Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [48]
Instantly Roselle stands up with me, ready to work. As a group, we follow the police officer, walking quietly.
What will we find outside?
Once, Karen and I were visiting her brother, who lived in the mountains of Idaho. It was a beautiful day, and we decided to take a walk. His nine-year-old daughter asked me a surprising question: “How can you go take a walk?” Of course she meant no offense, but her question put into words a common misconception: that somehow blindness equates to a lack of ability, or even to incompetence. Even though she had spent considerable time with me while we lived in New Jersey, she still couldn’t conceive of how a blind person could walk independently.
If there is just one message about blindness that I could share with sighted people, it would be this: It’s okay to be blind. It won’t ruin your life or drain away all joy and satisfaction. It won’t strangle your creativity or lower your intelligence. It won’t keep you from traveling and experiencing life in other places. It won’t separate you from friends and family. It won’t keep you from falling in love, getting married, and having a family of your own. It won’t prevent you from getting a job and making a living. Blindness doesn’t mean the end of the world. And with technology and education, blindness can be reduced from an all-consuming disability to just another human limitation, of which there are many. There is more to life than eye function.
The legal definition of blindness is visual acuity of less than 20/200 with correction or a field of less than 20 degrees; there are people all over the spectrum in regard to sight. Some people can see light but cannot discern objects. Some people have fuzzy vision but can still navigate and walk down the sidewalk without help. Some people see nothing. So how do you define blindness? The human definition of blindness, according to Kenneth Jernigan, a civil rights pioneer for the blind and past president of the National Federation of the Blind, is a little different from the legal definition: “A person is blind to the extent that the individual must devise alternative techniques to do efficiently those things which he or she would do if they had normal vision.”1 So blind people are still able-bodied, with full command of their intelligence and abilities; they just use alternative techniques on their journey through life. And sometimes those techniques can even be superior to the techniques of light-dependent people.
Laura Sloate is a managing director for a Wall Street investment management firm. She has been blind since the age of six. In an interview with the New York Times, she talked about how she reads constantly for her job, spending hours keeping up with the news from the Wall Street Journal and other industry news sources. She uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play the Economist (magazine) aloud at the pace of three hundred words a minute. At the same time, an assistant reads the Financial Times to her, and “she devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the magazine.”2
If you happen to call me on the telephone, while we are talking, I may also be catching up on e-mail or reading documents at the same time. So during our conversation, you just might hear a low-pitched, digitized man’s voice muttering in the background. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not that difficult to keep up with a screen reader at high speeds, and it’s not uncommon for blind people to listen to screen readers at three hundred, four hundred, or even five hundred words a minute.
Blindness doesn’t mean inferiority. When Kenneth Jernigan took over the presidency of the National Federation of the Blind, he began his leadership of a movement based on the belief that “a blind person can compete at almost anything on terms of equality with a sighted person.”3
Currently, there are successful blind architects, engineers, attorneys, doctors, teachers, scientists,