Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [50]
Helping to drive these advances is National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the oldest and largest national organization led by blind people for blind people. There are fifty thousand members across the country, and most of them are not mountain climbers or army platoon leaders, just regular folks. “We who are blind are pretty much like you (a sighted person),” said Dr. Maurer. “We have our share of both geniuses and jerks but most of us are somewhere between, ordinary people leading ordinary lives.” The NFB works hard to help ordinary blind people. Right now there are an estimated 1.8 million blind people in the U.S., “blind” meaning they have 10 percent or less of vision remaining and can no longer effectively operate as a sighted person. But with its fifty thousand members, NFB is making a significant impact on the blind population with its message of empowerment, a strong sense of community, and the education, tools, and resources offered to the blind by the blind. It is by far the largest organization of blind persons in the country and is the strongest representative of the blind in the nation.
The NFB serves as a watchdog organization. For example, the federation recently filed complaints with the government against Amazon, the mammoth online bookseller, to urge them to make the Amazon Kindle e-reader accessible to blind readers. The Kindle does have a primitive text-to-speech interface, but there is no method for people to get at the menus and operate the e-reader nonvisually. When the Kindle DX was marketed to colleges and universities for students to use in place of printed textbooks, Dr. Maurer said he remembers thinking, Wait just a second, now. You’re creating a barrier to reading. Blind people have as much right to read as anyone else. Reading is a fundamental right—it has to be—otherwise you’re creating two groups: one that is literate and one that is not.
The NFB is also working with the federal government to provide raised markers on paper money so blind people can distinguish one denomination from another. (I get around this by putting special folds on my cash bills, a different one for each denomination, so I can tell the difference. An unscrupulous person could still try to cheat me when making change. But my trusty K-NFB Reader has a special currency mode and can read bills.) The NFB has also been lobbying car manufacturers to add sound to electric cars, which are almost silent. Think about it: if you are blind and walking through a parking lot, an electric car with a virtually silent engine could easily make short work of you if its driver didn’t happen to spot you first. This effort is meeting with some success. Recently Nissan added a soft whine to the Nissan Leaf’s engine. The noise fluctuates in intensity with the car’s speed and makes a clanging sound in reverse.
Other car manufacturers are working on similar projects. Congress just passed a bill signed into law by the president on January 3, 2011, to require the government to research methodologies for quiet vehicles to provide audible sounds for the safety of all pedestrians and to create rules which will require manufacturers to incorporate appropriate audible signals in all quiet cars. This law came about because of the imagination and active participation of the 50,000 members of the National Federation of the Blind.
I grew up in the sighted community, mainstreamed by my parents. For the most part I never got the chance to be around other blind people and had no sense of the larger blind community. I thought I was doing pretty darn well on my own with my guide dog Squire. And because I did well in school, I began to develop a bit of an attitude, especially toward blind people who struggled more to cope with the challenges. In reality, I didn’t even know how to use a cane yet, and I was locked in my own little academic world, unaware that there were other blind people out there who might have something