Navigating Life's Contours
This week’s Thursday Throw-Down is with one of our up and coming blind soccer players. Take a read here and see her workout. She’s got it going on for sure and I can’t help but say a hearty amen to everything she reveals about her training regimen.
As with all these features during blind sports month, Bailey’s aspirations are achievements we can both admire and be inspired by for our own journey through life. Fitness is key, folks, and you’ve gotta love how she does it!
When do we forego benefit programs offered to us who are blind or otherwise physically disabled? It’s a question worth considering. After all, in an environment where 85 percent of people with various physical or cognitive disabilities remain unemployed, affording things like internet access, TV streaming, and even a home computer become harder to achieve.
And we’ve all heard the advise to budget better, work in the system, and shoot for the most inexpensive options possible. Add to that, many of us who have a physical or cognitive disability do not want to wear the badge of being needy.
On the other side of the argument is the aedvise not to look a gift horse in the mouth and reject the benefit. Recently when the FCC has come up with a plan for getting more people with disabilities online, they have worked out a system and funding to give us an opportunity to compete for work, hear the news, and improve our quality of life through the medddia and technology at our fingertips.
Enter in the Affordable Connnnectivity Program. As the following link explains, those who qualify, can get help paying for home internet access, funds to buy a personal computer, and other similar benefits. On the one hand, who wouldn’t want having such accommodations? If you live far away from a major city and your reception is poor using a connection whose bill is pennies on the dollar, you would greatly be helped by a government program designed for you to have faster internet, a Windows Operating System that is up-to-date, and higher speed when filling out forms online.
On the other hand, if you live nearer conections and routing stations, your internet provision may be satisfactory. You may prefer something quicker or a computer that has a bit more memory than your current terminal. You meet your budget every month and are sustaining yourself and perhaps a family on the SSDI or moderately paying job you just obtained.
I remember being in the second scenario and foregoing the benefits that the local HUD office held out to me. Why? Not only was I working but I had the potential to make more and gain upgrades on the technology I possessed. My news came primarily through the radio and internet. Paying for TV access would’ve been a waste of my money and time. When it came to choosing a housing voucher or turning the opportunity down, I weighed the fact I had gotten myself into a position I’d striven to have for a long time. My parents believed in paying in full for the things you bought; I inherited that ethic, knowing that the next person over who may not be so fortunate could use the funds that the local HUD had better than I could.
There may be other reasons for accepting or rejecting government help of various types that goes beyond the necessity of having enough to make ends meet each month. With that said, it’s always good to be educated on what is available in case you know someone who may need them while you may not. Here’s a link to the Affordable Connectivity Program through the Federal Communications Commission. Weigh the value of subscribing to it versus your own financial state of being. Perhaps, in time, with access to a computer and internet capability, you will get a job or service by which you can afford more of life’s necessities.
https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/acp-flyer-i_0.pdf
The latest braille teaching tool from the American Printing House for the Blind busts some needed myths that we adults may have held over the years. It’s called the Braille Brain and it’s designed to get someone who’s blind or a teacher of the visually impaired into the benefits of the still new Unified English Braille Code.
Yes, the name says a lot, grouping the lessons and structure of the courses into sections like that of the human brain. If you have sight, take a look at the logo when you click on the link. It looks like a real brain.
APH intends this new tool for showing a systematic way of making sense of all the letters, numbers, and signs that the six dot cell or group of six-dot cells convey.
After all, braille is not a language in and of itself. Instead, it transliterates that which is written visually into words and symbols that our fingers can read. Even in our age when braille displays and notetakers have largely replaced the demand for the old Perkins brailler, we who are blind or very low-vision can touch our way through case management, tax calculations, or any other computer-based work our jobs might entail. With the quick navigation key, we can make the correction on an address or form’s edit field instead of the old way of scratching out the dots when we wrote on paper.
The Braille Brain wil show you just how practica;l and everyday braille is for us. Think of not just computer braille on the job but emergency signage in public buildings, labels for men and women to enter the right restrooms, and labeld elevator buttons.
Never mind the driver’s sign menus at MacDonald’s or the ATM that is on the driver’s side of the car, brailled kiosks and signage help us navigate a hotel’s layout, explore a hiking trail like at Elephant Rocks State Park in Missouri, or read menus that some chain restaurants provide.
So, let’s get brainy with our bumps, dots, and cells with APH’s new Braille Brain!
The latest braille teaching tool from the American Printing House for the Blind busts some needed myths that we adults may have held over the years. It’s called the Braille Brain and it’s designed to get someone who’s blind or a teacher of the visually impaired into the benefits of the still new Unified English Braille Code.
Yes, the name says a lot, grouping the lessons and structure of the courses into sections like that of the human brain. If you have sight, take a look at the logo when you click on the link. It looks like a real brain.
APH intends this new tool for showing a systematic way of making sense of all the letters, numbers, and signs that the six dot cell or group of six-dot cells convey.
After all, braille is not a language in and of itself. Instead, it transliterates that which is written visually into words and symbols that our fingers can read. Even in our age when braille displays and notetakers have largely replaced the demand for the old Perkins brailler, we who are blind or very low-vision can touch our way through case management, tax calculations, or any other computer-based work our jobs might entail. With the quick navigation key, we can make the correction on an address or form’s edit field instead of the old way of scratching out the dots when we wrote on paper.
The Braille Brain wil show you just how practica;l and everyday braille is for us. Think of not just computer braille on the job but emergency signage in public buildings, labels for men and women to enter the right restrooms, and labeld elevator buttons.
Never mind the driver’s sign menus at MacDonald’s or the ATM that is on the driver’s side of the car, brailled kiosks and signage help us navigate a hotel’s layout, explore a hiking trail like at Elephant Rocks State Park in Missouri, or read menus that some chain restaurants provide.
So, let’s get brainy with our bumps, dots, and cells with APH’s new Braille Brain!
Some of my fondest memories growing up going to the Indiana School For The Blind centered around our sports programs. We were really good at wrestling and track while holding our own in swimming. When a sporting event was happening at the gym, you could find many of us packing the bleachers, cheering on the Rockets.
We knew our top athletes and us younger kids aspired to be like them, knowing that not all of us would get to that level. I myself wasn’t very involved from actually throwing my body around a wrestling mat except for some Peewee events as an elementary kid and a bit in junior high. But, I was the typical fan, picking our coaches brains, talking stats, strategy, and other stuff with my friends who were athletes. That’s when I began finding out about other blind sports like beep baseball, goalball, and other ParaOlympic opportunities.
iOnly when I started reading about nationwide competitions, camps, and other events did I learn that many people who competed were not from the schools for the blind but were mainstreamed. How did these kids get involved, find their passion, and develop their talents? The answer came through finding out about the coordinators and recruitment done through th eUnited States Assocation of Blind Athletes (USABA) Already back in the 1970s and 1980s our athletes were pursuing national and international endeavors. But how’d they do it?
In this milieu of being exposed to blind sports or participating in them, experts in this area have found the athletes and avenues to develop training programs.
And that’s what we witness in this link below. How do our athletes get discovered, encouraged, and trained for both the sports they enjoy and for life beyond the playing venue? This Youtube video will introduce you who aren’t blind to this whole process. I hope it also encourages you who are blind or low-vision to get involved in the blind sports movement. The more we build interest, engagement, and involvement, the more we will embolden people who are blind for all areas of navigating life’s contours.
It’s blind sports month which means that we get to highlight not only the accomplishments of blind athletes-a standard practice here at Boldly Blind-but also what habits and drive make them great. As such we turn to the USABA’s Thursday Throw-Down Series.
Of course, we’re a couple Thursdays late to the party, so here’s a couple installments here to catch us up. The cool thing about learning from these athletes is picking up on some of their wellness and fitness habits ourselves. Not that we have to be a big-time buff bruiser to consider ourselves primed for everyday life. We don’t. But finding inspiration from the training and adaptations some of our top flight athletes make may inspire us to develop that positive, can-do boldness whether we’re looking for a job or learning new skills to handle a recently acquired diagnosis of vision loss.
So without further adieu, we feature first Oct. 5’s post about Cheyenne Meyer and then Oct. 12’s post about Aysia Miller here.
Cheyenne Meyer interview:
https://www.usaba.org/thursday-throwdown-cheyenne-meyer/
Aysia Miller interview:
One of the hallmarks of a truly inclusive work environment for us who are blind or low-vision is that the blindness perspective is woven throughout the fabric of everything that forwards the interactions and mission that company undertakes. Some places like the National Industries for the Blind’s Lighthouse campuses provide profitable manual labor for those who desire it, job preparedness, socializing opportunities, and other ways of coping.
But being inclusive of blind workers, management, customers, and onlookers goes farther than crossing the t’s and dotting the i”s. It flies way past Title IX regulations and the accomodations addressed in the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990).
Being truly a company whose pulse is all things blindness, raising awareness of our dignity among those who are not means that everyone stands on a level playing field, able to address each other as simply employees, managers, customers, and observers with no fear of reprisal.
It’s in view of these qualities that Bruce Sexton has come to be part of the American Printing House’s leadership. You can read his story here. He is truly what we who are boldly blind aspire to be when navigating the contours of the workplace while bringing awareness of our capabilities to others.
https://www.aph.org/bruce-sexton-joins-aph-team-as-director-of-access-and-belonging/
We’ve mentioned our U.S. ParaOlympic goalballers on here quite a bit and for good reason. They all do more than just goalball. Some are involved in counseling, others teaching, others public speaking. For Tyler Merren, it’s all the above. His REvision App is one of this blog’s favorite landing points because it’s a great place for us to learn fitness. Tyler’s company weaves together fitness and public speaking in a number of venues.
Linked to this post, you can read NBC’s Hometown Hopefuls interview with Tyler. He speaks about his upbringing and faith, his family life and the many experiences he’s had playing goalball around the world as a ParaOlympian. Check it out here: https://www.nbcsports.com/olympics/news/hometown-hopefuls-tyler-merren-goalball-michigan-paralympics?fbclid=IwAR3lQB3_q16v7luvYdojtYIxbrE419CylgaucLhOGRYIJg5iuJnlPeHnlfc
I’ve heard it said that blindness is one of the least debilitating of all the major physical disabilities but it’s one of the least understood. Surveys over the years have shown that people fear losing their sight much more than they do losing their hearing. In our age of heightened video stimulation and snapchat messaging, we can certainly understand why. People today are simply on the go. When someone sees a person as lacking the ability to do something major in life, it doesn’t matter if that person is blind or deaf or paraplegic, they are often marked as different, abnormal, or handicapped.
Even in our age when special interest groups seem to get a lot of FEderal attention and personal rights are all the rage, blindness is lumped in as just another disability that must be overcome, seen as merely a nuisance, or beaten down as not such a big deal.
But that’s not the aim of those who wish to raise awareness in popular culture of blindness and dismantle the many myths about those of us who are blind. Being blind in itself simply means we lack the sense of sight to some degree from hardly a a concern to being totally unable to see. Yet, as important as this is, even more important is recognizing how adaptations have opened the job market, social events, and traveling from place to place to us who are blind.
In other words, we don’t argue what we do despite our inability to see. RAther we uphold those ways advances in technology, mental health, and advocacy has helped us live with our blindness as an integral thread of who we are.
Contour, Not Nuisance
One of the myths that so many both in and outside the blindness community is that we always have to compensate for our lack of sight in everything we do. There’s a blind way of cooking, a blind way of reading a novel, a blind way of being a parent. Yet, the more someone prepares spaghetti, orders new checks from the back or changes diapers, the more someone recognizes we are doing activities that are different than our sighted counterparts. Instead, we make adaptations, adjustments to give the same care or manage a home just like anyone else. What kind of adaptation or adjustment we make depends on how much or little remaining sight we may have.
Hence, we are contoured into the running flow of life so that, whether at work or school, home or social leisure, our drive to engage in everyday things remains the same as anyone else. How we feel or think about those adptations is wholly individual. What we do to throw ourselves in the daily grind is our way of embracing the condition(s) we have while teaching others who we are.
As we approach this years blindness awareness month, here are some further links that may give you who are blind or sighted a good feel for how people across the spectrum bring awareness of our dignity, capabilities, and contributions we bring to and for others.
Fort Wayne media is getting into the game these days! And I couldn’t be happier as a blindness advocate and goalball fanatic. Zach Buhler of nearby Huntington, Indiana get some local love on Channel 21. You can check out the article here: https://www.21alivenews.com/2023/10/03/huntington-paralympian-named-usa-mens-goalball-team/?fbclid=IwAR0LpaH_V2RtuWqTc1MmJUSGHbxFJ7qV3xvPXklhOVJaCMN7tMRzgSx3ri0
Go, USA, in scoring the goalball for gold!
With qulification in the Paris ParaOlympic Games on the line, the stakes are high for our U.S. goalball teams. Many of our athletes have just come off of playing for the nationals in Fort Wayne and now are training at the Turnstone Center in residence for the ParaPan-Ams in Santiago Chile.
Check out the press release from the United States Association of Blind Athletes. And go, USA!
Boldly Blind 