_______________________________________________________________________________
Vol. 69, No. 7 July 2026
Chris Danielsen, Editor
Distributed by email, in inkprint, in Braille, and on USB flash drive, by the
National Federation of the Blind
Mark Riccobono, President
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THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND ADVANCES THE LIVES OF ITS MEMBERS AND ALL BLIND PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES. WE KNOW 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. OUR COLLECTIVE POWER, DETERMINATION, AND DIVERSITY ACHIEVE THE ASPIRATIONS OF ALL BLIND PEOPLE. 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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Vol. 69, No. 7 July 2026
From the Editor
by Chris Danielsen
From the Backseat to the Driver's Seat: A Federation Journey with Waymo
by Jordan Moon
Federation Sues Government Agencies Over Delayed Web Accessibility Rules
by Chris Danielsen
National Federation of the Blind Official Comments in Response to the Department of Health and Human Services Interim Final Rule Regarding Section 504 Digital Accessibility
How I Came to the Federation
by Amy Porterfield
Becoming Blind: Finding the Truth Beyond Vision
by Ahmad Shafi
We Need Your Help
BELLs Should Be Ringing Everywhere
by Eric Duffy
Eye Condition Twins: A Double-Edged Sword
by Justin Salisbury
Of Seniors and Seeds
by Sandy Halverson
The Golden Rule, the Platinum Rule, and the Right to Speak for Ourselves
by Gary Wunder
Trainers Committee for Structured Discovery: A Name Change Reflecting Expanded Mission and Professional Impact
by Jimmy Morris
Monitor Miniatures
Copyright 2026 by the National Federation of the Blind
by Chris Danielsen
It is likely that most people reading this are preparing to attend the National Federation of the Blind 2026 National Convention in Austin, Texas, or have just returned from it. The convention is the highlight of each year in the National Federation of the Blind. It has been compared to a family reunion, and attendees have a wonderful time, but its most important function is as the supreme governing authority of our organization. That is because the convention is where officers and directors are elected and where new policies are set for our movement via the resolution process. Consequently, the convention will be extensively covered in the next issue of this magazine. But if you are unable to attend the convention in person and can’t or don’t wish to wait to read about it in our August/September issue, you can still sign up for the virtual convention experience if you have not done so already. The registration fee is only $10, and it is easy to sign up by visiting https://nfb.org/convention. Although you will still receive many of the highlights of the convention in the Braille Monitor, there’s nothing like being there, even virtually, and much as we would like to, this publication cannot award door prizes, whereas you can win them with a virtual convention experience registration.
If you are joining us in Austin, you may have the exciting opportunity to travel in an autonomous vehicle. Austin is one of the many cities where Waymo operates an automated rideshare service, available through its own app or through the Uber app you may already have on your phone. Waymo’s service has been available in Phoenix for a while now, and Jordan Moon, who lives there and works for Saavi Services for the Blind, shares his experience and provides useful tips for trying out the service. We made his article available on our Early Access blog, located at https://nfb.org/braille-monitor, where you can find other posts before they become available in our print, Braille, and audio editions, as well as updates of previously published articles as warranted. In this case we wanted to give readers plenty of time to prepare to take a Waymo ride if they wished, but if you missed the post, the article is now in your hands. And speaking of the Bolotin Award-winning training center Saavi Services for the Blind where Jordan Moon works, its executive director, Amy Porterfield, tells us in this issue about her journey to fully realize the meaning of the Federation in her own life and its ability to enhance the training and lives of her students.
Many who will not attend the convention for whatever reason are still doing the work of our movement, and the convention will not be the only Federation activity that occurs this summer. Some affiliates have already held BELL® Academy sessions and more will hold them in the weeks after the convention adjourns. If you are not familiar with the BELL Academy, Eric Duffy’s contribution to this issue explains this program well and makes a strong case for its importance to blind children, their families, and our movement.
Our advocacy work also continues behind the scenes even as we set new policy priorities at our convention. Regular readers already know that we are fighting for the implementation of rules that will facilitate our equal online access to the activities of state and local governments and to healthcare. This battle has entered a new phase: a lawsuit against the federal Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, which have delayed and may seek to water down or eliminate these rules. We share details of this new litigation in these pages.
The National Federation of the Blind has many divisions through which we support and address issues faced by blind and deafblind people based on our various interests, vocations, avocations, and stages of life. Most of these will hold their annual business meetings during the National Convention, but their activities continue throughout the year. The Seniors Division has always been a critical component of our movement because it serves the many individuals who experience blindness or vision loss as they age, as well as continuing to enhance the lives of existing members who are transitioning into retirement and other changes that come with growing older. In this issue, Sandy Halverson, a longtime leader in the Federation and chair of the Shares Unlimited in NFB (SUN) Committee, describes an innovation from this division that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic but now continues to be a learning and networking opportunity enhancing the ability of blind and deafblind seniors to live the lives they want.
We are unable to carry a Monitor Miniatures column in every issue, but we can carry it more often if we have more content. Since we are able to carry the column in this issue, it seems like a good time to remind our readers that you can submit Federation family news for inclusion in this space. You can also submit information about items you have for sale that will be of specific interest to our readers, such as gently used access technology. We also accept short items about the activities of other agencies, organizations, or individuals that may be of interest to readers. It is important to remember that, when we publish such information, we are not necessarily endorsing the product or service; we are merely sharing what we received in case our readers want to investigate further.
This issue is rounded out with some philosophical musings. My predecessor and dear friend Gary Wunder writes about the kind of understanding and acceptance that we as blind and deafblind people truly need from the rest of our society. Justin Salisbury of Hawaii ponders the ways that we make individual connections with each other in our movement and how the ways in which we do this may change over time. He posits that society’s emphasis on the medical causes of blindness may prompt us to first seek connection through shared eye conditions and gives his thoughts on why that can be a useful but limited strategy of forging bonds with other members. And Ahmad Shafi, president of the National Federation of the Blind of West Virginia, whom I had the privilege of meeting a couple of Washington Seminars back, shares his personal journey toward his proud and unapologetic acceptance of his identity as a blind person.
As ever, your feedback about the content of this issue and your own contributions are much sought and desired. If you do not see yourself writing an article, then a short letter or even a phone call will suffice. Perhaps your observations will be included in this note or in a correspondence column, or perhaps it will lead to a conversation that ultimately results in a complete article. However you choose to contribute, the flagship magazine of our movement cannot claim that distinction without your unique and authentic voice. Please email me at [email protected] or call 410-659-9314, extension 2330, to share that voice. I look forward to connecting with you!by Jordan Moon
We have all heard the jokes. “What are you, blind?” “Even a Blind Person can See that!” “Blind people driving? Absolutely not!” Even in casual conversation, blindness and driving are treated as the ultimate contradiction—the joke that writes itself. Growing up, I laughed along because I desperately wanted to fit in.
Like many blind people, I internalized the idea that not driving meant not being fully independent. Drivers got licenses. We got IDs. Even compliments carried low expectations: “Wow, you get around so well!” or “I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t drive.”
I spent years trying to speed past those stereotypes. I played sports, sat inches from televisions to play video games (some involving racecars), and commented on clothes and appearances as though I could see them perfectly. But when my friends started getting driver’s licenses, I hit the one barrier I could not fake my way around.
Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, the inability to drive seemed to shadow every major life decision. An orientation and mobility instructor once told me a blind person could never teach cane travel. How would I pick up my students and drive them around, let alone monitor them? Watching friends, and eventually my younger brothers, get licenses only reinforced the feeling that adulthood itself depended on driving.
Even at Arizona State University—Forks Up!—I quietly limited my own ambitions. I convinced myself print journalism was my only option because I could not drive to story locations or operate a camera. During job interviews, employers would ask how I planned to get around without a car, and I began wondering whether society’s low expectations were right after all. This self-doubt led to severe depression.
It was not until I met the National Federation of the Blind in 2014 that I realized the low expectations society had placed on me did not have to be my own. Maybe there was a way I did not have to let my blindness define me. But it still seemed almost too good to be true.
One of the first things that helped me embrace Federation philosophy was learning about the Blind Driver Challenge. This initiative emphasized that lack of eyesight was not the reason that blind people could not drive; the problem was that technology had never been developed to give blind people the information, through our other senses, to operate a motor vehicle safely and independently.
In 2004, then-Federation President Dr. Marc Maurer challenged university engineering teams to design a vehicle a blind person could independently operate. Seven years later, on January 29, 2011, Mark Riccobono, who would succeed Dr. Maurer as President in 2014, independently drove at the Daytona International Speedway, navigating obstacles randomly thrown into his path and even passing another vehicle along the course. That demonstration changed how the world viewed blind people and transportation technology. It also helped to ensure that blind people were included in conversations about autonomous vehicles from the very beginning.
Life has a funny way of presenting something only when you are ready for it. So it is fitting that in the same year I was introduced to the Federation and the story of the Blind Driver Challenge, transportation for blind people changed in a meaningful way. 2014 was the year blind people discovered the power of ride-share services. Uber and Lyft shook up the transportation arena like an earthquake. No more did we have to wait for a taxi that may or may not show up. No more were we forced to—as here in Arizona—ride a bus in 100-degree heat to go two miles up the street simply because we were not willing to pay the $15 for a cab. Now, blind people had the power to request a ride from their phone and go directly to their destination.
At the time, blind people were thrilled. I distinctly remember a friend of mine taking an Uber to a random place just because he was so glad he could. For years, Uber and Lyft have been great resources for our community and have participated in many Federation events, including national and state conventions.
Someone looking in from the outside might assume that since Uber and Lyft arrived, life for blind people is all good now. Of course, we in the Federation know differently. Even though transportation got easier, defending our right to ride the way we want and need to definitely got harder. Ride-share services introduced new barriers: How do we find our vehicles? Is the app accessible? Would a driver really be okay transporting a family with kids? But number one on this list—always—is the service animal concern. Have a guide dog and want to take a ride-share? You may or may not have a driver deny you. Of course, the Federation does not sit idle in the face of discrimination. We held town halls, built tracking and reporting mechanisms, and rallied at Uber and Lyft headquarters. As my Federation philosophy developed, it became clearer and clearer that good enough is not good enough.
It was just two years after I became a Federationist that I was first introduced to Waymo. Living in Arizona has its perks—sunny for most of the year, no Daylight Saving Time, beautiful scenery, and tons of tech innovation. In 2016, Waymo—operated by Alphabet, the parent company of Google—was seeking feedback from blind people to test this emerging technology. Somehow, I was invited to participate.
I vividly remember sitting in the backseat of that car as it drove—and being completely shocked. Wow! At that time, state law still required a licensed driver to be present in the front seat. So in the back of my mind, a question lingered: was this a truly autonomous ride, or was I being fooled? Being the skeptic I was, I asked the driver to prove the car was really driving itself. It was only when we were making a turn and the driver grabbed my hand with both of his, showing me his hands were completely off the wheel, that the reality hit me. The car not only made a perfect turn on its own, it merged into the center lane more smoothly than anything I had ever experienced. Something became very clear that day: it was not just that this technology was amazing. What became even clearer was that if it were not for the Federation, and the work we put into making sure this technology was inclusive, I would not have been in that car at all.
And yet, doubt crept in. There is no way this becomes mainstream, I thought. In those early days, it was widely held that someone capable of manual control needed to be present at all times. Waymo launched its Early Rider program in the Phoenix area in 2017, began offering paid rides in late 2019, and on October 8, 2020, officially opened its fully driverless service to the public. For some, even then, it was hard to trust their lives to a “robot.”
Between 2022 and 2024, Waymo rapidly expanded, opening to the public in San Francisco and Los Angeles and significantly widening its Phoenix coverage. In 2025, Waymo extended service to freeways in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Soon after, Waymo partnered with Uber to offer autonomous rides in Austin and Atlanta. As of May 2026, Waymo operates paid commercial service in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and Miami, with announced expansion into cities including Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Orlando, Nashville, Detroit, Las Vegas, Washington DC, and San Diego expected throughout 2026. London and Tokyo are in active testing phases. The scale is staggering: Waymo now completes more than 500,000 paid rides every week. Waymo is not the only player in the industry, but it is the farthest along in providing commercial rides and has worked closely with the National Federation of the Blind, hence this article’s focus on its service.
To understand where we are, it helps to know the industry’s framework. The Levels of Autonomy—the scorecard for how much a vehicle can operate without human input—range from zero to five. Level zero is full human control—what most of us grew up with. Levels one and two include common driver-assistance features; helpful, but the driver is still fully responsible. Level three lets the car handle basic traffic conditions but still requires a human backup. Waymo operates at level four: no human needed at the wheel, though currently within defined service areas. Current Waymo vehicles still have a steering wheel, mostly to satisfy existing federal regulations rather than any technical necessity. Level five is the ultimate destination: a vehicle that can operate in any weather, on any road, at any time, with no human required. We are not there yet, but the progress at Level four is already changing our lives. And when Level five does arrive, you can be sure the Federation will have its foot on the gas!
The legal landscape for Level four and five vehicles is at a major inflection point, as lawmakers are finally starting to recognize the potential of this game-changing technology. The Autonomous Vehicle Accessibility Act (H.R. 4419), a bipartisan bill reintroduced by Congressmen Greg Stanton (D-AZ) and Brian Mast (R-FL) in the 119th Congress, is a high priority for the Federation. President Riccobono has been vocal in his support, from testifying before Congress to engaging our members in call-to-action campaigns. The bill is simple but revolutionary: it prevents states from requiring a passenger to hold a driver’s license to use a Level four or five autonomous vehicle. For us, this is not a small technical detail—it is a civil rights protection. Our national leadership, along with the team at Waymo, honored Congressman Stanton at Saavi Services for the Blind in Phoenix for his leadership on this legislation. As the Legislative Director for the NFB of Arizona, I can tell you this bill represents a vital step toward making sure the driverless future does not leave our community in the backseat. We will literally be able to sit in the driver’s seat. I highly encourage everyone reading this to contact your member of Congress and urge their support. Before we know it, Level five will be here, and we do not want to be in the slow lane!
Some reading this will ask: why trust your life to a robot? One need look no further than the hard data. As of the publish date of this article, across more than 170 million fully autonomous miles driven in complex urban environments, the numbers show that Waymo is significantly outperforming human drivers. Compared to human-driven vehicles in the same operating areas, Waymo has recorded a ninety-two percent reduction in serious or fatal injury crashes, an eighty-two percent drop in injury-causing crashes overall, a ninety-two percent decrease in pedestrian injury crashes, and a ninety-six percent reduction in dangerous intersection collisions.
For a community that has long faced the risks of distracted drivers, impaired drivers, and quiet vehicles that seem to come out of nowhere, these statistics prove that the driverless future is not just about independence—it is fundamentally about a safer way to travel.
Before your initial Waymo trip, you must set up a profile in the Waymo app. If you are in Austin, where our 2026 NFB National Convention is being held, the regular Uber app gives you access to Waymo vehicles. Most features carry over, though some accessibility options may be limited in the Uber version. (Important: To be matched with a nearby Waymo vehicle, you must enable autonomous vehicle rides in the Uber app.) For this article, we will be riding with the full Waymo app.
The Waymo app works similarly to other ride-share apps. You sign up, add payment, and request rides just like you would with Uber or Lyft. You must confirm that your destination is within the service area. Temperature controls, trip tracking, and even leg room adjustments are available right in the app. As you will soon discover, playing music and adjusting your pickup/drop-off are definitely areas that need improvement. I will not go through every detail of the app layout, since updates happen frequently and things change.
The vehicles themselves make it pretty obvious you are hopping into a robotaxi. Waymo’s standard fleet is a modified Jaguar I-PACE—a sleek, all-electric SUV equipped with sensors and cameras that make it look like something out of the movie Back to the Future. Inside, it looks like a standard vehicle: driver’s seat with a steering wheel, front passenger seat, and three seats in the back. The trunk is spacious—large enough for me to fit a folding wagon and a backpack—and can be opened and closed directly from the app. When you approach, Bluetooth can automatically unlock the doors, or you can tap the unlock button. The handles pop out of the doors. Waymo is also rolling out its next-generation vehicle, the Waymo Ojai, an electric van built in partnership with Chinese automaker Zeekr. (I was recently invited by Waymo to ride in these.) With a lower step-in height, higher ceiling, basic Braille labeling of door buttons, and sliding doors, the Ojai is purpose-built for ride-hailing and is beginning to appear alongside the I-PACE fleet as Waymo expands into new markets.
One of the most common questions I get is about accessibility features. To Waymo’s credit—and with meaningful input from the Federation—there are a solid number of helpful features to take advantage of. When your ride is confirmed, you can use the “Find My Pickup” feature. Holding your phone in front of your body, the app announces the direction of the vehicle and how many feet away it is. As you walk toward the car, your screen reader continuously updates your position. Once the car arrives, you can use the same feature to locate it. You can also have the car play a melody or honk its horn if you are in a noisy or crowded environment. Personally, I find the horn feature a little more reliable, though the melody is certainly cool. Live agent support is available through the app at any time before, during, or just after your trip.
There are two settings you absolutely want to enable before you ride: audio announcements, which call out street names at each turn and provide real-time updates like “Waiting for intersection to clear,” and the feature that limits how far you need to walk to your pickup or drop-off. This second feature has been helpful but occasionally incorrect; I have had to walk close to a quarter mile in busy areas at times.
This is where I want to make something very clear: competent nonvisual travel skills are not optional. They are what complete the trip. Because the Waymo is not controlled by a person, it parks where its system determines is appropriate. I have been dropped in alleys, near dumpsters, and across a busy street from destinations. Because I have confidence in my nonvisual travel skills, I have always found my way. Your cane, your confidence, and your travel training matter—every single ride.
All of that history—the Daytona Speedway, the legislative battles, the safety data—leads to a single Monday morning in Phoenix. Let me show you what it actually feels like.
Good morning, fellow Federation family member! I am glad you could join me as I take my Waymo to work at Saavi Services for the Blind’s Phoenix center. It is one of those Mondays where you can barely remember what happened to the weekend. We are heading southwest from Northeast Phoenix to Central Phoenix, just outside of Downtown, about fourteen miles total.
It is 7:00 a.m. My daughter Liberti just got picked up for school by her bus. Let’s order the Waymo. I tap the “Work” destination already saved in my phone, confirm my pickup address, and pay with Apple Pay. The app shows the car is five minutes away. We head outside and stand in the driveway.
Holding my phone outward, I tap “Find My Pickup.” It says the spot is forty feet ahead. For some reason, today’s pickup is not directly in front of my house but across the street at the neighbor’s. We cross and wait at the spot where my phone buzzes with a steady vibration—letting me know I have arrived at the right place.
It is a beautiful Arizona morning. One of those mornings that makes you smile even when you have a million things on your mind. A notification chirp tells me the Waymo is arriving. The app shows the car is one hundred feet away. We listen and hear the soft hum of an electric motor approaching from the east—not loud, something like a medium-sized industrial fan running at a gentle setting. The car pulls up directly in front of us. It is almost like it knew exactly where we were standing, you think.
Because I have Bluetooth enabled, we hear the click of the door handles popping out. “Go ahead and sit in the front,” I tell you, since you are the guest on this trip. I take the seat behind the driver’s side so you have the full front passenger experience. You find the handle and pull. Immediately the car speaks: “Good morning, Jordan.” My wife Ashleigh calls the Waymo voice Wanda.
The vibe hits you right away. Front passenger seat. No driver. Just a steering wheel. You cannot help but reach over toward it—the seat where the belt is buckled with no one in it. You feel the leather seats, the sleek interior, the cup holders, the tactile details outlining the buttons. You find the side controls and adjust your seat independently. You find your seatbelt and click it in.
Just then I get in and close the back door. Once both doors are closed, we hear the gentle hold-like music through the speakers, a futuristic version of what you might hear waiting on a phone call. “To begin your ride, press the start button,” Wanda says. I ask if you are ready. You take a few deep breaths. “Are you sure about this?” I remind you I do this all the time. Just relax and enjoy the trip.
My screen reader announces: “Start ride button.” I tap it. “Double tap to start ride.” The moment I double tap, the hold music stops, a small chime plays, and the doors lock, all in one seamless motion. It all happens that fast. You take a deep breath.
We move. A smooth, clean takeoff. The engine grows quieter and that familiar low hum of an electric car takes over. The car goes straight for about ten seconds, shifts slightly left, makes a quick right turn, then stops. We are at the entrance to my neighborhood. “Waiting for intersection to clear,” Wanda says. The high school across the street starts at 7:30, and morning traffic is thick. I ask if you are okay. You do not answer. You are sitting in stunned silence.
After about a minute, the car eases forward and makes a firm left turn. “Proceeding on North 40th Street,” Wanda says. We drive for another minute, slow slightly, and about thirty seconds later the car turns right. “Proceeding on East Bell Road.” We are cruising now. Smooth. Quiet. Just the ambient world around us—music drifting from a nearby car, the whoosh of a bus braking.
Just as you are settling in, the car drifts left. It stops. “Waiting for intersection to clear.” Then it turns left. “Entering Freeway,” Wanda says.
“I did not know we were taking the freeway!” you say, a definite hint of nervous energy in your voice.
“Live the life we want, right?” I say. “If most Phoenicians take the freeway to work, why shouldn’t we?”
The car stops, inches forward, stops again, dancing with the traffic. Then the engine surges. It feels like the moment before a plane lifts off the runway. About ten seconds later Wanda says, “Proceeding on Arizona 51 South.”
Because you are still in awe, you put your window down. As we glide down the freeway, you hear the signature sounds: the whoosh of passing cars, the deep engine rumble of an eighteen-wheeler. You smell exhaust, feel wind against your face. The Arizona morning sun warms your left side. You feel that warm sun mixed with the chill of the wind and you start to relax. So far, so good, you think.
“I wonder what the traffic report looks like,” I say loud enough for you to hear over the noise. “Why don’t we turn on the radio and find out?”
The wind is getting to you now, so you roll up the window. The world goes quiet. I open Google Assistant and say: “Play the station KTAR 92.3 FM on TuneIn on Waymo.” About ten seconds later, a jingle plays and a deep voice announces: “Arizona’s Morning News.” I swipe back to the Waymo app and adjust the volume, each swipe producing a small pop from the speakers.
After a few news stories we probably should not bring up in this article, the traffic report hits. “A minor fender-bender on the 51 South has closed two left lanes from Glendale Avenue to McDowell Road.” You ask if that is on our route. “Yes,” I say. “Well, it wouldn’t be rush hour without traffic, right?” you say. “Now Wanda is really going to be put to the test.”
I put on some instrumental music to lighten the mood. Quietly, I am hoping we will not be late—I hate being late—but a small smile crosses my face. Here I am, a blind man on a Phoenix freeway on a Monday morning, trying to beat traffic and get to work on time. As American as apple pie and strip malls.
And then, as if on cue, the traffic hits. “Squeak.” “Beep.” The sounds close in around us. The car plays its own game of red light, green light. We feel the constant stopping and going. Five minutes pass. Then, suddenly: a jerk right, a stop, another jerk, and we are moving freely again.
“Wow!” you say. “I think we just navigated around the traffic to find the open lane!”
You settle back, shoulders dropping. But just as you get comfortable again, Wanda speaks. “Exiting freeway within one mile.”
Your energy shifts. I can feel it.
A minute later, we slow, stop briefly for a passing car, then ease right into the exit ramp. The car’s momentum shifts as we follow the curve—smooth, deliberate, like a gentle roller coaster. We complete the half-circle and stop abruptly.
“Waiting for intersection to clear,” Wanda says. I will not tell you this, but I am getting a little nervous. We are cutting close to when I want to be at the center.
We wait. And wait some more. I skip the track. The thumping bass is not matching the vibe right now. Simple piano notes arrive like a cold glass of water on a hot Arizona day. Refreshing. “What a busy street!” you say.
After another minute and a half, the car moves again. “Proceeding on East Indian School Road.” Finally!
Surprisingly, Indian School is clear for this time of morning. For the first time in the trip, you are genuinely relaxed. You put your window down again. The breeze at surface-street speed is manageable. The piano matches the mood: calm, present, unhurried. You rest your arm on the window ledge. You hear the sounds of the city—traffic, a bus pulling up to its stop, the chirp of a pedestrian signal.
Moments like this are why we are proud to be Federationists. We refused to let the inability to drive determine where we could go. We wanted to reach places some said we never could. A car with only blind people inside, no driver, moving through the city completely on our own terms. We are going!
“Can I try something?” you ask. “Remember, we cannot touch the steering wheel,” I say with a smile. “No, no,” you say. “Let me see your phone for a second.” I hand it over, honestly not sure what you are about to do. Throw it out the window? Go through my messages? Make a random call?
About thirty seconds later, it happens. It hits us like the final words of a Presidential Report at a national convention. “Live the life you want. Nobody can stop you. Reach for the sun and break on through.”
It’s that song that has defined our movement since it debuted at the NFB’s 75th Anniversary Convention in 2015. James Brown and the Cane Tips, coming through Wanda’s speakers! I put my window down, too. We both sing at the top of our lungs: “So you’re blind, you’ll be fine. We got good news!!!”
The song blasts as we sit at a red light, and every single doubt, every moment of believing I would never be able to live life like everyone else, every low expectation I ever let take root—it all goes right out that open window. The philosophy we carry in this movement—that blindness is a characteristic, not a defining quality—has never felt more real than right now.
“It is a good thing we can’t see the faces people are making as we sing out the window,” you say. “Who cares?” I reply. We both laugh.
As the car moves forward it turns left. “Proceeding on North 7th Street,” Wanda says. We turn the music down and just sit together in the moment. We proceed south for about a minute, both of us smiling, until a chime plays. “Almost there,” Wanda says. “Don’t forget your phone, keys, or wallet. Your future self will thank you.”
As the car slows for the right turn onto Verde Lane, the significance of this whole trip fills me like the cup of coffee sitting in the cup holder. “Finding a spot to pull over.” We feel the car ease slightly right, pause, ease a little more. The hold music returns.
“We have arrived at your destination,” Wanda says. “Pull on the door handle to exit the vehicle.”
Reluctantly, you gather your things. You pull the handle, grab your cane, and step out with an energy that says you want someone to notice a blind person exiting a car with no driver. You close the door. “Bye, Wanda,” you say.
I come around to meet you on the sidewalk. We just stand there together, breathing in the city air, taking everything in. Then the car makes a small sound, the door handles click back into place, the wheels shift, and we hear the quiet crunch of the road beneath them. Just like that, Wanda drives off.
We cross the small street toward the center. “We made it with time to spare!” I say. You are quiet. In your head, the voices of our movement are echoing. This journey brought us here, and this journey is a map for everything that comes next.
We walk inside. The Monday morning buzz is all around us. “Thank you,” you say. “No—thank you,” I say. “You are a Federationist, just like me. This is what we do.”
“What’s next?” you ask.
“I am looking forward to taking that autonomous flight with you,” I say.
As I park the metaphorical vehicle that is this article, I want to be honest: even as we celebrate how far this technology has come, we must not settle for anything that does not fully meet our needs. The inability to independently adjust your pickup or drop-off location on the map as a blind user is frustrating. The in-car touchscreen is not accessible without sighted assistance. And the process for playing music—requiring Google Assistant workarounds that sometimes work instead of seamless screen reader integration—is, frankly, maddening. These are not minor inconveniences. They are design gaps that a community as engaged and vocal as ours should not have to accept as permanent features.
To Waymo’s credit, they are listening. The Federation’s relationship with Waymo is not just ceremonial—Waymo has been a Grand Canyon-level sponsor of NFB Arizona conventions, a Washington Seminar sponsor for two consecutive years, and a sponsor of our Congressional Reception at Washington Seminar in 2024. That relationship means we have a real place in the driver’s seat, not just a ride in the backseat. We intend to use that seat.
More intuitive voice control, fully accessible in-car interfaces, AI-powered conversational features—these are not wishes. They are expectations. And with the Federation’s dedication and Waymo’s willingness to engage, we will keep pushing until they are reality.
Now we have choices. We do not have to worry about being turned away because of our service animals. We do not have to make small talk with a driver who keeps asking about our blindness. We do not have to apologize for our busy kids. I am reminded of something we have said many times in the Federation: “We know who we are, and we will never go back!”
If you had asked me as a child whether a blind person could ever drive, I would have laughed at you. That pot of gold called the Federation philosophy has led me to a place I can never leave—a place of acceptance, a place where I no longer have to wonder whether life as a blind person can be a full life. It drives my work as Director of Strategic Initiatives at Saavi Services for the Blind. It is the force behind my doing something my O&M teacher said could never be done: teaching cane travel as a blind person. That boy who felt like he was always missing out is now a man who cannot wait to drive his friends and family around Phoenix whenever they visit.
This philosophy is what my wife Ashleigh—lead coordinator for NFB STEM2U—and I impart to our blind daughter Liberti, our son Lemial, and the third child we are expecting later this year. Through the NFB, they will grow up knowing that blindness is not an excuse to stop reaching for your dreams. The low expectations of blindness will not be held by them. We are already planning those cross-country road trips in our Level five.
That pot of gold does not have to seem too good to be true. The sense of missing out, the feeling that we cannot live like everyone else, will still arise. But what would have happened if we had let those low expectations define us? We would not have had the Blind Driver Challenge. We would not be seated at the table where the future of transportation is being shaped. The refusal to remain in the backseat is what drives our movement forward. We are not afraid to let our voices be heard. We are not afraid to show the world what blind people can do.
I am reminded of the words President Riccobono shared in his 2016 banquet address: “We bond together in the National Federation of the Blind to face the uncertainty of the future, to challenge ourselves to expand the horizons, and to take ownership of living the lives we want. Society’s fears of blindness will not stop us. Facing our own fears will make us stronger. And the power of our unwavering love, hope, and determination will lead us through uncertainty to new heights. Let us break down the conditioned fears of others. Let us challenge ourselves to conquer the fears that stand in our way. Let us overwhelm fear with our unstoppable engine of hope.”
That unstoppable engine of hope has powered this movement since 1940. It is the gas our membership puts in the tank every single day. Our movement is the vehicle that empowers every one of us.
When it comes to blind people and driving, we will never be backseat drivers again! This is one invention we are steering. Let us use it as a reminder that the road ahead is wide open, and we have every right to drive on it!by Chris Danielsen
It goes without saying that for blind and deafblind Americans, inaccessible websites and mobile applications are not a minor inconvenience. They are barriers to healthcare, education, employment, civic participation, and independence. That is why the National Federation of the Blind has fought for equal access to digital content for the past two and a half decades or more. In addition to entering into direct negotiations with companies, universities, school districts, and government entities; providing resources to help businesses and governments improve accessibility through the establishment and growth of our Center for Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility; and, usually when all else fails, filing lawsuits, we fought for clear federal standards requiring government agencies and healthcare providers to make their digital services accessible. In 2024, after more than a decade of study, public comment, and rulemaking, the United States Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services finally adopted landmark regulations establishing those standards. Then, just as the first deadlines for compliance arrived in spring 2026, the current executive administration abruptly delayed them.
This betrayal of the promise made to blind, deafblind, and disabled Americans was covered in last month’s Braille Monitor. As we reported then, we made several attempts to forestall these actions, which government agencies had been signaling were coming. We wrote letters before the documents announcing the delays, known in government jargon as interim final rules, were even published. When they were finally issued, we submitted official comments. (Our comments to the Department of Justice (DOJ) announcement were published in May, and our comments to the Health and Human Services action follow this article.) In addition, John Paré, our Executive Director for Advocacy and Policy, and our general counsel Eve Hill, herself a former DOJ attorney, met with DOJ officials on three separate occasions attempting to dissuade them from this course of action. But now the adverse actions have been taken. So on May 21, 2026, the National Federation of the Blind—represented by Democracy Forward and our longtime allies at Brown, Goldstein & Levy of Baltimore, including Eve—filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland challenging the agencies’ actions.
Suing the government is no small matter and some members have wondered why we are pursuing litigation at this point rather than continuing our efforts at persuasion. The answer is that, in addition to violating our rights, the interim final rules violate a federal law known as the Administrative Procedure Act. President Riccobono explained this well in an email to a member. Here it is:
Thank you for your email and for your commitment to protecting the rights of blind Americans.
I agree that collecting stories and engaging in persuasion are important tools. In fact, they are tools we have been using. We have gathered stories from affected individuals, educated policymakers, engaged allies, communicated with agency officials, and worked to build public understanding of the harm these actions would cause. The National Federation of the Blind has always believed that changing hearts and minds is an important part of creating lasting progress. However, this situation presents a challenge that cannot be addressed through persuasion alone.
The federal agencies involved have taken actions that we believe violate the law, specifically the Administrative Procedure Act. The issue before us is not simply whether we agree or disagree with a policy outcome. The issue is whether federal agencies followed the legally required process before taking actions that directly affect the rights and opportunities of people with disabilities.
The process for challenging these agency actions provides only a limited window for legal action. If we fail to act within that window, we risk losing the opportunity to obtain meaningful relief regardless of how persuasive our arguments may be. Litigation therefore is not a substitute for advocacy; it is a necessary tool for preserving our rights when the government acts outside the bounds established by law.
It is also important to understand that we are not suing the President. We are seeking relief from federal agencies that we believe have violated federal law. We have never held back from taking action, and that action has no connection to who is in power at the time. Our lawsuit asks the courts to require those agencies to comply with the legal procedures Congress established. This is precisely how our constitutional system is designed to function. When an agency exceeds its authority or fails to follow required procedures, the courts provide a mechanism for review.
A letter-writing campaign can be valuable in influencing policy decisions and shaping future actions. What it cannot do is remedy a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act that has already occurred. Only the courts can provide the legal relief necessary to address that violation.
More broadly, I do not see this as a choice between persuasion and litigation. Throughout our history, the Federation has employed every available strategy when defending the rights of blind people. We have educated the public, told our stories, built relationships with policymakers, organized grassroots action, advocated before administrative agencies, pursued legislative change, and, when necessary, sought relief through the courts. These strategies are not mutually exclusive; they reinforce one another.
In fact, many of the Federation’s most important victories have been achieved through a combination of public education, political advocacy, and legal action. We persuade when persuasion can solve the problem. We legislate when legislation is needed. And when government agencies violate the law in ways that threaten the rights of blind Americans, we use the legal system as well. Our responsibility is not to choose one tool over another, but to employ every appropriate tool available to protect and advance our rights. Please remember also that the campaign you are currently referring to has been underway since at least 2010.
We will continue telling our stories. We will continue educating policymakers. We will continue engaging our families, friends, and communities. We will continue building public support. And when government agencies violate the law, we will continue to seek appropriate relief through the courts.
I appreciate your engagement and your willingness to think critically about our strategy. I would be interested in your reflections on what I have shared here. Do you see aspects of the persuasion and relationship-building work that you believe we should strengthen further alongside our legal efforts? I would welcome your thoughts.
Sincerely,
Mark
The complaint we filed argues, as explained above, that the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services violated federal law by delaying implementation of the regulations without proper notice and public comment and without adequately considering the harm to blind people and others with disabilities. The lawsuit seeks court orders restoring the original compliance deadlines and preserving the regulations that promised to bring disability rights protections fully into the digital age.
As background, the regulations at issue adopted the internationally recognized Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standards for digital accessibility. These standards are already widely used across the globe and provide clear technical requirements for accessible websites and apps. The DOJ and many of our nation’s courts have also adopted the standards in court cases and in settlements reached with various parties. The rules require covered entities to design websites and apps so that they work properly with access technologies such as screen readers and refreshable Braille displays. That includes ensuring that buttons and images are labeled properly, forms can be completed nonvisually, and digital content is organized in ways that allow blind users to navigate efficiently.
Our complaint notes that the regulations were the product of more than fifteen years of rulemaking, analysis, and public input. The DOJ first announced its intention to establish accessibility standards for government websites on July 26, 2010, the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Over the following years, the agency sought multiple rounds of public comments, conducted cost-benefit analyses, and held listening sessions with stakeholders. In 2024, the DOJ finally promulgated regulations under Title II of the ADA requiring state and local governments to ensure that their websites and mobile applications comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
At roughly the same time, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized parallel regulations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the ADA’s predecessor, requiring healthcare providers such as hospitals, nursing homes, and other recipients of federal financial assistance to make their web content and mobile apps accessible.
Both sets of regulations gave larger entities two years to comply and smaller entities three years. As the lawsuit explains, the agencies carefully weighed the need for accessibility against the burden on covered entities and concluded that the compliance timelines struck the proper balance between urgency and feasibility.
But in April and May 2026, only days before the first compliance deadlines arrived, the agencies issued the interim final rules postponing implementation by another year. The DOJ extended the compliance deadline for larger government entities from April 24, 2026, until April 26, 2027, while the Department of Health and Human Services extended the deadline for larger healthcare entities from May 11, 2026, until May 11, 2027. The deadlines for smaller entities are now two years away, in 2028. Importantly, although the agencies invited public comments on the interim final rules, they said that they would go into effect immediately regardless. Even more troubling than all that were the agencies’ signals, buried deep in the text of each interim final rule notice, that they may attempt to weaken or further delay the underlying accessibility rules in the future.
The Federation’s lawsuit argues that these delays, and any further tampering with the regulations, are not only unlawful but also “arbitrary and capricious” because little has meaningfully changed since the regulations were issued in 2024. In other words, the same circumstances under which the agencies set the original deadlines still exist; nothing has happened to make it harder for covered entities to comply. According to the complaint, the agencies bypassed the normal notice-and-comment process required under federal law (specifically the Administrative Procedure Act) and instead imposed the delays immediately while only allowing comments afterward. The complaint further argues that the agencies, having no real evidence of changed circumstances or unrealistic expectations in the original regulations, relied primarily on a few anecdotal assertions from longstanding opponents of the rules and failed to meaningfully consider the harms that disabled people would continue to experience as a result of the delays.
Those harms are not theoretical, as we all know. The complaint makes this clear for the court by including stories from blind Federation members across the country, solicited through our publications and social media, describing the barriers they continue to encounter when government agencies, educational institutions, and healthcare providers fail to make their digital services accessible. (Those stories are still coming in, and you can submit yours by emailing [email protected] or calling 410-659-9314, extension 2444. They are still needed to support the lawsuit and our advocacy efforts.)
For example, Andrew Slater was unable to apply for unemployment benefits in his home state of Illinois. “The website was not designed for screen readers, making it difficult to navigate,” the complaint explains. “Certain fillable online forms could not be completed, making it impossible for him to submit his application for benefits online. Andrew spent hours attempting to resolve the issue via phone calls directly to the relevant administrative agency, and the agents he spoke with frequently recommended actions that were similarly inaccessible for a blind screen reader user of the website. These barriers resulted in inconvenience and wasted time that a sighted person does not have to endure.” Many of us can doubtless identify with Andrew’s frustrating experience. Who among us has not dialed a contact number provided on an inaccessible website in hopes of finding a helpful human to get us around the problem only to be referred back to the same website by a not-so-helpful human or, even worse, an automated system that doesn’t let us get to any human at all?
Barriers to business registration, civic participation, and community life were also addressed in the lawsuit. Sina Bahram, an accessibility consultant and entrepreneur from North Carolina, encountered inaccessible online systems when attempting to form a new corporate entity in his state. Because the state portal was unusable with his screen reader, he had to hire a registered agent to complete the process on his behalf, resulting in additional expense, inconvenience, and delay that sighted business owners do not experience. Dana Ard, president of the National Federation of the Blind of Idaho, described being unable to identify legislators serving on relevant committees because Idaho state government websites were inaccessible to her screen reader. As a result, she was unable to obtain information needed to participate effectively in the democratic process. Margie Donovan of California explained that, during her fifteen years of residence in her city, inaccessible Parks and Recreation Department websites prevented her from independently reviewing event calendars and information about community programming. Even after raising concerns with city officials, the barriers remained.
The complaint also details the educational consequences of inaccessible digital systems. Lindsey, a blind graduate student in California, encountered delays registering for coursework because her university distributed the course catalog as an inaccessible PDF table that her screen reader could not interpret. While her sighted classmates could quickly review course offerings, she could not access the same information with equal convenience or timeliness.
Healthcare barriers described in the complaint are equally troubling.
Jolean O’Connell of Kentucky sought telehealth counseling services but encountered an inaccessible online intake form containing a signature field that could not be completed with a screen reader. When she requested an alternative method for signing the form, the therapist refused to provide services at all, telling Jolean that telehealth was not appropriate for her.
The complaint emphasizes that these examples represent only a small sample of the barriers blind people face every day. The delayed regulations were intended to address exactly these kinds of problems. The lawsuit also pushes back against the government’s claim that the delays are necessary because compliance would be too burdensome. The complaint notes that the agencies already spent years considering those concerns before issuing the final rules. The regulations included not only the statutory exceptions for undue burdens and fundamental alterations contained in the original ADA, but also provided additional, newly-created exceptions covering, for example, much pre-existing content, allowing entities to focus primarily on making content accessible going forward, which is simple and inexpensive. In addition, smaller entities were already given an extra year to comply with the regulations. Therefore, the regulations as promulgated relieved many burdens rather than imposing new ones. The complaint further argues that many organizations have already spent years preparing for compliance and that the administration’s last-minute delays create uncertainty rather than clarity.
In announcing the lawsuit, we stressed that digital accessibility is not optional in a society where government services, education, and healthcare increasingly exist online. “For over fifty years, our laws—specifically Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act—have promised blind Americans and other Americans with disabilities equal access to all areas of life, including digital spaces and services. Yet today this promise remains unfulfilled, and now our government is compounding the outrage by asking us to wait even longer,” said Mark Riccobono, President of the National Federation of the Blind in OUR OFFICIAL statement. “We will not wait. We will fight to ensure that the promise of America’s laws, and indeed its founding documents, finally becomes reality for blind and disabled Americans.”
This litigation represents the latest chapter in the organized blind movement’s long fight to ensure that technological progress benefits blind people equally rather than leaving us behind and relegating us to second-class citizenship. The internet long ago ceased to be a mere luxury or novelty. It is now the primary gateway to government services, healthcare, education, employment, and community involvement. Blind people cannot afford to wait indefinitely for equal access while agencies continue postponing rules that have already been studied, debated, and finalized.
The National Federation of the Blind does not seek confrontation, and we have patiently pursued both regulatory and legislative avenues to achieve the goal of clear and comprehensive guidance for entities covered by the civil rights laws that promise our full participation in society. But we will not have the promise of full integration dangled in front of us only to be unlawfully snatched away at the last minute with no credible justification or fair opportunity, as guaranteed by our laws and the Constitution’s First Amendment, to petition our government to seek redress for the ongoing harm being done to us. In the courts or wherever else the battle is joined, we will continue to engage until the war for the equal web is won.
From the Editor: The footnotes in the document reprinted below have been omitted. To see the document in its original form, visit https://nfb.org/advocacy and then click Policy Statements.
May 29, 2026
Paula Stannard
Director
Office for Civil Rights
United States Department of Health and Human Services
200 Independence Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20001
RE: RIN 0945-AA30
Dear Director Stannard:
The National Federation of the Blind, the transformative membership and advocacy organization of blind Americans, appreciates the opportunity to comment on the Interim Final Rule (IFR) regarding the regulation to establish specific requirements for web and mobile apps offered by covered entities to the public, in accordance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (The Rehab Act).
In 2024, we were pleased to see the Department of Health and Human Services (the Department) moving forward with a regulation addressing website and mobile application accessibility. However, this IFR delaying the rule’s implementation for another year, while also proposing to consider further changes to the final rule, is deeply concerning.
First and foremost, any delay of the compliance deadline for the rule is utterly unnecessary. Covered entities have known for many years that a digital accessibility rule was in the works, that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA—an internationally recognized consensus standard for digital accessibility—was published in June 2018, and that the WCAG 2.1 AA standard was proposed in the 2023 NPRM and then officially adopted in the May 2024 final rule.
No matter how we choose to look at this, covered entities have had a minimum of three years to familiarize themselves with a set of guidelines that has existed since 2018. Delaying implementation or enforcement for another year only acknowledges that covered entities knew the law, did not meet it, and are now being given a pass rather than being held to the standards they could have been meeting for years.
While Section 504 covered entities, such as hospitals and medical diagnostics labs, are able to postpone implementation of accessibility requirements for their websites, blind Americans are not afforded the same luxury to postpone paying the bill. Consider the story of Chris, a blind Marylander in Baltimore who was forced to go through extraordinary measures just to pay an approximately ten dollar charge from LabCorp because the company’s mobile app is inaccessible:
I received a text message from LabCorp stating that the bill for recent tests I had at Mercy Hospital here in Baltimore was available and inviting me to pay it online. I was busy so did not get to it until the next day. I thought I would quickly access the link in the text message and pay the bill, which was a small one of just over ten dollars. I was able to double tap on the link on my iPhone, and I was able to get through the first screen, where my invoice number was pre-populated and I only had to add my ZIP and birth date.
When I got to the page where I could view and pay the bill, however, I was unable to enter my credit card information, even with the help of auto-fill features. The system threw errors without letting me know what they were, and form fields where I was supposed to insert information randomly disappeared or did not perform as expected.
I finally gave up and called the toll-free phone number for help. The first thing it did, after letting me know how wonderful LabCorp is, was to ask for my invoice number. This would have been printed on the invoice they mailed me, which I did not have, so I had to hang up, find the invoice number on the initial web page I accessed from the text message, and memorize it.
I dialed back in and was able to enter it, but then the system wanted my credit card number. It did not give me enough time to enter the entire number using my iPhone keypad. I finally had to dial in from my land line (which fortunately I haven’t gotten rid of) so that I could use the tactile keypad on my land line phone to enter all the information. After roughly a half hour to forty-five minutes of doing all this, I was finally able to pay them the ten dollars they wanted. Had their online portal been accessible, I probably could have paid the bill in two minutes or less.
Or Kelsey, who was unable to even schedule an appointment due to an inaccessible online patient portal and had to wait on hold for an unacceptable amount of time:
I visited my primary care doctor back in March for my annual physical. Prior to that, I was asked to complete blood work. The hospital where my doctor is affiliated recently switched their lab services to Quest Diagnostics. Unfortunately, their website and mobile app are completely inaccessible, so just to make an appointment, I had no option but to wait on hold for over an hour to talk to a person at corporate.
The person I spoke with was extremely rude and when I tried to explain that I couldn’t use the website or the app because it is inaccessible to blind people, all I got from her was “I apologize,” but no offer to try to escalate to the appropriate department. When the day of the appointment came, had my dad not been there, I would have been unable to sign in.
These are not offhand experiences for blind Americans, but rather near daily barriers caused by inaccessible website and mobile applications used by Section 504 covered entities.
Fortunately for these covered entities, the tools, techniques, and expertise needed to implement WCAG 2.1 are well established and commercially available. Thousands of organizations, including many state and local governments, have already achieved compliance. This is not difficult, and covered entities have no excuse to still be out of compliance with the requirements of the 2024 final rule.
The IFR states that “the Department underestimated burdens to recipients, especially smaller recipients, when setting the compliance dates in the 2024 final rule.” We know the opposite to be true. Far from underestimating the burden of coming into compliance, given the rapid development of simple and inexpensive tools for making existing and new content accessible, if anything, the 2024 final rule likely overestimated the cost and difficulty of compliance.
Moreover, Section 504 already provides two general defenses to deal with any burden: (1) undue burden and (2) fundamental alteration. Both of these longstanding exceptions are well-recognized by Americans with disabilities and by the United States legal system. The IFR explicitly acknowledges this. To be frank, the relevance of the undue burden defense is being mitigated through the advancement of technology.
We are living in an era where digital accessibility is already relatively easy to attain, and it is only getting easier. Therefore, there is simply no basis for an assumption that covered entities will face a significant burden to make their websites and mobile apps accessible.
However, the final rule goes further; adding five new classes of exception to the requirement to make web and app content accessible. These exceptions relieve covered entities of the need to make much pre-existing content accessible, thus further reducing any burden. These proposed exceptions go far beyond the current undue burden and fundamental alteration defenses and therefore substantively decrease the obligations of existing law.
The proposed exceptions exempt broad swaths of new and existing content regardless of how easy the content is to make accessible and regardless of the resources available to do so. These exceptions allow covered entities to focus their efforts on making new content accessible—which is inexpensive and simple to accomplish.
Two to three years was more than enough time for covered entities to develop processes and procedures to ensure new content is accessible. Any further delay in compliance only compounds the problem by allowing for the creation of more new and inaccessible content.
Providing accessibility for new web content is neither unduly burdensome nor costly, and covered entities should not be able to avoid providing accessibility for new content unless they can demonstrate that doing so would actually constitute an undue burden or fundamental alteration. Requiring still another year before being in compliance with the law is an outrageous admission that the civil rights of Americans with disabilities are not a priority.
It is true that some existing content may properly be subject to an exception because it may arguably be presumed that it will be burdensome in most instances. However, new content should never be presumed to be burdensome to make accessible in the absence of some unusual constraint on the resources of the particular covered entity. The entity is in the best position to determine what those constraints are, to document them in real-time, and to respond affirmatively to assertions of liability.
People with disabilities should not lose access to important information, including new content by large entities, simply because some small entities may, for reasons unique to them, have difficulty complying. Those entities already have an additional year to comply and a defense available to them. Here again, failing to implement and enforce the rule now because of the Department’s belief that entities will fail to comply only serves to provide a pretextual justification for continuing to deny people with disabilities the access guaranteed by law.
It is preposterous for the Department to say simultaneously that the law already protects people with disabilities, that the law must be enhanced because it is not actually protecting people with disabilities, and also that such enhancements will come eventually, but not today, not this year, but maybe next year or the year after that, all because some entities may have an undue burden that they have yet to raise or support.
Furthermore, as the IFR states, “the Department is concerned that noncompliance among a significant portion of those recipients would lead to a significant increase in litigation.” This is only partially true. As the IFR notes, a private right of action is already available under Section 504. The thousands of lawsuits that get filed every year, targeting digital accessibility specifically, are not dependent upon this rule.
For example, in 2025 3,117 ADA Title III website accessibility lawsuits were filed in federal courts. Note that statistic is for ADA Title III website accessibility suits, and that rulemaking for Title III has not progressed beyond an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) published on July 26, 2010. Lawsuits regarding digital accessibility under Section 504 can proceed directly under the statute and the existing regulations.
If anything, further delaying the compliance deadline does not reduce litigation risk, it increases it by removing the one clear, predictable technical standard and exceptions that Section 504 covered entities could rely on. Without the rule’s compliance framework, courts will be at leisure to continue applying the Rehab Act’s general effective-communication standard for digital content without defined benchmarks for compliance.
Finally, in what is by far the most concerning part of the IFR, the Department states: “The Department plans to engage in future rulemaking related to the substantive requirements of the 2024 final rule. During the extension period, the Department will consider issuing an NPRM providing members of the public with an opportunity to comment on the substance of the 2024 final rule and any changes proposed by the Department, including any changes that would affect the web content and mobile app accessibility requirements.”
This sentence transforms the IFR from a mere delay into a staging action for a far more consequential attack on the rule itself. The National Federation of the Blind is categorically opposed to further limiting the scope of the final rule as published in 2024. As we have repeatedly pointed out, the rule offers covered entities five additional exemptions beyond those provided by undue burden and fundamental alteration.
This watering-down of our rights is wrong enough. Any additional reduction in our rights is not merely a subtraction of those rights, but an exponential decrease. The National Federation of the Blind would stand in direct opposition to such degradation and would work tirelessly to ensure it does not come to fruition.
In closing, the National Federation of the Blind again appreciates the opportunity to comment on the Section 504 Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability in Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance Final Rule.
We urge the Department to let the rule go into effect with no further delay. We further urge the Department to immediately cease any plans or efforts toward additional rulemaking on this regulation. We look forward to the entire rule being implemented and enforced. If there are any further questions, or if we can be of assistance in any way, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
Mark A. Riccobono, President
National Federation of the Blind
by Amy Porterfield
I was about six weeks old when my parents figured out I wasn’t tracking anything visually. The doctors confirmed I was totally blind. My mom and dad had never met a blind person before. When the doctor told them to place me in a sanatorium in Coolidge, Arizona, because raising a blind child would be too hard, they knew there had to be a better way.
My mother called what was then Arizona Services for the Blind. A young blind man named Ray Mungaray picked up the phone. He told my parents I could live a good life, and that it was their job to help me explore the world. They took him at his word. My childhood is full of memories that prove it. My father would distract the staff at a museum while my mother ducked me under the velvet ropes to touch the exhibits. My mother opened boxes on toy store shelves so I could feel what was inside. In our house, curiosity wasn’t just permitted. It was expected.
My father became a teacher and later an administrator at the Arizona School for the Blind, and my mother worked in the dorms. Both spent over thirty years at the school. My father used to tell me, “You are normal. You just can’t see.” That sentence was the interior compass I carried about what every blind person had the right to expect from their own life. But having a compass is not the same thing as trusting it when a credentialed voice tells you to put it down.
I didn’t go straight into the field. I spent years in other human services work while earning my master’s in rehabilitation counseling and raising my preschool-aged son, Jordan, on my own. When a position opened teaching access technology at what was then the Southern Arizona Association for the Visually Impaired, I took it.
Once I was in the building, it didn’t take long to see how differently blind and low-vision students were treated. Students with residual vision were given opportunities to try things. Students with none were given excuses. I started meeting with the executive director about what more could be built, and together we wrote a grant so that I could complete my master’s internship at the agency, build a comprehensive program, and get paid for the work. As a single mother raising Jordan, an unpaid internship was not something I could afford. The grant was how I took care of my son and stayed in the field at the same time.
Even with the grant in place, the culture around me did not change. My supervisor told me to teach my students about good-guy drinking glasses and bad-guy glasses. Tall or thin glasses were the bad guys because they would be too hard to pour into. I was supposed to teach that in the name of safety. I refused. There were other things I also refused. My students were called my disciples. I was often ostracized by my sighted peers.
I eventually left to work at the Arizona Rehabilitation Services Administration, where I met people doing the work differently. I met Julie Deden from the Colorado Center for the Blind and saw what authentic blind training looked like, where students led and confidence was not a goal but an expectation.
Around the same time, I enrolled in a rehabilitation teaching methods class taught out of a living room. Bob Kresmer, now the board chair of Saavi Services for the Blind and then the president of the Tucson Chapter, and his wife, Lynn, taught it out of their home. It was the best class I ever took. They had made the environment so completely accessible that there was nothing to accommodate. Philosophy and technique were the same subject, braided together. Bob started inviting me to the National Convention, and every year I had a reason I couldn’t go. Eventually, when Mike Gordon became Saavi’s executive director and brought me back as associate director, he told me to go, and that the organization would support it. So I went.
It was the day before convention, the evening when everyone reconnected after a year apart. I had come down to the hotel lobby to meet Bob and Lynn Kresmer. While I waited, I really listened to what was around me: canes tapping in every direction, conversations overlapping, and people greeting each other like family.
What captured me first was the young, confident blind women. They moved the way I moved. They talked the way I talked. They carried the confidence I had always carried. I realized, sitting there, that I had been missing these friendships in my own life. I had grown up around blind adults and blind friends, but I did not have a peer community of blind women who were mine. The second thing I realized, almost without a gap, was that my students back home were missing this too.
Then I saw a teenager I recognized. The year before, we had worked with him at our “Ready, Set, Go” summer camp, and my orientation and mobility teachers had told me, with the confidence of professionals, that he would never travel independently. I didn’t question it. I took them at their word. That same young man had gone to the Colorado Center for the Blind after our camp, and every time I turned around in that convention hotel, there he was: traveling on his own, crossing streets, and moving with his friends. He had been let loose.
I want to tell the truth about what I felt in that lobby, because if I don’t tell it honestly, I can’t tell the rest of this story. I felt a profound shame. The shame wasn’t that I hadn’t known. That would have been easier. The shame was that I already knew. My father had handed me the compass when I was a child. Ray Mungaray had told my parents, before I was old enough to remember, that my life could be a full one. The Braille Monitor and the Kernel Books had come to our house my whole life. I still remember a piece I read years ago by a woman who had a mouse in her house and had to catch it and let it out. I used to turn it over in my mind, picturing how she had done it, running through how I would do it myself if I ever had to. I think about that piece to this day. So I knew that blind women lived ordinary lives, solved ordinary problems, and wrote about them in their own voices. Everything I needed to push back on what my orientation and mobility teachers had said about that young man, I already had. And I didn’t use it. I deferred to their credential over the student’s own potential.
That is the conditioning it would take me years to name. Low expectations are insidious. They live in the blind adult at the buffet line deciding whether to try to serve herself. They live in the habit of saying, “I can’t,” when what we mean is, “I was told I couldn’t.” Every one of us has done some version of this. I certainly have.
I came home from that convention and went straight to Mike. I told him we were hurting our students by not letting them find their own potential, that the Federation was offering something critically important we had been missing, and that we had to learn it together. Mike believed me. He caught my zeal and he backed me. The rebuilding of everything we thought we knew is a story for another article.
The first time I met Mark and Melissa Riccobono was at an Arizona state convention when, in 2011, Mark was serving as our national representative as the executive director of the NFB Jernigan Institute. He was kind and funny, and he was the first person to make me feel like a real Federationist rather than a professional visiting from the outside. What he offered me that day is what I have tried to offer every person I have met in the Federation since. A way to join, and to feel like they matter. That is the most important work I feel I can do in the Federation. Melissa was there with their toddlers, moving through the convention as an independent mother and a professional at the same time. I was still a single mom then, and watching Melissa was its own kind of affirmation.
Every convention I attended in those growing years surfaced another layer. One year the layer was what I had allowed at the center. The next it was catching myself still deferring to a sighted lead in small ways. Each year, Federationists beside me were working on the same layer. We didn’t finish the work. We shared it.
Pam and Rolland Allen and Joanne and Harold Wilson became mentors and friends. We would catch up at convention and keep the conversation going in between. Pam had a way of listening long enough and patiently enough for me to find the next step. Joanne had a way of pumping me back up when I was discouraged until I remembered why I had started.
The closest anchor through all of it has been my husband, Donald Porterfield. Donald came to Saavi as a student. After his training we began dating and we built a life together. He is a prosecuting attorney by profession and today serves as president of the National Federation of the Blind of Arizona. He believes it is our responsibility to use our gifts to advocate for those who haven’t yet found how to use theirs. That belief has been the steadying line through convention after convention where I found another layer of the shame to work through. Donald has walked me back into the work more times than I can count, and he has walked a great many other blind Arizonans into it beside him.
Becoming a Federationist did not make me a different person. It reintroduced me to the person I had already been. What the Federation adds is the part no training center and no mentor can provide alone. It is the place where the work of pushing back against low expectations gets held across time, across members, and across generations so that no one of us carries it alone.
I know this in a particular way now, because I have watched it happen in the lives of our students. The young blind people I first started bringing to convention years ago meet each other there, year after year. They have become each other’s roommates, best friends, wedding party members, and babysitters. They are raising each other’s children beside their own. The friendships I spent my twenties looking for are the friendships they have now, and they have them early. That is why we show up at convention together, loud and proud. Not because we are trying to be noticed, but because we actually love each other, and a room full of people who love each other tends to make a certain amount of noise.
That is the life I wanted for that teenager the first time I saw him free in a hotel lobby. It is the life I want for every student who walks through the doors of Saavi Services for the Blind. And it is the reason that, whenever a student graduates from our program, I tell them the same thing: Training gives you skills. The Federation gives you a home.
by Ahmad Shafi
From the Editor: Ahmad Shafi is president of the National Federation of the Blind of West Virginia and participated in the 2025-26 cohort of the Kenneth Jernigan Leadership in Service Program.
Growing up, no one would have ever considered me blind. Most people assumed I was clumsy, and that probably made sense at the time since I bumped into things constantly. I’ve always worn prescription glasses, so to others I could “see.” What I didn’t realize was that my experience of the world wasn’t the same as everyone else’s. When night came, my vision disappeared almost entirely—but I assumed that was normal.
Blindness was not unfamiliar in my life. My mom taught us to offer help to blind people crossing the street. My first babysitter was blind. I didn’t think much of it—I even used to hide from her as a game. She took care of us, fed us, walked with us, and rode the bus. My uncle is also blind and has worked at the same hospital longer than I’ve been alive. Even with all of that exposure, I didn’t truly understand what it meant to be blind.
That changed when I was about the age of 13. I was admitted for a sleep study for unrelated reasons, and a doctor noticed something unusual in my eyes. After multiple appointments with retinal specialists, they diagnosed me “legally blind” with Retinitis Pigmentosa. It was a shock—but also an explanation. Suddenly, the things I struggled with made sense. For my mom, it was much harder to learn that her son had a rare genetic eye disease.
In seventh grade, I was given a choice: start learning Braille and Orientation and Mobility (O&M) right away, or wait until high school. I chose to start immediately, and I’m glad I did. At that point, I didn’t feel ashamed of being blind. In fact, I was excited. I told my friends when I got back to school. But their reaction changed everything. They told others, and soon they began avoiding me. That was the moment I learned that blindness, to others, meant something very different. From then on, I became more selective about who I told and when I used my cane.
That summer, I attended programs at the Romney School for the Blind. I earned my first leadership award there. I also visited places like Gallaudet University for the deaf and the headquarters of the National Federation of the Blind. There, I had my first real conversations about blindness. But even then, I didn’t fully understand what was possible. I remember saying I would never let a blind person cut my hair. I even saw the now President Riccobono driving a car and thought maybe I could still drive someday. I had hope—but not yet clarity. So I kept searching.
I attended NASA Space Camp for Visually Impaired Students throughout high school. I joined programs that took blind students skiing, whitewater rafting, and ziplining. At sixteen, I was selected to raft the Grand Canyon. I was surrounded by blind people doing incredible things. But despite all of these experiences, something was missing. None of these programs fully changed how I understood blindness.
That began to shift my junior year, when my O&M instructor told me about people with my condition—Retinitis Pigmentosa—who never fully accepted blindness or learned the skills they needed. He also told me about the Louisiana Center for the Blind. Around the same time, I realized how easily blind students can fall through the cracks. I had not been introduced to access technology early enough. I had to fight for what I needed. In college, that fight continued. I studied cybersecurity, but the systems we relied on—websites, course platforms, exams—weren’t accessible. When I raised concerns, I was asked to prove it. Even when I did, little changed. When COVID moved everything online, the barriers became overwhelming, and I had to withdraw.
That was the turning point. I made a decision: I was going to live as a blind person—fully and without apology. I committed to using my cane everywhere outside my home. I decided that if people had a problem with it, those weren’t the people I needed in my life. Shortly after, I reconnected with the National Federation of the Blind through members in West Virginia. Listening to their stories brought back the hope I had felt years before—but this time, it was different. When I shared my story, they didn’t measure me by how much vision I had. They accepted me completely. Through them, I learned about my rights, about advocacy, and about what was truly possible. They helped me access resources and supported my decision to attend the Louisiana Center for the Blind—even when others in my life doubted it.
That experience changed everything. At the center, I learned practical skills like cooking, cleaning, and technology while wearing learning shades, but more importantly, it changed how I saw myself. I stopped thinking of myself as “a person with some vision trying not to be blind.” I accepted that I am a blind person—and that blindness does not limit my ability to live a full life. I became adaptable. I gained confidence. I developed real independence.
Today, I serve as president of the National Federation of the Blind of West Virginia. I am working toward becoming a certified Orientation and Mobility instructor so I can help others navigate their own journeys.
Looking back, I’ve had many experiences as a blind person—some exciting, some difficult, some transformative. But no organization has had a greater impact on how I understand blindness than the National Federation of the Blind. They didn’t just teach me skills. They taught me to expect more from life.
And now, I want others to know what I didn’t know at the beginning: You have rights. You have options. And you are capable of far more than you may believe right now.
If you’re at the start of your journey, I encourage you to connect, to learn, and to share your story. You never know who it might reach—or how it might change their life.
Through the Federation, I learned that most of what I was taught to believe about blindness was untrue. Being blind wasn’t something to be ashamed of. Using my cane in public wasn’t weird. If I wanted to pick up my cane or my [guide] dog and walk somewhere, I could just do it because the fears of other people didn’t have to be my fears too. - Julie
Blind people across the United States are making powerful strides in education and leadership, but we need to continue helping people like Julie. For more than eighty years, the National Federation of the Blind has worked to transform the dreams of hundreds of thousands of blind people into reality. With support from individuals like you, we can continue to provide powerful programs and critical resources now and for decades to come. We hope you will plan to be a part of our enduring movement by including the National Federation of the Blind in your charitable giving and in your estate planning. It is easier than you think.
Below are just a few of the many tax-deductible ways you can show your support of the National Federation of the Blind.
We accept donated vehicles, including cars, trucks, boats, motorcycles, or recreational vehicles. Just call 855-659-9314 toll-free, and a representative can make arrangements to pick up your donation. We can also answer any questions you have.
General donations help support the ongoing programs of the NFB and the work to help blind people live the lives they want. You can call 410-659-9314, extension 2430, to give by phone. Give online with a credit card or through the mail with check or money order. Visit our online contribution page at: https://nfb.org/donate.
Through the Pre-Authorized Contribution (PAC) program, supporters sustain the efforts of the National Federation of the Blind by making recurring monthly donations by direct withdrawal of funds from a checking account or a charge to a credit card. To enroll, call 877-NFB-2PAC, or fill out our PAC Donation Form https://www.nfb.org/pac.
The National Federation of the Blind legacy society, our Dream Makers Circle, honors and recognizes the generosity and imagination of members and special friends who have chosen to leave a legacy through a will or other planned giving option. You can join the Dream Makers Circle in a myriad of ways.
You can specify that a percentage or a fixed sum of your assets or property goes to the National Federation of the Blind in your will, trust, pension, IRA, life insurance policy, brokerage account, or other accounts.
You can name the National Federation of the Blind as the beneficiary on a Payable on Death (POD) account through your bank. You can turn any checking or savings account into a POD account. This is one of the simplest ways to leave a legacy. The account is totally in your control during your lifetime and you can change the beneficiary or percentage at any time with ease.
If you do decide to create or revise your will, consider the National Federation of the Blind as a partial beneficiary.
Visit our Planned Giving webpage (https://www.nfb.org/get-involved/ways-give/planned-giving) or call 410-659-9314, extension 2422, for more information.
Just imagine what we will do in 2026, and, with your help, what can be accomplished for years to come. Together with love, hope, determination, and your support, we will continue to transform dreams into reality.
by Eric Duffy
I joined the National Federation of the Blind in 1984. I have held various offices in my local chapter and state affiliate. I have served as president of the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio, and I was Director of Access Technology at the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute. But one of my most rewarding roles has been that of BELL® Coordinator for the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio.
The BELL (Braille Enrichment for Literacy and Learning) program is for blind and low-vision children ages four to twelve. This innovative program was designed and built from the ground up by the National Federation of the Blind. We created the program because we recognized the need for blind children to receive more instruction in Braille than they get during the school year and certainly during the summer. I have coordinated four of the seven programs that the Ohio affiliate has conducted. I have consulted with affiliates that have started programs. For a number of reasons, we have not had a BELL program now in Ohio for a few years. Rather than coordinating a program, I have had time to reflect on the value of BELL. I know that we do far more than teach Braille in these programs, and I for one wonder what my life might have been like today had I been introduced to the National Federation of the Blind through the BELL program. But all of my contemplation on that subject will help no one, including me. Here is what I know for sure: We change lives through this program. Not only do we change children’s lives, we change the lives of blind and sighted adults as well. I plan to demonstrate this through this article and, in doing so, make the argument that BELLs should be ringing everywhere from here on out.
In 2013, Ohio conducted its first BELL program. It was a day program, and I believe we had six students. For most of these students, blindness was their only disability, but it was clear that they all needed the National Federation of the Blind. Not all of the blind adults knew it at the beginning of the program, but we needed them, too. Working this program took most of us out of our comfort zone at least a little, and that’s always a good thing. We challenged the students, and they challenged us. They challenged us to think of exactly how to teach a particular skill. Even at their young ages, they challenged us to explain the importance of wearing learning shades or using a cane. The program lasted two weeks, and most of our volunteers stayed at the Ohio State School for the Blind and commuted to the location of the program each day. The days were long for everyone, and long days turned into long weeks. But we did it. We were proud of our accomplishments and those of the kids. We were satisfied with our work. The students and their parents seem pleased as well.
But we knew that the real test of what we had accomplished was yet to come. What was going to happen in 2014? Could we fund the program? Could we get enough students again? Could we get some of the same students back? Could we get more students? Could we get enough volunteers again?
The answer to all of these questions was overwhelmingly yes from 2014 to 2018. In 2016, we made the decision to conduct a one-week residential program to be held at the school for the blind. Before we were too far along in the planning, I accepted a job at the New Jersey Commission for the Blind. But it will come as no surprise to anyone who knows the Federation that the show went on. Federation leaders in Ohio filled the void and ran successful programs in 2016 and 2017. There was no program in 2018, but in 2019 I had the privilege of coming back to Ohio to live and to coordinate another BELL Academy. Somewhere along the way (and I honestly can’t remember when) we began using the word “academy” rather than “program.” Academy is a much more appropriate word than program. Although I had to get used to this change, many of the students who participated in our first program were still with us. To me this spoke to our success more than anything else to that point. The students wanted to come back, and their parents were bringing them back. This wouldn’t have happened if the students hadn’t been learning and growing and if the learning and growing couldn’t be attributed directly to BELL.
But to me that still doesn’t pass the smell test. For me the question is: How do we know we changed lives? Do the families understand the importance of the National Federation of the Blind? Without a doubt, it is safe to say yes. How do I know? I stayed in contact with some of the families after they stopped coming to BELL. Some families attended state and national conventions. At least one of our first BELL students is now a member of the Capital Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio. She is also involved in the National Association of Blind Students. She attended the Midwest Student Seminar this spring. One challenge in doing this was that she had to convince her family that she should and could do this on her own. She did, and, while there, she met Mark and Melissa Riccobono. She has just completed her freshman year at Miami University of Ohio. Here is a story that appeared in the student newspaper:
Miami University News
May 6, 2026
MaKenzie Love was honored by the Ohio legislature recently for being the first Ohioan to win the national Braille Challenge in 2025 as a high school senior.
Now a first-year student at Miami University, Love told lawmakers about the importance of Braille, a system of writing that uses characters made up of raised dots. She uses Braille every day at Miami and has even read the “Harry Potter” series in Braille.
“Braille literacy is absolutely crucial to the lives of blind and low-vision students. Over ninety percent of students that read Braille are employed, but the startling statistic is that only ten percent of blind people in the United States read Braille,” Love, of Commercial Point, told lawmakers on the floor of the Ohio House of Representatives in late March.
“We need to get out there as a nation and as a community, and as Ohioans especially, to encourage Braille literacy throughout the state and the nation.”
Love, who was born blind, is in Miami’s new Inclusive Education program. She wants to teach PK-5 students who are blind or have low vision.
Ashley Cartell Johnson, clinical professor of Educational Psychology and coordinator of the Inclusive Education program, said, “The Inclusive Education major prepares teacher candidates to teach all learners, including students with disabilities and multilingual learners, in today’s increasingly diverse classrooms. It is the first and only program in Ohio to offer a comprehensive and integrated major that leads to blended licensure in primary general education and K-12 special education (both mild/moderate and moderate/intensive licenses) and to an endorsement in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).”
Cartell Johnson said Love is a “dedicated and passionate inclusive education teacher candidate. We are confident that MaKenzie will shape, lead, and define the movement toward inclusive and accessible classrooms that support and honor all learners.”
Love said she plans to attend graduate school after earning her bachelor’s degree.
Love, who made President’s List her first semester, said she’s having a great experience at Miami. “I absolutely love it here. I love the friends that I’ve made, and I have met so many wonderful people.”
She chose Miami because of the education program in the College of Education, Health, and Society. “It really stuck out to me. I loved campus when I first came to visit,” she said, noting that she enjoys being in the Honors College and living in an honors residence hall on Western Campus.
Zeb Baker, dean of the Honors College, said Love is the embodiment of the ‘citizen scholars’ the Honors College has taken as its mission to produce those who use their education to advance the common good.
“MaKenzie is the kind of student who reminds all of us who are fortunate to work with her why we entered this profession in the first place,” he said. “Her inexhaustible love of learning and bottomless energy to do as much good as she possibly can through that learning are an inspiration.”
Love appreciates having the Center for Student Disability Services and the AccessMU Center on campus for assistance when students need them. For her, that ranges from getting materials in Braille and tactile graphics, using assistive technology, to meeting with her professors in advance “so they know how best to serve me in class.”
She demonstrated how she uses the BrailleNote device. She also uses Job Access with Speech (JAWS), a screen reader designed for blind and low-vision users to navigate computers via text-to-speech or refreshable Braille displays. It provides full access to applications, websites, and documents.
Love is able to get around campus without the aid of a guide dog. She walked from a class in Shideler Hall to the Armstrong Student Center’s Shade Room for this interview.
“I think the use of the white cane is absolutely crucial to mobility and to being able to get around,” she said. “It’s so important to have those cane skills before you could contemplate getting a guide dog.”
Love sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a Cleveland Guardians baseball game last July for Disability Awareness Celebration Night. Now she enjoys being a member of Miami’s Choraliers women’s vocal ensemble.
“It’s a lot of fun. We get to do a lot of interesting repertoires and a very diverse amount of music,” she said. “And it’s been great to establish relationships with other students that love to do the same thing as I do.”
Robyn Lana, director of the Choraliers, called Love a valuable addition to the choir.
“She works to learn movement and is open to the help of colleagues, who are eager to assist because of her ability and desire to do well.”
While Love uses a Braille reader to learn lyrics that aren’t available for the musical scores, Lana said Love catches on very quickly. Lana noted Love was a percussionist in high school and will be playing a cajon, a box-shaped Peruvian percussion instrument, during this Friday’s concert in Kumler Chapel.
“For this piece, she will ground the tempo for the entire choir,” Lana said.
Love also is involved with Navigators, a Christian ministry student organization on campus, and she is one of the co-founders of the Honors Spanish Tables for students who want to practice conversational Spanish in the Honors College.
She started Spanish Tables with Emma Grupe, resident director of Hillcrest Hall.
“MaKenzie and I were talking at the beginning of the year, and I had mentioned that I was a Spanish major here at Miami,” said Grupe, who graduated in 2024 with a bachelor’s in Anthropology, Spanish, and Linguistics and a master’s in Spanish through the combined BA/MA program in Spanish.
“She speaks Spanish as well, so we started chatting in Spanish that day,” Grupe said. “We discussed the possibility of doing something with Spanish for the residents of the Honors Residential College, and Honors Spanish Tables were born.”
Grupe said Love is a wonderful co-host for the program. “She is such a caring individual, and it shows in her commitment to her community and the ideas she brings to better it. I’m so glad to have the opportunity to work with her in this regard.”
Love said it was gratifying to win last year’s three-day academic challenge testing students on five fundamental Braille literacy skills: reading comprehension, spelling, speed and accuracy, proofreading, and interpreting charts and graphs.
“It was amazing to see how much my work had paid off because I had practiced really hard,” she said. She first won the Harley Fetterman Award for Excellence in Charts & Graphs, which she traditionally considered to be her weakest category. “I was very, very, very surprised and honored to win,” she said.
Love learned she won the varsity competition when her name was called.
“It was very surreal to hear it, but it was also very exciting to know that Ohio had been represented and that my wonderful teachers and instructors in high school were there watching online,” she said.
Her Teachers of Blind Students “got me to that point,” said Love, who at age five became one of the first students to join the Braille Enrichment for Literacy and Learning (BELL) Program through the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio. Love is still involved with the Federation, which she called “a major part of my journey as a student.”
She hopes to pay it forward by working with young blind students. “Braille exposure to individuals at a young age is very important,” she said, “and I think it’s so important and crucial to emphasize the learning of Braille and also to learn from blind adult role models as well.”
That was the student newspaper’s story about MaKenzie, and, yes, I know reporters can often generate a lot of fluff, especially those working for student papers, but MaKenzie is the real deal. I say without a doubt I am proud to know MaKenzie Love and proud to have her as a member of the National Federation of the Blind.
BELL is right for the sighted as well. I first met Caroline Karbowski at the 2018 National Convention. She was just getting to know the organization at the time, and we were just getting to know her. Since then, she has won a Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award for the work her company does with 3D printing. In 2019 She volunteered in our BELL Academy and taught our students how to dissect sharks among other things. On the afternoon the program began, Caroline and I went shopping for supplies. She wore learning shades and used her long white cane throughout the shopping trip. One might be tempted to say she probably used her vision too. From the length of that shopping experience, I can assure you she didn’t. I sat on a bench at the front of the store hoping we would make it back to the school before the families started arriving. Caroline told me that volunteering for BELL has been one of the best learning experiences she has had as she prepares to teach blind children. Caroline is one of those rare sighted people of whom we can truly say, “In her heart, she’s as blind as we are.”
In 2019, Emily Keihl also volunteered to help with our BELL Academy. With encouragement from Caroline, she came to Columbus as the ball of energy that she is. She was terrific with the kids, and she quickly picked up on the alternative techniques of blindness that week. Her growth as a blind person was tremendous. Although she has had a fair amount of useable vision all of her life, her skills and confidence really began to develop as a result of her involvement in the BELL Academy. She is now a leader in the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio. She is also a tenBroek Fellow, which means she has won two scholarships from the National Federation of the Blind.
Since my involvement with BELL, I have consistently said that this program benefits everyone who is a part of it, from the youngest child to the oldest adult. If anyone comes away from the program without learning to do something he or she has not done before, or without having learned to think about blindness in a more positive way than before, he or she didn’t leave it all on the field. I include myself in this as well. I have benefited greatly from working in our BELL academies, and I know you will too. The BELL Academies that are not already planned will not happen this summer, but I hope this article helps Federation leaders from across the nation consider the value of hosting a BELL Academy. I hope that affiliates that are not running a BELL Academy this year will do all they can to host one next year. I would be more than happy to assist in any way possible to help you have BELLs ringing in your affiliate next summer. That’s how much I believe that next summer BELLs should be ringing everywhere.
by Justin Salisbury
Sometimes blind people with the same eye condition will refer to themselves as “twins” in some way. The most common way that I seem to hear it is “eye condition twins.” In my experience, this is usually done in a positive, playful manner. I support the idea of blind people forming bonds with each other, but something about bonding over having the same eye condition has always seemed problematic to me, even when I could not quite put my finger on why. As I try to grapple with this concept, I hope that readers of the Braille Monitor will consider engaging in a conversation about the idea of eye condition twins and its drawbacks, as well as some of its benefits.
I remember being newly blind as a sophomore in high school and the process of looking for other people who shared the same medical conditions that caused my blindness. My top focus was figuring out how to succeed in the academic and social parts of school, and I was not interested in identifying with other blind people yet. I wanted to be remembered as the competitive student and athlete that I had been before that point, and grouping myself with other blind people seemed like an ineffective way to maintain that status. I would now discourage any other blind people from taking that attitude, but that was what I did at the time.
During the summer, I attended some residential high school youth programs at a training center for the blind. In my first program, which aimed to help youth transition to adulthood, we had a series of classes on a daily schedule, including Braille, orientation and mobility (which did not necessarily include using a cane), individual counseling, group counseling, and a few other things. We did not have classmates in the individual counseling class because that was where the counselor would walk us through the stages of grief and loss to deal with our blindness. In the classes where we had classmates, we were paired with other students who had similar levels of functional vision so that we could discuss similar techniques to accomplish tasks, maximizing the use of our residual vision. I do not recommend this clustering strategy, but it happened. Whether or not the program designers intended this, I found that I ended up bonding more with the students who had similar levels of residual vision, and I bonded less with the ones who did not. This was partly facilitated by the clustering of classmates, but I suspect that I would have taken this approach anyway, since I felt like my level of residual vision was such an important and defining feature of my own life. I wish that my training program had known better than to follow the same beliefs about blindness that I had as a newly blind teenager, but we cannot go back in time.
I noticed that some of the other students who shared the same eye conditions seemed to bond over that eye condition, and I think it was in that summer program that I first heard blind people referring to themselves as twins. At some level, I think this comes from the early conversations that we have with the eye doctors who tell us that we are blind or going blind. Eye doctors have a tendency to tell people that they have a rare eye condition, which is true when we are compared to the general population of the country or world. But once you get into the blind community, some of those eye conditions are quite common. For example, I have heard people start off by saying that they have this super-rare eye condition, eventually naming it as retinitis pigmentosa, only to find that about forty percent of the people in the room share that eye condition. I remember seeing those other blind kids finding their twins and feeling a bit left out when I didn’t have a twin myself.
Consider a conversation like this:
Person 1: Oh my gosh, you have Stargardt’s?
Person 2: Yes, I do.
Person 1: Wow, that’s so cool! I have Stargardt’s, too! We are twins! I’ve never met anyone else like me.
Person 2: Me neither! It’s so nice to finally find another person who understands me!
It took until I was in college to finally meet anyone with the same eye condition as me—and become aware that this was the case—but then that person still did not have a similar amount of functional vision as I did. That still did not seem to count as a twin. I think I was a graduate student at Louisiana Tech University, in my master’s degree program to become a cane travel instructor, before I finally met another person who could be my eye condition twin. By that point, I had stopped caring about the search. There were way too many other ways to bond with other blind people to worry about finding my eye condition twin. Here are a few of those other bonding strategies and examples of why I believe the “twin” approach can be problematic.
If we wait until we find someone with our exact same eye condition to trust that another blind person might share similar experiences with us, we might miss out on the opportunity to bond with a whole lot of blind people who could have much to offer us. One of the biggest ways that I started bonding with other blind people was through student division programming and scholarship programs at the state and national levels of the National Federation of the Blind. One of the biggest factors that helped us bond was shared academic or career interests. If I had waited to trust someone until I found someone with exactly my eye condition, I would have waited far too long.
The majority of the problems that we face as blind people are not automatic consequences of blindness; instead, they are consequences of living in a society that is designed based on sightedness. In our society, the dominant group whose needs and ways are prioritized are the sighted people. The people who fall outside that group share a common experience of our needs being treated as if they exist only in the margins. The margins have been set in ways that create a barrier that keeps blind people on the outside. As we work, collectively and individually, to get past those barriers, we learn things and make progress in ways that benefit everyone else who is kept in the margins like we are. Everyone who shares this common experience of marginalization can work together as one blind community to make the world more welcoming for us.
This is not to say that focusing on our medical conditions is never appropriate. I can easily imagine circumstances in which our medical conditions may lead to certain kinds of barriers that we may face that other blind people do not. For example, some eye conditions cause extreme sensitivity to bright lights, leading people to wear dark sunglasses or hats to minimize discomfort. Some people in our society look down upon those who wear hats or sunglasses. When they have influence over spaces, they may work to set rules, customs, or norms that make people wearing hats or sunglasses unwelcome. People who navigate this barrier may share kinship over shared experiences and be able to support each other in many ways. This is a way that specific ableist societal forces can corral together people with a specific medical condition.
While our level or quality of eyesight should not matter and does not make us any less of a blind person, it can relate to specific kinds of ableist microaggressions that we face. At the time of writing and for the past twenty-one years, I have had a significant amount of residual vision, with pretty good acuity but a narrow visual field. Some people call this “tunnel vision.” I often find that sighted people think that I am faking being blind because I am making good eye contact or reading the sign of a big-box store from across a parking lot. If they do not think I am faking blindness, they may assume that I can see more than I can and expect me to access visual information that I am not receiving. For example, they may try to hand me a printed form that I am supposed to complete visually with a pen, which I cannot do. A legislator may walk by me in the hallway and think that I am rude for not acknowledging them, when I never even knew that they were there, only to find me in their office moments later, looking them in the eye and asking for their support on a bill.
If they are less willing to support that bill because of what they assumed I saw in the hallway, we all suffer. People with no light perception do not experience these same microaggressions in the exact same way. Different groups within the blind community receive their own special casserole of microaggressions, but it is also essential that we work together to combat all forms of ableism against the blind, even if we personally are not part of that subgroup. Nonetheless, there is a way that these shared experiences with special forms of ableism can create some kinship among those smaller groups. Our eye condition twins may belong to the same smaller group as we do.
Overall, I believe that the idea of eye condition twins can be productive in some short-term ways, but I suspect that each blind person needs to progress to a point where we no longer feel emotionally invested in it. Dr. Jernigan gave us a model of three stages of independence: fear and insecurity (FI), rebellious independence (RI), and normal independence (NI). In the early stage of fear and insecurity, the idea of eye condition twins may lead us to feel comfort and acceptance at a time when we may find it difficult to feel comfort and acceptance from other sources. Finding a twin may create a bridge to help us to get connected with a broader blind community and perhaps a local chapter of the National Federation of the Blind. Our twin might get us in the door. If someone learns that I am their eye condition twin and feels a sense of safety, comfort, or understanding with me because of it, I would probably try to treat that as a good thing and help introduce them to additional blind friends and spaces that may help broaden their comfort zone. Eventually, when we get to normal independence, I suspect that we no longer feel the unique kind of emptiness that can only be filled by an eye condition twin. In the phase of normal independence, the eye condition twin is no longer so important to us, but we may be able to be a bridge for others who think of us that way.
Sometimes blind people became blind because of some other medical condition, where blindness was just one consequence. For example, diabetes causes many effects, and blindness can be one of them. In the National Federation of the Blind, we have a division for blind people who also have diabetes, and I think this is a good thing. For a blind person who has diabetes, connecting with other people who have diabetes can lead to sharing tips and strategies for how to manage diabetes as a blind person, such as by using talking glucometers and learning adaptive techniques as blind people with the complicating factor of diabetes. For example, I have heard blind diabetics share strategies for dealing with neuropathy in their hands while learning to read Braille or increasing their reading speed. These are great things, and these other intersecting medical conditions are not the type of twins that I am proposing that we should perhaps consider problematic.
When I think about the ways that I intentionally bond with other blind people, I think it should not be centered around my eye condition. I am much more complex than my eye condition, and my eye condition is a relatively insignificant part of who I am. My identity as a blind person is, by contrast, a significant part of who I am. My eye condition and my identity as a blind person are two very different things. If we think that we can fit in or belong once we find someone who shares our eye condition, then we also reinforce an idea for ourselves that, when we are in places where nobody shares our eye condition, we do not belong. This means that, in most spaces in this world, we will not belong. That can be a dangerous downside to settling into a sense of comfort based on shared eye conditions. In the National Federation of the Blind, we consistently reject the notion that the most important part of blindness is a medical condition; instead, the marginalization of blind people in society and how we deal with that marginalization are much more important. If a newly blind person is willing to connect with me because I share their eye condition, I am happy to connect with them. I simply never make my eye condition the pitch for why anyone should trust me or bond with me. I do not want to reinforce the common ableist idea that a person’s eye condition is a central part of who they are.by Sandy Halverson
Our National Federation of the Blind message has always been one of hope, support, love, and planting seeds to raise the low expectations, based on misconceptions and stereotypes, about our perceived limitations. Many of us have transitioned throughout our lives within this community, starting as blind students supporting and problem-solving with each other, then connecting with blind and sighted parents providing guidance to their children and, ultimately, the push to leave the nest for higher education or employment. Eventually we reach retirement to pursue leisure activities or other interests, navigating health issues and complex bureaucratic systems. But when we find ourselves at an impasse created by a lack of access to information or the fear of what might lie ahead, we once again seek those like us who can show us how to live the lives we want. Our National Federation of the Blind Seniors Division was formed to meet the needs of both our longtime Federation family members and those newly blind older adults who lost sight from various eye conditions such as strokes and diabetes and who are coming to our movement for the first time.
We began by planning and executing programs for blind and low-vision seniors seeking information about hearing aids, downsizing, choosing a retirement living community, and methods to appropriately label and monitor medications. After the pandemic brought the Zoom platform into our lives, our division board proposed conducting an annual virtual seniors retreat, and we want Braille Monitor readers to know about this program and help us spread the word. Participants have been recruited by listserv announcements and word of mouth for the past few years, but next year registration information will be disseminated earlier and more widely to reach others who need to know about us and what we offer. In the meantime, here’s a recap of our most recent retreat to build anticipation and provide a preview of what to expect.
This year, our virtual retreat began with a meet-and-greet on Sunday, February 8 and concluded with a wrap-up on Saturday, February 14, 2026. We had thirty-two participants from thirteen states. We were delighted that President Riccobono joined us to recognize our lived experiences, express his gratitude for the many ways in which we contribute to the work of the National Federation of the Blind, and look forward to being an active member of our division at a later point in his life.
We devoted an hour each day introducing participants to nonvisual techniques beginning with cane travel, home management and independent living skills, technology, and general information sessions. Cane travel instruction is coordinated by Duncan Larsen, our treasurer, whose career was teaching cane travel for many years in addition to coordinating senior programs at the Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB). Orientation and mobility staff from that Federation training center, all of who were blind, taught some of the sessions, with topics covering cane basics from length to tip, indoor and outdoor navigation, stowing a cane in a variety of situations, using a cane with a walker or wheelchair, crossing a variety of intersections, cardinal directions, and answering questions from our participants. It was made clear that these instructions will get you started but building self-confidence requires a lot of practice and working with individuals who know that our methods yield success.
Jane Degenshine, one of our division board members, brought high energy and much enthusiasm to our daily one-hour technology classes. Presentations she scheduled included demonstrations of NFB-NEWSLINE®, NLS BARD, iOS apps with VoiceOver, kitchen high- and low-tech methods, and a variety of Alexa skills. I find home management conversation topics that propose solutions for organizing personal documents, kitchen safety, and accessing information to accomplish those tasks most helpful, but we also are often faced with medical condition considerations such as severe hearing loss for which cochlear implants might be an appropriate remedy if hearing aids are not effective.
We invited one of our NFB of South Carolina members to tell us how, after several years of poor service delivery from the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, he obtained support from that agency to attend the Louisiana Center for the Blind, one of our Federation training centers, and now has the self-confidence afforded by such positive blindness skills training to pursue employment. We were fortunate to learn about birding from Donna Posont, a Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award winner, who inspired us with her knowledge of a wide range of bird sounds and enthusiasm for nonvisual exploration of our natural environment.
Our president, Glenn Crosby, has wonderful community connections who taught us how to shop for anything we are seeking, make do-it-yourself home repairs using nonvisual techniques, and use methods for medication identification and management. We were delighted and inspired by a conversation with Jonathan Mosen, who shared details about his mother’s resistance to technology and his approach to her gradual acceptance of that same technology to allow her to maintain contact with her grandchildren and her children. Jonathan stressed the importance of determining what each of us wants to do and then identifying the most efficient device or devices for those tasks.
Our five-hour Zoom meetings have an hour between the second and third classes for topics not covered elsewhere: getting our families to accept and respect our nonvisual methods, strategies for church and community involvement, and just fun banter. Judy Sanders, our vice-president, moderates this session and keeps the rest of our schedule running smoothly.
One of our participants who had been working with her state agency for blindness services and had identified her need to learn how to use her iPhone, was ecstatic to learn about VoiceOver and, during the course of one evening, figured out how to read email and text using that powerful iOS screen reader. Several participants are planning to attend our upcoming national convention and are looking forward to our division activities and an opportunity to join us for a meal.
We agree that hands-on teaching is the best, but virtually we are able to reach seniors throughout the country who clearly need to be a part of our family, learn how they can control their lives in ways they never thought possible, and be introduced to nonvisual techniques for all aspects of life. Several participants expressed interest in joining local chapters and are beginning to make those in-person connections that will bring them more fully into our family. We will continue sharing the hope, love, and true gift of the National Federation of the Blind.
by Gary Wunder
The Golden Rule is one of the most beautiful moral teachings ever given to humanity: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It is simple, memorable, and powerful. It calls us away from selfishness and toward sympathy. It asks us to imagine ourselves in the place of another person and then act with the kindness, fairness, and mercy we would want if the situation were reversed.
There is a reason the rule is called golden. It shines. It reminds us that other people are not obstacles, tools, cases, problems, or projects. They are people. They have feelings. They have hopes. They have fears. They can be hurt. They can be encouraged. They can be respected or dismissed. The Golden Rule asks us to begin with this basic truth: I should not treat another person in a way that I would regard as cruel, degrading, dishonest, or dismissive if it were done to me.
For this reason, nothing in this article should be read as an attack on the Golden Rule. The world would be far better if more of us lived by it. Public life would be kinder. Families would be stronger. Workplaces would be more decent. Schools and other public institutions would be more humane. The Golden Rule has restrained many a cruel impulse and inspired many an act of generosity. It deserves our respect.
But there is another rule, sometimes called the Platinum Rule: do unto others as they would have you do unto them. Its purpose is not to replace the Golden Rule but to carry it further. The Golden Rule charges me to look within myself and ask, “How would I want to be treated?” The Platinum Rule charges me to look beyond myself and ask, “How does this person want to be treated?” It requires not only sympathy but curiosity. It requires not only kindness but humility. It requires not only a good heart but a willingness to listen.
This distinction matters deeply in the lives of blind people. A sighted person who lives by the Golden Rule may sincerely want to help. That person may say, “If I were blind, I would want someone to take my arm, lead me across the street, order for me in the restaurant, tell me where to sit, explain what I cannot do, and protect me from embarrassment.” These impulses may come from kindness. They may be rooted in a desire to prevent danger or discomfort. But they may also be rooted in misunderstanding. The sighted person is imagining blindness from the outside. They are asking, “What would frighten me if I suddenly could not see?” That is not the same as asking, “What does this blind person know, want, need, and prefer?”
This is where the Platinum Rule becomes especially valuable. It says: do not merely imagine yourself as blind and then act from that imagined fear. Get to know blind people. Ask us. Listen to us. Learn from our experience. Understand that blindness is not a costume sighted people can put on for an hour and then understand. Real curiosity demands fuller answers than a temporary simulation can provide.
Blindness is not best understood by closing one’s eyes and trying to cross a room. It is understood by listening to people who live with blindness every day. It is understood by learning from blind people who work, raise families, travel, read, cook, teach, lead, worship, vote, love, argue, build, and contribute. It is understood by recognizing that we are not symbols of tragedy, courage, helplessness, or inspiration. We are human beings.
There is a familiar saying about walking a mile in another person’s shoes. It is meant to encourage empathy, and in that sense it is useful. But we should be honest about its limits. We can never fully walk a mile in another person’s shoes. At best we can listen, observe, learn, and be changed by what the other person tells us. Otherwise, taking another’s shoes only leaves them without shoes and with a mile of distance between us.
Blind people do not need the public to pretend to be blind for a day and then announce what blindness means. We need people to listen to those who live with blindness every day. We need people to understand that the meaning of blindness is not best defined by fear, pity, or cinematic imagination. It is best understood through the lived experience of blind people themselves.
This is why the philosophy of the National Federation of the Blind matters. We are not an organization speaking for the blind from the outside. We are the blind speaking for ourselves. When we say that we are the voice of the nation’s blind, we do not mean that every blind person thinks exactly alike. No group of human beings does. We mean that blind people must be central in defining what we need, what we want, and what kind of future we intend to build.
This principle does not reject help from sighted people. Far from it. Blind people want and need allies, friends, teachers, employers, family members, public officials, readers, drivers, technology developers, and neighbors. We need people who care enough to stand with us. We need people who will use their influence when it can help open doors. We need people who will read a document; describe a picture; offer transportation; support sound public policy; and make room for us in schools, workplaces, churches, and civic life.
But help must not become control. Assistance must not become ownership. Friendship must not become management. The Golden Rule may move a sighted person to offer help. The Platinum Rule teaches that the help should be shaped by what the blind person says is helpful.
There is a difference between saying, “May I help you?” and seizing someone’s arm. There is a difference between saying, “Would you like me to read the menu?” and ordering for someone without asking. There is a difference between saying, “The empty chair is two steps to your left,” and pushing someone into it. There is a difference between making information accessible and deciding that a blind person need not have the information at all. The first approach respects the person. The second approach treats the person as an object of custodial care, or worse, of neglect justified as realism.
This distinction matters beyond social courtesy. It affects education, employment, transportation, technology, rehabilitation, and public policy. If sighted people decide what blind people need without listening to blind people, even good intentions can produce bad systems. Schools may protect a blind child from ordinary responsibilities and call it compassion. Potential employers may assume that blindness means inability, call it realism, and spare the blind person not only from failure, as they intend, but also from success, which they consider impossible. Public agencies may provide services that keep blind people dependent and call it care. Technology companies may build inaccessible products and call blind people a small market. In each case, people may believe they are being reasonable. Some may even believe they are being kind. But kindness that refuses to listen is still a barrier.
Federation philosophy challenges this. We know that blindness is not the characteristic that defines our future. We know that low expectations create obstacles between blind people and our dreams. This is not a denial that blindness has practical consequences. Blindness changes how we read, travel, gather information, and perform many tasks. But it does not reduce us to helplessness. With proper training, opportunity, accessible tools, and public attitudes that make room for our competence, we who are blind can live full and meaningful lives.
This is why the Platinum Rule is not merely a matter of politeness. It is a matter of justice. If you assume that I need what you would need if you suddenly lost your sight, you may offer me pity when I need opportunity. You may offer protection when I need training. You may offer charity when I need a job. You may offer a handout when I need a chance to give. You may offer sympathy when I need respect.
Blind people do not want to be cast permanently as receivers. We want to be givers. We want to serve on boards, raise children, pay taxes, teach classes, run businesses, lead organizations, comfort friends, solve problems, and contribute to our communities. Sometimes we need assistance, as everyone does. But needing assistance in some circumstances is not the same as being needy as an identity. Every human being is dependent in some way. The question is whether dependence is treated as a mutual part of human life or as a reason to lower expectations.
The Golden Rule can help sighted people begin the journey. “If I were treated with contempt, I would be hurt, so I should not treat blind people with contempt. If I would want access to information, I should support access for blind people. If I would want the chance to work, I should not deny that chance to someone else.” This is a worthy beginning.
The Platinum Rule asks for the next step: “Let me learn what blind people themselves say about blindness. Let me listen when they say that pity is not respect. Let me believe them when they say that low expectations hurt more than the absence of eyesight. Let me understand that help is best when it is requested, negotiated, and respectful. Let me recognize that blind people are not all alike and that one blind person may want assistance that another does not. Let me ask rather than assume.”
This approach also requires blind people to speak. We cannot demand that others listen if we are unwilling to explain. We must say what we need in public policy and in personal interaction. We must teach the public when the public misunderstands us. We must elect leaders, build our organization, write articles, testify before legislatures, mentor one another, and speak directly in the situations of daily life. The right to speak for ourselves carries with it the responsibility to speak clearly, honestly, and with enough patience to change minds. We must not make the public a victim of our preconceived notions of who they are but practice the Platinum Rule with as much vigor as we wish to benefit from it.
Of course, the public must be willing to receive what we say. Listening is more than hearing words. A person can hear a blind person say, “I can do this,” and still think, “That is brave, but not realistic.” A person can hear us say, “We want opportunity,” and still think, “Of course they say that, but they are very limited.” A person can hear us say, “Blindness is not the tragedy you imagine,” and still hold tightly to the assumption that blindness must be a life of sadness, dependence, and diminished humanity.
That kind of listening is not listening with both the head and the heart. The head is needed to understand the argument. The heart is needed to accept its legitimacy. The head may follow the logic that training, opportunity, and access make a difference. The heart must be willing to let go of pity as the central response to blindness. The head may understand that blind people can use canes, Braille, screen readers, guide dogs, Structured Discovery training, and other tools. The heart must be willing to believe that a blind life can be a full life.
This is where attitudes matter. In the Federation we have long understood that the real problem of blindness is not the physical absence of sight but the misunderstandings and low expectations that surround it. We believe blind people have value, and we act to enhance that value and bring sighted people to recognize it. That work requires both blind and sighted people to change. Blind people must reject the limitations imposed by fear and low expectations. Sighted people must reject the assumption that they already know what blindness means.
The Platinum Rule is useful because it reminds us that love must learn. Respect must listen. Generosity must be guided by the person receiving it. The question is not only, “Would I want someone to help me?” The question is also, “What kind of help does this person want? What kind of help preserves dignity? What kind of help opens doors rather than closing them? What kind of help allows this person to become more free?”
A blind person standing at a street corner may want assistance crossing. They may not. A blind student may need a book in an accessible format, not a reduced assignment. A blind employee may need accessible software, not a reassignment to fewer duties or less responsibility. A blind traveler may need accurate directions, not someone grabbing his suitcase. A blind voter may need a private and independent way to mark a ballot, not someone else deciding that marking their ballot for them is good enough. A blind child may need Braille, cane travel, high expectations, and chores at home, not sentimental protection from ordinary life.
The same principle applies to organized advocacy. When blind people speak collectively through the National Federation of the Blind, we are not being ungrateful for the help of sighted people. We are exercising the basic human right to define our own needs. Public officials, educators, employers, and service providers should welcome this. They should want policy shaped by those who live with its consequences. They should want programs tested against real experience. They should want blind people at the table: not as decoration, not as testimony after the decision has already been made, but as a dominant force in deciding what the decision should be.
Good intentions are a wonderful starting point. They are not the destination. A person may intend kindness and still block a doorway. A teacher may intend protection and still deny a child literacy. An employer may intend fairness and still never interview a qualified blind applicant. A public official may intend efficiency and still create a process blind people cannot use. Intention matters, but results matter too. The Golden Rule may purify our intentions. The Platinum Rule is more likely to improve our results.
So let us keep the Golden Rule. Let us honor it. Let us teach it to our children. Let us practice its call to decency, sympathy, and fairness. But let us also understand that the Golden Rule reaches its fullest expression when it leads us to the Platinum Rule. If I truly want to treat others as I would want to be treated, then I should want others to learn who I am before deciding what I need. I should want them to ask, listen, and respect my answer. I should want them to see me as a person, not as a category.
That is what we ask. See us as human beings. Listen to us as people with knowledge. Help when help is wanted. Step back when independence is called for. Join us when justice requires collective action. Do not make blindness smaller than it is by pretending it has no consequences, but do not make it larger than it is by turning it into the defining fact of our existence.
The Golden Rule says, “I will remember that you are like me.” The Platinum Rule says, “I will also remember that you are not me.” Both truths matter. We share a common humanity, and we live that humanity in different circumstances. The best relationships honor both.
For blind people, this means that the public must move beyond pity to partnership, beyond assumption to understanding, beyond charity to opportunity, and beyond speaking for us to listening when we speak for ourselves. That is not a rejection of the Golden Rule. It is its flowering. It is the Golden Rule made more careful, more humble, and more effective.
And if we can live there—where kindness listens, where help respects, where blind people define our own needs, and where sighted people join us as partners rather than managers—we will have moved closer to the world both rules are trying to build: a world in which every person is treated not as we imagine them to be, but as they truly are.
by Jimmy Morris, M.A., NOMCT
From the Editor: The author is chair of the Trainers Committee for Structured Discovery of the National Blindness Professional Certification Board.
Within the organized blind movement, the concept of Structured Discovery is well-known to be the pillar of excellence and high quality non-visual training grounded in a positive philosophy of blind people. Structured Discovery is a teaching methodology trademarked, developed, and overseen by the National Blindness Professional Certification Board (NBPCB), and this professional organization has historically maintained a strong partnership with the National Federation of the Blind due to their aligned belief in the blind.
An important development within the NBPCB reflects both institutional growth and a continued commitment to professional advancement within. The committee formerly known as the National Orientation & Mobility Certification Trainers committee (NOMCT) has adopted a new name: the Trainers Committee for Structured Discovery (TCSD), a committee of the NBPCB.
This change is not cosmetic. It reflects an evolution in scope, responsibility, and direction as we align our work with the full range of certifications administered by the NBPCB.
In recent years, our efforts have expanded beyond supporting orientation and mobility certification alone. We now contribute to initiatives affecting all NBPCB credentials, including:
By adopting the name Trainers Committee for Structured Discovery, we acknowledge our broader responsibility: to develop training practices, projects, and strategic initiatives that strengthen professionals across all Structured Discovery disciplines.
NBPCB certification programs are grounded in Structured Discovery training methods, which draw on cognitive learning principles and consumer-driven expectations. This perspective differs fundamentally from traditional models; it encourages active exploration, problem-solving, and self-directed strategy development. Our mandate is to advance professional excellence while promoting the conviction that blindness itself is not a barrier to achievement. To accomplish this, the TCSD operates through three primary pillars: Recruitment, Education, and Mentoring.
A vital component of our mission is ensuring a steady influx of talented individuals into the field. The Recruitment Subcommittee works tirelessly to spread the word about NBPCB certifications and the pathways to obtaining them through graduate school or apprenticeship programs. By demystifying the process for future instructors, we ensure the longevity of our profession. Recent initiatives include:
In line with recruitment, our Education Subcommittee focuses on equipping current practitioners with the knowledge and ethical grounding necessary for modern instructional environments. Since 2025, more than 500 participants have engaged in these offerings, which include:
Once recruited and educated, professionals must be supported. Our Mentoring Subcommittee launched a program in November 2025 that pairs experienced practitioners with newcomers. This initiative transfers institutional knowledge and reinforces philosophical consistency. By building these relationships, we reduce isolation among early-career practitioners and build collaborative networks that benefit the field as a whole.
Taken together, the committee’s name change and the coordinated efforts of our subcommittees signal a new era of professional standards. These developments provide:
We are positioning ourselves not merely as a support body for credentials, but as an active contributor to professional culture. Our trajectory reflects a continued commitment to building capacity while maintaining fidelity to the core philosophy of Structured Discovery.
Practitioners, prospective certificants, and those interested in mentoring opportunities may direct inquiries or suggestions to Committee Chair Jimmy Morris, Trainers Committee for Structured Discovery at: [email protected].The greater Jacksonville Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of Florida is administering a generous grant from the Rotary Club of Julington Creek—Bartram Trail. The grant enables blind residents in Duval or St. Johns Counties to receive a pair of the Meta Smart Glasses. The grant covers seventy-five percent of the cost and also includes training courtesy of The Magnification Company if requested by the recipient. The blind person covers twenty-five percent of the cost if they choose the Meta Ray Bans or the difference if they choose to order the Vanguard Oakley Glasses instead. The total amount of the grant is $6,000. At the time of this writing there have been sixteen pairs of glasses awarded to recipients by a committee consisting of members of the National Federation of the Blind of Florida Greater Jacksonville Chapter.
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.
The secret is out! Ski for Light, Inc. (SFL) will celebrate its fifty-second international week in West Yellowstone, Montana, where active adults who are blind or have mobility impairments will gather to learn the basics of cross-country skiing from January 17- 24, 2027.
“West Yellowstone is a perfect skiing venue for the 2027 Ski for Light International event.
The terrain includes long flat areas that will be perfect for beginners as well as hills that will challenge and thrill more advanced skiers.”
Each participant is paired with an experienced, sighted cross-country skier who acts as an instructor and an on-snow guide for a week of skiing, sharing, and learning. First time skiers will be introduced to basic technique, while returning skiers will have an opportunity to enhance existing skills.
Founded in 1975, Ski for Light is an all-volunteer nonprofit. While the focus of the week is cross-country skiing, there are plenty of after ski activities where participants have an opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones.
Join participants from across the US and around the world. Applications and additional information will be available in July at www.sfl.org; meanwhile, join our community on Facebook (Ski for Light, Inc.), and check out our YouTube channel (Ski for Light International).
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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