6 posts tagged “blindness” - Margy’s Blog on Vox

Mini-Vac

May 12, 2008
3 comments

I actually took a little vacation this past weekend and flew down to Baltimore, MD to visit Rosie, my blind friend. We're very close and are in constant touch with each other via telephone, email and webcam (she can see a little bit) using Skype. There's something about seeing, hearing and touching someone in person, though. There's simply no way to compensate, no matter how many times you talk on the phone or read an email. You just can't hug that way!

Rosie's one of the most talented people I know. I'm amazed by the somewhat weird but incredibly creative projects she undertakes. She's a writer, a seamstress, a comic, and an inspiration to many who turn to her for advice, consolation and protection. In short, she's amazing.

Rosie and Friends

A few years ago Rosie started - and I'm serious - sewing little outfits for cement lawn ornaments in the shape of large and small geese. She has three geese in her house that she dresses up:Lucy, Lucinda and Daisy. Lucinda is sitting opposite of Rosie and little Daisy is in the background. They have outfits that are absolutely amazing: Easter, Christmas, Valentine's Day and other holiday get-ups, historic outfits, wedding outfits and more. We spent hours on Saturday night taking pictures of Daisy in scores of outfits. We ran out of time and energy and decided to call it quits until some point in the future. I took pictures and some videos of Rosie dressing up the geese. The portrait above shows Lucinda in her "cave goose" outfit. Rosie sewed a little cloth bone "pin" to hold the leopard skin together and also attached a little club she'd made out of styrofoam. Rosie wants to photograph all her clothes and post them to a blog or website on the internet. I took the pictures and will eventually upload them - with music! - to a blog or website I'll build for her.

Now, mind you, Rosie is 95 - 98% blind. She has a field of vision that's smaller than a dime. She can see only the strongest, boldest contrasts and has all but no color perception. She feels the outfits more than she can see them.

Apple Pie Goose

Damn. It's enough to give you an inferiority complex.

Rosie's also a fine gardener, who's transferred the entirety of her garden to large pots which are easier for her to manage.

Quite the inspiration - although she'd never admit it. I have to say, I'm extremely grateful to know her!

Rosie's Northern Garden

Apr 20, 2008
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I finally started in on my garden yesterday, despite a lingering virus and a migraine that hit this morning. Actually, I owe this little fit of inspiration to my friend Rosie, who mailed me a few of her Iris plants. Rosie's a dear friend who's

Iris

been losing her vision to a genetic eye disease (retinitis pigmentosa). At some point she lost the ability to see her garden, although she is quite amazing when it comes to identifying plants by their feel and fragrance. Little by little, Rosie's been digging up her garden and either transferring her plants to containers or sending them off to friends for them to tend.

This woman knows more about plants than anyone else I've ever met. "So," she asked one day, during a phone conversation (she's in Baltimore, MD and I'm in Boston, MA). "Did you get a box in the mail?"

I had. Inside was a plastic bag with some plants trailing off to tuberous roots. I had no idea what they were, although the shape was vaguely familiar. I could just hear her rolling her eyes: "They're Iris, for Christ's sake!" she roared. "Now, they don't like being too wet, so don't use potting soil when you plant them. Use something called 'Lawn and Garden' soil. They won't bloom this year, but they should next year and eventually you'll have so many Iris you won't know what to do with them." Then she added the coup: "If one of them comes up purple, it's the one from my mother's garden. Those plants are over 100 years old."

100 years old? Don't use potting soil? Man, there were some weights on my shoulders now. First I had to figure out when I could get to a garden shop to get the right damn soil - all I had was potting soil - then I had to find the time to plant them into pots. My garden, I explained, was not ready yet. I hadn't had much of one last year so most of the area was overgrown with grass and weeds. I couldn't plant anything, much less an Iris that had just traveled 500 miles and was probably pretty pissed off about it, too.

Well, I was going to do that this weekend, after spending all week applying barely moist paper towels to the drying roots. I didn't want to drown them, since Rosie said they didn't like much water. Oh my god, she almost took my head off when I asked If I could leave them in a glass of water until I could get to a garden shop. So, damp paper towels it was. They seemed to handle this graciously, and remained green and relatively firm.

Then - disaster. Or, more accurately, a virus. I spent Saturday in bed, just getting up long enough to stumble around like a drunk before dropping into bed again. Okay, I said to myself: Sunday. Hop in that car, drive to Pemberton Gardens and come home with the soil to make those 100 year old Iris happy.

Then I woke up Sunday with a migraine that was about ready to take the top of my head off. In my mind's eye I saw Rosie's Iris languishing without soil or water and then painfully dying, leaving me with the guilt trip of my life. Then, I finally said to myself, "the hell with this. I'll dig up some soil in the side garden and plunk them down there. If they live, great, if not, well, I tried."

Hmmmm. Easier said than done. The area I had chosen had not been worked in any recent memory. I stuck my spade in the dirt and practically had to stand on top of it to get it to go down. When I finally pulled up the shovel it was burdened with a network of inter-connected roots tough enough to braid into rope. Damn. So, migraine and all, I hacked, bashed, pulled and cursed for about an hour. You want tough? Take a look at some of these things! I took pictures of them after I'd finally wrestled them out of the ground:

Embedded roots

See that stick? That was part of the root. Yes, I was uprooting a baby tree. And then there was this baby:

More roots

Man, those root fibers did not want to leave home! But, I finally succeeded, at least as far as I felt like going that afternoon. I had enough room in the newly denuded garden space for three of the five Iris plants Rosie had sent me. In they went, lined up like little soldiers. I looked over at the other two and marched them right over to my condo neighbor and co-owner and gave them to him. He's a dedicated gardener and has done a lot more with his side of the property than I have with mine, garden-wise.

You know, I looked at those little plants, all nice and happy in their new home, all nice and watered, and felt great. I'd accomplished something of consequence. The before and afters were really obvious:

Before:

Side Yard2

Side Yard

Now, here's what that same side yard looks like without the weeds and scrub, and with the Iris!

Planted Iris

Not bad for an afternoon of hacking, slashing and cutting. Good exercise!

Now, I've decided to call this part of the garden Rosie's Northern Garden. The more I think about it, the more I realize that part of the garden is just like her: tough and unyielding. She'll fight you every step of the way, no matter what. She's stubborn as a mule. It keeps her going, lets her do battle with the blindness and still come out on top, no matter how beaten up she gets in the process. No, you will not pull me out! No! No! No!

And me? I'm the patient gardener. I tug, pull, and heave, all with great love, and then plant a flower where there was once just a dark hole full of weeds and knotted roots.

Awwwww.

She's sending daffodils next. I better get a back hoe.

Talk About the Blind Leading the Blind

Apr 19, 2008
6 comments

I read an article in an online computer magazine the other day, talking about the problems blind and low vision folks continue to have when it comes to using computers. This is not really news. This problem has been around forever and there are an ongoing trickle of articles that come out about it. I could probably compare the article with another one written 5 or 10 years ago and come up with the same set of problems.

This article started with an interesting challenge, though:

"Put your graphical user interface to this test: Adjust the contrast on your display until the screen is completely black.

Now, perform basic e-mail, word processing and Web-browsing tasks.

What? Having a problem?"

Having a problem indeed! Screen readers, the bit of assistive technology designed to "read" a computer screen if you can't physically see it, does just that. In other words, it reads everything that's there.

Now, here's the problem: What you see on an internet computer screen is only a fraction of what's there "behind the scenes." A screen reader is not going to have an easy time interpreting what should and shouldn't be read. It's also not going to know what to read first if you're dealing with multiple columns, for example. I have some blind friends and became interested in this technology as a result. At one point I played around with a few screen readers, just to find out what they were like to use.

Well...they're chatty! It went to the top of my Firefox screen and read: "File, New Window, New Tab, Open Location, Open File, Close Window..." Yes, very helpful. It took forever just to get to the actual content of the web page. And then, it read that: "http, colon, double-slash, www dot vox dot com forward slash compose..."

Wonderful! Just wonderful!

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leaders.

Blind users still struggle with 'maddening' computing obstacles

See video of Narrator screen reader in action

By Lamont Wood
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April 16, 2008 (Computerworld) Put your graphical user interface to this
test: Adjust the contrast on your display until the screen is completely
black.

Now, perform basic e-mail, word processing and Web-browsing tasks.

What? Having a problem?

Welcome to the world of the 1.3 million Americans who are blind. For
them, the world of personal computers, office automation and the
Internet offers mixed blessings. That world wasn't designed for them,
but with the right assistive technology, they can take part in it. When
everything works well, they have access to an ocean of information
vastly greater than anything previously available to the blind. But
pitfalls and maddening frustrations are a constant reality.

Screen readers

Blind computer users mainly rely upon screen-reader software, which
describes the activity on the screen and reads the text in the various
windows, explained Gayle Yarnell, owner of Adaptive Technology
Consulting Inc. in Amesbury, Mass. Yarnell is blind.

It can take a while to wade through a strange site -- it can be maddening.
Jay Leventhal, editor of /AccessWorld Magazine/

Screen readers cost between $500 and $1,000, although there are also
freeware screen readers, she noted. (Windows XP and Vista come with a
screen reader called Narrator, but even Microsoft Corp. says it's not
powerful enough for serious use.)

The screen reader's output can be sent to the computer's speakers as a
synthesized voice or to a Braille display. The latter uses tiny push
pins to create a pattern of raised dots that can be read by a moving
finger. A unit with an 80-character line (enough for one full line of
text) costs about $10,000, and Yarnell said that most blind people use a
40-character unit, which costs closer to $5,000.

Braille displays are better than speech for editing because individual
characters can be isolated, she noted, and they are a necessity for the
deaf-blind. She also said that it lets her silently read e-mail while
talking to someone else.

This is the default player used to display virally syndicated titles via
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Although major operating systems usually have built-in screen readers
for accessibility by the blind, they are rudimentary at best. In fact,
after starting Narrator, the screen reader that comes with Windows XP
and Vista, Microsoft's introductory screen says, "Most users with visual
impairments will need a screen reader with higher functionality for
daily use." Here's an example what a blind user would hear upon opening
up /Computerworld/'s Web site with Narrator activated in Windows XP, the
operating system most in use today.

But knowing what the screen is saying is just the beginning -- the blind
user then has to issue commands using keyboard shortcuts, because the
mouse cursor is useless. Using shortcuts involves a lot of memorization,
but at least the option is always available -- or at least it used to be.

"Starting with Version 3.1, Microsoft tried to make sure there was a
keystroke to do everything in Windows," noted Dave Porter, an
accessibility consultant and head of Comp-Unique Inc. in Chicago. "But
with Vista, we seem to have lost that thread." The main problem is that,
with Vista, the effect of a keystroke depends on the situation about a
third of the time. Also, there are things that simply can't be done with
keystrokes, said Porter, who is blind.

"It's not so much that the keyboard shortcuts are different but that the
user interface has changed," said Rob Sinclair, director of
accessibility at Microsoft. "We have gotten away from a lot of menus and
created a more simplified experience. No one would argue that there is
no learning curve, but we have seen value and heard great feedback from
those who have taken the time to learn the new version.

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It Don't Rain But It Pours

Apr 10, 2008
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Damn. I just heard that one of the Maggie-Della Mystery draft contributors suffered an ocular stroke and is now blind in one eye. That makes three of the writers/readers for the series blind in one way or another. Granted, the stories focus on blindness and its relationship to truth, although that's only one theme among many. Still, I wasn't expecting to hear from this person to say that she was now "visually impaired."

This person is an extremely dedicated, Southern-style, writer. She's skilled at her craft and I always enjoy reading her stories, even though my style is quite different from hers. She had some wonderful insights of her own to offer regarding my writing. I met her on a site for writers called EditRed. A lot of my stories are there, too.

This makes a second strike for the Maggie-Della clan this week. Another contributor lost a friend and co-worker to an unexpected heart attack. This person had just given birth to a baby and died shortly afterwards. This contributor works in a hospital (she's the inspiration for the character Kay Miller in the second novel, still being written). She'd worked with the recently deceased woman for 7 or 8 years there. She was devastated by it.

All I've had to deal with this week is a slight head cold. It kept me out of work today, although I was well enough to get some work done from home. So, not bad overall. But, then this happens to two other people in the same writing "community." Sometimes life rears up and kicks you on the head. Then, on other occasions it'll rear up and kick a friend's head. In both cases, it hurts.

A Festival of Light, Sound and Smell

Dec 18, 2007
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Of course, you all know I'm a writer and I certainly hope you've had the chance to check out some of my stories, particularly the ones I've worked on with Rosie. The most enduring of these little series, of course, are the Maggie-Della mysteries and I'm hard at work on the second novel.

I got a wonderful call from my sister-in-law, who ordered a copy of Family Secrets (the first novel) for herself and finally sat down to read it during our recent snow storm. She called to let me know how much she liked it and, in particular, how taken she was by Della. My sis-in-law is also disabled, due to earlier brain surgery that left her weak on one side of her body. She and I spent a long time talking about the relationship of Maggie to Della, and how well the first book was able to explain Della's world, in all its happy and sad moments, to sighted readers. She was really fascinated by it, and could very strongly relate to a lot of Della's frustrations, since so many of them were also her own.

At the same time my husband and I had begun our holiday shopping in Arlington, choosing to patronize local business here rather than send our money on its way out of state, or even out of country. We ended up in a charming little gift shop a stone's throw from my house and dropped a few bills there on Hanukkah and Christmas presents. The owner, also a fellow Arlington Chamber of Commerce member as am I - thanked me for my business and chatted a bit. Later I put in an email to the the Chamber, talking about my decision to patronize local business this year for a lot of our holiday shopping. My little scribe ended up in the Chamber newsletter, with my friend's business featured in bold-face, along with other places Aram and I had visited. A few days later I was checking my business email when in popped a thank you from the gift store business owner. I was really touched by it. It felt really sincere and personal.

So, where is this all leading? Well, I don't normally write Christmas stories but I had some time to kill on Sunday as it howled outside of my door. Somehow, my conversations with my sister-in-law and the small business owner in Arlington converged and I ended up spending the day writing a story and incorporating Della. I keep fictional blogs on the Maggie-Della website, so I put it up there for visitors to read. But, somehow, the themes that came out in the story seemed appropriate for this blog as well. What do we take for granted when it comes to our senses, what do we cherish, and why?

I really enjoyed writing this story and I hope you have as much fun reading it:

http://maggie-della.com/maggiesblog/

By the way, the blog and the site in general are as accessible as I can make them. You can hear the story, as well as read it.

Let me know what you think!

Drill Sergeant

Jul 17, 2007
1 comment

Author's Note: I wrote this story round-robin with my friend Rosie. She and I created two fictionalized characters based on ourselves. Mostly we write mysteries, but occasionally we'll just play around with whatever ideas pop into our heads.

Rosie is blind, due to a condition called retinitis pigmentosa. She has less than 3% of her normal field of vision remaining. Her character, Della, is also blind. My character, Maggie, is a Polish-American web worker who teams up with Della to solve mysteries and deal with life's challenges.

In this story, Della helps a newly-blinded person deal with his new and unwelcome disability. Della has to be tough, but she's also very, very funny. It was based on an idea for another story that Rosie had. I suggested we try the idea out on Maggie and Della and this is what came out of it:

Drill Sergeant

“Della!” Skye’s face blossomed into a wide smile. “Come in, come in!” She walked from behind her desk to where Della stood at the entrance to her office. After a hug hello, she helped her to a nearby seat.

“Another soul in need?” Della asked, smiling.

“And you’re just the person for the job,” Skye continued, squeezing Della’s arm as she spoke. “Freak accident. A game of touch football a few months ago. He was running for the ball when he tripped and fell…” Skye stopped for a moment.

“Yes?” Della asked. “Please continue.”

“Unfortunately, he landed on his face, in a pile of brush and discarded tree limbs. One of those limbs was sticking straight out. One eye’s completely gone and the other’s barely usable. He has some sight, but not enough to make a difference.”

Della nodded. “Like me,” she observed.

“Like you,” Skye continued. “He’s been home ever since he got back from the hospital. He won’t do anything to help himself. His wife does everything for him - bathing, feeding, everything. He won’t deal with his condition at all. He won’t even walk upstairs to his own bedroom on his own. Spends all day in the living room. Won’t talk m