design." One great example of universal design is the iPhone.
Every single iPhone comes with built-in accessibility features that can be
activated right out of the box. Now all iPhone users can activate
accessibility features whenever they encounter a temporary or permanent
visual disability. This should be the case for all diabetes technology too.
Accessible diabetes technology is sorely needed. The sad truth is
that diabetes is still a leading cause of blindness, and, as the incidence
of diabetes soars, so does the incidence of diabetes-related vision loss.
Moreover, as the population ages, the incidence of vision loss from other
conditions also grows. It is clear the world needs diabetes technologies
that everyone can use.
DM: What are you most excited about going in to the DiabetesMine
Innovation Summit?
TL: It seems as though the feedback from PWDs is very important to the
Summit attendees from industry and government. And it also appears as
though there may be people in attendance with the power to influence
decisions. If this is true, then I'm excited to be able to tell our story,
with the hope that positive change will happen. Blind diabetes advocates
have shared our stories for decades with industry representatives in sales
and marketing at national diabetes events, but, although the reps listen,
nothing has ever changed. The chance to talk directly to decision-makers is
truly exciting.
DM: What would you most like to see the Summit achieve?
TL: I have now been blind from diabetes for around thirty years.
During all this time I, and thousands of other blind and low-vision
diabetics, have never had access to the diabetes innovations available to
other diabetics. For decades we have been advocating for equal access to
diabetes treatments. Our hope is that my participation will help persuade
decision-makers to commit to ensuring equal access to care for all blind
diabetics. This means that we would have access to the same technological
advancements everyone else gets to use and have them at the same time. We
are tired of feeling like second-class citizens.
DM: We couldn't agree more, Tom! We are excited to have you as a part
of the Summit and look forward to hearing more about universal design.
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Steve Dumaine]
Equal Access for the Blind: Airfares, Hotels, Cruises--Savings with
Travelocity
by Steve Dumaine
>From the Editor: Steve Dumaine is senior vice president of global strategy
and product innovation at Travelocity Global. He addressed the national
convention on Wednesday afternoon, July 4, 2012, and pledged to partner
with the NFB to see that the travel experiences of blind people are as good
as those for the sighted, beginning with booking and continuing throughout
the trip. As advertised on NFB lists earlier in the year, the company
offered convention-goers a promotion code good until September. The code is
no longer valid, but the gesture was meaningful enough that it has been
left in these remarks. Here is what Steve Dumaine said:
On behalf of Travelocity's twenty-seven hundred employees around the
world and the four hundred and fifty based here in our DFW headquarters,
welcome to North Texas. Thanks to all of you for spending your Independence
Day with us here at the Anatole, one of Dallas's premiere convention
hotels. Like the NFB, Travelocity is fortunate to count Hilton as a
partner, and we've really enjoyed the atmosphere here and appreciate the
attentiveness of the Hilton team.
Over the next few minutes I'm going to tell you a few stories. My
overarching objective with this opportunity today is to share with you why
our team believes travel is such a foundational element, and we want
everyone to have the opportunity to play a role in its ecosystem. At
Travelocity, simply stated, we believe everyone deserves life-enriching
travel experiences. Having spent my career in the military and in the
travel industry, I've had the good fortune to see the world over. So I want
to begin with a personal story of what travel means to me.
Back in 1999 my son, who was eight years old at the time, and I
backpacked across Indonesia. Many of you know that Indonesia is an
archipelago, and our plan was to work our way over land and water from the
island of Tamar to the island of Komodo, which is famous for its Komodo
dragons. This island is, however, very remote. We had reached a place
called Lara Tuba, which is on the far end of the island, just to the east
of Komodo Island. In planning the trip, I had looked at the map, and it
appeared to be approximately sixteen miles by bus to our next stop. I had
interpreted this as a relatively short ride, a couple of hours at most. The
once-daily bus was scheduled to depart at 8:00 a.m., and so we arrived at
the bus stop, and we waited. Then we waited, and then we waited some more.
Finally a bus that looked like something pulled right out of the movie Back
to the Future pulled up. The bus, as it were, appeared to be a Winnebago
with cutouts for windows and a steel bar exoskeleton. We piled in and were
able to get the last two seats in the back. The bus was packed with locals,
and we were seated next to the live chickens. Now, after picking us up, the
bus circled around town, picking up more passengers, who were climbing on
that steel bar exoskeleton. Our lesson that morning was that in Indonesia
the bus leaves when it's full, not when it's scheduled.
As we left town, the driver picked out a cassette tape-hopefully some
of you will remember what those are-and popped it into the player, and this
is what we heard: "I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world; Life in plastic,
it's fantastic," a Danish pop band called Aqua with their big hit,
"Barbie." Needless to say, dance pop music was not part of my expectations
for the trip. While we felt like we were riding in the Scooby-Doo Mystery
Machine, as the ride progressed, we met three Dutch nationals who had been
traveling in Indonesia for several months, and we made fast friends. For
the rest of our trek they taught us a lot about how to navigate the
country, and to this day my son and I fondly remember that ride, a sixty-
mile ride that incidentally took more than twelve hours due to road
conditions.
So this anecdote encapsulates much of what we believe at Travelocity.
First, travel opens doors to unforgettable experiences. We like to say that
life isn't about acquiring possessions; it's about collecting memories.
Every day we help millions of customers connect with thousands of travel
suppliers so that our customers can have new experiences and collect new
memories. Second, the Travelocity team firmly believes travel is an
inalienable right. Everyone, regardless of circumstances, should have the
opportunity to experience something as unforgettable as riding a bus across
Indonesia. [Applause]
Third, we acknowledge that travel can be very challenging, and being
able to take advantage of others' expertise can improve the experience. At
Travelocity we live these beliefs every day by being the traveler's trusted
guide. It revolves around a philosophy deeply ingrained in our company's
DNA. We aspire to be the customer's champion twenty-four hours a day, seven
days a week. As a traveler's trusted guide Travelocity empowers its
customer service team to make it easy for shoppers to find the right trip
that's right for them at any time. We market this through our Travelocity
guaranty, but I can assure you that this is not just some slickly worded ad
copy. Rather, it is something that every one of our employees around the
world believes is part of the job.
A couple of proof points for your consideration: Travelocity ranks
number one in 2012 among its peers in customer satisfaction by the American
Customer Satisfaction Index. The ACSI survey showed that Travelocity led
the pack in quality, loyalty, and expectations. Travelocity is a full-
service travel agency and not just a website. We are staffed twenty-
four/seven with experts on hand to help customers book their dream
vacations to destinations like Las Vegas; Orlando, Florida; New York;
Mexico; the Caribbean; and Hawaii.
So how do we personify this? Several examples come to mind. As you
know, we are currently in the throes of hurricane season. Each year these
storms wreak havoc with the travel plans of thousands of our customers who
book summer vacations to the Caribbean, Mexico, and the Gulf Coast. When
these storms pop up, we don't wait for those affected to come to us for
help with their travel plans. We instead take it upon ourselves to contact
them proactively and advise them of their options. For some no action is
required. For others it may be more complex and involve changes to flights,
hotels, and/or car reservations. Anyone who has ever travelled knows that
such a sequence of events can cause headaches. What we've learned, however,
is that, when we anticipate our customers' needs in such times, the
headaches are far less severe.
Of course some situations test our ability to go above and beyond the
call of duty. I am sure all of you will recall the tragedy involving the
cruise ship Costa Concordia near the island of Giglio in Italy earlier this
year. Sadly, not only were the travel dreams of thousands thrown into
complete and utter disarray, lives were lost. We had two of our customers
traveling together on the Concordia who made it off the ship safely and
ended up in Paris following the accident. Our customer care team tracked
them down and found out that they had reached the City of Lights with
nothing. At that point our team on the ground in Paris stepped in and
delivered a thousand Euros to help cover any short-term expenses. We also
contacted the hotel where they were staying and gave them authorization to
charge meals and other sundries. Needless to say, our customers were very
thankful for the assistance we provided. Once they had regained their
bearings, they actually continued their tour of Europe. [Applause]
While we know our future success will be grounded in excellent
customer service, we also know that part of being a great retailer means
offering competitive pricing and great deals. As a traveler's trusted
guide, Travelocity makes it easy for shoppers to find the trip that's right
for them and at the best value. There are several ways we do this. First,
Travelocity guarantees that customers will not find lower prices anywhere
else, and, if they do, the company will refund the difference and provide
the customer with a $50 promo code for a future booking. Booking a dynamic
flight plus a hotel vacation package with Travelocity can save customers up
to $525 compared to booking the flight and the hotel separately, while also
giving them added convenience and flexibility.
With Travelocity's top secret hotels, consumers can save up to 55
percent off three- to five-star hotels. Above and beyond everyday great
deals, I have a special exclusive deal for all of you here today.
[Applause] Between now and September 4 we are offering the three thousand
attendees of the NFB conference a special promo code for $200 off a three-
night flight and hotel vacation package. You'll want to take note of this.
The code is NFB2012. It can be entered in at checkout. If you have any
questions about the code, feel free to let me or another Travelocity team
member know. Remember, it's redeemable for a three-night flight, hotel, and
vacation package, $200 off, and the code expires September 4 [2012]. We
hope that many of you can take advantage of this offer. [Applause]
Hopefully you now have a better idea of why I am here today, why
members of my team have been attending sessions here at the Anatole over
the past few days, and why we deemed it important to engage with the NFB in
such a meaningful way. We are passionate about travel, and we want everyone
to be able to enrich their lives through its wide lens. Making travel fully
accessible is completely consistent with these values. You see, we want the
amazing experience of travel to be accessible and available to everyone,
whether young or old, sighted or not sighted.
With that, I'd like to give an update on our Road to Accessibility
full disclosure. When we first started working with the NFB in 2011, our
site wasn't accessible. While we're not quite where we want to be, we have
made significant progress, and we are very close to becoming fully
accessible, unlike the other major online travel companies. Throughout the
entire process we've worked hand in hand with Dr. Maurer, Anne Taylor, and
the entire NFB staff. In just eighteen months we have transformed
Travelocity. I am proud to say that Travelocity is the only major online
travel company and one of the first e-commerce companies committed to
making its website fully accessible to blind people. [Applause]
Our project started with the simple milestone to ensure that our home
page and each of the home pages for our major travel services, particularly
hotels, flights, and vacation packages, were accessible. We completed that
effort last year, but then the real work began. We spent the first half of
this year making our hotel, vacation package, and flights paths accessible,
from the time you search, all the way through to the booking. Our site is a
large and complex one, and the project called for us to change hundreds of
web pages. Additionally, Travelocity has an accessibility coordinator who
reports directly to me and an accessibility committee in place within our
company so that it receives the constant attention that it deserves from
key stakeholders.
Finally, and in my opinion, most important, a wide range of our team
members in customer service, technology, and design have undergone hours of
accessibility training. Many of them have been here at the conference this
week. But we still have more work to do. As we head into the second half of
the year, here is what we are planning to achieve. As I speak, we're in the
midst of completing and releasing accessibility changes to our site. Once
those changes are in place, we anticipate that our hotel, vacation package,
and flight shopping will offer an accessible path for you to plan and book
your next vacation using screen readers. So, if you are thinking about
travelling this summer or over the Labor Day weekend at the end of summer,
please think about shopping at Travelocity, and don't forget about that
$200 promo code. [Applause]
Our next milestone calls for cruise shopping and booking to be
accessible by the end of 2012, just in time for the beginning of next
season's wave season when the cruise lines offer up their best deals of the
year. We also plan to have our other high-traffic transactional and
promotional pages accessible in that same timeframe. Again, when all the
work is completed, we will be the first and only online travel company to
make its site fully accessible to blind people. [Applause]
I hope you find all these developments as exciting as we do. Before I
wrap up, I thought you'd like to know that our work with the NFB is making
an impact on our team. Here's a quote from Fernando, one of our developers:
"After listening and learning in more detail about the aspects of travel
that worry or impede blind travelers or travelers with low vision, I
understand now how many different things can make travel feel difficult or
take the enjoyment out of the experience. There are so many more factors
that blind people need to account for when going through each of the steps
to plan, book, and take a trip. The best thing we at Travelocity can do is
to make the booking process as easy and fast as possible. I don't think I
would have really understood this had I not attended the conference this
week. Up until now I didn't really have a good sense of the different
people who wanted to use our site. This week has definitely changed my
perspective and will help my work on this important project moving
forward." [Applause]
I want to reiterate that we would not be where we are today without
the collaborative spirit of our counterparts at the NFB. They have provided
an immense amount of feedback and direction on matters like testing tools,
coding best practices, and even implementation solutions. Working so
closely with them has made us better and of course helped solidify our
commitment to accessibility. As evidence of our commitment, I have some
additional breaking news for you. First, as a token of our goodwill, we are
giving away a hotel stay in Miami at tomorrow's banquet, so be sure and
make it. [Applause] Second, Travelocity will be a platinum sponsor at next
year's conference in Orlando. [Applause] We will have a team onsite,
providing a series of training workshops and break-out sessions for
conference attendees. [Applause] We look forward to demonstrating our site
to the NFB members next year when the entire site is accessible.
I'll leave you with three points. First, we realize that
accessibility for Travelocity's site is a journey, not a destination, and
we've committed to making that journey. We're making travel accessible to
everyone and look forward to maintaining a strong partnership with the NFB.
We would love your feedback on our site, so feel free to contact us at
<executiveoffices.offices at travelocity.com>. Second, a reminder that you
have two months to use the promo code NFB2012 to save up to $200 when you
book a three-night flight plus a hotel vacation package with us. Finally,
should you ever need to catch a bus in rural Indonesia, remember the bus
will depart when it's full, not when it's scheduled. [Applause]
----------
Court Orders DCA to Accept Prisoner's Braille Filing
by Jan Pudlow, senior editor
>From the Editor: This article is reprinted with permission from the Florida
Bar News, where it appeared on September 15, 2012. The fight for Braille
frequently occurs in schools, sometimes in libraries, and sometimes in
businesses and other places where the public is invited. Readers will find
this most interesting; perhaps it portends a wider acceptance of Braille by
government at the local, state, and federal levels.
It doesn't matter if he's a blind guy locked in prison for life with a
penchant for papering the court with pro se filings. He still has the right
to equal access to the courts, like anyone else. In this case that means
the clerk of the Fourth District Court of Appeal should have accepted his
letter in Braille, rather than simply writing on a form: "We are unable to
accept your Braille correspondence." That's what a unanimous Florida
Supreme Court said in a recent decision in Demetrio R. Gabriele v. State of
Florida (Case No.: SC09-993) when it held Gabriele was entitled to mandamus
relief.
The quietly released unpublished opinion, ending more than three years
of litigation, was discovered by Miami disability rights attorney Matthew
Dietz while doing research on cases under Florida Rule of Judicial
Administration 2.540. "This was so brand new. I thought, 'Oh, my God! This
is great how the court gave it a huge boost by saying this is not only the
rule, but also essential to due process. It's something that we should be
proud of. All of the [participating] justices put their names on this
decision, which gave it more of a directive that the court was not going to
tolerate the denial of due process,' " Dietz said.
At the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Director of
Public Relations Christopher Danielsen said, "I would say it's very unusual
for a court to do this and not something we would demand as a blanket
rule." But, with a pro se litigant stuck in prison, Danielsen said, "His
reading and writing medium is Braille, and he doesn't have a way to get his
pleadings to court in print, then it is a pretty important accommodation."
Gabriele's case was handled pro bono by Stephen Senn and Timothy Kiley
of Peterson & Myers in Lakeland. "Access to the courts is what it's all
about," said Senn, a member of the Florida Bar's Appellate Practice
Section. "The Florida Supreme Court did what the Fourth DCA should have:
they found somebody who could translate the Braille and interpreted it as a
writ of mandamus to require the DCA to accept his Braille filings."
At first the pro bono appellate lawyers met with resistance from the
Attorney General's Office, who called their client a pesky liar who should
be disciplined in prison. "Gabriele has misrepresented his need for
accommodations to this court. Gabriele's own hand-written filings have been
accepted by the Fourth District Court of Appeals for over twenty-five
years. The Fourth District appropriately rejected Gabriele's attempt to
amuse himself and inconvenience the court through the use of Braille
filings," Special Counsel Lisa Raleigh wrote in the attorney general's
response. "Gabriele requires no accommodation to access the courts, and,
even if he did, the law does not require the exact accommodation requested
by Gabriele. It is sufficient that the courts accept his hand-written
pleadings."
Raleigh argued, "the most appropriate remedy is to both request
discipline by the Department of Corrections and to bar further
unrepresented litigation." But, as Senn and Kiley were able to show through
DOC records, Gabriele's eyesight had worsened over time to the point he was
deemed "legally blind" in 2007, and prescription glasses provide no help.
His most effective way to communicate is by using a Braille typewriter,
they said. "Simply because Mr. Gabriele can, with difficulty and using
large-lined paper, scrawl out a letter, he is not thereby barred from
protection of the ADA," Senn and Kiley wrote in court documents. The AG's
office eventually stipulated that Gabriele is indeed blind.
"Because he is incarcerated in state prison, Mr. Gabriele cannot seek
other forms of accommodation, such as voice-recognition computer software
or other technological accessories," Senn and Kiley wrote in their amended
petition for writ of mandamus. "His ability to be heard rests substantially
upon the Fourth DCA's acceptance without prejudice of his Braille
documents."
The Florida Supreme Court agreed. "The substantive merit or lack of
merit in the petitioner's underlying claim does not determine the ADA
[Americans with Disabilities Act] analysis," the justices said. "The Fourth
District has refused to provide the petitioner with an accommodation as
mandated by the ADA and the Florida Rules of Judicial Administration....
The petitioner has no remedy available other than to petition this court
for relief."
Because the Supreme Court had accepted jurisdiction, it exercised its
discretion also to address the substantive merits of Gabriele's post-
conviction claims, and denied relief. "Therefore, we withhold issuance of
the writ because we have resolved this case on the merits and trust the
Fourth District Court of Appeal will fully comply with the dictates of this
order when presented with similar situations in the future," wrote Chief
Justice Ricky Polston, with Justices Barbara Pariente, Fred Lewis, Jorge
Labarga, and James E.C. Perry concurring.
Kiley, a member of the Bar's Young Lawyers Division, called the ruling
fair but not surprising. "I don't think it came as a tremendous surprise,
given the court's focus on accommodation issues lately. Justice Lewis spent
a lot of time talking about this issue. And Florida's courts have shown an
interest that persons with disabilities have access, particularly since the
move to electronic filing," Kiley said. "I think the Supreme Court sent a
little bit of a message to the courts in Florida--really, any court in
Florida--to take these things seriously."
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Chelsea Cook]
Bitten by the Space Bug
by Chelsea Cook
>From the Editor: Chelsea Cook is a blind college student living in
Virginia. She read testimony in Braille which was presented to Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan and a number of his colleagues. She has long been
fascinated by space travel and in this delightful article explains how she
came to be bitten by the space bug and what she is doing to make space
travel for her and other blind people possible.
Before getting to her article, let's get to know some of the real and
fictional characters she mentions. Noreen Grice is an author who has worked
to make many objects viewable using only telescope images made touchable
for blind people. Jimmy Neutron is a cartoon character featured on the
Nickelodeon Television Network. He is a boy genius, but his intellect
doesn't make him popular. With this background, enjoy what Chelsea has to
say:
Jimmy was about to go on another adventure. Without his parents'
permission. In a homemade rocket. To a galaxy no human had ever visited.
And I was coming with him.
To my ten-year-old mind, there was nothing more thrilling than
watching Jimmy Neutron. Even without audio description I could still follow
enough to be infatuated with the idea that a fictional boy genius the same
age as I was could accomplish all these amazing feats. He didn't always fit
in, so I could relate to him. His sheer boldness and confidence inspired
and showed me that with hard work I could do just as well in math and
science. But, most important, he showed me I could go to the stars.
Certainly most kids have the fantasy when they are young of becoming
an astronaut. That dream never died for me. At the same time that Jimmy was
rocketing around town and galaxy, I picked up Noreen Grice's Touch the
Stars II, and read about Kent Cullers, the first blind radio astronomer. As
the Braille graphics whisked me off to the constellations, planets,
galaxies, and star clusters, it dawned on me that a career in some sort of
astronomical field was no longer just a childhood dream. It could become
reality--and had for other blind people. I thought, "If he could do that,
so could I." Now I had to work to join those ranks.
Once I was bitten by the space bug, it wouldn't let go. I attended
NASA workshops for youth, dragging my parents to Saturday morning lectures
about Mars, impact craters, and the basic characteristics of flight. I took
advanced math in fifth grade, catapulting me into algebra for seventh and
eighth. I couldn't get enough of the sciences surrounding astronomy. When
the Braille eighth-grade science physics and chemistry book was ordered
instead of the seventh-grade biology one, I let no one know that I sneaked
three volumes out every weekend, devouring under the covers the inner
workings of laser technology and neutron stars. I found a way to get my
hands on every book that Noreen Grice produced. When I entered high school,
I used to joke that my idea of spending a perfect Friday night was to stay
up late watching Discovery Channel documentaries about black holes and dark
matter or to surf the NASA website when my parents had gone to bed and the
pages loaded quickly. Most of my science education was self-driven. I had
to fight to take Advanced Placement calculus and physics my senior year.
People thought I was an amazing blind person for wanting to go into a
scientific field. How great it was that I wanted to learn these hard,
abstract concepts that sighted peers would have no idea about. But it was
much more than that: a drive and a thirst for knowledge propelled me. I am
convinced that early Braille reading was the catalyst for all my other
adventures. Jimmy Neutron and Noreen Grice came along at just the right
time to spark my love of math and science.
For the longest time I thought I would combine astronomy and
chemistry...until I took physics in tenth grade. My teacher expected
nothing less from me than any other student, though he would give me a fair
advantage. Every demonstration we did, I got my hands dirty: pushing
bowling balls up for pendulums, having graphs drawn into my hand, playing
with slinkies to simulate wave properties, being rolled around in a swivel
chair to appreciate negative acceleration. I loved physics so much and felt
its absence in junior year so greatly that I had to listen to calculus-
based lectures on the Internet. I could generally follow what the
professors were saying and would get in a few problems at the lunch table.
Even though I hadn't had formal training in calculus, physics, which was
connected to astronomy, was all I cared about.
Then came my Sweet Sixteen. Most girls want a party, or boys, or (for
the sighted folks), a car. I really didn't know what I wanted, but what I
got was beyond anything I could have expected. The NFB national convention
was in Dallas that year, and my mom had dismissed the idea of going to
Houston early on, so I was not expecting a recording from her on my
birthday: "We have a problem. The tickets aren't for Dallas. You're going
to Houston!" For two days I toured the Johnson Space Center campus, but
another surprise was coming my way. I had a private tour, and one place we
visited was Mission Control.
This was not a glassed-in view, nor one from a movie or photograph.
This was the actual room used from 1965 to 1995 to control all of America's
space missions. Astronauts of all eras, flight controllers of all
competencies, and flight directors of all ranks had stood and sat where I
currently occupied the universe for the better part of twenty minutes. "Awe-
inspiring" was too weak a word to describe the flood of overpowering
emotion that took hold while I stood in that large, all-encompassing
chamber. I sank down in front of one of the work stations, the cushion
accepting that a new occupant had come along. Still not believing my
circumstances, I looked out over the darkened consoles to the giant black
screen at the front of the room, imagining controllers filling every one of
these seats. I thought of myself in Gene Kranz's position and wondered if I
had a right to fill his enormous shoes. I had heard his voice many times
over the years (Apollo 13 is my favorite mission), but I couldn't fathom
the fact that I was actually sitting in his chair.
Now I am in college, pursuing my dreams for real. Freshman year
totaled four astronomy courses and a space survey course. I am currently in
an astrophysics sequence. I have Braille math and physics books, readers
well versed in their fields, and professors who understand that I can learn
the material; sometimes all it takes is a different way of presenting. But
the connections and influences made when I was ten are still present. I
have all five of Noreen Grice's books sitting on my shelf at Virginia Tech,
and I have many megabytes on my computer devoted to the boy genius with the
ice-cream hairdo (think dipped cone on top of large head). I still listen
to his soundtrack when solving especially difficult calculus or physics
problems; something about that carefree time when I first realized anything
is possible helps the answer come. And I always dream of that day when I
will no longer be bound by Earth's gravity; I will be in a place where the
scope of the universe is as limitless as my imagination.
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Patti Chang introduces scholarship recipients at the 2012
NFB Convention banquet.]
The Secret to Winning a National Federation of the Blind Scholarship
by Patti S. Gregory-Chang
>From the Editor: Patti Greggory-Chang chairs the NFB's scholarship
committee. She is herself a past scholarship winner. Here is what she has
to say about applying for NFB scholarships:
Let me begin with the exciting announcement of a brand new scholarship
donated by Oracle. Students can apply for the Oracle Scholarship using the
same process as they do for our other twenty-nine scholarships. Special
thanks go to Oracle for its belief in blind students.
Each July at our national convention the National Federation of the
Blind gives a broad array of scholarships to recognize achievement by blind
scholars. We offer thirty scholarships ranging in value from $3,000 to our
$12,000 Kenneth Jernigan Scholarship, which is the largest. The NFB
Scholarship Program is our investment in the future of blind people who
demonstrate scholastic aptitude, leadership, and service. I encourage every
blind college student to apply. I am sometimes asked what the secret is to
winning an NFB scholarship. I am going to tell you the secret.
First of all, applicants must meet the eligibility requirements to
receive a scholarship. All applicants for these scholarships must be
legally blind; must reside in one of our fifty states, the District of
Columbia, or Puerto Rico; must be pursuing or planning to pursue a full-
time postsecondary course of study in a degree program at an accredited
United States institution in the fall of the 2013-2014 academic year; and,
if chosen, must participate in the entire NFB national convention and in
all scheduled scholarship activities.
Many think the key to becoming a winner is a high grade-point average.
Others believe it is based on participation in extracurricular activities.
Still others think it is one's level of commitment to the NFB. While grade-
point average is important because it demonstrates the ability to learn and
be successful academically, it is not the only attribute that influences
the scholarship committee. Participation in extracurricular activities is
important in portraying oneself as a well-rounded person; it is not
sufficient in itself to justify a scholarship award. Committed members of
the organization recognize the attributes that are important to committee
members when determining who wins a scholarship.
The scholarship program is a tremendous tool for us to develop future
leaders of the National Federation of the Blind, but scholarship awards are
not restricted to members of the organization. The National Federation of
the Blind is an organization dedicated to creating opportunity for all
blind people. To that end, recipients of NFB scholarships need not be
members of the National Federation of the Blind. Many of our past winners
were not even aware of the NFB before they applied for our scholarships.
When you check the records for past winners, you will see that students of
all ages and in widely differing fields have won over the years. The class
of 2012 included students entering their freshman year on up to older
students who were nearly ready to write their PhD dissertations. The
winners of 2012 are currently working toward credentials for employment in
diverse fields.
There is truly only one way to win an NFB scholarship, and that's to
apply. Each November the new, updated scholarship application form is
posted on the web at <www.nfb.org/scholarships> along with important
information about the contest, links to information on past winners, and a
page of frequently asked questions. The application form for 2013 is
already online. It will remain up until March 31st, 2013. The process can
be initiated with an online application, which we prefer, or students can
ask for a print application by contacting our scholarship office at
<scholarships at nfb.org> or (410) 659-9314, ext. 2415.
A complete application consists of the official application form and a
student essay (limited to 700 words or less), plus these supporting
documents: student transcripts, two letters of recommendation, and proof of
legal blindness. The student must also complete an interview with the
affiliate president of the applicant's state of residence or the state
where he or she will be attending school. High school seniors must also
include a copy of the results of their ACT, SAT, or other college entrance
examinations. Unfortunately, some applications are incomplete, so the
committee is unable to consider them fairly.
Applicants should be sure to provide all the requested information
along with supporting documentation to our scholarship office either online
by midnight March 31, 2013, EST, or by mail postmarked by March 31, 2013.
They should carefully consider who can do the best job of writing their
letters of reference. Letters should support the application by being full
of facts and observations that will help the members of the committee see
the applicant as a smart, active student and citizen. Students can write
their essays using word-processing software. They should remember to use
the spell checker (or a human proofreader) before uploading, printing, or
copying and pasting it into the online application form. In an effective
essay the applicant will talk about his or her life in a way that gives the
committee insight into him or her. The essay should cover the ways in which
one lives successfully as a blind person and describe one's personal goals
for the future. Information about positions of leadership is especially
helpful. Committee members give the essay a great deal of attention. The
NFB scholarship committee is comprised of dedicated, successful blind
people who will review all applications and select the top thirty
applicants as the scholarship class of 2013. Note that students submit just
one application to the program; the scholarship committee will choose the
thirty winners from all applications received. These thirty scholarship
winners will be notified of their selection by telephone no later than June
1.
Finally, during the annual convention from July 1 through July 6,
2013, in Orlando the scholarship committee will decide which award will be
presented to each winner. Attending the entire NFB national convention is
one of the requirements to become an NFB scholarship winner. Of course
attending the convention with our financial assistance is also a
significant part of the prize.
This is the largest gathering of blind people to occur anywhere in the
nation each year, with 2,500 or more people registered. Those chosen as
scholarship recipients will have the opportunity to network with other
blind students, to exchange information and ideas, and to meet and talk
with hundreds of blind people who are successfully functioning in many,
many occupations and professions. Our past winners often comment that the
money was quickly spent, but the contacts they made and the information
they gathered at convention have continued to make their lives richer than
they ever imagined.
Often students apply more than once before winning a scholarship, so
applicants are encouraged to reapply. The NFB may award three or even more
scholarships to men and women who have already received one Federation
scholarship in the past if enough strong and worthy candidates apply.
Individuals receiving a second NFB national scholarship are recognized as
tenBroek Fellows. The secret, if there is one, to winning an NFB
scholarship is to read carefully the application on our website and then
provide all of the required information and supporting documentation before
the deadline of March 31, 2013. However, I actually maintain that there is
no secret. The only way to win an NFB scholarship is to apply.
----------
[GRAPHIC/DESCRIPTION: A formal place setting, complete with placecard
bearing the Whozit logo and the words, "Miss Whozit."]
Ask Miss Whozit
>From the Editor: From time to time Miss Whozit answers reader questions
about etiquette and good manners, particularly as they involve blindness.
If you would like to pose a question to Miss Whozit, you can send it to the
attention of Gary Wunder, 200 East Wells Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21230,
or email me at <gwunder at nfb.org>. I will pass the questions along. Letters
may be edited for space and clarity. Here are the most recent letters Miss
Whozit has received:
Dear Miss Whozit,
I am a sociable fellow, but I feel overwhelmed in a loud crowd. I've
occasionally tried the bars, but the noise is so loud that conversing is a
major effort, no matter how much or little I drink. My hearing is good, but
pulling out the conversation from the background noise is difficult. How
can I more fully participate in the after-work celebrations and feel
included?
Eager to Join in
Dear Eager,
Miss Whozit sympathizes with your problem. The truth is that most
sighted people in loud bars do a lot of lip reading in order to follow the
conversation. This is one reason why you will find that most blind people
avoid loud social scenes whenever possible.
The solutions are no secret. The most obvious one is to attach
yourself to a group planning to go to the party or bar, and be sure to do
your share of standing rounds. It is easy to commandeer someone to go with
you to the bar to help carry drinks back since you obviously have to use
one hand for the cane or dog harness. This will help you return to your
table efficiently. If a large group of your acquaintances is together at a
bar, do your best to find a couple of interesting people to hang with at
the tables.
You may decide that getting to know folks at a bar is a good way for
you to strike up friendships. If so, give some thought to choosing a bar
without loud music, perhaps even one with carpeting or acoustical tiles to
absorb the noise. Then return frequently enough to get to know the
clientele and the layout of the room. In this way you will get to know
voices and move around confidently. If you are at ease with the general
social situation, others will relax and give themselves a chance to get to
know you.
----------
Dear Miss Whozit,
In my job attendance at dinner parties is sometimes required. I work in
sales and support, so developing relationships is important. The parties
our company hosts are meant to provide people like me with a chance to form
relationships that inspire trust. As a blind person how can I seek out
people with whom to converse? I sometimes walk up to others in
conversation, but I am never quite sure when this is socially acceptable
and when I may be intruding. How would Miss Whozit conduct herself at such
social events, making the most of them as my company intends, but not
posing a problem for my coworkers and our current and potential customers?
Nervous in New York
Dear Nervous,
Company dinners can be very different from each other. If someone is
organizing the seating, you may be able to speak with him or her about
helping you meet the people you need to meet by seating you at the same
table. If you discover when you reach the restaurant that a seating chart
is posted, grab someone you know to tell you where you have been assigned
and who else is seated at the table. When seating is completely
unstructured, stake out a place for yourself at a table you like and let
other people come to you.
To make a social success of such occasions, it is important to
practice the rules of social interaction and etiquette: do not encroach on
other people's space, which in the U.S. means standing no closer than
eighteen inches to two feet from the person with whom you are chatting. Try
your best to get the other person to talk about himself or herself. Express
interest in what other people are saying. Laugh at their jokes. Respond
thoughtfully to their comments. Be prepared with amusing anecdotes of your
own or interesting facts or stories that you have heard recently. People
who are good listeners are usually thought to be excellent
conversationalists. You can acquire such a reputation if you work at it.
These skills do not emerge fully developed from your mouth. You must
practice the art of conversation, including dealing quickly with and then
dismissing questions about blindness. If you make it clear that you are not
interested in the topic and substitute something that is engaging or
humorous, other people will drop the subject, and you can get on with your
effort to get to know them. Miss Whozit has often noticed that
conversations in groups that include a blind person frequently focus on
blindness. She suspects that the sighted people presume that the blind
person has no other interests and the blind person stays with the topic
because he or she is the expert and so feels confident with the subject.
Everyone in such groups needs to discover that blind people can and do
discuss other topics.
----------
Dear Miss Whozit,
I love your columns and wish they appeared more frequently. The problem as
I see it is that you don't get enough thoughtful questions from readers.
How can I help?
Straw Man in Stratford
Dear Straw Man,
As you imply, the solution is for readers to sit down and write out
their questions and send them to the editor. That is the only way for more
columns to appear.
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Pictured here are left to right: Jacobus tenBroek; Jacob
Fried; Russell Kletzing; and Kenneth Jernigan. Dr. Jacob Freid is holding
the Newel Perry Award certificate. Photo taken 1963.]
Newel Perry: Teacher of Youth and Leader of Men
Address by Professor Jacobus tenBroek at a Memorial Convocation for Dr.
Newel Perry at the California School for the Blind, Berkeley, March 25,
1961
>From the Editor: Last month the Braille Monitor concluded the serialization
of an oral interview with Dr. Newel Perry. It seems fitting to follow this
with the eulogy for Dr. Perry which was delivered by Dr. Jacobus tenBroek.
Here is his tribute.
I come before you today--indeed we are all gathered here--to discharge
a public duty and to honor a private debt. Newel Perry was a public figure.
To us he was also a personal friend. We can appraise his public
contribution. We can only acknowledge our private obligation and personal
attachment. We can detail his public record, define his influential role,
itemize his accomplishments, recount his deeds, enumerate his statutes,
specify his doctrines, disentangle the elements of his social philosophy,
identify the general and the institutional fruits of his life's work,
analyze and psychoanalyze the personality traits that made him a leader.
Upon the life we shared, we can only dwell in memory, sifting through the
loose meshes of the mind the hours, the days, the nights, the months, the
years of our common experience; the fears, the travails, the aspirations,
the laughter that were ours together.
We were his students, his family, his intimates, his comrades on a
thousand battlefronts of a social movement. We slept in his house, ate at
his table, learned geometry at his desk, walked the streets interminably by
his side, moved forward on the strength of his optimism and confidence.
The boundless devotion to him of his wife Lillie (to whom he was
married from 1912 until her death in 1935) spilled over onto us to balm our
institution-starved spirits, to lighten with gentle affection the
bewilderment of our eccentricity and the unnatural confinement of our
segregation. Upon a later generation of us, after the death of Lillie, the
same bounty was conferred in her turn by his sister Emma Burnham, who lived
with Doctor during the last twenty-one years of his life.
As a forward youngster of twelve, who made so bold as to address him
as "Doc," I was once thrown out of a class by Doctor with such a lecture as
still rings in my ears. As a somewhat older youngster still forward but now
also bored by the slow pace and the unimaginative techniques of high
school, I was expelled by him altogether for incorrigible recalcitrance.
Eventually, despite these unpromising beginnings, I did graduate from high
school. With plenty of ambition but no money I prepared to enter the
university. At that point I was denied state aid to the blind, a program
then newly instituted as a result of Doctor's efforts in sponsoring a
constitutional amendment and a comprehensive statute. The reason was not
that my need was not great. It was that I intended to pursue a higher
education while I was being supported by the state. That was too much for
the administrative officials. Almost without discussion, Doctor immediately
filled the gap. Just as Warring Wilkinson had earlier done for him, he
supplied me with tuition and living expenses out of his own pocket for a
semester while we all fought to reverse the decision of the state aid
officials.
It was ever thus with Doctor. The key to his great influence with
blind students was, first of all, the fact that he was blind and therefore
understood their problems and, second, that he believed in them and made
his faith manifest. He provided the only sure foundation of true rapport:
knowledge on our part that he was genuinely interested in our welfare.
Aside from these immediate personal benefactions, there were three
habits of life--one might almost say three elements of personality--which I
formed out of his teaching and example when I was an adolescent in his
charge. First, an attitude toward my blindness, a conception that it is
basically unimportant in the important affairs of life. A physical
nuisance, yes. A topic of unembarrassed conversation, a subject of loud
questions by small children in the street as you pass, certainly. But not
something which shapes one's nature, which determines his career, which
affects his usefulness or happiness. Second, a basic assumption that
sighted people generally have boundless good will toward the blind and an
utterly false conception of the consequences of blindness. It is their
misconception about its nature which creates the social and economic
handicap of blindness. Third, public activity as a rule of life, a sense of
responsibility to exert personal effort to improve the lot of others. While
I was still a lad in my teens, I was attending meetings and doing work that
Doctor assigned me in the blind movement. He was a social reformer. He made
me one too. Through participation with him, these attitudes and practices
became habits of my life. So deeply instilled were they that they have
remained ever after an almost automatic behavioral pattern--potent and
often governing factors in my outlook and activity. Mature reflection in
later years could only confirm through reason what his influence had so
surely wrought in my youth.
It is altogether fitting that we should hold this memorial
convocation at the California School for the Blind. It was here that Newel
Perry came in 1883 as a ten-year-old boy--penniless, blind, his father
dead, his home dissolved. Two years earlier he had lost his sight and
nearly his life as the result of a case of poison oak, which caused his
eyeballs to swell until they burst and which held him in a coma for a
month. It was here at the school that Warring Wilkinson first met and took
an interest in him, laying the basis for future years of intimate
relationship and mutual endeavor. Warring Wilkinson was the first principal
of the California State School for the Deaf and the Blind. He served in
that capacity for forty-four years, from 1865 to 1909. With his
characteristic interest in his charges, he soon saw young Newel's full
potentiality. He sent him from here to Berkeley High School to complete his
secondary education. It was he who overcame the numerous obstacles to this
arrangement, so fruitful in its understanding of education and of the needs
of the blind. Newel continued to live here at the school while he attended
the University of California from 1892 to 1896. Again admission had to be
secured over strong resistance. Again Wilkinson was the pathfinder, Newel
his willing and anxious instrument. Wilkinson's role in Newel's life as a
youth can hardly be overestimated: father, teacher, guide, supporter-in
Newel's own words, "dear Governor."
As this institution was not only the school but the home of his
boyhood and the foundation of his manhood, so sixteen years later, in 1912,
at the age of thirty-nine, Newel Perry returned here to take up his
permanent career as a teacher. He remained in that post until 1947-a third
of a century. It was here that his life's work was accomplished. It was
from this place as a base that he organized and conducted a movement for
social reform. It was here that many of us first met him as his students.
It was here that his impact upon us first made itself felt. It was here
that our lifelong association with him began. How often in these halls have
we heard his footsteps? How often in this chamber, his voice? The sound of
those footsteps and that voice have now gone from the world as a physical
reality. How often hereafter will they continue to sound in the halls and
chambers of our lives?
In the years between departure from the school in 1896 and return to
it in 1912, Newel Perry devoted himself to further education and to the
search for an academic job. He took graduate work at the University of
California, meanwhile serving successively as an unpaid teaching fellow, a
paid assistant, and finally an instructor in the department of mathematics.
In 1900, following a general custom of that day, he went to Europe to
continue his studies. He did this for a time at the University of Zurich in
Switzerland and then at the University of Munich in Germany. From the
latter he secured the degree of doctor of philosophy in mathematics with
highest honors in 1901.
He lingered in Europe for a time, traveling and writing an article on
a mathematical topic which was published in a learned journal. He then
returned to the United States in 1902, landing in New York, where he was to
remain until 1912. He had about eighty dollars in capital, a first-class
and highly specialized education, and all the physical, mental, and
personal prerequisites for a productive career, save one, visual acuity.
During this period he supported himself precariously as a private
coach of university mathematics students. He applied himself also to the
search for a university position. He had begun the process by mail from
Europe even before he secured his PhD. He now continued the process on the
ground in New York. He displayed the most relentless energy. He employed
every imaginable technique. He wrote letters in profusion. In 1905 he wrote
to five-hundred institutions of every size and character. He distributed
his dissertation and published articles. He haunted meetings of
mathematicians. He visited his friends in the profession. He enlisted the
aid of his teachers. He called on everybody and anybody having the remotest
connection with his goal.
Everywhere the outcome was the same. Only the form varied. Some
expressed astonishment at what he had accomplished. Some expressed
interest. One of these seemed genuine-he had a blind brother-in-law who, he
said, was a whiz at math. Some showed indifference, now and then masked
behind polite phrases. Some said there were no vacancies. Some said his
application would be filed for future reference. One said-ironically, "as
an encouragement to men who labor under disadvantages and who may learn
from it how much may be accomplished through resolution and industry." Some
averred that he probably could succeed in teaching at somebody else's
college. Many said outright that they believed a blind man could not teach
mathematics. Many of these rejections were, of course, perfectly proper.
Many were not. Their authors candidly gave the reason as blindness.
We know about this period of Newel Perry's life from reports of
contemporaries or near contemporaries such as Hugh Buckingham, a student at
the school from 1896 to 1900 during Doctor's absence, who has prepared a
manuscript about Doctor's boyhood and youth. We know about it from what
Doctor told many of us in later years. But we know about it in all its
poignancy, desolation, and bleakness from Newel Perry's own intimate
accounts written at the time to his old mentor and true friend, Warring
Wilkinson. These accounts, with copies of many of the letters of rejection,
have been preserved by the Wilkinson family through the intervening years.
In the last two weeks they have been opened to my inspection by Wilkinson's
granddaughter, Florence Richardson Wyckoff, who is here with us today.
I have dwelt on this period and these experiences for several
reasons. They reflect, they accurately portray, a phase of all of our lives
as blind people. In fact, thirty-five years later I personally received
identical letters from many of these same institutions. It was almost as if
a secretary had been set to copying Doctor's file, only changing the
signatures and the name of the addressee. Yet great progress has been made.
Many of us are now teaching at colleges and universities around the country
and filling many other jobs hitherto closed to us.
Doctor Perry's reaction to this decade of defeat and privation was
remarkable. He did not break. He did not resign. He did not even become
embittered. Discouragement, frustration, a sense of wrong and injustice,
certainly these; but never collapse. He was not licked. We see in these
bitter years of hunger and rejection the source of true knowledge about the
real problems of the blind and an ineradicable determination to do
something about them. Here was a mainspring of social reform, an ever-
flowing motivation to redirect public attitudes and actions toward the
blind. To this was added the thrust of an active and restless disposition
and the wit to perceive remedies and adapt them to the need.
Out of these elements of mind, personality, and experience were
compounded the public career of Newel Perry; and out of these elements also
were constructed the programs the initiation of which made that career
publicly significant. First of all the distress of poverty must be
relieved. The necessities of life must be available. The minimum essentials
must be assured. So much in some way had been provided in the Anglo-
American system for three centuries before Newel Perry faced near
starvation and economic exclusion in New York City. The Elizabethan poor
laws did it in one way. County direct relief, instituted in California in
1901, did it in another. The almshouse and the county hospital and poor
farm did it in still other ways. At the very minimum it had to be done
better. It should be done by a system of cash grants, adequate in amount to
maintain standards of decency and health, receivable upon fixed and uniform
standards of eligibility, made generally applicable by state participation
and control, and expendable by the recipient through a free exercise of
self-management and consumption choice. To bring this about, however,
prohibitions in the state constitution would have to be removed by the
arduous process of a people's amendment, an organic statute would have to
be lobbied through the state legislature, faithful administration would
somehow have to be secured. Year by year and session by session into the
indefinite future, the myriad minor corrections and major improvements made
necessary by time and disclosed by experience would have to be worked
through the legislature and the administration. And so indeed it came to
pass in California.
Secondly, much more had to be done than merely relieve the distress
of poverty. Security is a necessity. As an unmixed blessing, however, it is
a stultifying concept. An indispensable ingredient of any welfare system is
opportunity. One of the objects of public aid must be to stimulate and
enable people to become independent of it. Accordingly, their initiative
must not be hemmed in. The means of productive activity must not be
withdrawn or denied. Independence of action and self-reliance must be
encouraged. Legal liability of relatives must be relaxed so as not to
spread poverty, increase dependence, and disrupt family life. Economic
resources, reasonable amounts of real and personal property, must be
devotable to plans for self-support instead of being required to be
consumed in meeting daily needs. Incentive to earn must be constructed out
of retention of the benefits of earning. And this too presently came to
pass in California. The new system took cognizance of the need of the blind
for adjustments on the social and psychological as well as the physical
level. It permitted and encouraged them to strive to render themselves self-
supporting. It applied the democratic principle of individual dignity to an
underprivileged class of American citizens. It guaranteed them a fair
measure of independence and self-respect in the conduct of their lives. The
California system, the Newel Perry system, was thus far in advance of its
time. It is still envied and emulated throughout the nation.
Thirdly, the reintegration of the blind into society on a basis of
full and equal membership could only be achieved if they had a chance to
earn their daily bread as others do in the community. Accordingly, action
must be taken to eliminate restrictive barriers and legal discriminations.
The main channels of opportunity must be swept clear of artificial and
irrational obstructions. The public service, private employment, the common
callings, the ordinary trades and occupations, the professions must be
rescued from arbitrary exclusions based on blindness when blindness is not
a factor bearing on competence and performance. Doctor was a prime mover in
securing legal, constitutional, and other provisions which protect the
right of the blind to enter a number of professions; forbid arbitrary
discriminations against us in the state civil service and in secondary
teaching; enable blind college students to pursue their studies with the
aid of sighted readers hired by the state; bring the blind in an ever-
increasing stream into the colleges and universities of the state and
thence into the higher callings.
These achievements-legal, social, economic, and political-have been
the fruits at once of Dr. Perry's leadership and of the collective self-
organization of the blind which that leadership engendered. More than any
other person it was Doctor who implanted and nurtured among the blind of
California the sense of common cause, the spirit of collaborative effort in
seeking solutions to our problems. More than any other person it was he who
taught us that the blind can and must lead the blind, and the sighted too,
when dealing with the problems of the blind. More than any other person it
was he who made us aware that to go on unorganized was to remain
disorganized, that only through concerted action can the blind hope to
convert and enlist the power of government and to defeat the thoughtless
tyranny of public prejudice and opportune ignorance.
Newel Perry was a teacher: a teacher of subject matter and a teacher
of men. He taught his specialty of mathematics and taught it very well
indeed; but he taught his pupils even better. To be sure, not all the
students who came his way during his thirty-five years on this campus were
wholly inspired by him. His personality was vigorous and his standards
rigorous. But for many of us who attended the school during those three and
one-half decades, it was Dr. Perry who furnished the impetus and incentive,
the goad and the goal, that would light our later lives and nourish our
careers. Our bond with him was not broken when our schooldays ended. We
went on to become his comrades and colleagues in the cause which was always
his true vocation.
Newel Perry was, in short, both a teacher of youth and a leader of
men. These two roles were not, however, quite separate. For the secret of
his success in both of them lay in this: that his teaching was a kind of
leadership, and his leadership a kind of teaching. In his pedagogical
method as well as his social purpose Doctor was thoroughly Socratic. His
classroom manner was essentially that of the Platonic dialogue:
dialectical, inquiring, insistently logical, and incessantly prodding.
In this Socratic combination also lies, I think, the secret of
Doctor's success as the leader of a social movement. Just as in the
classroom he taught his students by leading them, so as the pioneer of the
organized blind movement he led his followers by teaching them. His power,
like that of all leaders, rested in the last analysis upon persuasion. His
triumphs, however, were not the product of oratorical or literary skill,
although he had a notable gift for trenchant and incisive phrasing, the
epigrammatic thrust which distills the essence of a complex issue. His
persuasive power was not that of the demagogue but of the pedagogue. And it
was not only his followers who learned from him. He educated the blind
people of the state to an awareness of their capabilities as individuals
and of their powers as a group. He educated the legislators in the state
capitol by dint of dogged, relentless, well-nigh incorrigible campaigns of
persuasion carried on year after year and decade after decade. He educated
the general public, by his preachment and his example, to regard the blind
not in the traditional terms of charity and custody but in the realistic
terms of normality and equality.
And, most of all, in his role as leader Newel Perry educated,
indoctrinated, and persuaded a distinguished group of cohorts to join him
in carrying on the struggle and carrying out its goals. Those whom Doctor
gathered around him were other blind men and women, mostly former students,
whose special talents and professional positions uniquely supplemented his.
Raymond Henderson: By profession an attorney, self-taught, by
preoccupation a reformer, with poetry in his soul and literature in his
stylus. Born in 1881, he attended this school from 1889 through high school
and continued to live here until his graduation from the University of
California in 1904. He practiced his profession in Bakersfield, California,
from his admission to the bar until his death in 1945. Raymond came to the
organized blind movement in his maturity from a long background of
experience in other causes. He brought to it a notable array of personal
abilities, a high degree of professional skill, a fine spirit of humanity,
and the enrichment of wide and intensive activity.
Leslie Schlingheyde: Also by profession an attorney, gentle and
religious by disposition, practical rather than reflective in frame of
mind, with a brilliant academic record and a liberal outlook. He was born
in 1893, attended this school from 1906 to 1913, and thus came under
Doctor's influence in the year of his graduation. He received a J.D. from
the law school of the University of California in 1920 and from that time
until his death in 1957 practiced his profession in Modesto, California,
and served the blind movement all over the state.
It was Raymond Henderson and Leslie Schlingheyde who were primarily
responsible for handling cases in court, for preparing innumerable legal
briefs and arguments, for drafting projected bills and constitutional
amendments, for continuous legal counsel during the insurgent and formative
years. They were in a real sense the legal arm of the organized blind
movement.
Ernest Crowley: Again by profession an attorney but distinguished for
his service in another arena. He kept a law office open in Fairfield-Suisun
from the time of his graduation from the University of California Law
School in 1923 until his death in 1952. To him, however, the law was only a
necessary and not a particularly attractive means of earning a living. His
law office was a cover for his real love and active life-the practice of
politics. He was born in 1896 and attended this school from 1910 to 1916.
He was thus under Doctor's tutelage as a student for four years. His
significant contribution was made as a member of the state legislature from
1928 to 1952. It was he who introduced and skillfully maneuvered through to
passage the memorable bills which are now the statutory landmarks of our
movement. In a very real sense he was the legislative spokesman and arm of
the movement.
Perry Sundquist: Social worker and public administrator by
profession, bringing to his work a sympathetic personality, an unshakable
faith in blind people, and skillful management of administrative techniques
and devices. He was born in 1904 and attended this school from 1918 to
1922. For exactly twenty years now he has been chief of the division for
the blind in the state department of social welfare. During those two
decades he has translated the principles of the organized blind movement
into concrete administrative action, from legislative parchment into
practical reality. Under his direction programs for the blind have
multiplied and prospered, services have been expanded, and their benefits
spread. Most important of all, the working philosophy of the movement has
been transformed into a working practice. In a very real sense he has been
the effective administrative arm of the movement.
Through the years this little band grew in numbers and evolved in
normal structure. It formed the nucleus of the California Council for the
Blind, which came into being in 1934 with Doctor Perry as its first
president. For nineteen productive years, until his retirement in 1953 at
the age of eighty, Doctor forged and shaped the Council on the anvil of his
own will into an instrument larger and more formidable but essentially
similar to the informal group from which it originated.
Doctor's social vision in the field of blind welfare outdistanced his
time and placed him in the advance guard of thought and planning. His
liberality on these matters gains rather than loses in significance when it
is placed alongside his broader attitudes toward politics and human
affairs; for, in matters unrelated to the blind, Doctor was fully an heir
of the nineteenth century, conservative, even reactionary by nature, often
inflexible and not without a touch of old-fashioned nationalist-
imperialism. When it came to the cause to which he was most committed, he
was far less a Victorian than a Utopian, less a standpatter than a restless
progressive in search of new horizons.
How shall we sum up a man's life? How capture the essential quality
of a human career? How convey the inward meaning, the imponderable and
intangible qualities of will and heart and spirit? There are the vital
statistics. But they are more statistical than vital. All that they can
tell us of a man is that he was born, he lived, he loved, he died. For
Newel Perry we must amend the litany at least this much: he lived, and he
brought new life to many; he loved, and he was beloved; he died, and he
will not be forgotten.
On the day following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Walter
Lippmann wrote some words about him which might also stand as an epitaph to
the leader and comrade whom we honor today: "The man must die in his
appointed time. He must carry away with him the magic of his presence and
that personal mastery of affairs which no man, however gifted by nature,
can acquire except in the relentless struggle with evil and blind chance.
Then comes the proof of whether his work will endure, and the test of how
well he led his people.... The final test of a leader is that he leaves
behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on."
-----------
An Appeal from the Past
by Anna Kresmer
>From the Editor: The following is another in our series of historical
documents in the Jacobus tenBroek Library collection.
Since November of 2010 the Braille Monitor has featured a series of
special items from the archives at the Jacobus tenBroek Library. These have
included documents as varied as Thurgood Marshall's 1953 letter to NFB
founder Jacobus tenBroek, Federationist Margaret Warren's newsy letter to
current President Marc Maurer in 1981, and most recently an endearing
letter from a beloved guide dog in 1976 to past President Kenneth Jernigan.
Each of these items provides a unique look into the history of the NFB, and
each survives to this day because someone sent them to the archives. As a
result the tenBroek Library is one of the leading resources on the
organized blind movement in twentieth-century America and is undeniably the
best resource on the history of the National Federation of the Blind.
Unfortunately, there are some gaps in our records. For decades the NFB
Records Center, which was the predecessor of the archives here at the
tenBroek Library, dutifully preserved the interactions between the national
headquarters and NFB affiliates across the country. However, no effort was
made systematically to collect the records that document the grassroots
activities of affiliates and chapters until 2009. As a result pieces of
state- and chapter-level history have been lost. But with your help we can
begin to fill in some of the missing pieces.
The archives at the Jacobus tenBroek Library are committed to
preserving the history of the NFB at all levels. Whether your files are
from 1955 or 2010, if you have newsletters, announcements, meeting minutes,
or significant correspondence that documents the history of your state
affiliate or chapter, we ask that you contribute them to the NFB
institutional records. Help us to ensure that the legacy of the Federation
is well documented for future generations. Please contact NFB Archivist
Anna Kresmer at <akresmer at nfb.org> or call (410) 659-9314, ext. 2310, for
more information.
The NFB has always been conscious of its place in history, so
gathering and preserving its records and those of its affiliates is nothing
new. This awareness is evident in Dr. tenBroek's plea to NFB state
historians in this letter from 1955. In hopes of publishing a comprehensive
history of the NFB and the organized blind movement in time for the
twentieth anniversary convention in 1960, he turned to Federationists for
help. Sadly, the late 1950s proved to be a turbulent time for the NFB, and
this book was not published, but the importance of tenBroek's request is
still applicable today. Here is what he wrote:
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
Office of the President
March 28, 1955
2652 Shasta Road
Berkeley 8, California
CIRCULAR LETTER
TO ALL STATE HISTORIANS
Dear Friend:
The following is intended to indicate the general scope of the state
history and the character of data and materials to be collected for use in
connection with the preparation of an over-all history of the National
Federation of the Blind.
At this early stage of the development of the project, it is of
course impossible to tell just how the state histories will be incorporated
into the final work. It is believed therefore that we should prepare as
complete state histories as possible and, after that has been done and
other work on the over-all history has been completed, to determine how
much state history to include and how to integrate it into the total work.
Each state historian should therefore:
1. Collect, write up, and send to me general data about the state
affiliate. When was it formed? What were then and what are now its
purposes and activities? What changes has it undergone during the
years of its existence? What programs has it carried out? Who have
been the leading personalities in it?
2. What has been the history of the development of public and private
programs for the blind in your state? Indicate what those public and
private programs are, where they have been instituted, what their
progress has been, what their objectives are, and the extent to which
they have achieved those objectives. In the case of public programs
indicate the statutes upon which they are based and the important
changes made in those statutes from time to time. Mark out the role of
the state affiliate in relationship to those public and private
programs and agencies. Which ones did they fight? Which ones did they
agree with? Which ones came into existence as a result of their
efforts? What impact have they had?
3. Obviously, information bearing upon the subjects listed under 1 and 2
can be gathered from a number of sources. Some of it exists within
your own knowledge and experience. Some of it can be collected by
personal conversations with other blind persons in the movement or
other persons in the community. Still more of it, however, must be dug
out of the documentary record. It is essential that you verify all
information to the greatest possible extent. Dig through the files of
the affiliate. Secure access to letters and correspondence of persons
who have engaged in the movement or in other programs over the years.
If there are several versions of various events, set them all down,
giving your evaluation of each and the source of your information
about them.
4. As you collect this information, write it down, and send it to me
along with as many supporting documents as you can lay your hands on.
I will go over the material you sent me from time to time and write
you suggesting areas that need verification, gaps that need filling,
and additional lines of inquiry that should be pursued.
It is expected that this work will take a good deal of time. We have
therefore set as a general target date for the production of the final work
the twentieth anniversary of the National Federation of the Blind, namely
1960. It is necessary, however, to begin collection of data immediately if
we are to do a thorough-going and solid historical job.
The project has exciting possibilities. If successfully carried out,
it will be not only the history of the blind movement in this country but
the history of blindness in recent times in this country. It will reveal in
ways which cannot be refuted the character of the democratic impulse which
lies behind the claims of self-determination by the blind and which
supports our organizations. It will be a public educational instrument
which can be drawn upon to meet all sorts of Federation needs. It will
above all tell the story of the accomplishments which the blind themselves
have wrought.
Cordially yours,
Jacobus tenBroek
President
----------
[PHOTO CAPTION: Allen Harris]
Convention Scholarships Available
by Allen Harris
>From the Editor: Allen Harris chairs the Kenneth Jernigan Convention
Scholarship Fund committee. He has an important announcement for those who
would like to attend this year's national convention but find themselves
short of funds. This is what he says:
The Kenneth Jernigan Convention Scholarship Fund is looking for
individuals who can use some financial assistance to attend our national
convention in Orlando, Florida. At the 2012 convention in Dallas we were
able to assist sixty-three people. In 2013 our convention will begin on
Monday, July 1, and run through Saturday, July 6. The convention is a day
shorter than you might expect, ending with the banquet Saturday evening.
Who is eligible to receive a Kenneth Jernigan Convention Scholarship?
If you are a member of the National Federation of the Blind who has not yet
attended a national convention, you are eligible to apply.
What do I have to do to apply for a Kenneth Jernigan Convention
Scholarship? You must do the following and are responsible for meeting
these application requirements:
1. Each individual who applies for a Kenneth Jernigan Convention
Scholarship must write a letter to the selection committee. You will send
your letter of application to your NFB state affiliate president. A list
of state presidents is posted on the NFB website <www.nfb.org>. He or she
will forward your completed application, along with his or her
recommendation, to the committee at <kjscholarships at nfb.org>. You and your
state president should make contact by telephone so that he or she is well
aware of your financial need and your wish to attend the convention in
Orlando. If you have questions, you may also send a message to the Kenneth
Jernigan Scholarship chairman by addressing your email to the scholarship
submission email address.
2. You must write a letter to the Kenneth Jernigan Fund committee
expressing the reasons why you want a scholarship. Describe your
participation in the Federation and what you think you would contribute and
receive at the convention.
3. You must register for and attend the entire convention, including
the banquet.
What else must I do to insure that my application will be considered?
We must have all of the following information:
1. Your full name
2. Your address
3. Your telephone numbers (home, business, and cell)
4. Your email address (if you have one)
5. Your state president's name and the name of your local chapter, if
you attend one.
All applications must be received by April 15, 2013.
How do I get my scholarship funds? You will get a debit card at the
convention loaded with the amount of your scholarship award. The times and
locations to pick up your debit card will be listed in the notice you
receive if you are a scholarship winner. The committee is not able to
provide funds before the convention, so work with your chapter and state
affiliate to assist you by advancing funds you can pay back when you
receive your scholarship.
When will I know if I have been selected as a Kenneth Jernigan
Scholarship winner?
The committee makes every effort to notify scholarship winners by May 15,
but you must do several things to be prepared to attend if you are chosen:
1. Make your own hotel reservation. If something prevents you from
attending, you can cancel your reservation.
2. You will receive a letter with the convention details which should
answer many of your questions. It is also helpful to find a mentor from
your chapter or affiliate to act as a friend and advisor during the
convention. Although you will not know officially whether or not you have
been selected until mid-May, you must make plans to attend and then adjust
your arrangements accordingly.
Last summer in Dallas the Jernigan Fund scholarship committee awarded
sixty-three Kenneth Jernigan Scholarships. Grants ranged from $400 to $500.
The amount we can give will depend on the funds available; we attempt to
award additional funds to families. You can include in your letter to the
committee any special circumstances which the committee may choose to take
into consideration. Above all, please use this opportunity to attend your
first convention and join several thousand other blind Federationists in
the most important meeting of the blind in the world.
If you have questions or need additional information, call Allen
Harris at (205) 520-9979 or email him at <kjscholarships at nfb.org>. We look
forward to seeing you in Orlando.
___
Recipes
This month's recipes are offered by members of the NFB of Kentucky.
Barbecued Pork Chops
by Denise Franklin
Denise Franklin has been an active member of the NFB for forty years and
has served on the board of the NFB of Greater Louisville in various offices
during that time. She is currently secretary of the chapter and a member of
the NFB of Kentucky board of directors. She says that she firmly believes
that the best recipes are the simple ones that make people think you've
been working in the kitchen for hours. These two recipes are examples of
that type.
Ingredients:
6 pork chops
1 tablespoon oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/3 cup celery, chopped
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
2 8-ounce cans tomato sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
Method: In a large skillet with a tight lid, brown chops in oil over
medium heat for five minutes on each side. Pour off fat. Sprinkle celery,
brown sugar, lemon juice, and dry mustard over chops. Pour tomato sauce
over all and add salt and pepper to taste. Cover and simmer over low heat
for one hour until chops are tender.
-----------
Creamy Corn Scallop
by Denise Franklin
Ingredients:
1 can condensed cream of celery, chicken, or mushroom soup
1 tablespoon onion, minced
Dash of pepper
1 can whole kernel corn, drained
1 cup soda crackers, crumbled
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
Method: Combine soup, onion, and pepper. In a one-quart casserole
arrange alternate layers of corn, soup mixture, and cracker crumbs. Dot
with butter and bake open at 400 degrees for 25 minutes. Serve immediately.
----------
Hanky Pankies
by Nickie Pearl
Nickie Pearl lives in Louisville. She is a lifelong NFB member, thanks to
her mother, Cathy Jackson, NFB of Kentucky president and member of the
national board of directors. She served as Greater Louisville chapter
president for five years and in other board positions for another five
years. Nickie reports that she enjoys working for the greater good of
blind people and striving to change what it means to be blind. She offers
recipes for an appetizer and a dessert although her husband could make a
meal of the appetizers!
Ingredients:
1 pound ground beef
1 pound sausage meat
1/2 log of Velveeta cheese
2 teaspoons dried oregano
2 teaspoons crushed red pepper
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 loaf cocktail rye bread
Method: Cook ground beef and sausage separately. After meat is cooked
and drained, combine in a large mixing bowl. Add the oregano, crushed red
pepper, and garlic powder to meat and toss together well. Cut Velveeta
cheese in small cubes and place in a microwave-safe bowl and microwave
carefully to melt. Once cheese is melted, pour it over meat mixture.
Thoroughly combine the cheese and meat. I use my hands for this step, but
please note that the cheese can be very hot, so be careful.
Now it's time to build the hanky pankies. Place the desired amount of
meat and cheese mixture on a slice of cocktail rye bread. I use about two
full tablespoons on each slice. Place the open-face sandwiches on a cookie
sheet and bake in a 400-degree oven for ten to twelve minutes. These little
treats are still good the next day warmed up again in the oven.
-----------
Caramel Apple Salad
by Nickie Pearl
Ingredients:
8 ounces cream cheese
8 ounces sour cream
16 ounces whipped topping
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
8 to 12 apples
2 to 3 cups seedless grapes
Raisins and pecans, optional
Method: Combine the sour cream and cream cheese. Dice apples to a
desired size and cut grapes in half. Mix the brown sugar with the cream
cheese and sour cream. Add the apple, grapes, and optional ingredients to
that mixture. Finally fold the whipped topping into the apple mixture.
Chill and serve.
----------
Pimento Cheese
by Joan Balot
Joan Balot, longtime member of the Louisville Chapter of the NFB of
Kentucky, is famous for her culinary talents. She is known around the state
of Kentucky for her pimento cheese.
Ingredients:
1/2 cup Miracle Whip
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 pounds Velveeta
8 ounces cream cheese
8 ounces pimentos, drained and chopped
10 sweet pickles, chopped fine
Method: Bring all cheese to room temperature. Combine cheese, chopped
pimento, and pickles and mix well. Add mayo and Miracle Whip and whip until
completely incorporated. Spoon into serving bowl, cover with plastic wrap,
and chill until ready to use. Spread will be most flavorful if served at
room temperature.
----------
Mom's Fresh Apple Cake
by Denise Bourne Carnes
Denise is a longtime member of the NFB of Kentucky. Her parents are
founding members of the Louisville Chapter.
Ingredients:
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cup oil
3 eggs
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup chopped pecans
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups self-rising flour
1 cup dates, chopped
3 cups apples, peeled and diced
Method: Cream oil and sugar together. Fold in eggs one at a time,
then add vanilla. Mix together flour, cinnamon, dates, and pecans and then
stir them into the creamed mixture. Fold in apples. Batter will be thick,
but juice from the apples will thin the batter as it cooks. Grease and
flour a 9-by-13-inch baking pan. Pour in the batter and bake one hour at
325 degrees. Note: coating dates and pecans with flour keeps them from
settling to the bottom of the cake.
----------
Monitor Miniatures
News from the Federation Family
National Federation of the Blind Congratulates Dr. Fredric K. Schroeder:
The National Federation of the Blind recently announced that Dr.
Fredric K. Schroeder has been elected as first vice president of the World
Blind Union (WBU). Dr. Schroeder, who also serves as first vice president
of the NFB, was elected to the position at the Eighth General Assembly of
the World Blind Union, recently held in Bangkok, Thailand.
Dr. Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind,
said: "We congratulate our longtime friend, colleague, and leader Fred
Schroeder on his election as first vice president of the World Blind Union.
Fred will bring invaluable skill, experience, and knowledge to the many
challenges faced by blind people throughout the world, as he has done so
capably for blind Americans throughout his career."
Dr. Schroeder said: "I am honored to have the opportunity to
represent the blind of the United States within the World Blind Union, and
I look forward to helping to advance the WBU's important agenda to improve
the lives of blind people across the globe. I thank the members of the WBU
for placing their trust and confidence in me."
Dr. Schroeder has a long and distinguished career in service to the
blind. He served as the first executive director of the New Mexico
Commission for the Blind. His success in making its rehabilitation and
employment programs the most successful in the country led to his
appointment in 1994 by President Bill Clinton as commissioner of the
Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) in the United States
Department of Education. Following his service as RSA commissioner, he
joined the faculty of the Interwork Institute at San Diego State
University. He now works as a research professor specializing in
leadership and public policy in vocational rehabilitation and also serves
as president of the Virginia affiliate of the National Federation of the
Blind.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Joe Money, January 15, 1950, to November 5, 2012]
In Memoriam:
With deep regret we report the death following a massive heart attack
of Indiana Federationist Joe Money. He was a deeply committed member of the
NFB of Indiana for forty years. For six years he served as affiliate
president, and current Indiana President Ron Brown reports that at one time
or another he held just about every other affiliate office.
Joe was a Randolph-Sheppard vendor who was always actively working in
the legislature. Single-handedly he fought for and obtained funds for NFB-
NEWSLINE in Indiana. He worked on the Braille bill and many other pieces of
state legislation, and he missed only two Washington Seminars.
Joe quietly worked for the NFB, wherever the work took him. He helped
members of the Federation family physically or financially whenever he saw
a need. We offer our deepest sympathy to Joe's wife Debbie and his
affiliate family.
Elected:
On October 27, 2012, the National Federation of the Blind of Maine
elected its new board of directors. Elected were president, Leon Proctor
Jr.; first vice president, Patricia C. Estes; second vice president, Roger
Cusson; secretary, Faith Armstrong; treasurer, Curtis (Skip) Estes; and
board members, David Van Wickler, Lee Ann Nelson, and Walter Woitesek.
Pennies for Pages: Support Braille Literacy:
The National Association of Blind Students (NABS) is proud to be
holding our fourth annual Pennies for Pages fundraiser to support Braille
literacy. Students and supporters from across the country are reading in
the Braille Readers Are Leaders Contest and soliciting donations for pages
read. If you haven't yet had the chance to support a reader, it's not too
late. Please go to the following URL and make a pledge for pages read or a
fixed donation to the state or student of your choice:
<http://www.nabslink.org/pennies_for_pages/pennies_form.php>. We can accept
credit cards, checks through postal mail, or cash in person at the
Washington Seminar. Your donation of any amount will go a long way toward
helping NABS to carry out the important work of the Federation. If you have
any questions, please contact NABS President Sean Whalen at
<nabs.president at gmail.com> or by calling (608) 332-4147. We are extremely
grateful to all who have donated or will donate.
2013 NFB Writing Contest:
The annual youth and adult writing contests sponsored by the Writers'
Division of the NFB opened January 1 and will close April 1. Adult
contests, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and stories for youth are open to
all entrants eighteen years of age and over.
The youth writing contests, poetry and fiction, are to promote
Braille literacy and excellence in creative writing. Entries will be judged
on creativity and quality of Braille. The age groups for these authors is
divided into grade levels: elementary, middle school, and high school.
Prizes for contest winners range up to $100 in adult categories and up to
$30 in youth categories.
All contest winners will be announced at the Writers' Division
business meeting during the NFB national convention to be held in Orlando,
Florida, the first week of July, 2013. In addition, shortly after
convention a list of winners will appear on the Writers' Division website,
<www.nfb-writers-division.net>. First-, second-, and third-place winners in
each category will be considered for publication in the Writers' Division
magazine, Slate & Style. For additional contest details and submission
guidelines consult the Writers' Division website.
In Brief
Notices and information in this section may be of interest to Monitor
readers. We are not responsible for the accuracy of the information; we
have edited only for space and clarity.
Message of Hope Ministry:
Unity's Message of Hope ministry, serving the blind and visually
impaired, has the following products and services available free of charge:
1. "Daily Word" in Braille--bimonthly, one Braille volume.
2. "Daily Word" on CD. Two CD's, bimonthly.
3. A virtual library of downloadable Braille Unity publications, available
free of charge to anyone with access to a computer, Braille notetaker, or
digital Talking Book player at
<http://content.unity.org/prayer/inspirationalArticles/messageOfHope.html>
4. An audiobook lending library. Contains Unity publications on
audiocassette and CD. To request a catalog, call (866) 421-3066 or email
<message-of-hope at unityonline.org>.
5. Hardcopy Braille book lending library. Unity publications in Braille. To
request a catalog, call (866) 421-3066, message us on Facebook at
<facebook.com/messageofhope> or email <message-of-hope at unityonline.org>.
Visit the Message of Hope Facebook page at:
<http://www.facebook.com/messageofhope> to stay updated on new books and
other materials that become available in our various accessible libraries.
Visit the Message of Hope website at <http://www.unity.org/>.
News from the Braille Authority of North America (BANA):
BANA circulated the following press release in November 2012:
BANA Adopts Unified English Braille (UEB) for United States
On November 2, 2012, the Braille Authority of North America (BANA) set
a new course for the future of Braille in the United States when it adopted
Unified English Braille (UEB). The motion, which passed decisively,
specifies that UEB will eventually replace the current English Braille
American Edition and that the U.S. will retain the Nemeth Code for
mathematics and science notation.
The transition to UEB will not be immediate and will follow a
carefully crafted timeline. Implementation plans will be formulated with
the input and participation of stakeholders from the consumer, education,
rehabilitation, transcription, and production communities. Plans will take
into consideration the various aspects of creating, teaching, learning, and
using Braille in a wide variety of settings. The plans will be designed to
provide workable transitions for all involved in Braille use and production
and to minimize disruption for current Braille readers.
UEB is based on the current literary Braille code and was developed
with input from many people, primarily Braille readers, who worked to
achieve an optimal balance among key factors including keeping the general-
purpose literary code as its base, allowing the addition of new symbols,
providing flexibility for change as print changes, reducing the complexity
of rules, and allowing greater accuracy in back translation.
Letters and numbers will stay the same as they are in the current
literary code. There will be some changes to punctuation, but most will
remain the same. Some rules for the use of contractions will change. Nine
contractions will be eliminated, and some will be used more often. A FAQ
providing more detail about changes is available on the BANA website. After
implementation the official Braille codes for the United States will be
Unified English Braille; Nemeth Code for Mathematics and Science Notation,
1972 Revision and published updates; Music Braille Code, 1997; and the IPA
Braille Code, 2008.
More detailed information about UEB and the motion that BANA passed
can be found on the BANA website at <http://www.Brailleauthority.org/>. The
Board of BANA consists of appointed representatives from fifteen member
organizations of Braille producers, transcribers, teachers, and consumers.
The mission and purpose of the Braille Authority of North America are
to assure literacy for tactile readers through the standardization of
Braille and tactile graphics. BANA promotes and facilitates the use,
teaching, and production of Braille. It publishes rules and interprets and
renders opinions pertaining to Braille in all existing codes. It deals with
codes now in existence or to be developed in the future, in collaboration
with other countries using English Braille. In exercising its function and
authority, BANA considers the effects of its decisions on other existing
Braille codes and formats, the ease of production by various methods, and
acceptability to readers.
Attention Prospective NASA Student Interns with Disabilities:
NASA hopes to increase the number of students with disabilities
pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers through
our internship programs. NASA has a 2 percent hiring goal for employment of
people with disabilities, and internships are a good way to get experience.
Students can apply for summer internships now. The deadline for submitting
applications is Friday, March 15, 2013, and we will begin extending offers
to students as early as February 2, 2013. We encourage you to apply early
because the best opportunities are likely to be filled quickly, and your
likelihood of being selected decreases the longer you wait. You can
register for an account and look for internships anytime at the One Stop
Shopping Initiative (OSSI): NASA Internships, Fellowships, and Scholarships
(NIFS) at <http://intern.nasa.gov/>. Summer 2013 internships run for ten
weeks for college students and six to eight weeks for high school students,
from early/late June through early/mid-August. College students receive a
stipend of $6,000 and high school students $1,800. As an intern you are
responsible for your own housing. NASA internships for college students are
also offered during spring, fall, and year-long sessions.
NASA has internships for high school students and for rising freshmen
through doctoral students in STEM fields. A rising freshman is a high
school student who has been accepted to an accredited institution of higher
learning, i.e., a college or university, at the time of the internship.
Applicants must be U.S. citizens, with a minimum GPA of 2.8 for college and
3.0 for high school; however, applicants must understand that the
competition for internships is keen. High school students must be at least
sixteen years old at the time the internship begins.
Internships are available at all NASA centers nationwide. Students can
submit a completed application whether they apply to an opportunity or not.
However, applying to opportunities has the advantage of allowing applicants
to be considered by mentors who work in disciplines of interest and at a
particular center. Applicants may apply to as many as fifteen posted
opportunities. For example, an opportunity having to do with the Solar
Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will be at the Goddard Space Flight Center in
Maryland because SDO is located there. Not applying to an opportunity means
that prospective interns will be hoping that a mentor happens to read their
applications rather than directing their applications to mentors in fields
and at centers of interest.
Students who are selected for summer internships will receive an offer
letter by email sometime after February 1, 2013. They will then have five
days to accept or reject the offer through their OSSI: NIFS account. The
offer will automatically expire after five days if no action is taken.
Please feel free to contact me for more information or help with
applying: Kenneth A. Silberman, Esq., U.S. Supreme Court, Maryland, and
Patent Bars B.A., M.Eng., J.D., NASA Engineer & Registered Patent Attorney,
Office of Education, Code 160, NASA/GSFC, Mailstop 160, Bldg. 28, Rm. N165,
Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA; Voice: (301) 286-9281; Fax: (301) 286-1655;
Email: <kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov>
Disney's The Lion King and Newsies to Offer New Accessibility Services on
Broadway:
Supported by funds from the City of New York Theater Subdistrict
Council, LDC, and the City of New York, Disney's hit musicals The Lion King
and Newsies have joined the Broadway Accessibility/Audience Expansion
Initiative, which creates collaboration between producers and accessibility
specialists at all stages of production. The Initiative is a partnership
between Inclusion in the Arts, a New York-based not-for-profit, and G-PASS,
a service company using technology from Sound Associates Inc., in
collaboration with Disney Theatrical Productions. This historic initiative
provides theater-goers with disabilities a theater experience as complete
and captivating as that enjoyed by non-disabled audience members. The
services are I-Caption for deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons and D-Scriptive
for blind and low-vision patrons.
I-Caption, a revolutionary text-based system by Sound Associates Inc.,
provides the entire script of the show--including character names--as it
unfolds in performance, via a handheld polarized video screen. D-Scriptive
provides an extremely thorough audio description of a show on a handheld
unit for blind and low-vision patrons. Both services are integrated into
the show's light and electrical cueing system so that the commentary keeps
pace with the action onstage. These services are provided for every
performance and evolved from the Infrared Listening System, for which Sound
Associates Inc. won a Tony Award in 1979.
With the addition of The Lion King and Newsies, Inclusion in the Arts
and G-PASS expand access to Broadway audiences of all ages in unprecedented
ways. The Initiative is particularly proud to showcase Broadway as a
welcoming entertainment option for all family members at every show.
New Perkins SMART Brailler® Opens Braille Learning and Teaching to All:
Learning to read and write has just become easier for students who are
blind, and that process can now smoothly include their teachers, families,
and friends. For the first time since Louis Braille created his namesake
writing code more than 200 years ago, people who are sighted can instantly
understand the tactile reading system used by people who are blind with the
new easy-to-use, portable Perkins SMART Brailler. Until now only
specialists or those trained to read the configurations of raised dots
could understand Braille. Today the SMART Brailler allows a classroom
teacher, a parent of a child who is blind, or a sighted classmate to hear
and see what is being Brailled instantly with built-in audio and visual
output. Perkins Products, a division of Perkins, developed the new device
and is ready to ship to schools, rehab centers, and individuals.
The Perkins SMART Brailler, from the maker of the world-renowned
Perkins Brailler®, provides audio and visual feedback coupled with hardcopy
output so that everyone can learn Braille together--students, teachers,
parents, and adults losing their vision. The new product enables a student
to use Braille more independently. A proprietary electronic device displays
large-print and simulated Braille images and provides audio output in
English and a range of other languages using Acapela text-to-speech
software developed by Perkins Products in conjunction with the American
Printing House for the Blind. Perkins Products Vice President and General
Manager David Morgan says, "We are convinced that this truly levels the
playing field and demystifies the Braille code to allow a shared learning
experience for all--student, parent, teacher, friend."
For a child who is blind or partially sighted, learning Braille is
equivalent to a sighted child learning to write letters and read back words
and sentences. The SMART Brailler is unique in its multi-function, multi-
sensory output using the standard Braille keyboard. Because the device is
built around a next-generation Perkins Brailler, hardcopy Braille is also
generated simultaneously. It not only functions as a mechanical Brailler,
it allows a student to save and transfer electronic documents via USB and
to edit documents. Even more important, with the audio feedback and the
screen which displays what is being Brailled, a sighted classmate or parent
can work alongside the student. It makes inclusion of students who are
blind into mainstream classrooms far more possible than ever before.
The SMART Brailler comes with a quick start guide and an audio
overview. Free training videos will be available online. See the SMART
Brailler in action on YouTube: <http://youtube/A41u7XXB4QQ> (90 sec.); for
more details: <http://youtube/avA_DOn6gk0> (4 mins.). For more information
and to keep abreast of availability of this and other Perkins Products,
visit <www.perkinsproducts.org> or email <perkinsproducts at perkins.org>.
NFB Pledge
I pledge to participate actively in the efforts of the National
Federation of the Blind to achieve equality, opportunity, and security for
the blind; to support the policies and programs of the Federation; and to
abide by its constitution.
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