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Braille Monitor

Vol. 58, No. 10                              November 2015

Gary Wunder, Editor

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The National Federation of the Blind

Mark Riccobono, President

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THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND KNOWS THAT BLINDNESS IS NOT THE CHARACTERISTIC THAT DEFINES YOU OR YOUR FUTURE. EVERY DAY WE RAISE THE EXPECTATIONS OF BLIND PEOPLE, BECAUSE LOW EXPECTATIONS CREATE OBSTACLES BETWEEN BLIND PEOPLE AND OUR DREAMS. YOU CAN LIVE THE LIFE YOU WANT; BLINDNESS IS NOT WHAT HOLDS YOU BACK. THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND IS NOT AN ORGANIZATION SPEAKING FOR THE BLIND--IT IS THE BLIND SPEAKING FOR OURSELVES.

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Contents

Vol. 58, No. 10                                       November 2015

Illustration: Effort and Planning: A Crucial Part of our Successful Mosaic

The Gift
by Debbie Wunder

Pushing the Limits: Changing the World through Big Ideas
by Eileen Bartholomew

Crafting Your Diamond: The Four Cs of Bringing Up Blind Children
by Carlton Anne Cook Walker

Leadership through Education: Raising Expectations, Improving
Training, and Innovating Opportunities
by Michael Yudin

Important Changes 2016 Washington Seminar Logistics
by Diane McGeorge

The Foundation of Our Federation
by Jeannie Massay

iBRAL is Back!
by Robert Gardner

Transforming the Training of Professionals in Education and Rehabilitation for the Blind
by Edward Bell

The Joy of Getting a Summer Job
by Everett Elam

A Therapeutic Research Collaboration
by Anil Lewis

Increasing the Investment in Accessibility: Nonvisual Access in Microsoft Products and Services
by John Jendrezak

Food for Thought about the BEPLT
by Sheryl Bass

Innovation and Accessibility: Creating Outstanding Customer Experiences at Target
by Alan Wizemann

Raising Expectations: A Commitment to Full Participation in the Twenty-First Century
by Christopher Lu

Recipes

Monitor Miniatures

Copyright 2015 by the National Federation of the Blind

Effort and Planning: A Crucial Part of our Successful Mosaic

We began planning meetings in the fall of 2014. This started by working with an image of the parking lot captured from Google Earth to help with the planning of our design. An order for 3,000 umbrellas was placed in December 2014. We took pictures of the lot during a pre-convention visit in May to assist with logistics. In both May and July we walked the parking lot. The Rosen Centre Hotel closed the parking lot to its staff beginning on July 2nd. A small team created a grid outline using spray chalk in the parking lot on July 4th.

Test columns of dots were laid out on July 5th, the first of 3,280 dots to be sprayed.

Teams of fifteen continued with the spray chalk at 5 a.m. on both the mornings of July 6th and 7th.
Work was scheduled for the evening of the 7th, but a particularly angry Florida storm forced us to change plans.

About twenty folks helped place umbrellas at 5 a.m. on July 8th.

Our work plan had assignments for 113 staff and volunteers, but, as is typical of NFB events, additional willing hands jumped in wherever needed. It turned out we needed those hands as well to make up the mosaic.

The Gift

by Debbie Wunder

From the Editor: Debbie Wunder is the mother of four, is my wife, and together we live in Columbia, Missouri. She has long held the view that blindness, while something that cannot be ignored, is not her most significant characteristic. This message she has communicated to her family by word and deed.

In this article Debbie commits to do something she is sure she can, has second thoughts and emotional doubts, and looks for a way out. But what she finds both uplifts and terrifies her—her children believe she is as capable as she has always claimed, and they will expect no less from her, even when self-doubt threatens to erode her confidence and immobilize her. Incidentally, the little girl about to turn ten in this story celebrated her twenty-first birthday on October 5, 2015. Here is Debbie’s story:

All of our children's birthdays are special, but some more than others. When my youngest daughter Abbey was about to turn ten, I asked her to think hard about what she wanted on her special occasion. She said she would be happy if we could redecorate her room, buy her some new clothes, or get her a GameCube. "Which of those do you really want" was the question I asked her, and she thought through the choices. She knew I wasn't enthused about a GameCube, since I’d already warned her that her game time could not cut into her reading time. She was old enough to know that winter was coming and that new clothes were something she was likely to get whether they were on her birthday list or not. Eventually she answered: "I want to fix up my room and paint it in mixed colors." I immediately thought about the cost of repainting. For a moment I felt sadness and regret for offering something I might not be able to afford. But after my initial shock I began to feel excited. Here is why: I have an addiction; it is not to chocolate, drugs, or alcohol—well okay, maybe a slight addiction to chocolate. But the addiction I am speaking of is HGTV, the Home and Garden Television Network. I can spend hours watching programs such as Design on a Dime, Trading Spaces, or just about any fix-it-up show they carry. One of my strengths has always been arts and crafts. A wonderful possibility was taking shape in my head and my heart: I could give my daughter something more than a gift off a store shelf—I could give her a gift that showed my love, my talent, and my creativity. Her tenth-birthday gift would be something she would treasure for a long time to come. I decided that I would do it on my own, my way of providing a very special gift to her.

I told Abbey that fixing up her room would be her present, and I anxiously began to plan the project. We made a trip to the paint store to choose her colors. I told her to pick three that would complement one another. I already knew that her first choice would be some shade of pink. I was right; she chose a color called “passionate pink,” otherwise known as Pepto-Bismol pink. The other two were a slightly lighter shade of pink and purple. She asked what I was going to do with three different colors, and I told her this would be part of her surprise.

From HGTV I learned that you need one wall to be the focal point. It can contain a piece of artwork or furniture, or the focal point can be the wall itself. I could not afford to buy new furniture, and neither did I have an eye-popping piece of artwork, so it would have to be the painted wall that made the room. I had a good idea what could make that wall the focal point if only I could figure out how to do it: I remembered Abbey telling me that one day she would like to travel with me to Mexico to see a mountaintop that is filled with beautiful butterflies in the winter. This provided the inspiration, but could I possibly paint a wall of butterflies? Then it hit me: I realized I could use a large rubber stamp to stencil the image. I used two of the colors Abbey had chosen, painting one half of the butterfly in one color and the second half with the other. Those contrasting colors would make the butterflies stand out.

When the weekend before her special day drew near, I went out and got the other items I would need. I also arranged for Abbey to visit a friend for a slumber party and made plans to paint her room.

The night before she left, Abbey began questioning me about how I was going to redecorate. It was clear that she was skeptical but didn't want to show it. Some of her skepticism was whether an adult could do the kind of makeover a ten-year-old would want, but some was because my husband Gary and I are blind. Painting is not something blind people typically do, and Abbey was worried about what she would return to at the end of her weekend. I reminded her that we did all kinds of things that others thought blind people couldn't do and asked if I had ever disappointed her or broken a promise. "No, Mommy," was her reply, but her tone was less confident than her words. "Will Megan help you?" Megan is one of Abbey’s older sisters, and Abbey has always adored her, respected her judgment, and admired her honesty.

"No, I am going to do the job myself, but of course Megan will want to take a look once it is done, and we all know how Megan always gives her honest opinion.” I assured Abbey that I knew what I was doing, told her to have a good weekend, and once again promised she'd be happy with her room when she returned.

The initial steps were easy. The first thing I did was remove all the switch plates and socket covers. I then taped around all of the woodwork, door frames included. I probably used more tape than necessary, but I wanted to protect the woodwork and thought that I might get to it faster when I was painting than someone who could see. Then I put tape between the walls and the ceiling. I put plastic on the floor, unwrapped the brushes and the rollers, got out the cans of paint and a couple of paint trays, and closed the door to the room I would soon turn into my daughter's dream place.

But when it came time to open that paint, put it on the roller, and start painting the wall, I fell apart inside. The thought of painting the room energized me; the thought of taking that brush in hand and messing up an already painted wall terrified me. Could I follow through to create something worthy of my daughter's tenth birthday, or would I create a tenth birthday memory that would shame us all? I sat down on a stool and began to cry. I was a sweating, shaking, crying mess, and I couldn't think of any easy way out of what I had committed to do.

Then my cell phone rang, and my older daughter Megan said she was dropping by to see how the room was coming. I started to tell her I was at my wits' end and was paralyzed by doubt, and then it came to me: God was delivering a response to my unvoiced prayer. Megan was coming over. She could help. I would do my share, but she would be there to do the hard parts, to supervise my work, and to make sure I didn't mess things up. I could still deliver on my promise, and no one would have to know how scared I had been of failing.

When she arrived, Megan could see that I had done all the preparation but hadn't yet started on the wall. I told her I was nervous about the project, and I suggested we have a girl's night, order a pizza, laugh about some memories and stories, catch up with one another, and together create a gift her sister would love. She was not enthusiastic about spending the evening together, reminding me that it was Friday and that she already had plans with her friends. Again I began to feel panic, and it showed. Noticing my imminent meltdown, Megan began to repeat back to me things I had said to her since she was a baby. She reminded me that I had told her I could do anything I set my mind to and that blindness only made the way I did a thing different—not better, not worse, just different. She said that I had always been as good as my word, that I had never let my family down, and that she was so proud of the mom I was. She told me that there was no way I'd let Abbey down, that I was perfectly capable of painting that room, and that I needed to put myself back together, remember how much I loved to do artsy craftsy things, and that, by the end of the weekend, we'd all have something to treasure. I heard what she said, and, although they were nice words that were exactly what I had dreamed she would one day say to me about raising her, my fear held fast, and I begged her to stay and help.

After listening to my pathetic protests, Megan turned to me and said, "Okay, I'll help you," and immediately she went for the paint can and the roller. She dipped the roller into the can, and I gave a big sigh of relief when I heard paint being applied to the wall. We would do this together. I could hand her brushes and pour paint into the trays, but she could do the painting, and we'd do a great job. But my elation was short-lived. The next thing I heard was the roller being placed back in its tray and Megan saying, "Okay, Mom. I've started it. It's your turn. Bye!"

I laughed, and in a shaking voice I said, "Oh Megan, don't tease me. I don't think I can take it tonight."

"I'm not teasing," she said. "Mom, this is Friday night, and I have plans. You told Abbey you could do this, and you can. You've been planning it for two months. This is only paint; you can't break anything. Now get to it, and I'll come by tomorrow to see how you're doing. Bye. Love you." With a hug and a kiss, out the door she went.

Again I was alone, but now Abbey's wall, which had been an off-white color, had a big pink stripe across it. There was no turning back. Eventually I pulled myself together, thought about what Megan had said, said a silent prayer for God's help, and started to paint. I painted all that night and much of the next day. I used a specially-made stamp to place the imprint of butterflies on the wall, being careful to ensure that each went on at a slightly different angle to give the appearance of the butterflies in flight. I had to be careful about their spacing since being too close together or too far apart would ruin the intended effect.

When Saturday night came, I was a boiling mix of emotions: exhausted, exhilarated, proud, scared, anxious for Megan to return and give me her always painfully honest opinion, and afraid of what she might say. When she entered the room, I felt as tense as I have ever felt. “Hey, Mom, it looks great! This will be the best present ever. Abbey will be so excited."

Again I began to cry, but these were not tears of fear but tears of relief. When Abbey came home on Sunday and looked at her room, the joy she felt wasn't conveyed just in what she said but in her tone. She kept saying, "Thank you, Mommy, oh thank you, Mommy. This is the best birthday present ever!" After all the fear, all the anxiety, all the concern that I had pushed too hard, promised too much, I felt supremely happy. There wasn't one trace of surprise or amazement in her little voice—just appreciation for a promised birthday gift that was exactly what she had asked to receive. Again I cried. This time I shed tears of joy—I had given my ten-year-old a gift she would remember for the rest of her life. I had done what I said I would—just as she expected I would do.

We always tell people that blindness poses two problems: one is the physical lack of sight, the other the reaction that we and others have to being blind. A big part of what we do in the National Federation of the Blind involves changing the attitudes of the public with the words we say and the actions they can see, but it is hard to measure something as large as a change in public acceptance. What we can more easily see is the reality our children come to know as we tell them what we believe about blindness, and they then compare those words with what they see day after day and year after year. My daughter Megan believed what I told her about the role blindness played in my life, and she accepted as true what I said about being able to do anything. She then reflected or echoed back that belief to me at a time when I was down on myself and was questioning whether I had promised to do something beyond my capabilities. So certain was she that I could succeed that she placed me on a road that ran in only one direction—forward—and left me alone to navigate that road by myself.

The Bible tells us that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and I am a living example of that truth. To my daughter that newly decorated room was something she enjoyed, treasured, and proudly showed her friends. But soon she was no longer ten and wanted a bigger room downstairs. Now she is in college, the newly decorated room a treasured but distant memory. But for me the picture of that room will always remain in my mind, and the accomplishment it represents often reminds me that I can do more than I think I can, that I should encourage others to go beyond what they think they can do, and that sometimes discomfort is a necessary ingredient in finding the joy of real accomplishment. Blindness almost stopped me from giving my youngest daughter the best gift I've ever given, but it was my older daughter's faith, her belief in my ability, and her reluctance to accept anything less than my best that has made this one of the most treasured stories of my life.

Pushing the Limits: Changing the World through Big Ideas

by Eileen Bartholomew

From the Editor: One of the most exciting presentations made by someone from outside the organization occurred when Eileen Bartholomew from the XPRIZE Foundation took the stage on Friday morning, July 10, 2015, to address our seventy-fifth convention. We often tell people that success is primarily about attitude, so it was interesting to hear the words of another organization that holds this view. Here is what Ms. Bartholomew said:

Thank you for that welcome, and I'm so glad to be here. At XPRIZE we like to say, "The day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea." You know, the world needs a lot of crazy ideas, and never before has the world been poised to take individuals and empower them to make those crazy ideas the breakthroughs we need. The reason behind that is because of exponential tools, business models, and a mindset that I know you all have in this room.

I'd like to share a little bit about what we think is possible in the coming years and decades ahead of us. But first, to do that, I want to talk about a big problem with all of us. That is that we are pretty linear in how we think about things. Our brain hasn't had an upgrade in about 50,000 years. We get up every morning, and we think that tomorrow is going to be pretty much like it was yesterday, only that's really not the case. The brain that we have is limited in our ability to understand that. There's even a famous number called Dunbar's number, which is really the number of relationships that you can keep track of and that's about 150. So for all of you who have more than 150 friends on Facebook, you really only know about 150 of them.

But the world and technology is exponential and global, and to give you a sense of that, the world created more information in the time the last speaker from Google spoke then we really have had in almost all of human history. That is exponential.

What does exponential feel like? Well, I'll give you a brief exercise to think about this. If you took ten steps linearly, you'd go about thirty feet—one, two, three, four. If you took ten steps exponentially—one, two, four, eight—you'd be all the way to the moon and back. Technology grows exponentially, and it's really hard sometimes for us to know about that and understand about that.

I want to give you an example of what exponential looks like. All of you probably know Kodak, the famous photography company. In 2012, when it was about a $26 billion dollar company employing one hundred thousand people, it declared bankruptcy—a hundred year company gone basically overnight. Its competitor in the same year, Instagram, a company that captures moments and images and memories all over the world, had an IPO, and it was worth $1 billion and only employed thirteen people. That is exponential change. Kodak was known for creating the digital camera, but it didn't take advantage of that, and it was instantaneously usurped overnight. That is exponential change and exponential technology's impact.

As a result, the average lifespan of most companies today has gone from about seventy years in the 1920s to less than fifteen today. What that means is that in ten years about half of the Fortune 500 companies we know today won't be around. Innovation is going to happen at the corporate level; it's going to happen with individuals.

Why is this happening? I want to talk about some new, amazing tools, many of which you may have heard about to help realize this future. There is a little-known but important fact that is driving all of this: Moore's law, the idea that every eighteen months the processing power of computers will double. We've all seen the benefits of this; that's why we're all carrying around small phones and not ginormous contraptions. But the world is now going to see the impact of this, and what's going to be happening is going to take us in an amazing direction.

Today we can process things at about the rate of a mouse brain. In about ten more years we'll be able to process information at the rate of a human brain. But in ten more years after that we will be able to process information at the rate of every human brain on this planet, and, when that happens, brilliant new things will occur.

So what is driving this? We are seeing advances in things such as biotech, robotics, artificial intelligence, energy, medicine—changing what it means to be human every day. Companies like: HLI (Human Longevity Institute) are going to be taking every piece of medical data that exists and trying to find a cure for individuals, not for groups of people; companies like Rethink Robotics that are making humanoid-like robots that have facial expressions and arms and legs—robots that you don't have to program that you can simply train—you teach them to do things by showing them how to do it, just like you would teach a child or teach a friend; things like synthetic meats—we may no longer have to grow meat, we will craft it in factories and breweries all around the world; things like advances in healthcare. You know about five or six years ago the only product you had to help you understand your health was a thermometer and a telephone to call your doctor, but now we have millions of devices—Fitbits, iPhones, Pulse oximeters, bringing health care to individuals. That is going to be the patient of the future, not just the clinician of the future. Companies like Matternet that are taking drone technology and are able to craft the last mile of logistics in a space of just a few months’ time—in other words, getting things to remote villages in Africa can now be a matter of delivery by drone, not by having to build roads and infrastructure to do this. And, most importantly, things like 3-D printing that are changing the way manufacturing happens and even personalized development—cooking in your home.

These are the tools and technologies that are driving changes, and they're pretty exciting, but they are only one part of the equation. The next real piece is the new type of business models that are happening because we are all connected online. What does that mean? Well right about now there is about 25 percent of the planet that is connected to the internet. Only a quarter of the possible minds are actually connected online, but in the space of the next five or six years, that number is going to grow to about 70 percent. That equates to about 3 billion new minds coming online that have not had a voice in what we consume, create, desire, demand, and legislate; when those minds come onboard, they are going to want to be engaged and connected in really amazing ways, and we're already starting to see that.

We have new business models like crowdfunding, crowd labor, and crowd knowledge that are taking problems that before used to have to be solved by governments and now are solved by individuals. You probably have all heard of something called Kickstarter. [Applause] Kickstarter is democratizing the way companies and individuals get access to capital and resources. Companies like Oculus that have developed the Rift virtual reality goggles that are going to be crafting the virtual worlds of tomorrow: they set out to raise $200,000 on Kickstarter. They ended up raising $2.5 million. Less than a year after that campaign, they were acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion. No longer will companies and individuals need to wait around for financial markets to invest in their ideas. Individuals can now ask other individuals to give them the resources to make this happen.

What about the future of work? There's a new model out there called crowd labor, where individuals are asked to help participate in small tasks. Consider a company called Gigwalk which is based out of San Francisco, that pays people anywhere from one dollar to ten dollars to perform tasks that used to take staffs and staffs of researchers and companies—things like, go and see if a product is at the end of an aisle at the local CVS. Or perhaps the assignment is to test out this new application. Today almost $1 billion worth of gigs that before were the responsibilities of companies are now happening on a one-to-one basis. Individuals are now the new movers and shakers of the business economy.

What about creativity? Here is a great story from only two years ago: the Super Bowl ads—those ginormous, expensive, frustratingly difficult, and sometimes non-comical ideas—in 2013 the number twenty-four placed commercial, which, by the way, was an advertisement for Speed Stick Deodorant, was developed by a team of four people, not by a multi-tiered corporation or a big advertising agency, not on a $500,000 budget or even a $5 million budget. It was done for $14,000 by a group of four kids. That's the new type of creativity and creation that's being allowed to happen because of the connectivity of these exponential tools and technologies.

Even really hard challenges, things like finding Genghis Khan's tomb, which, by the way, we haven't been able to figure that out for about 800 years—we're closer than ever before because a famous National Geographic researcher realized that the research and archaeology community couldn't find the answer to this. He turned to the entire collective crowd, and almost 30,000 people helped him sift and sort through data to identify fifty new sites that had never before been determined. They think that they are pretty close to finding something that has eluded the experts for almost 1,000 years.
 

These are the types of tools and technologies and business models that are changing what's possible, but these are only just a start. Because the third ingredient for making this new world possible is something that every one of us has; it is so simple and yet so hard; it is a new mindset. Most of the world looks at the world today and sees a lot of problems, sees things that feel like they can't be fixed—and trust me, every major media news network out there loves to talk about that. So whatever you call it (CNN, the constant negative news network or whatever else it might be), they are always talking about how bad things are, how difficult things are, how it's harder than ever before to do that. But you know what's funny? Our brain—the one that hasn't had an upgrade in 50,000 years—we're actually wired to think and pay attention to negative news. We are wired to pay attention to it almost ten times more than positive news. We've all experienced that, right? You pay attention to a negative comment much more often than you do a positive comment in your life. An abundant mindset needs to be thought about today because the biggest problems we talk about are actually the world's biggest business opportunities. A billion people on the planet can't take a drink of water without risking their lives. That's a great business opportunity. How can we bring tools and technologies to make that not a reality?

In reality the world isn't getting worse; it's getting better, and the data show it. There's a recent article in The Economist called "The End of Poverty." In the last twenty years the number of people who have lived below a dollar and a half a day, which is the international poverty line, has been cut by half. Access to things like connectivity, energy, and water is happening, and it's happening through these tools and technologies. Right now your world is pretty darn safe. In primitive society almost 20 percent of the people died because of some form of violence. Today that's down to 1/500th of what it used to be. We are safer than ever before; the world isn't worse off; it's way better off. As a result, we need to think about these problems differently.

I want to tell a little story about an abundant mindset, something that I think really resonates with me and maybe something you'll take home with you as well. Back in the 1840s when Napoleon III had a very important diplomatic event happening, the King of Siam was to visit him, and of course the entire kingdom wanted to layout its finery. So at the dinner where the King of Siam was to be greeted, Napoleon's staff was to eat off silverware. The King of Siam's staff was to eat off gold, but the king himself was going to eat off aluminum plates—aluminum plates—because in 1840, aluminum, although very plentiful, was extremely rare in its purest form. In fact it was so rare that it was reserved for the most royal of Royals. Today, because we've invented a simple system that separates aluminum from bauxite, which naturally occurs in nature, we throw it away. Aluminum foil is a throwaway substance. Something that in decades past was scarce, impossible, and rich is now available, plentiful, and in fact throw-awayable.

The idea of changing your mindset about what is scarce versus what is abundant can really happen through simple technological breakthroughs, and it is that type of mindset that we have to bring to all of the world's problems today.

So what do all of you think about scarcity in your lives or in the world today? Do you think about diamonds? Diamonds are now being crafted in the lab for about five dollars a carat. What about energy? A lot of people talk about a lack of energy all around the world. More energy hits this planet every day in solar rays than we can use in any given year at our rate today. All we need to do is figure out how to tap into that solar power, and we're seeing these changes happen—solar power's cost has come down 50 percent in the last year; it's almost on parity with diesel generation, and, when that happens, we will unlock a future of abundant energy that will free us from a lot of issues around environmental concerns and access to energy. It is a simple change that we need to have, and that changes the mindset that we bring to it.

What about water? We know that water is not necessarily available where it needs to be, but there are breakthroughs that are happening right now in osmotic technologies, and things like Dean Kamen’s SlingShot, where you can literally put a SlingShot into a pool of anything that looks like water and, for about the voltage required by a hair dryer, in a few minutes you can have completely drinkable water—simple, simple things that are changing the mindset of what's possible.

Again, we think that the day before something is a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea, but we need to think exponentially, abundantly. We can't think linearly and statically.

At XPRIZE we've crafted competitions to help try to change the mindset of what is possible. A great example is that everybody knew in 1996 when we launched our first prize that only governments go to space, but we didn't think that that was right, and we thought exponentially about what was possible. In 2004 the first privately built spaceship went a hundred kilometers up in the air. That is underpinning the Virgin Galactic technology that may one day allow all of us to buy a ticket to go to space.

We ought to think exponentially, abundantly, to craft the future that we think we can create. There are others around the world using prizes to help do that. We think that's a great idea. One simple example: right now, today, the Christopher and Dana Reeve foundation says there are about 7 million individuals who are paralyzed, and in a hundred years the only thing we've been able to develop is a wheelchair. We think that should change, and there are a lot of robotics companies around the world that think that should change too. They are launching a Paralympic competition in the fall of next year to take formerly paralyzed individuals, strap prosthetics, bionics, and all kinds of great new advancements on them to try to change what we think of in terms of disability. That type of exponential and abundant thinking is what we need.

In closing I would like to ask all of you: where are you thinking linearly, where you should be thinking exponentially? What do you think of as scarce that, with a simple mindset, could be looked at as abundant, and where are you attempting crazy ideas? Thank you.

Crafting Your Diamond: The Four Cs of Bringing Up Blind Children

by Carlton Anne Cook Walker

From the Editor: Carlton Anne Cook Walker is the immediate past president of the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children, an attorney, an educator, and—most importantly—the mother of a blind daughter. She has recently taken a job at the NFB Jernigan Institute as manager of Braille educational programs. Here is what she said to parents attending the seminar held at the 2015 national convention:

Good morning! Again, welcome! As president of the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC), a proud division of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), I am eager to share with you over this next week all that the Federation, including the NOPBC, has to offer.

First, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Carlton Anne Cook Walker, and I am the mother of a blind fourteen-year-old, Anna Catherine. In addition to serving as president of the NOPBC, I am a teacher of students with blindness/visual impairment in South Central Pennsylvania, and I am an attorney with my own solo law practice. Of all my roles, parent is most important, and it will always be so. However, after faith and family, the most important facet of my life is the Federation—the National Federation of the Blind. For without the NFB and its Parents’ Division, the NOPBC, I would not have the information I need to be an effective parent for Anna Catherine. Indeed, it is the education from and support of my fellow Federationists—both in the Parents’ Division and in the membership at large—that has taught me how to provide my Anna Catherine the tools and skills she needs to become the successful blind adult she has the right to be.

You may have heard that the NFB is celebrating a diamond anniversary—seventy-five years of the blind advocating for, supporting, and serving the blind. Seventy-five years—and still going strong! On a personal level this year’s convention is the tenth for my daughter Anna Catherine and me. You might know that the traditional gift for a seventy-fifth anniversary is the diamond. We will encounter many of those this week. But guess what? The tenth anniversary gift is also a diamond! Coincidence? I think not.

When my husband Stephen and I went to our first NFB convention in Dallas, Texas, we thought that our “low vision” five-year-old would probably be okay because she had some remaining vision. After just one week of learning from parents and blind adults, listening to new ideas that made sense, and seeing competent, successful blind adults with varying levels of vision, we left with the knowledge that it would be our daughter’s level of blindness skills—not her residual vision—that would determine her chances of future success.

Diamonds are created from a common element—carbon—which has been subject to uncommon external pressures. Most natural diamonds were created in the high-pressure environment of the mantle of the Earth (about ninety miles deep) at temperatures of around 2,000 degrees Celsius and were brought up toward the Earth’s surface by deep source volcanic eruptions. Other tiny, natural diamonds have been found where asteroids have hit the Earth. The necessity for high temperatures and extremely high pressure render natural diamonds a rare gemstone. As parents of blind children we know how rare blindness is—there is a good reason it is called a low-incidence disability.

Diamonds also come in many shapes, sizes, and colors—like our children. Many people have an image of what a diamond—or a blind child—looks like. While there will certainly be examples to fit the stereotype, there are many more which do not.

The outside world often places value on diamonds in a manner unrelated to their actual utility and functionality. But despite the external differences highlighted by society, every diamond has a core strength unmatched by any other gemstone. I know that our children, blind or sighted, are the most precious gems we will ever encounter. Like diamonds they are strong and resilient. And, like diamonds, they are often judged on factors that are not related to their actual potential.

When shopping for diamonds, buyers are taught to focus upon the “four Cs” of diamond buying: cut, carat, color, and clarity. With our precious diamonds, our blind children, I submit that the four Cs of rearing a successful blind child are: competence, confidence, creativity, and community.

Competence

Like determining the cut of a diamond, the first step in rearing a successful blind child is ensuring that child’s competence. In what areas should a blind child be competent? In all areas!

As I have mentioned, my blind daughter Anna Catherine has functional vision. For some tasks her vision is quite functional; for others it is not. In some circumstances (“perfect” ambient lighting, familiarity with an area, etc.) her vision is more functional than it is in other circumstances. Like Anna Catherine, blind children must be skilled in all situations in which they find themselves, and the key to this is blindness skills. For children with visual impairment/blindness, their vision is not their strong suit. Asking a visually impaired/low vision/partially sighted child to rely solely on that impaired/low/partial vision ensures that the child’s progress and success will be impaired/low/partial.

As a teacher of blind students I am tasked with performing assessments on my students, part of which involves interviewing classroom teachers about my students in their classrooms. Far too often I hear, “She’s doing great for a low vision student,” or, “He’s doing well considering his eye issue.” I know these teachers mean well, but I cringe whenever I hear them describe my students with “for a” or “considering.” My students need to perform at their optimal levels, not “considering their visual impairment” or “for a blind child,” but their individual optimal levels period. And it’s my job to teach them the skills that will help them accomplish this—blindness skills.

Blindness skills provide our children the tools they need to be defined as individuals, not by their disabilities. Blindness skills include Braille (all forms: literary, math, science, music, etc.); orientation and mobility skills, including use of the long white cane and mobility in all areas—on escalators, crossing streets, buying food at the snack bar by themselves; technology skills, including nonvisual software, refreshable Braille displays, and audio output; and nonvisual skills that help our children maximize their independence—no matter if they are blind, with or without additional disabilities.

This week you will hear about and experience a secondhand immersion in many different blindness skills. You will witness efficient, confident mobility with long white canes. You will hear brilliant, well-researched sessions and speeches which were created and will be presented using Braille and accessible technology. You will watch blind adults performing everyday tasks without regard to their visual abilities and living their lives just as you do—and as you want your children to. Most importantly, you and your child will be enriched by learning the importance and secrets of the blindness skills you will experience here this week.

Every child deserves to have the skills and tools to achieve all that s/he can achieve. Anna Catherine’s success, like that of your child, will be determined by what she can do, not by what she can see. This basic competence is the first “C” necessary for preparing a blind child for lifelong success. And you will find a multitude of opportunities to gain information about and practice blindness skills at the NOPBC conference as well as at the NFB convention for the entire week.

Confidence

The next vital “C” for all children is confidence. While confidence is important to sighted children, it is probably even more important to blind children. Blindness is a low incidence disability, particularly in children, so blind children may have few same-age peers in their home communities. This can be isolating and can make it difficult for blind children to accurately gauge their levels of accomplishment.

For example, many blind children are bombarded with people telling them what they can’t do because they are blind. Alternatively, they might hear how amazing they are for performing tasks which are both mundane and come easily to them. Both of these environments can erode the self-confidence of a blind child. In neither case may the blind child experience the opportunity to try, fail, and try again—the very experiences which build learning and self-confidence. A child in the former environment may never be permitted to stretch into new areas, and a child in the latter environment will never feel the need to do so. In both cases these children’s wings are clipped: they will never walk to and from school, cook a meal, or gain other skills of independent living, no matter how much they achieve academically.

Confidence is not something that can be taught or given. Confidence comes from within. Our children deserve to have the confidence to know that they can do—or figure out how to do—anything they need. Our children deserve to have quality instruction in Braille, long white cane skills, technology, and independent living skills. Will all of this instruction occur in the school building? No. It cannot. As parents we have the right and the duty to support our children in their acquisition of blindness skills. I knew this intuitively ten years ago, but as a sighted adult whose child is the first blind person I’d ever met, how could I do this? Didn’t I have to rely on the school—after all, they are the experts.

No. You, as a parent, are the expert on your child. Blind adults, who have learned, become proficient in, and used blindness skills every single day are experts. School officials have a great deal to share, and they may be experts, but they are not the experts. Instruction in skills leads to competence; the opportunity to use and master these skills instills confidence. Please do not hesitate to take advantage of the competent, caring blind adults you will encounter everyday here, and connect with Federationists in your own state. A strong network of experts in the home, in the community, and at school and the high level of expectations they will bring will provide your child a fertile field in which confidence may grow every single day.

Creativity

Diamond buying’s third “C” is color, and my third “C” is creativity. Like color, creativity is both unimportant and vitally important.

In diamonds, the color is irrelevant to actual industrial utility. However, the color of a diamond can significantly affect its value as a gemstone, and many people have strong opinions about diamond color (hating or loving colored versus clear diamonds).

In the lives of blind children, creativity is too often pushed off to the side in favor of academics. So many blind children are pulled from art and music for instructional time. Can you believe it? Art and music? These subjects are vital to the development of a well-rounded person. The lessons learned in the creative arts spark innovative thought processes that will help children overcome both academic and real-life challenges.

Another obstacle to creativity is the pursuit of perfection. Too often children, especially blind children, are not allowed to fail. They are not allowed to experiment and find that their ideas didn’t work that time. This robs them of the opportunity to problem solve to determine what they might do differently to achieve a different result. In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, I encourage you and your children to “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Today during our concurrent sessions, ask a question no matter how scary it might seem at first. Tomorrow morning your one thing might be a cane walk under sleepshades with your child. This week, go to the exhibit hall and experiment with some of the multitude of devices, both high-tech and low-tech, even if you don’t know what they do. In fact, explore a device with your child, and guess at what it does.

Once you encourage imagination and make it okay to be wrong, you may be quite surprised at what ideas your child comes up with. This is the beauty of creativity in action. Creativity cannot be measured on a standardized test, but its value outweighs that of any test. First, your blind child gains competence and confidence in blindness skills. Then you help nurture the creativity that will serve your child for a lifetime. These three “C”s, competence, confidence, and creativity are great. And we’re almost there, but not quite.

Community

The fourth “C” in crafting our diamonds is community. Wonderful blindness skills and terrific academic achievement are of little consequence if a blind adult merely goes to work, goes home, and repeats the cycle day after day after day. An important part of all of our lives is our interaction with others.

Many blind children are always on the receiving end and do not have the opportunity to serve others at all. Each of us needs to be needed, and each of us needs to have something to give. No matter your child’s age, he or she can give back. Maybe your child will make a “Thinking of You” card for someone in a nursing home or a soldier overseas. Maybe your child can volunteer to read (in Braille, of course) to other children. Maybe your child makes lunch for others at a local soup kitchen. It doesn’t matter how your child uses blindness skills to give back to the community; it matters that your child does it. Indeed, this last “C,” community, completes the circle.

Welcome to the Family

Speaking of community, please know that you are a most welcome part of our community. As a member of the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children you are a part of an amazing community—actually, a family. Tonight, please come to our family hospitality night and talk to someone you don’t know yet. This week, go up to a blind adult and introduce yourself. Here in the National Federation of the Blind, you won’t find any strangers—just friends you haven’t met yet.

Leadership through Education: Raising Expectations, Improving Training, and Innovating Opportunities

by Michael Yudin

From the Editor: Michael Yudin is a former chairman of the United States Access Board and at the time of the 2015 National Convention had just been appointed as the assistant secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services at the United States Department of Education. Here is what he said to the convention on Friday afternoon, July 10:

Good afternoon, everyone. How are you? I am truly honored to be here, President Riccobono, with Dr. Maurer, Jim Gashel, and my partner Sachin there whom I have the pleasure of serving as his vice chair at the US Access Board. Congratulations, everyone; congratulations on your seventy-fifth anniversary. It is truly amazing—the work that you all do here—and I am honored—I am honored to address you today. The work that you do around raising expectations, around securing enduring equity, and removing barriers and creating opportunities for blind and low-vision people in this country is so incredibly important. I just want to say to the young people here—and I know there are a bunch of you here today—that your success reflects the fundamental belief in this country that, if you give a child the opportunity to learn, he or she can achieve anything; that, if you aim high, there are no limits; and that your success is our success as a nation.

About fifty years ago President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (otherwise known as ESEA), and it ensured that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds had the same kinds of educational opportunities as their more affluent peers. When he signed that law, he said that he believed that no law he had signed or would ever sign would mean more to the future of America. He set full educational opportunity as our first national goal. But we all know that takes work; it takes real work to make that opportunity real.

If you truly believe that all of our children deserve that kind of opportunity, then our collective work becomes extraordinarily clear. We know that, when families and educators and community leaders work together, they can unlock the great vaults of opportunity of this nation, to echo the words of Dr. King from the March on Washington. We know that we have to work to make sure that that opportunity is not just a possibility, but that it's a promise. We know that we've made enormous progress in those fifty years since Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We have passed the IDEA and the ADA. We know that forty or fifty years ago millions of kids with disabilities were denied access to education. We know we've made an enormous amount of progress. We know that today a majority of kids with disabilities spend about 80 percent of their time in the general classroom. We know that today African-American and Latino nine-year-old students succeed in math at about the same level that their thirteen-year-old peers did in the 1970s. Today dropout rates are down significantly, and high school graduation rates have soared in recent years for all students. Just since 2008 alone, college enrollment by black and Latino students has grown by more than a million. That's a big deal, particularly because many of these young people are first-generation college-goers.

But clearly our work is not done. The achievement and opportunity gaps are pernicious, and they are persistent. For too many kids, circumstances of birth remain a barrier to opportunity; the odds are stacked. Opportunity gaps begin early, often at birth, and they compound over time, becoming harder and harder to bridge. Too many kids drop out of school. Too few kids go on to college, too many are underemployed or unemployed, and far too many end up in jail. Our work will not be done until we ensure that that opportunity is again not just a possibility but a promise. You know the president of the United States, President Obama, has said that there is nothing, not a single thing, that is more important to the future of America than whether or not young people all across this country can achieve their dreams [Applause]. And that's why we're all here today. Because, particularly for the young people, particularly because as the president says, "We believe in the idea that no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter what your circumstance, if you work hard, if you take responsibility, then America is the place where you can make something of your lives, that we care about you, and that we believe in you."

So how are we going to get to these goals? I think that there are three things—and I know that we're running short on time; I could talk all day, I won't—but there are three things: breaking down barriers, ensuring that students and families and educators have the tools they need to be successful, and identifying opportunities and exploiting them so that we ensure kids' success.

First barrier: low expectations. We must change the culture of expectations in this country [Applause]. Too many parents—I've heard it, you all know it—too many parents hear from their doctors, from their kids’ teachers, "I'm sorry, your kid's not going to/your kid can't/your kid won't." It is not a parent's expectation of their child [Applause]. Their expectation is, "My kid can/my kid will/my kid is able to succeed." We know from research that high expectations and access to the general curriculum actually make a difference. We know that teachers’ expectations on a kid actually make a difference in their performance in reading and math. So again we need to change the culture of expectations; that's the first barrier. We also need to begin focusing on results in the education field, particularly in special ed. We have spent so many years focusing on compliance and ensuring procedural safeguards that are critically important in special education, but we haven't focused enough on results. It's really important to focus again on these procedural safeguards and compliance with the law—it is absolutely necessary. But if you look at how kids are doing in reading and math and graduating, students with disabilities have among the lowest performance outcomes out of all subgroups of kids. We need to change that focus and also look at results and outcomes.

We also know that there is inadequate access to Braille. We know that from parents and advocates of blind children. We know that numbers of students receiving education and instruction in Braille have decreased significantly over the past several decades despite years of research that has shown that Braille is a very effective reading and writing medium for many students who are blind or visually impaired, including heightened self-esteem and increased likelihood of productive employment. That's why it's important for us at the Department of Education to issue guidance to remind states and local school districts of the importance of Braille instruction as a literacy tool for blind and visually impaired students and to clarify the circumstances in which Braille instruction should be provided. I'm going to quote the law. The law says that "In the case of a child who is blind or visually impaired, the IEP team must provide for instruction in Braille and the use of Braille unless the IEP team determines, after an evaluation of the child's reading and writing skills, their needs, and appropriate reading and writing media, including an evaluation of the child's future needs for instruction in or use of Braille, that instruction or use is not appropriate for the child." This requirement of course applies to kids as they enter kindergarten, as well as children who will benefit from Braille later on because they face the prospect of future vision loss later on in their careers.

Accessibility—the attorney general [Maura Healy of Massachusetts] talked about accessibility. We know that access to information and technology is so critical. Our Department of Justice, our Office of Civil Rights has issued a series of guidances, has taken some very active roles in ensuring that colleges and universities ensure that emerging technology is accessible to individuals with disabilities, including those with visual impairments and other impairments that make it difficult to access printed materials. They must ensure that the technology is implemented in a way that affords individuals with disabilities an equal opportunity to participate and benefit from the technology.

We explained that under the federal civil rights laws blind students must be afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. Relying on these principles, our Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice—resolved complaints filed by the National Federation of the Blind regarding universities that were asking or requiring students to use the Kindle DX. Those universities agreed not to use ebook readers that are not fully accessible to individuals who are blind or have low vision unless the universities provide reasonable accommodations so that a student can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. We've actually also taken this guidance and made sure that everybody understands that applies to elementary and secondary schools as well.

We have engaged in a number of enforcement actions requiring equal access to school websites and online resources: University of Cincinnati, Youngstown State University, and the University of Montana at Missoula. These all say that technologies, including websites, online course registration, library database materials, video classroom clickers, discussion boards, and electronic textbooks must be accessible. Just last month our department and the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in litigation the National Association of the Deaf filed against MIT and Harvard, reiterating that Section 504 and the ADA apply to your online content.

Effective communications—we issued guidance just a year or so ago regarding insuring that educational agencies understand their requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as IDEA, to reinforce that effective communication requires schools to ensure that students with disabilities receive communication that is as effective as communication with others through the provision of appropriate auxiliary aids and services.

I'm going to run out of time, but I want to talk about tools and Bookshare. You all know about Bookshare, right? [Cheers] It converts instructional materials into accessible formats. We have over twenty-eight personnel development prep programs that are providing supports to train teachers on the way to provide instruction to kids in Braille. Technology—creating and disseminating a mobile app—the Braille Challenge mobile app—incorporating evidence-based strategies. Media services: video on demand TV programming is now accessible for thousands of students with visual or hearing disabilities. The Accessible Television Portal Project opens access to free video on demand children's television program for thousands of students who are blind, visually impaired, deaf, or hard of hearing. And finally, just one more quick thing—Mister President, I promise you I will leave—two things I want to say:

Randolph-Sheppard—Randolph-Sheppard is doing incredible work. That program in 2013 generated in excess of $708 million in gross sales, had a nationwide average annual income of $56,000, and employed over 14,600 individuals. Randolph-Sheppard programs around the country are doing incredibly innovative work. They're working with private industries—the state of Illinois actually is contracted with the Randolph-Sheppard program to operate the cottages at Carlyle Lake. It is the largest campground in the state of Illinois, offering services that include lodging, a swimming pool that will accommodate two hundred people, a camp store, a laundromat, and vending machines. The state of Georgia's state licensing agency is looking at having blind vendors work food trucks. There is so much innovation that is going on in the Randolph-Sheppard program, and I urge you to work with our young people, mentor them, and show them how they can take advantage of these opportunities.

Finally, the last thing I want to say and before I get the hook is about the WIOA, the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act. It provides so much opportunity to ensure that individuals with disabilities have the supports and the services and the skills and the training they need to engage in high-quality, competitive, integrated employment. There are so many really important issues to talk about focusing on transition and services to youth: limitations on sub-minimum wage, working with employers, making sure that VR counselors understand the skills that are necessary to meet the demands of the economy, and creating a seamless, accessible workforce delivery system that is physically and programatically accessible to all. I'm going to wrap up and just say that breaking down barriers, creating opportunities, and making sure that folks have the tools that they need is critical. The fundamental belief that, if you give a child a meaningful opportunity to learn, they will succeed is all-important. Equity in education is a core American value; kids must have the chance to learn and achieve; education must provide a path to a thriving middle class for all who are willing to work hard. Our national identity and our economic strength depend on it. Thank you so much; I'm honored to be here.

Important Changes
2016 Washington Seminar Logistics

by Diane McGeorge

From the Editor: For many years now Diane McGeorge has been the coordinator who works with the hotel to see that we get room reservations and meeting rooms for our annual Washington Seminar. With renovations and staff changes that have occurred at the Holiday Inn Capital, Diane writes to inform readers of the Braille Monitor about how we will now handle making room reservations and other important matters. Here is what she has to say:

This message is to advise you that Washington Seminar will be held January 24-28, 2016, with the Great Gathering In taking place on Monday, January 25. Additionally, I wanted to inform you that I will no longer be managing reservations for this event. With the Holiday Inn Capitol’s progressive policy changes and renovations having been completed, it seemed like a natural progression that we turn the reservations over to the hotel. We no longer need to document special requests such as smoking or non-smoking rooms, or the need for refrigerators in rooms. We may no longer request rollaway beds since the rooms now have queen beds and can no longer accommodate rollaways.

The reservation process has become very standard, requiring check-in and check-out dates only, just as you experience with national conventions. This process will allow you to have full control of your reservations and any changes you need to make.

You can now reserve a room at the Holiday Inn Capitol (550 C Street, SW, Washington, DC 20024) for Washington Seminar for check-in beginning Saturday, January 23, 2016, check-out Friday, January 29, 2016. The rate is $184.00 per night. This rate does not include DC sales tax, currently 14.5 percent. You may begin booking reservations directly online at: <www.nfb.org/ws-hotel>. You may also make reservations by calling (877) 572-6951 and referencing booking code N9B. Credit card information is needed at time of reservation. Individual cancellation policy is that you must cancel seventy-two hours prior to date of arrival to avoid one night's room plus tax cancellation charge on the credit card provided. Please call (877) 572-6951 and reference your confirmation number. Please obtain a cancellation number when cancelling a reservation. The firm deadline date to make a reservation is Monday, December 21, 2015. Reservation requests received after the deadline date will be subject to availability and the hotel’s prevailing rate.

If you wish to hold a special meeting during the Washington Seminar, please email Lisa Bonderson at <[email protected]> just as you have done in past years. She and I will work with the hotel on the assignment of those meeting rooms. To ensure that you get the space you need, please let us know about your meeting needs by December 10, 2015.

Lisa and I will always be available to help you with any problems you might experience with this new system of booking your hotel reservations, but we have worked closely with the hotel staff, and they are looking forward to working with each affiliate or group wishing to make reservations.

See you in Washington!

The Foundation of Our Federation

by Jeannie Massay

From the Editor: Jeannie Massay is a member of the National Federation of the Blind Board of Directors, the state president of the National Federation of the Blind of Oklahoma, and she works as a Licensed Professional Counselor in her newly established private practice, addressing mental health and behavioral concerns. In this article she writes in her capacity as the chairman of the National Federation of the Blind Membership Committee, and here is what she says:

What did you think of when you read the title of this article? Perhaps you thought of one or more of our leaders in the organized blind movement who have been visibly active over the years. I too think of President Riccobono, Dr. Maurer, Dr. Jernigan, Barbara Pierce, Joanne Wilson, Dianne McGeorge, and countless others. They are all leaders in our movement and have all played and continue to play vital roles in the Federation today. I believe that the most important decision that they all made as blind people was to join and become active members in the National Federation of the Blind. Without that pivotal decision they would not be the people they have become, nor would our beloved organization, which many of us call family, be the leading force in blindness that it is today.

You may have heard me or others say that the National Federation of the Blind is a membership-driven organization. What exactly does that mean? In simple terms it means that without our members, without you and without me, the National Federation of the Blind would not have the collective voice to drive change in seeking equality in education and employment, the collective action to facilitate changes in legislation that bring about civil rights equality, the power to make sure that blind parents don’t have their children removed solely on the basis of their being blind—I could go on. Without members there would be no Federation.

Now let me go back to the title of this article—The Foundation of the Federation. When President Riccobono asked me to chair the membership committee, I accepted the challenge and then began thinking back over the years that I have been a part of the Federation. It occurred to me that no one ever really asked me to join. I paid my dues, and that was that. I then began to think about the many individuals I have invited to local chapter meetings or to our affiliate and national conventions. I had an interesting epiphany: I never really asked any of them to join.

It has become clear to me that, while we are very passionate about what we do, we are not always focused on finding blind people wherever they may be and then bringing them into the family by actively asking them, “Please join us; we need your help.” I know of many blind people in Oklahoma and across the nation who do not yet understand what the Federation can bring to their lives, so we need to help them discover what being a member of the organization can do for them. We are living the lives that we want, and this is why we boldly affirm and must share what we have learned: that blindness is not the characteristic that defines us and that together we must address those obstacles that stand between us and living the lives we want. The Federation found me where I was and took me to where I could believe in myself again. I fervently want this for every blind person. Don’t you?

At our national convention held in July of this year, the membership committee held a meeting that was exciting! The room was packed. The meeting was dynamic, interesting, and participants left with real examples of how to bring in new members. Six speakers made presentations about what they have done and are doing to bring the positive message of the Federation to blind people and their families and friends. Beyond bringing the message, they explained how they are working on bringing these men and women into the Federation family.

The speakers (listed here in no particular order) were Amy Porterfield from Arizona, Lisamaria Martinez from California, Shawn Callaway from the District of Columbia, Jimmy Boehm from Tennessee, Mary Jo Hartle from Maryland, and Jedi Moerke from Oklahoma. Each speaker enthusiastically came to share his or her secrets about how they are growing our Federation family.

Lisamaria told us about an event called “Discover You” where NFB of California members spoke about and demonstrated technology, discussed employment, promoted sports and recreation, and shared tips and tricks about being blind parents. The event brought in more than one hundred attendees from all over the Bay area. Members from several chapters came together to telephone every name on any list they could get and to visit agencies who regularly work with blind people. This really paid off. She said, “We partnered with the Lighthouse to use their facility. They also helped out by adding to our list of presenters and by chipping in for the meals.” Another comment was that the California affiliate board’s decision to help members get to the state convention was a tremendous benefit in bringing them to the transformative experience a convention can represent. The NFBCA Board voted to charter buses from different parts of the state to encourage and make financially feasible the opportunity to attend. The newly found members were encouraged to attend a national convention. We all know how important this gathering can be in showing new people the big picture through highlighting all we do, but what is sometimes overlooked is how much stronger we become by spending time together.

The idea of getting new members to attend state affiliate and national conventions seems to be a solid strategy that is shared by many affiliates and for good reason. Amy Porterfield from Arizona spoke about the Membership Recruitment and Engagement Committee for the affiliate. Amy said, “We aim to bring in new members and help find a lasting role for them in an area where they both bring and feel value. We have a very diverse spectrum of members on our committee, including members from each chapter and division. We also include members with a range of experience in the Federation and with a wide range of interests.” In order to bring this concept to all chapters in the affiliate the NFBA Membership Recruitment and Engagement committee developed a traveling road show that visited all local chapters in Arizona. Every meeting included a philosophy/membership training session that allowed new members to learn about us, while encouraging our more established membership to welcome and mentor new members. Amy’s final remark about membership recruitment and engagement was this, “The NFBA affiliate relies heavily on all the branding and messaging that is provided by our national office and board. We find that the one-minute message is a vital element in educating others as well as our other tools. The value statement is foundational and reminds us about why we are spreading the Federation philosophy.”

Shawn Callaway, president of the National Federation of the Blind of the District of Columbia delivered a similar message. He stressed how important it is that we create opportunities to meet blind people who can use the information we possess about the adjustment to blindness and who have not had the opportunity to meet us and hear our message of hope. The DC Affiliate planned an event in cooperation with the DC Independent Living Council. This event, as did ones mentioned earlier, brought in many new faces. Shawn proudly announced that the DC chapter would soon surpass one hundred dues-paying members.

Jimmy Boehm, membership chair in the Tennessee affiliate, also spoke passionately on the necessity of finding blind people where they are and bringing the message of the Federation to them. Jimmy and others in the Tennessee affiliate have begun efforts at finding blind college students by organizing a chapter on campus and having official chapter meetings by applying to be a campus-recognized organization. By doing so, the chapter was able to secure funding for members to attend the Tennessee affiliate convention and funding to assist members in attending the national convention this year.

“Growing our movement requires that we not only meet people where they are, but that we provide them needed information enabling them to move forward on their journeys toward living the lives they want,” said Jedi Moerke, president of the T-Town Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of Oklahoma. She went on to describe an event planned and executed by the chapter. “Last October our chapter held a seminar for local vocational rehabilitation consumers. The half-day seminar covered a variety of important topics including the value of blindness training featuring high expectations and an empowering curriculum; a variety of everyday jobs blind people do; the steps to the rehabilitation process; advocacy in the rehabilitation process; and an opportunity to hear from executive agency leadership regarding available services and the direction in which our agency is headed. They heard from real blind people who went to training, got jobs, and are leading fulfilling lives. We expected at least twenty-five participants. We had double that number in our audience! Some participants joined our chapter, and others continue to remain in contact with us. Many attended our most recent state convention.”

No report of our convention meeting would be complete without mentioning the comments of Mary Jo Hartle during her presentation. She is the president of the newly formed chapter in the Greater Baltimore area. Mary Jo said, “Our chapter meets on a weekday evening closer to the area that we live in. We were coming to the National Center for the Blind for the chapter meetings on Saturdays, but it took us over an hour one way to get to the meeting and another to get back home. With kids it just wasn’t making sense for us. We decided to organize a second chapter so that members would have a choice of meeting days, times, and locations. Things have worked out really well. Our chapter is growing, and our original chapter in Baltimore has not diminished in size. This presents a growth opportunity that we need to look into wherever we have chapters in large cities. We can find many more people in this manner.”

In all of the presentations summarized above, you will note a shared theme: that we must find people where they are. We then love them into the Federation family by educating and helping them to discover that blindness is not what holds them back. They can live the lives they want and we, the members of their new family, are standing beside them every step of the way. We continue the forward momentum of the Federation by finding blind people and asking them to join our family. To help perspective members learn more about us, tell them about our new member homepage at <www.nfb.org/how-join>, but always remember that no webpage or piece of literature can substitute for the personal contact of a friend, mentor, and Federation family member.

Wherever we find new members to grow the Federation, we must begin and keep the momentum going. Let’s go build the Federation!

Consider a Charitable Gift

Making a charitable gift can be one of the most satisfying experiences in life. Each year millions of people contribute their time, talent, and treasure to charitable organizations. When you plan for a gift to the National Federation of the Blind, you are not just making a donation; you are leaving a legacy that insures a future for blind people throughout the country. Special giving programs are available through the National Federation of the Blind (NFB).

Points to Consider When Making a Gift to the National Federation of the Blind

Benefits of Making a Gift to the NFB

Your Gift Will Help Us

Your gift makes you a part of the NFB dream!

iBRAL Is Back!

by Robert Gardner

From the Editor: Robert Gardner is a man of tremendous accomplishment. He was trained and worked as a mechanical engineer, and when he lost his vision, he simply figured out on his own the alternative techniques he would need to do his job. On retirement he decided that he had the time to really learn blindness skills, so off to BLIND, Incorporated he went. He learned Braille but soon realized that he could use the discipline of other people to help him maintain and increase his speed. Readers may remember an article he wrote that appeared in the October 2010 issue of this magazine entitled “We Are Able.” Here is what Bob has to say about a reading contest for young people:

iBral? No, we’re not talking about iPad or iTunes, we’re talking about iBRAL. Say hello to the Illinois Braille Readers Are Leaders, or iBRAL, contest for kids.

For the second year the National Federation of the Blind of Illinois (NFBI) has run its own Braille reading contest for kids within the state. And once again the response to our contest to promote the reading of Braille by school children was fantastic. Last year (2013-14), we had twenty-six applicants, and this year (2014-15), we had thirty-two. These ranged from a first grader all the way to students in the twelfth grade.

We have been happy with the enthusiastic response to our contest, reflecting the interest in Braille by blind and visually impaired children in Illinois. It also shows how throwing in a little competition can increase that interest. For example, one mother wrote on a registration form, “Thank you so much for organizing this event in Illinois. The iBRAL contest was the single biggest motivator for my son to really work on his Braille skills.”

Another typical comment on a registration form was received from a teacher of the visually impaired (TVI). She wrote, “This is my first student to take the Braille Challenge, and we are both super excited!”

Another TVI wrote at the end of iBRAL: “I have attached my students’ reading logs. They enjoyed participating in the competition, and it definitely gave them more incentive to keep reading.”

The iBRAL contest was first organized in the fall of 2013. Patterning our contest after the former Braille Readers Are Leaders contest run by our national center, the NFBI put together rules and forms, which are accessible and can be found on our state’s website. This last year, the reading period for the contest ran for seven weeks, including the Christmas school break, to allow even more time for the kids to work on their Braille. As always the object of the competition was to read as many pages as possible during the contest.

Deborah Kent Stein of the NFBI Chicago Chapter and editor of Future Reflections volunteered to be the contest coordinator. She created an email account for iBRAL, allowing electronic submission of registration forms at the beginning of the contest and reading logs at the end. The email account also allowed easy communication between Deborah and parents and/or TVI’s, the people who acted as certifying officials for the kids.

Sometimes the feedback was amazing. One parent wrote of her son, “He wanted to make sure he would do well. He just brought me his last book to log and told me his fingers hurt. No wonder. He read five hundred pages today alone!”

Sometimes the feedback was touching. For example, a TVI wrote about one of her students, “We had a great time reading! Pierre has just started reading Braille the last few years and is finally reading with some fluency and reading for fun! He is seventeen years old and has autism along with his blindness and cognitive delays. He was diligent daily about telling people he had to read for the Braille challenge. Hope to do it again next year! Thanks!”

Cash prizes are awarded to first, second, and third place winners in each of the five grade levels. When Joanne Sullivan of the National Braille Press was contacted about us purchasing gift certificates to use as additional prizes, she subsequently told us we wouldn’t have to buy them. The NBP, a great supporter of Braille, would donate gift certificates to be given to all entrants. In addition, the NFB national center has donated slates and styluses and Braille calendars to be given to all contestants. When the contest is over, each child receives a generous goodie package from iBRAL, regardless of their placing in the contest.

The Braille Literacy Committee in Illinois, along with the entire state affiliate, is proud of their accomplishments: they took the dream of having a statewide Braille reading contest for children and made it a reality. More information about the Illinois Braille Readers Are Leaders contest for kids can be obtained by contacting our affiliate president, Denise Avant, at <[email protected]>.

We are committed to running the iBRAL contest for kids and hoping to make it even bigger in the future. Go Braille! Go iBRAL!

Transforming the Training of Professionals in Education and Rehabilitation for the Blind

by Edward Bell

From the Editor: Eddie Bell is the head of the Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness, a solid academic, and a man who is well-steeped in the philosophy of the National Federation of the Blind.  Here’s what he has to say about a program pioneering new and innovative work for the blind:

Louisiana Tech remains the foremost leader in preparing professionals who hold a positive and empowering philosophy of blindness consistent with the National Federation of the Blind. We at the Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness strive to provide our students with the most cutting-edge, thorough, professional training programs to ensure that our students succeed in the field and have high expectations for future blind students. We continue to adjust and add to our curriculum without compromising the characteristics that set our programs apart. There have been several updates which prospective students and employers should know about related to our Teaching Blind Students (TBS) program, changes in the Orientation and Mobility program, and the recent addition of our Rehabilitation Teaching for the Blind program.

Teacher of Blind Students Program

President Mark Riccobono addressed us at the fourteenth annual rehabilitation conference in Orlando about the need to change our nation’s education system in the same way that the nature of rehabilitation has changed, and I couldn’t agree with him more! As he mentioned, blind people often say how they wish that they had found the Federation’s positive philosophy sooner, and how they wish they had received quality blindness skills training earlier. The only way that will happen is if we get our philosophy into the education system through Federationists teaching blind students.

Teachers of Blind Students teach children in school settings or adults in rehabilitation centers the skills of Braille, assistive technology, and problem-solving, which we know to be crucial for their success.

We, of course, think some of the best teachers for blind kids are blind adults. We’ve made it a point from the ground up that our programs are inclusive and built to be appropriate for blind or sighted teachers. Keep that in mind as you think about your clients, people you work with, or you yourself. We’re taking applications, and we’d love to have you.

There are three ways to enroll in our TBS Program. If you do not have an education background and you are not a certified teacher, you would enroll in our Master of Arts in Teaching program, which is an alternative certification program. We also have two programs for those who already hold a teaching degree: we have a Master of Education program and, if you want to only take the classes needed to add on certification to teach blind students, we have the graduate certificate program. All three of the programs have the same seven core courses specific to blindness. If, for example, you’re just doing the graduate certification to add to your education degree, you take the seven core classes, complete a student teaching internship for one quarter, and you’re ready to take the professional exams that your state requires.

I am often asked, “Can I take the classes without being admitted into Louisiana Tech University?” For example, a student at another university may want to take one or two classes without getting the certification. You can take individual courses without seeking a degree or certification, but you still must be admitted to Louisiana Tech. One option is to be admitted as a lifelong learner, meaning you don’t have to take the Graduate Records Examination as you do with our degree tracks. At the institute we are happy to help you find the best education plan for you.

Another frequent question is about our online coursework. Our Master of Arts in Teaching and the graduate certificate program are almost entirely online. This is something that we really thought hard about, and there are a few reasons we decided to push forward with the online platform. Primarily, we must train more teachers. There are so many people already working or with families who can’t pick up and move to Ruston for a couple years. We need to serve those people as well. The unique elements of our program, however, used to be in-person opportunities working with blind people at the Louisiana Center or in the community. We have a number of classes—like our Braille 1, Braille 2, and assistive technology classes—conducted weekly using a video conferencing platform so that instructors can give students real-time feedback. We also schedule times for hands-on, long-weekend training sessions in Ruston for assistive technology and advanced Braille training. In the summer quarter there’s a week in Ruston focused on teaching orientation and mobility to teachers of blind students, in which students receive cane travel instruction under sleepshades from successful blind role models.

Orientation and Mobility Program

Our Orientation and Mobility cognate is now housed within the Master of Arts in Counseling and Guidance degree track at Louisiana Tech University. We feel that this degree track better prepares our students for working in the field. Instructors, after all, don’t teach only travel skills, they build confidence and help people accept their blindness. This new program touches on some of the strategies and techniques that allow us to guide students toward this way of thinking.

Scholarships are available for incoming students in the orientation and mobility track thanks to a long-term training grant from the US Department of Education, Rehabilitation Services Administration. This allows us to provide financial assistance to our students on a first-come, first-served basis. We hope that this will help encourage you to consider joining us. One thing that definitely hasn’t changed is the need in our field for more quality orientation and mobility instructors. We need blind and sighted mobility instructors who really believe in blind people and possess nonvisual skills.

Louisiana Tech University is still the only orientation and mobility university program that has the Federation philosophy and specifically teaches the Structured-Discovery Cane Travel (SDCT)™ method. All of our orientation and mobility students go through blindness immersion at the Louisiana Center for the Blind for a full quarter. In immersion, students take all of their classes—cane travel, Braille, computers, wood shop, and home management—under sleepshades.

After their immersion experience, students take six additional months of cane travel classes under sleepshades to improve their mobility skills. They also participate in several trips with the Louisiana Center for the Blind and on their own to further hone their skills in environments from subways to nature trails, Capitol Hill to the mountains of Arkansas, and Mardi Gras to New Jersey. We conduct the majority of these trips with Louisiana Center students so our students can watch others progress in their skills and adjustment to blindness.

The ten-week summer internship is a great opportunity for our students to teach others and gain feedback from the highly-qualified travel instructors at the Louisiana Center. As you all know, the Louisiana Center for the Blind has a great reputation as one of the best rehab agencies in the country. Our students get to spend the entire summer working with Roland Allen, Marco Carranza, and Darick Williamson. They also get to work with kids in our summer programs, including the Louisiana NFB BELL, Buddy, and STEP programs.

People often ask if they have to have excellent travel skills before coming to our programs, and my response is always the same: it doesn’t hurt, but we’ve accepted many students whose skills aren’t up to par yet. They come in, do immersion at the center to get the skills they need, then they continue to work on nonvisual travel for two hours a day, five days a week for about six months. That will get your skills where they need to be. Your background or bachelor’s degree is irrelevant; we’ve had people with majors from art to education. You don’t need to be a blindness expert when you come into the program, either. We need more good orientation and mobility instructors out there in our schools, state-run agencies, and veterans’ programs. If you or anyone you know is interested in becoming an orientation and mobility instructor, I urge you to give us a call at the Institute on Blindness.

Rehabilitation Teaching Program

In addition to these two core programs, we now offer a Master of Arts in Counseling Guidance with a concentration in Rehabilitation Teaching for the Blind. There are a lot of different jobs out there for which this degree applies, but, in a nutshell, rehabilitation teachers are cross-trained individuals who are skilled in all aspects of blindness techniques. The folks going through the rehabilitation teaching degree program will go through immersion training at the Louisiana Center and the first orientation and mobility class, which will give them a solid introduction to teaching independent travel. They also take the first Braille class to demonstrate competency in Braille and assistive technology.

The rehabilitation teaching degree program came into existence thanks to a grant from the Department of Education, Rehabilitation Services Administration, a grant which also allowed us to strengthen our orientation and mobility program. The scholarships that we are able to issue cover tuition, fees, and a living stipend. To qualify for funding, you need an undergraduate degree and must be admitted to our program.

Every day, job opportunities cross my desk for instructors in Braille, cane travel, and home management, many of which come from training centers who are looking for people to hire in all these fields. We train professionals who will be ready and equipped to go to those centers and be able to fill almost any of those positions. The person who gets certified as a rehabilitation teacher can choose to stay at Louisiana Tech for an extra semester to earn the designation of NOMC (National Orientation and Mobility Certification). With a little bit of extra effort, a student who goes through the rehabilitation teaching degree program can be certified in all three areas: rehabilitation teaching, orientation and mobility, and Braille. After all, we want to see more cross-trained individuals in the field.

Immersion is a requirement for either of these degree tracks. Blindness immersion can occur at any of the NBPCB (National Blindness Professional Certification Board)-approved centers that use the structured discovery method. While the vast majority of students’ internships will take place at the Louisiana Center, I would love to see our students working as interns in Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Hawaii. I need staff at all structured-discovery centers to send us people to train, including your graduates; then, I want to turn around and send them back to you, so you can finish polishing them and hire them yourselves.

Through these programs, we can do what Mark Riccobono charged us to do: do with the education system what we’ve already done in the rehabilitation field. I’m excited to work toward this goal. With your help, dedication, and recruitment efforts, we can collectively build the next generation of highly trained and qualified teachers for our blind children and adults. Come and visit us at Louisiana Tech in Ruston, Louisiana, or online at <www.pdrib.com>. We look forward to developing a better world together.

The Joy of Getting a Summer Job

by Everett Elam

From the Editor: Everett Elam is a college senior majoring in music. Needing money and some work experience, he applied for a job and was hired by the Arkansas Lighthouse for the Blind. Here is what he has written about the joy of being hired, the challenges in his training, and the benefits of bringing home a paycheck:

It is difficult to describe the elation I felt from seven words: “Are you ready to come to work?” Since these words came to me through the phone, I didn’t have to worry about the lady on the other end seeing my mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. But there’s another reason I didn’t need to worry about her seeing me: she was the recruiting receptionist at the Arkansas Lighthouse for the Blind and was herself blind.

Founded by a blind Methodist reverend in 1940, the Lighthouse is a nonprofit organization which employs individuals who are blind and visually impaired. The Lighthouse manufactures belts and t-shirts for the military and also mass produces spiral bound notebooks and paper products. During the summer of 2015 I would be a sewing machine operator, sewing the shoulders onto t-shirts for use by the military. I would be making a difference in thousands of lives, just as the Lighthouse was making a difference in my own.

I’d first learned about the Lighthouse at a conference in early April. My roommate and I were asked to speak about the importance of fitness in the blind community. The lady who spoke prior to us gave a brief overview of how she’d come to work at the Lighthouse. It was very inspiring. Both my roommate and I applied and were hired within weeks. According to National Industries for the Blind, seven out of ten working-age individuals who are blind are unemployed. The Lighthouse provides a beacon of hope to those who wish to enjoy the same prospects as their sighted counterparts.

Employees begin working promptly at 6:30 a.m. The workday is a standard eight hours, with three breaks throughout the day for lunch and for workers to stretch their legs. While working, employees are allowed to listen to reading material or music if they wish, and the atmosphere is one of high energy and motivation. A forklift passes by periodically to deliver fresh material and supplies, beeping its horn intermittently to alert those who can’t see it.

My machine was a surger, or over lock machine. At full RPM, the surger was capable of sewing a stunning sixty-five hundred stitches a minute; it was the Gatling gun of sewing. My job was to sew the shoulder seams onto t-shirts. To do this, I had to become familiar with the shape of the t-shirts and the different materials from which they were made. I also had to be extremely precise. If I put the shirt into the machine incorrectly, the shoulders would turn out lopsided, and I’d have to send the poor piece to a fellow worker for a repair. A straight line of raised tape was set as a guide for me to sew against. As long as I kept the two corners of cloth together and against the guide, the seam stayed straight. My trainer also gave me stacks of dummy test shirts which were made of lower quality cloth that I could use to practice.

“Remember, the machine’s going to do what you do,” my trainer Janice said, smiling after the umpteenth time I’d mangled a t-shirt beyond repair. “If you pull on the shirt, it’s going to pull back. Talk to it if you need to.” Janice was from a small town and had worked with her aunt in a factory sewing the inseams of blue jeans. Her aunt was visually impaired.

I was pretty slow at first. Janice told me, “I didn’t understand how my aunt could use the machine so well even though she didn’t have sight. I decided to try sewing the way my aunt did, by touch. It was actually easier that way.”

During my training I learned how to sew in a quiet office, isolated from the manufacturing floor. This allowed me to concentrate and move at my own pace. At the end of the day Janice would tell me how many shirts I’d sewn correctly. If I’d made mistakes, she’d show me by touch how I could fix them.

My third week was exciting because I got to leave the training room and work on the floor for the first time. The machine I worked with was much faster than the training machine. I couldn’t get the hang of it, but within hours the operations manager, Curtis, arrived to fix the issue. Curtis had been training blind people in the use of sewing machines for over a decade. Before that he’d served four years in the air force. He’d learned his trade through hard knocks and had never been formally trained. Like Janice, he’d pulled himself through life’s challenges by sheer determination.

”My grandma always told me to keep myself humble, because there is always going to be someone out there who knows a little more than you, and then there may be times where you know more than the next guy. That’s what makes us all unique.” Curtis fixed my machine and gave me tips on how to keep the shirts against the guide, and within a week I’d more than doubled my numbers and was sewing eighty to one hundred shirts a day.

Occasionally schools and perspective clients would take tours of the facility. Blindfolded, Janice would demonstrate how a blind person could use a sewing machine by touch. It was inspiring to know that my trainer could use the machine without sight, and I respected her for putting herself on an equal playing field with me by learning to operate the machine without using vision.

Though I only worked at the Lighthouse for a summer, the experience I gained and the friends I made will remain with me for the rest of my life. I have now entered my final year of college as a music major, and the money I earned from my summer job has allowed me to pay the remaining amount for my violin.

The Lighthouse is still searching for prospective employees. If you are interested, contact Toni Fraser by email at <[email protected]>, or contact the Lighthouse by phone at (501) 562-2222.

A Therapeutic Research Collaboration

by Anil Lewis

From the Editor: Anil Lewis is the executive director of the Jernigan Institute, and one of his goals is to partner with others involved in research. The collaboration with the Therapeutic Research Foundation is one of many partnerships in which the NFB Jernigan Institute will be involved. Here is what Anil has to say:

The National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute leads the quest to understand the real problems of blindness and to develop innovative education, technologies, products, and services that help the world's blind to achieve independence and live the lives they want. We capitalize on the collective life experiences of the blind in order to analyze, design, develop, and evaluate products, services, and systems that affect the lives of blind people. We seek to establish productive and mutually beneficial relationships with other researchers to leverage their expertise with our own.

In one of our most recent collaborations, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has engaged in a partnership with the Therapeutic Research Foundation (TRF) to seek innovative and technologically driven solutions to improve the healthcare and mobility of the blind and visually impaired.

TRF is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded to facilitate the research and development of cost-effective and innovative pharmaceutics, biotech devices, medical aids, and treatment options. Because of our shared interest in developing mobility and healthcare solutions for the blind and visually impaired, we helped TRF develop and launch an online survey of members of the blind and visually impaired community. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals (BI), a research-driven group of companies dedicated to the discovery, development, manufacture, and marketing of innovative healthcare products generously made a ten thousand dollar donation to support this effort. We received feedback from 377 participants. The survey focused on mobility and healthcare needs, with an emphasis on adoption and usage of current technology such as internet and mobile phones. TRF will be publishing their findings in an upcoming white paper, and we will provide a link once it is available. The following is a sample of some of the survey findings:

Survey data related to access technology usage demonstrated that the most frequently used access software programs were JAWS, VoiceOver, Window-Eyes, and Kurzweil 1000. Even with knowledge of and use of access technology, 57 percent of those completing the survey expressed an inability to use important websites due to lack of accessibility. In addition, 52 percent expressed experiencing mobile phone apps not working as expected, which could be an expression of usability and/or accessibility issues.

Of those individuals surveyed, 88 percent expressed having difficulty reading the medication label, with 84 percent of them using a magnifier and 51 percent using additional visual aids.

Thirty-six percent of those surveyed indicated transportation is a significant barrier to receiving healthcare services. In addition, an inability to independently complete required paperwork and lack of empathy from professional medical staff was identified as major challenges they experienced when visiting a doctor’s office.

Along with the focus on medical concerns, the survey covered some basic issues of mobility, with these findings: long white cane, 93 percent; sighted guide, 78 percent; electronic device, 33 percent; and guide dog, 31 percent.

After a preliminary analysis of the online survey findings, we helped TRF coordinate three separate telephone conference focus groups to probe deeper into the responses and to better help understand the unmet needs of the blind and visually impaired community. The conference calls, consisting of fifteen NFB members, were held on March 30, 2015. As a result of the focus groups, several innovative ideas emerged including a desire for certain accessible medical devices. We plan to work with TRF to refine the best ideas using our membership and specifically our Diabetes Action Network as a resource. Moreover, we will seek to build prototypes that result in advances in healthcare tools and mobility aids for blind and visually impaired consumers in the marketplace.

The TRF bridges the gap between academia and industry, and with our continued collaboration the TRF hopes to forge an unprecedented effort to design, develop, and implement solutions to the unmet navigation and healthcare needs of the blind and visually impaired. For additional information about the Therapeutic Research Foundation and to donate to this cause, please go to <www.tr-f.org>.

Increasing the Investment in Accessibility: Nonvisual Access in Microsoft Products and Services

by John Jendrezak

From the Editor: John Jendrezak is ‎Partner Director of Program Management at Microsoft. Since the accessibility of products that run on the Windows Platform is crucial, we have worked extensively with Microsoft to press for measureable improvements, and this is the report Mr. Jendrezak provided to the convention:

Thank you, Mark, for the intro; hopefully I can live up to the expectations of the group here. First of all, as many other people have done today, I really want to congratulate everybody on the seventy-fifth anniversary for the NFB. Your years of advocating are great, and we really appreciate everything that you do. On behalf of Microsoft employees who are here throughout the week, we are honored to have the opportunity to partner with you. We’ve had more employees at this convention than we’ve ever had before, so hopefully you’ve really felt our presence. We’ve appreciated the opportunity to listen, to connect, and to share ideas with you throughout the week. We’re looking forward to taking your feedback back to our teams in Redmond.

At Microsoft I’m an engineering manager on the Office development team. I’m here specifically to talk to you today about Office and the work we’re doing to improve accessibility. I’ve worked on the Office team for over twenty years, but my personal involvement in accessibility began two years ago with the implementation of CVAA [Communications and Video Accessibility Act]. The work that you all have done to have CVAA passed has been great, and that involvement that I’ve had personally has really whet my appetite for accessibility, and my passion and involvement has been growing ever since. So thank you.

We believe that the Office products are essential for you to be successful in your work and your personal lives. Communicating and collaborating with people, whether they’re your coworkers, your friends, businesses or other institutions is part of what we all do on a regular basis. When we release products that aren’t accessible, we make it difficult for you to succeed professionally and personally, and that’s not acceptable. [Applause] I was recently reminded of this in a poignant way when I spoke with a woman at our ability conference this spring. She’s blind, and she shared with me her personal story about how she had to drop a college course because she had to use Microsoft Project, and it wasn’t accessible with her screenreader. That’s just not acceptable. We do not think that our software should prohibit people from going to college [Applause]. So by getting involved and leaning in, I think we can make a big difference and a big change for the better.

This is my first opportunity to attend the conference, and I’m very excited about it, but I can definitely say we’ve appreciated working with the NFB over the years. You’ve always provided us with very candid feedback, which is great—grateful for that. It’s really really helped us out. So I wanted to spend a couple minutes and really share some of what we’re doing today to improve accessibility of Office.

On the desktop, our apps have had a long history of accessibility through the partnerships we’ve developed with the AT [assistive technology] community. The apps continue to lead the industry in terms of functionality and availability to our customers who are disabled, but, with that said, we have to continue to improve the experience. We’ve made some progress over the year; I’d like to share a little bit of that with everybody. Our core mission, really, is to deliver the best productivity experience to all of you across all of our products, across all of the devices that you use them on. We’re clearly unique in that we bring productivity to you on any device you own, whether it’s a Windows, a Mac, an Android, or an iOS device. We really want to respect your choice and deliver the best experience to you. We’ve been busy over the last two years building versions of Office that span multiple platforms with the goal of providing this productivity experience across all of our devices. We’ve made Office accessible for iOS by adding VoiceOver support across our core iPhone and iPad devices. The early feedback for that has been super positive. We want to keep hearing feedback for those applications so that we can drive further improvements to them.

I’m sure many of you use iPads and iPhones, so hopefully you’re able to use our products with them. We’ve also made Mac Office accessible for the first time. [Cheers] We released just yesterday Mac Office 2016, so if you have a Mac, I highly suggest you go download it, try it out, and give us feedback.

Again, there’s no doubt that the NFB gives us good feedback. I’ll probably say that over and over and over again. It’s awesome that we have such an active and passionate partner; you definitely keep us on our toes.

One specific piece of feedback for the Office team over the last year is that we need to improve our keyboarding workflows in Office. Based on that, we’ve made improvements to our overall workflow so that our keyboard shortcuts are consistent across our desktop and our Office online products. We’ve taken it a step further; we’ve found ways to improve and speed up the overall keyboard interaction by simplifying the steps needed to get things done. We’ll continue to work in this space over the coming year, so watch for more improvements.

This year we also launched a third-party AT partnership program for desktop users and have since expanded it to all of our Office365 subscribers. AT providers provide an important part of the Office accessibility experience, and in 2013 we approached all of our partners to find ways to provide this experience in a more affordable way. After reaching out to our core partners in the screenreader market, we’re proud to have partnered with GW Micro (now Ai Squared) to make Window-Eyes available to all of our customers free. [applause]

Finally I want to highlight a new feature that we’re shipping called Tell Me. Tell Me is a feature that helps our customers find and use Office features. It’s a feature that’s a great example of how we can design for accessibility and how we want to evolve our engineering culture to really weave accessibility into the fabric of our team. I’m sure you’ve all been in the situation where you’re using a product, maybe Excel as an example, and in the back of your mind you’re trying to remember how to do something, and you can’t quite figure it out, and you don’t know where that feature or that functionality is in the product. It’s a problem for any user using our product: search through the ribbon, and the tabs, and figure out what’s going on—and I can imagine that with a screenreader it’s even a little bit more challenging. Tell Me helps avoid that frustration by allowing you to type what you want to do using your own words and phrasing into a simple search box. We then expose the best matches for what you’re trying to do, and you can execute the features right there from that search in the product. [Applause] It’s a great example, we think, of combining natural language input with machine learning to help really build the best experience for our customers to access the functionality of Office. Now, coincidentally, while managing that team that built that functionality, I was also responsible for the accessibility work that we were doing. We were going through our CVAA implementation at the time, and I was involved in an early demo of that Tell Me feature. Because of my newly-heightened awareness of accessibility, I just asked simple questions like: Can you hotkey into that feature? Is there anything we can do here to help people with disabilities? What happens if you turn a screenreader on when you’re using the feature? And just from that kind of serendipitous involvement that I had with these two teams, it really helped us build a feature that we think is a great way to help our customers with blindness accomplish the tasks with less effort, while also keeping all of our users able to discover commands more readily. This is the type of universal design we really strive to deliver: functionality that helps everybody.

This was also a great career-level lesson for me—it really was. The thing that I took away was that, in order to make material improvements, to find those serendipitous moments, to build Office for everyone, we really need to have local awareness of disability. This is similar to what Kannan talked about, I think, with Google as well. We at Microsoft need to increase the diversity within our engineering organization. This “Tell Me moment,” as I call it, not only created a new capability for our customers, but really set our organization down a path to materially change the culture and composition of our team. Our CEO Satya Nadella has said, “The world is diverse. We will better serve everyone on the planet by representing everyone on the planet. We will be open to learning our own biases and changing our behaviors so we can tap into the collective power of everyone at Microsoft. We don’t just value differences, we seek them out, we invite them in. And as a result, our ideas are better, our products are better, and our customers are better served.” [Applause] It’s really important that we encourage a culture that sees accessibility as an ongoing investment that results in better designs for all of our users right up-front, as opposed to relegating it to a task that we complete afterwards at the end of design and development. We’ve operated that way in the past, and it really is our goal to change that: to establish an engineering culture that’s inquisitive about accessibility early on, and on-point to carry that through the end of development. So now with implementation of Tell Me, first in the Office online apps, and soon to be delivered in our Office 2016 applications, you can hotkey right into Tell Me, find what you want, and get your task done quickly. [Applause]

I want to spend a minute talking about the things we want to do to change our culture. Again, it’s eerily similar to what Kannan talked about, but one of the things we really want to do is change the culture in the Office organization because until you change the culture, you’re not going to change the way they behave. I really believe that if we want to move the culture of our organization in a direction that thinks first about inclusive design, you have to start with the makeup of the engineers on your team. To that end, we’re making intentional changes in our hiring practices. We’re partnering with our corporate accessibility and human resources team to develop recruiting pipelines specifically for engineers with disabilities. [Applause] Our goal, and we have a number of active open positions today, is to hire a number of engineers with blindness, deafness, and learning disabilities into our engineering teams to help the culture that we strive for. Over the coming months we’ll be hiring fully qualified engineers to come work on products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote—and I can say from my personal experience that when someone on your team has a disability, it really makes a big difference in how you think about your product and the features in your product overall. A few years ago we hired a program manager in our user experience team who has a severe hearing disability. After she was hired we watched her quickly become one of our rising stars, and we noticed direct influences on our team culture as communication improved significantly. She’s able to provide a different perspective, and often provides insights and makes connections that other people on the team don’t because of her personal experience. She has a great perspective on how to make our products more accessible, and we want more people like her in our organization. [Applause] On a related note, while she’s not on the Office team specifically, and apparently she’s on loan, we’re excited to have one of your own, Anne Taylor, at Microsoft—I’m really looking forward to working with her.

In addition to changing our perspective on how we’re hiring engineers, we’re also changing the way we think about our engineering process. When we began our efforts to build versions of Office for iOS, Android, and Windows 10, we quickly realized the software code written for apps was specific for each platform; our code wasn’t able to run across platforms. Over the last couple of years we’ve worked hard to bring that together so that we can simultaneously release our products across multiple platforms. There’s a bunch of engineers back in Washington that are patting themselves on the back for their increased efficiency, but that’s not the important part here. The important thing for everyone here is that, by doing this work so that our features are built to be cross-platform for all devices roughly at the same time, it’s now possible for us to make faster advances in our accessibility improvements. Because, as we make those changes to our common code base, they will accrue to all of our endpoints and will be able to release accessibility improvements at a much more rapid pace. We’re also changing the cadence we work at Microsoft. We used to build Office on a three-year-long lifecycle, and if we delivered a product to market that didn’t have the accessibility features you were looking for, it took three years for another one to come out. We’re changing that, and we’re releasing our product every month, so we’ll be able to work regularly on accessibility. [Applause]

And finally we’re raising the visibility of accessibility at Microsoft. Within Office, we’ve made accessibility one of our core investments for the next wave of development. I personally oversee the effort, and I’ll be working with our organizational leaders to improve the accessibility of our products and reinforce the culture of inclusive design that we strive for.

To conclude, let me talk a little bit about what we have planned for the next year. Specifically, we’re going to continue to provide Tell Me support for all Office applications across all platforms and all devices, making it easier than ever for everyone to harness the power of Office. We’re going to make our Android and Windows 10 applications accessible. We’ll continue to improve the accessibility of our desktop applications, insuring that with our partners we’re delivering best-in-class accessibility. We’ll monitor the feedback we’re getting from iOS and Mac releases and continue to improve those products. We’re going to further improve Office online reading and editing scenarios so that our web applications more closely match the desktop applications. We’re going to continue to move to shared code so that we have more rapid and consistent accessibility features. Finally, we’re going to be more engaged with this community. That increased involvement started here this week, and we want to continue it throughout the year. With that, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak.

Food for Thought about the BEPLT

by Sheryl Bass, The Hadley School for the Blind

From the Editor: Nicky Gacos is the president of the National Association of Blind Merchants, and one of his goals is to create more opportunity for blind entrepreneurs through partnering. One partnership he has helped to establish is with The Hadley School for the Blind, and the result is a quality training program that will help to bring national training standards for blind merchants and assist those states that do not carry on active training programs. Here is what The Hadley School for the Blind has to say about this joint partnership:

For those not in the know, the acronym sounds like a popular sandwich. However, for Louisville, Kentucky, resident George Bouquet, The Hadley School for the Blind’s and the National Association of Blind Merchants’ joint BEPLT program (Business Enterprise Program Licensee Training) is more like a dream come true. Hadley is the largest provider of distance education for people who are blind and visually impaired worldwide, and the BEPLT program is part of the school’s Forsythe Center for Employment (FCE) and Entrepreneurship. Under the Randolph-Sheppard Act, legally blind adults are given first right of refusal on operating state and federal government vending facilities including cafeterias, snack bars, convenience stores, micro markets, and vending machines and rest stop vending areas nationwide. In February 2014 Hadley’s FCE partnered with the National Association of Blind Merchants (NABM) and the National Federation of the Blind Entrepreneurs’ Initiative (NFBEI) to bring the academic portion of training to would-be blind vendors. Individual state Business Enterprise Programs provide the hands-on component of the blind vendor training.

Bouquet is Hadley’s first graduate from the school’s new BEPLT program. Born with both Pierre Robin Syndrome, which often results in a smaller-than-normal lower jaw, a cleft palate, a tongue that falls back in the throat, and difficulty breathing, as well as Stickler Syndrome, which causes hearing loss, eye abnormalities and joint problems, Bouquet has struggled with health issues throughout his fifty-four years. Although he was born without eye lenses, he was not born blind. Rather, his vision worsened over time. Bouquet had worked in several food service positions since high school and wanted to become a Randolph-Sheppard vendor even before he would have qualified as legally blind!

There are only so many blind vendor licensee training slots available, and many more people compete for them than such programs can accommodate. The first time Bouquet applied to receive the training was in February 2014. Unfortunately he was not accepted into a program. However, he was fortunate to gain some blind vendor experience by working under friends who already held the license.

In early 2015 Bouquet’s counselor told him about another opportunity to apply for vendor training. This time he was accepted, and Bouquet began Hadley’s BEPLT program in April 2015. Bouquet was so motivated to graduate from the program that he completed approximately two modules (one-lesson online courses) per week. Hadley’s BEPLT students complete a ten-module program and then take their state’s physical training component. After passing both elements, graduates are eligible to bid for the opportunity to become a blind vendor in their community.

“The Hadley BEPLT program offers a lot of useful information. It will really help anyone wanting to undertake vending,” he said. Bouquet then acknowledged that the material about food-borne illnesses helped him to realize the tremendous responsibility he would be accepting by running a government food service area. “As a manager you need to decide what you are willing to delegate to other people,” he added.

For Bouquet, becoming a blind vendor allows him to hire and train his twenty-five-year-old unemployed son, who inherited most of his visual and hearing problems. This training is Bouquet’s first step toward creating a legacy of financial independence.

Innovation and Accessibility: Creating Outstanding Customer Experiences at Target

by Alan Wizemann

From the Editor: With players such as Google and Microsoft at the seventy-fifth convention, one would expect to hear exciting news about technology, but one of the most exciting presentations focusing on accessibility and technology came from a retailer. At one time we found it necessary to engage Target in the courts to get them to address accessibility, but today their efforts represent some of the most innovative and forward-looking efforts to be found in the country. Target has embraced accessibility as a critical customer service, and this is clear by their actions in hiring a quality team and the way that team is embraced by the corporate culture of Target. Here is what Alan Wizemann said to the convention on Friday, July 10:

Thanks very much. That's great applause, and you don't even know what I'm going to talk about yet.

I appreciate that. I have to say that I'm pretty honored to be up here: not only to be part of what we're trying to do at Target for accessibility, but to also be part of this panel and the speakers that are here today—I'm a technologist who works with a retailer, and to be on the same stage with Ray Kurzweil and politicians is pretty humbling, so thank you for the opportunity.

But more than that, to see an organization like this that can crush world records and take down problems of companies the size of Apple is pretty impressive. Today, I'm really here to talk about how Target treats innovation and accessibility, and we're really about creating outstanding customer experiences. We refer to our users or anybody who interacts with our company as guests. You'll hear me use that phrase a lot in this.

First, let me give you a sense of the size of Target: we're a $70 billion company, with 350,000 employees, powering 1,800 stores that service 30 million guests a week, just in the United States. Digitally, with Target.com and our mobile apps, we serve and handle over 2 billion user sessions a year. We have stores within three miles of 95 percent of the US population, and our brand promise, which hopefully you've heard before, is "Expect more. Pay less." Now when I found out that the slogan of the NFB was "Live the life you want," I immediately thought of our brand promise, "Expect more. Pay less." Especially the "expect more" part. It's my job to empower my teams to deliver on that promise and to make sure that we're building experiences that fulfill the needs and fuel the potential of our guests. That is our internal, foundational mission statement as a company.

When I started doing research into this presentation, something really funny happened. When we build presentations internally, we actually deal with several different parts of our company. They asked to see a visual slide presentation—which told me that we have a lot to learn internally as a company about how to treat accessibility. What I also learned, though, is how many people can be affected. According to the research that I've done, and confirmed by the National Center for Health Statistics, 20.6 million adults in the United States have experienced vision loss or impairment. When we couple that with an aging population of baby boomers, there's actually a significant total addressable new market for us to lead in. It's a large opportunity for not only growth and revenue, but it's also just the right thing to do. Target prides itself on being an inclusive and diverse culture, and for us not to support an entire segment of the population just doesn't fit with our mission as a company. [Applause] But more importantly, we want to lead. We want to set the standard of what it truly means to be accessible. We don't feel it's right to change experiences or remove features for any guest, regardless of their abilities. Everyone should be able to experience Target the way we want them to be able to experience it: all the same. And to do that, we needed to hire accordingly.

We've built a world-class accessibility team that deals with issues and opportunities of the population that we want as guests. Many of our accessibility team members are blind and use assistive technology on a day-to-day basis in their work. Some of the team are actually here today, and I'm not only proud of what they've helped us accomplish; I'm proud of their continued efforts to drive this exciting work across our company. I'm actually hoping—if you don't mind—that we can give them a round of applause. [Applause] They definitely deserve that and more.

At Target one thing I've realized in the eighteen months I've been there is that we had to change the rules. When I started, accessibility was really viewed as compliant; it was a checkbox before we released something to our guests. Our engineers did not like handling it. It became a hurdle. What we needed was something that would be treated differently—a positive change.

What we've done is just made it part of what we do. We've empowered teams to think of new ways to design, test, and build our products for all of our guests, rewarding teams that help us lead in this important guest segment. It has also become a really proactive use of resources within our company. Engineers are now actively building for accessibility and understanding its true value and that it is core to our guests’ mission. The great news is that it's working. We're seeing significant accessibility work across all of our experiences.
 

Recently our teams demonstrated some really neat changes to some of our Target.com activities properties such as selecting a store. What we didn't realize until we saw that through actual assistive technologies was that it was incredibly difficult. So they took it on their own to build new experiences with our accessibility team to make that easy.

In the past three years we have decreased our accessibility issues by 400 percent. We are aiming for zero issues across all of our platforms. [Applause]

To show a small example of this, I looked at the last test run that we did of our homepage. We compare these tests to several of our closest competitors. Target had six minor issues. Although we were going to address them, I wanted to see what our competitors had. Our closest one had 170. Now these results are from automated testing, and we use that as an indicator of our own success, but it's not the only indicator. We do heavy manual testing to represent what our guests' actual experiences are, and we train our internal and external partners to test with assistive technology across all of our guest experiences. Now our team has made this a priority, to not only inform, but instruct and maintain some of the highest standards of the industry. But we're also teaching these practices as we go. We think there is massive room for improvement, and we're constantly conducting user research and usability testing to incorporate the widest range of Target guests, including users of assistive technologies.

Here's where we need your help. If anyone here is interested in performing usability research for Target or would like to give our accessibility team some feedback, feel free to reach us anytime at <[email protected]>, or catch our team members here at the convention. You can help us reach our goal and show the industry why others should treat accessibility as a priority. Because as we compare ourselves with our competition, part of leading the industry, an important part, is to help others understand the unique challenges we faced, tools we used, and practices we have established to help the accessible community. We have already supported companies across several industries and even a few of our own competitors. With this work and the work across all of our teams, we're bringing accessibility to a national conversation. Every developer that works with us, every contractor we hire, learns about accessibility and our commitment. They take that knowledge with them, which means over time we will actually help shape an industry far beyond our own walls. [Applause] Our teams of engineers are excited. We're exploring the development of our own tools that we can opensource and release to the communities.

But there's one very big number that I want you to take away from our presentation here, and that's 100 percent. Our goal at Target is for all our guests' experiences to be 100 percent accessible, regardless of device. That is the mandate I gave our teams and what we strive for every day. I'm also hopeful that this mission will start to spread, not only across our company, but into our stores to create exciting experiences for all our guests and jobs for the community.

So here's what we're doing to make that happen: we've been developing an accessible, adaptive web platform. Currently if you're using Target.com on any device, you're actually using three different codebases. It makes changing our experiences incredibly difficult. It also makes testing, tracking, and fixing accessibility issues harder work than it needs to be. Later this year and early next year we'll be transferring all of our platforms that power our mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences to this new, single platform that adapts to the device you are using, making it easier to attain our accessibility goals [Applause].

We're not just stopping with the web. Our mobile applications are some of the most accessible in the industry, but we also want to do more. We want to make sure that we can leverage every tool at our disposal to bring our experiences to life, whether they're used outside—or more importantly—inside our stores. By combining different types of navigation using beacons, voice, and more, we are slowly unlocking more ways to experience Target. We just announced a new product called Target Run, which is available in fifty of our stores as a test, using location beacons and different navigation to guide someone through a store based on items in their shopping list and tell them where they are when they're there. [Applause]

We also know we can't do it all, so we're partnering with new and innovative technologies that we find. We've recently partnered with a company called Conversant Labs, that's actually here today, on the launch of their new mobile application, Say Shopping, to leverage their capability with Target to deliver our entire assortment in a new and exciting way—through speech. This new conversational shopping technology will provide a quality accessible experience and also help identify new shopping capabilities to satisfy the needs of all our guests. And I am proud that they announced the launch of this application for this convention, and it's available right now on the app stores. [Applause]

One of the most exciting things, however, about dealing with innovation and technology is the future of wearable devices. I personally think that wearable devices have the potential to be world-changing technologies for accessibility. If one of the most important parts about blindness is access to information, this has the potential to be one of the biggest advancements we've seen in a generation by giving us never-before-experienced levels of that information. We are currently testing multiple wearable platforms like the Apple Watch to see if we can unlock new features and capabilities across our digital portfolio that will allow our disabled guests to build lists, find products, and navigate our stores without any assistance. [Applause, cheers] Although widespread adoption of these technologies is probably a couple years away from being mainstream, we're investing the time now to make sure we're at the forefront of these potential use cases. If you've seen the news this week, we just launched our Open House, a place in San Francisco where people can actually experience what we call the connected home, which uses many different assistive devices across new and exciting innovation companies showing how you can use different technologies for sale at Target within your house.

But being a retailer, our mission is just to get our guests what they want, when they want it, and where they want it. It's a remarkably easy statement, but an unbelievably complex set of processes, technologies, and partners are here to make that happen. We're experimenting with multiple fulfillment options to allow us to deliver on that promise, and accessibility is part of the decision criteria that we use to introduce, test, and ultimately deploy these to our guests. From curbside delivery, we are rapidly expanding to deliver on that promise.

That brings me to my final point and the reason I'm here today, which is all about innovation. Innovation is key to driving change across our digital properties, our stores, and our company. We feel that there is a place for an innovative accessibility team to help identify, prototype, and deliver innovative ideas to help unlock this large and growing guest segment. From augmented reality through audio and touch technologies, to partnering on driverless cars and digital guides, we want to always be on the cutting edge to make sure that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can experience Target. So expect more, a lot more. Thank you.

Raising Expectations: A Commitment to Full Participation in the Twenty-First Century Workforce

by Christopher Lu

From the Editor: Christopher Lu serves as the deputy secretary for the United States Department of Labor. He appeared on the 2015 convention agenda on Friday morning immediately following a presentation by a newly graduated high school senior, Angel Ayala which appeared in the October 2015 issue. Secretary Lu obviously was moved by those remarks and President Riccobono’s pledge to Angel. Here is what the secretary said:

Thank you so much, Mark, for that kind introduction. Mark, I want to thank you and this wonderful organization for your seventy-five years of advocacy. I was moved by your words about your having Angel’s back, and let me say that we have the backs of everyone in this room, and we are proud of our partnership with the NFB.

In the 2014 State of the Union, President Obama said, “The best measure of opportunity is access to a good job.” The folks in this room know better than most people that people with disabilities want to work, can work, and deserve to work. They want the same things we all want: the feeling of pride and purpose that comes with waking up every morning, performing a job, earning a paycheck; the ability to make choices about the course of their lives, what they do, where they live; the ability to support families, raise children; the ability to enter the economic mainstream, and at bottom the ability to earn a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Now I use the word they, but it’s really we; it’s really us. People with disabilities are our friends, our colleagues, sisters and brothers. They are members of every part of our community, and, most importantly, they are young people like Angel: people that we work for every single day at the Department of Labor to ensure that they have a fair shot at opportunity in their future. So our goal in the Obama administration is really quite simple: we want to level the playing field and provide equal access to good, integrated, and competitive jobs for all people with disabilities. To do that we need to create inclusive and supportive workplaces where, as we say at DOL, people can bring their whole selves to work.

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I can’t think of a better place to celebrate the anniversary than right here with all of you to celebrate your seventy-fifth anniversary. Like other civil rights legislation that came before it, the ADA renewed and advanced our nation’s founding ideal of equality for all by prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in all aspects of community life, including most especially, employment. The passage of the ADA and the progress that we have made over the past quarter-century would not have been possible without the vigorous advocacy of organizations like NFB. Yet in many ways employment is the unfinished business of the ADA. Simply put, the employment gap between Americans with and without a disability is unacceptable. Last week we released the job numbers for the month of June, and the unemployment rate among people with disabilities was 9.3 percent, which is down from 12.9 percent a year ago. Now before you start clapping, let me say that while the downward trend is positive, it’s less positive when you compare it to the unemployment rate of 5.3 percent for people without a disability. More concerning is the labor force participation rate among people with a disability. It’s only 20 percent, and compare that to the almost 70 percent labor force participation of people without a disability.

We know at the Department of Labor that the groundwork that the ADA laid is not finished, that there remains more work to be done in order to create a more perfect society. That is why my boss, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, and I often refer to the Department of Labor as the Department of Opportunity. We work hard to provide opportunities to Americans to contribute fully to our nation’s workforce because we believe that America does best when we field a full team, and we can’t afford to leave anyone on the sidelines.

Especially in 2015, when we have such an array of fantastic technological advancements, we can no longer say that someone can’t do what they need to do in the workplace. As an example, I know of a young woman named Helen Chang. Helen is a web developer with a multinational technology services corporation, and she spends the majority of her time writing code for computer applications. Her employer is a federal contractor, and she works with the company’s defense division, which services the US Department of Defense—pretty important stuff. It doesn’t matter that Helen is blind because she can do this important work thanks to cutting-edge accessible technology, which is one of the great equalizers in today’s world of employment.

When other young people with visual impairments ask Helen for advice on pursuing a high-tech career, she tells them to be open to learning new technologies and software—anything that will be helpful to you in order to be successful in your job. So our mission at the Department of Labor is to help people like Helen bring their whole selves to work.

Let me spend a few minutes telling you how we’re doing that. First, we are working hard on the implementation of the new Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act or WIOA. This landmark bipartisan legislation is the first update to the nation’s workforce development system in over fifteen years, and it amends and reauthorizes crucial programs to help jobseekers access the services they need in employment and match employers with skilled workers. In addition to prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in services and programs, WIOA includes a specific focus on increasing competitive, integrated employment opportunity for people with disabilities, including the most significant disabilities. To that end WIOA established a committee to make recommendations to the secretary of labor and Congress on how best to accomplish this goal. This advisory committee is already hard at work, having met three times since January, and we look forward to receiving the recommendations of this advisory committee about how to move forward. Just this week we also released a guide for all 2,500 American Job Centers around the country on how to better support persons with disabilities in helping them prepare for and find work. If any of you are looking for a job or know someone who is looking for a job, I hope you will consider our American Job Network first. We are in almost every community in the country, and the people who staff these centers are experts. In the Department of Labor we also have a civil rights agency called the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP, that is tasked with protecting workers, promoting diversity, and enforcing laws to prohibit discrimination and take affirmative action. Last year we demonstrated that commitment to increasing access when we implemented long-overdue updates to regulations implementing Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act. As you may know, Section 503 establishes an aspirational 7 percent utilization goal for the employment of qualified individuals with disabilities. This law encourages federal contractors to proactively recruit and retain qualified people with disabilities. The basis for 503 is quite simple: contracting with the federal government is not a right; it is a privilege, and that privilege should only be extended to companies who try to make the workforce reflect the diversity of our country, and that includes hiring and retaining people with disabilities.

While the ADA leveled the playing field for people with disabilities in many ways, we all know that there is much work that remains. One of those areas is accessible technology. I know this particular issue is near and dear to people in this room, and I certainly don’t need to tell you of the barriers that inaccessible technology poses to people in the workplace. That’s why yesterday—just yesterday—I visited a company in the suburban Virginia area just outside Washington, DC. The company is called SSB BART, and I had the opportunity to spend an hour with an extraordinary technology expert named Sam Joel. Sam is blind, yet he provides critical assistance to government agencies and major corporations around the country about how they can make their websites more accessible to the visually impaired. Sam did this wonderful demonstration—and I’ve got to tell you, I’m not a tech person—I was completely blown away by what Sam showed me. He took a website—and I’ll be honest; he had a website already ready, but I said to him, “Take the United States Department of Labor website. I want you to scan our website and see how we’re doing.”

So he scans the digital content of any website—it happens in like twenty or thirty seconds—and he can instantly look at where the flaws are in the website. He and his company make recommendations to the clients about what ought to be adjusted, and they make those adjustments. In just that one hour I spent with Sam, I was inspired by the tenacity and dedication that he brought to his job. The work that he is doing is cutting-edge—it’s cutting-edge in any industry, and the fact that he is visually impaired is immaterial. The work that he is doing is transformative for all people.

We at the department want to do more to support what Sam and his colleagues at SSB BART are doing. That’s why we’ve created a new effort called the Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology. We call it PEAT. This is a multifaceted initiative to advance the employment, retention, and career advancement of people with disabilities through accessible technology. I want everyone in this room to consider yourself in the PEAT effort, because at the core of PEAT is a commitment to dialogue, collaboration, and action. You can access PEAT online at <peatworks.org>, and we’ve created a user-friendly web portal that will make it easy for you to learn about and actively engage in issues related to accessible technology in employment. There are educational articles, webinars, interactive online tools—resources that are intended to provide incentives to businesses to create more inclusive IT practices.

We at the Department of Labor are your partners. We want to be close partners with all of you because, while we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ADA, we know that there is much more work to be done. We know that the promise of the ADA has yet to be fulfilled, and we believe at its core what this is about is increasing opportunity for all people.

This really is about the American dream. I am the child of immigrants; my parents came to this country seeking a better life. They came to this country because of the enduring value of the American dream: the very simple idea that, if you are willing to work hard, you can get ahead. Unfortunately our neighbors, our friends, our family members with disabilities want to work hard and aren’t given the chance to do so. That’s why I am motivated; that’s why my boss, Secretary Tom Perez, is motivated each morning to get up and work for people like you in this room.

Twenty-five years ago when President Bush signed the ADA on the South Lawn of the White House, he did so a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he said this at the signing ceremony: “And now I sign legislation which takes a sledgehammer to another wall, one which has for too many generations separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse but not grasp. Once again, we rejoice as this barrier falls for claiming together we will not accept, we will not excuse, we will not tolerate discrimination in America.”

Thank you to all of you at NFB for being our partners to create a more perfect union. It is truly an honor to be here with you today.

Recipes

This month’s recipes come from the members of the NFB of Washington.

Oven Baked Fajita
by Debby Phillips

Debby is the state affiliate’s secretary, is an active leader in her church, and sings in the church choir.

Ingredients:
1 pound boneless, skinless, chicken breasts cut into strips
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons chili powder
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 teaspoon seasoned salt
1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes with green chilies (Ro*Tel)
1 medium onion, sliced
1/2 green bell pepper cut into strips
1/2 medium red bell pepper cut into strips

Method: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place chicken strips in a greased 13-by-9-inch baking dish. In a small bowl combine oil, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, dried oregano, and salt. Drizzle spice mixture over chicken and stir to coat. Next add tomatoes, peppers, and onions to the dish and stir to combine. Bake uncovered twenty to twenty-five minutes or until chicken is cooked through and the vegetables are tender.

Blue Cheese Dressing
by the Mackenstadt Family

Gary and Denise are longtime Federationists and strong leaders both in the state of Washington and nationally.

Ingredients:
1 serving spoonful plain Greek yogurt
2 1/2 serving spoon scoops real mayonnaise
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
6 ounces blue cheese crumbles
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon ground mustard
Coarse ground pepper to taste
1 teaspoon garlic powder
Pinch of sugar

Method: Mash blue cheese crumbles. Mix with yogurt to consistency of cottage cheese. Mix all wet ingredients, blend well. Add dry ingredients, stir, and add pepper to taste. Refrigerate in a jar or similar container. Let sit overnight before using.

Meat Roll
by Denise Mackenstadt

Ingredients:
1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
2 teaspoons barbecue sauce
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt

Filling:
1 cup shredded sharp cheese
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
1/4 cup chopped green pepper
2 tablespoons water
1 small onion finely chopped

Method: Combine beef, bread crumbs, barbecue sauce, egg, and salt, mix well. Line 9-by-13-inch pan with heavy foil. Put meat mixture in pan, spread evenly and pat down firmly.

Combine filling ingredients and mix well. Sprinkle over meat mixture. Pat down firmly, keeping about one inch from edge of meat. Roll as jelly roll. Chill overnight. Cut into six even pieces. Place in shallow pan cut side down. Bake about thirty-five minutes at 350 degrees. This recipe freezes well.

Cowgirl Cookies Gift In a Jar
by Amanda Mackenstadt

Amanda is the daughter of Gary and Denise Mackenstadt. 

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup cooking oats
3/4 cup M&M’s
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup white sugar
1/3 cup to 1/2 cup chopped pecans

Method: Start with a one-quart smooth ball jar. (I found these at Hobby Lobby craft store.) Layer ingredients in like this: first layer—flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; second layer—oats; third layer—M&M’s; fourth layer—chocolate chips; fifth layer—brown sugar; sixth layer—white sugar; seventh layer—chopped pecans.

Pack each level down really tightly. I mean it. Pack it in or it won’t all fit. Also, I add the chopped pecans last because if the ingredients were too much or not enough then I could add more or less pecans to adjust. I would rather sacrifice nuts than chocolate, you know. The ingredients should be flush to the top of the lid when you seal it up. Attach tag with directions for preparing cookies, and you have a lovely gift.

Tag Directions:
Ingredients:
1 egg, slightly beaten
1/2 cup butter, melted slightly in microwave
1 teaspoon vanilla

Method: Stir all the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients. Use the back of a large spoon to work it all together. You may even need to use your hands to get everything incorporated. Roll the cookie dough into 1-1/2 inch balls and place on a parchment-covered baking sheet. Bake about ten minutes in a preheated 350 degree oven. I got about twenty-six to twenty-eight cookies out of these.

Caramel Apple Salad
by Betty Watson

Betty Watson is the Clark County Chapter president and a member of the state board. She has lived in several states over the years and attended her first national convention in 1965.

Ingredients:
8 ounces cream cheese
8 ounces sour cream
16 ounces whipped topping
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
8 to 12 apples
2 to 3 cups seedless grapes
Lemon juice
Raisins and pecans optional

Method: Combine sour cream and cream cheese. Dice apples to desired size and sprinkle with a little lemon juice. Cut grapes in half. Mix brown sugar with cream cheese and sour cream. Add apples, grapes and optional ingredients to mixture. Finally fold whipped topping into apple mixture. Chill and serve.

Easy Crockpot Cream of Crab Soup
by Betty Watson

Ingredients:
3 cans condensed cream of potato soup
2 cans condensed cream of celery soup
4 large cans evaporated milk
1 stick butter
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
8 ounces Velveeta cheese, cubed
1 pound crab meat with shell bits removed, or 2 8-ounce cans crabmeat
Old Bay Seasoning to taste

Method: Combine all ingredients except Velveeta, crabmeat, and Old Bay Seasoning in crockpot, heat on low until hot (about one hour). Add cubed Velveeta, crabmeat, and Old Bay seasoning to taste. Heat on low until Velveeta has melted (about one half hour). Serve and enjoy.

Colossal Caramel Apple Trifle
by Betty Watson

Ingredients:
1 package yellow cake mix
6 cups cold milk
2 packages instant vanilla pudding
1 teaspoon apple pie spice
1 12.25-ounce jar caramel ice cream topping
1 1/2 cups chopped pecans, toasted
2 21-ounce cans apple pie filling
2 16-ounce containers frozen whipped topping, thawed

Method: Prepare and bake cake according to package directions using two greased round nine-inch baking pans. Cool ten minutes before removing from pans, and then cool cakes completely on wire rack. In large bowl whisk milk, pudding mixes, and apple pie spice two minutes. Let stand two minutes or until soft set. Cut cake layers if necessary to fit evenly in an eight-quart punch bowl. Place one layer in punch bowl and poke holes in cake with a long wooden skewer. Gradually pour one-third of the caramel topping over cake. Sprinkle 1/2 cup pecans and spread with half of pudding mixture. Spoon one can pie filling over pudding. Spread with one container of whipped topping. Top with remaining cake layer and repeat caramel, pecans, pudding, pie filling, and whipped topping layers. Drizzle with remaining caramel topping and sprinkle with remaining pecans. Chill to set. Store in refrigerator.

Monitor Miniatures

News from the Federation Family

Travel & Tourism Division Annual Trip Fundraiser: New York State Experience:
The National Federation of the Blind Travel & Tourism Division is organizing a fundraiser trip called “The New York State Experience.” This trip is open not only to Federation members, but also to the general public to try and make this the biggest and best trip it can be. The trip will take place September 21 to 26, 2016.

On this trip we’ll visit the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and New York City. There will be a number of tours of the city and options for those who are interested in seeing a Broadway show or other extra experiences. We will also be visiting other parts of New York State, as well. Hyde Park, New York, is the home of the Roosevelt Museum, Eleanor Roosevelt’s Cottage, and the Culinary Institute of America. We will have a dinner at the Culinary Institute as a part of the tour package, and the dinner is included in the price of the trip. From there we will head over to Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum and Wax Museum, because who doesn’t like baseball? There will also be a brief side trip to one of the best apple cider mills in the area to have lunch. After that, it’s back to New York City for more touring, especially optional activities you might have decided to try, as well as a good-bye dinner.

Pricing is based on double occupancy at $1,290 per person. A deposit of $300 per person is due no later than December 15, 2015. For full details of the trip, check out our website at <http://nfbtravel.org/september-21-26-2016-fundraiser-trip-to-new-york-state/>.

In Brief

Notices and information in this section may be of interest to Monitor readers. We are not responsible for the accuracy of the information; we have edited only for space and clarity.

EZ2 See Weekly PlannerAnnouncing a New Low Vision Weekly Planner:
If you are seeking a print calendar designed for people with low vision, you should know about this new product. The EZ2 See Weekly Planner has just entered the market. The 8-1/2-by-11-inch spiral bound product was brought to the market by NFB-member Edward Cohen. You may have met him at convention when he was an active member and lived in Indianapolis. He designed this calendar when he could not find a weekly planner that met his late-stage RP vision needs. His calendar is nothing like you’ve ever seen. The all black and white calendar features a clean and open design with maximum spaces for each day’s schedule. Calendar fonts range from forty to fifty-five point. The monthly pages include large-print holidays with room for your own reminders.

Tired of writing off the edge of the page? Well it will be hard to do with the EZ2 See calendar. Each weekly page has a dark border or as Edward calls them, “pen bumpers.” Check it out at the NFB Independence Market: <https://ecommerce.nfb.org/asp/default.asp>.

NFB Pledge
I pledge to participate actively in the efforts of the National Federation of the Blind to achieve equality, opportunity, and security for the blind; to support the policies and programs of the Federation; and to abide by its constitution.

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