Blog

Today begins the seventy-ninth year for the National Federation of the Blind. During the past six weeks I have worked with blind people from at least a dozen states—having traveled to four of them—and have gained insight from visiting with blind people in two foreign countries.

We’ve often heard users of access technology products express frustration over the cost to keep their technology up-to-date. With a software maintenance agreement (SMA), a user incurs a periodic fee to make sure they have the latest version of their screen access program.

We've certainly come a long way, but voting still isn’t completely free of barriers for blind people. One such barrier can be transportation to the polling place. This can be a particularly troublesome issue for people who live in cities or rural areas that don’t have adequate public transportation.

There are those that have a hard time accepting a cane, and for a long time I was one of them. I was told it made me “look blind,” which was something I wanted to avoid at all costs. No kid likes feeling different, and I was no exception.

"We’ll find out..." It was a phrase said to me repeatedly by two of my greatest mentors, Fred Sanders and Jim Platt. Almost fifty years later, that phrase seems to pop out of my own mouth with increasing regularity.

In 2005, I was blessed and fortunate to marry my lovely wife, Latonya. After the marriage ceremonies, the most frequently asked question of me was, “When are you going to have children?” When this question was asked of me, I would present a big smile and remark, “Soon.”

As a kid, I always loved sports. My younger brother and I were always hitting the game-winning shots in our backyard.

Last week, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed S.2559, the Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Act of 2018, which amends our domestic copyright law to comply with the Marrakesh Treaty that our Senate ratified at the end of June.

September is National Preparedness Month, when local, state, and federal officials collectively work to ensure citizens are prepared for the disasters likely to affect their area. Appropriate since, as I write this, there are four active named tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

My fascination with Asian culture began when I was about thirteen years old sitting in my parents’ house near Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. It started with learning everything I could about the Chinese zodiac, various anime (which is Japanese animation), and manga (which are Japanese comics or graphic novels).