Volume 44, Number 1 Winter 2025
A magazine for parents and teachers of blind children published by
the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults in partnership
with the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children.
Deborah Kent Stein, Editor
ISSN-0883-3419
Copyright © 2025 American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
For more information
about blindness and children contact:
National Organization of Parents of Blind Children
200 East Wells Street at Jernigan Place, Baltimore, MD 21230 • 410-659-9314
https://nfb.org/nopbc • [email protected] • [email protected]
CAPTION: An aerial view of the New Orleans Marriott.
The 2025 Convention of the National Federation of the Blind will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, this summer. Start planning your trip now.
Tuesday, July 8 through Sunday, July 13
The Marriott New Orleans and the Sheraton New Orleans
As our headquarters hotel, the Marriott will host convention breakouts, general sessions, and the banquet. Right across Canal Street, the Sheraton serves as our overflow hotel and will be home to the Exhibit Hall and Independence Market.
If this will be your first convention, or if you need a refresher, check out our First Timer’s Guide at https://nfb.org/get-involved/national-convention/first-timers-guide.
Reserve your room by calling 888-236-2427 for the Marriott or 855-516-1090 for the Sheraton New Orleans. Ask for the “National Federation of the Blind 2025 Convention” block. Here are important things to know about the rates and booking the room:
The nightly rate for both the Marriott and the Sheraton is $119 for singles and doubles, while triples and quads can be booked for $129 per night. You should also anticipate the combined sales tax and tourism support rate of 16.2 percent and note there is a hotel occupancy fee of $3.00 per night.
At the time you make a reservation, a deposit of the first night’s stay is required for each room reserved. If you use a credit card, the deposit will be charged against your card immediately, just as would be the case with a check. If a reservation is cancelled before Sunday, June 1, 2025, half of the deposit will be returned. Otherwise, refunds will not be made.
Registration for convention will open in March. Registration will be $25 per person plus $80 per banquet ticket. Register early because prices go up if you register onsite in New Orleans. Registration includes the biggest event of the year, access to the event app, and communications on the latest news and events.
The 2025 Convention of the National Federation of the Blind will be a truly exciting and memorable event, with an unparalleled program and rededication to the goals and work of our movement.
A wide range of seminars for parents of blind children, technology enthusiasts, job seekers, and other groups will kick the week off on Tuesday, July 8. Convention registration and registration packet pick-up will also open on Tuesday.
Breakout sessions continue on Wednesday, July 9, along with committee meetings.
Thursday, July 10, will kick off with the annual meeting, open to all, of the Board of Directors of the National Federation of the Blind. National division meetings will follow the board meeting that afternoon and evening.
General convention sessions will begin on Friday, July 11, and continue through the afternoon of Sunday, July 13.
Convention ends on a high note with the banquet on Sunday evening, so be sure to pack your fancy clothes. The fall of the gavel at the close of banquet will signal convention’s adjournment. Make plans now to be a part of it all!
DARE TO BE REMARKABLE
Evolving Principles, Practices, and Philosophy
by Mark A. Riccobono
Evolving Principles, Practices, and Philosophy at the Rehabilitation Services Administration
by Danté Allen
Innovate to Elevate: Fostering Excellence in Rehabilitation Services for Blind Youth
by Carlos Serván
ADVOCACY
Leading Courageously with Higher Expectations: Braille, Teacher Preparation, and the Continued Influence of the Organized Blind Movement
by Casey Robertson
IEP Advocacy Academy 2024, The Work Has Just Begun
by Sanho Steele-Louchart
Being Trained in the Law but Not Knowing How to Enforce My Right to Accessible Textbooks
by Julie Orozco
EARLY CHILDHOOD
Ten Tips to Introduce Braille to Your Baby
by Amber Bobnar
THE GREAT OUTDOORS
Project BOLD: Fostering Inclusion through Immersion and Observation
by Norma Crosby
All Those Amazing Little Bugs: Breaking Barriers in the Great Outdoors
by Olivia Cichowlas
"Climb Their Mountains and Get Their Good Tidings!"
by Henry Young
JOURNEYS
My Life in the Pool
by Cole Carper
A Chance to Serve
by Kyle Chellino
From Frustration to Freedom: How Training Gave Me Confidence in the Kitchen
by Katelyn Siple
CANE TRAVEL
Nebraska Cane Walk 2024
by Merry-Noel Chamberlain
A Travel Lesson to Heed
by David Meyer
TECHNOLOGY
APH Secures Ten Million-Dollar Grant
Access On: Expanding the Conversation about Accessible Technology with NFB’s Newest Podcast
WHAT’S HAPPENING
Crossing the Bay Bridge
by Cassie McKinney
2025 NFB BELL® Academy
Braille Books Program: Empowering Minds and Fostering Literacy
New Policy from National Library Service Regarding Patrons Under Age Eighteen
Announcements
Are you the parent of a blind/low-vision child? Don’t know where to turn? Have you ever wondered what your child will be capable of when he or she grows up? Are you concerned that your child’s future will be limited by blindness or low vision? Do you have questions about how to parent a blind child? We are here for you.
Founded in 1983, the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC), a proud division of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), is a membership organization of families, friends, and educators of blind children. We have thousands of members in all fifty states plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico.
We have a very inclusive definition of blindness which includes children who have some usable vision. Instead of focusing on what the child can or cannot see, we focus on the child and what she or he wants to be.
NOPBC is for families, educators, and friends of blind children, including those who have some usable vision. We welcome all families of blind children, and many of our children have both blindness and other disabilities.
We help families and blind children themselves maximize the child’s abilities and opportunities; we hold high expectations for all of our children, regardless of any additional disabilities they may have.
As a division of the NFB, the largest and most influential organization of blind people in the world, the NOPBC is well informed about the societal, legislative, and technological issues that affect blind people. We enjoy the resources, support, and expertise of fifty thousand blind people who can serve as mentors and role models for us and our children. When we as parents join the NOPBC, our children belong to the Federation family.
The NOPBC:
Most states have an NOPBC affiliate chapter. You can find your state chapter at http://www.nopbc.org. If your state does not have a chapter and you would like to start one, please contact us. We may be able to offer training and other assistance to start a state NOPBC chapter.
We have been where you are, and we want to support you and your blind child. We know that blindness does not define your child's future. We can connect you with other families and blind adults who can serve as positive mentors and role models. They can teach you the attitudes and techniques that will enable your child to become independent and to succeed in life.
The NOPBC offers hope, encouragement, information, and resources for parents, families, and educators of blind children. NOPBC provides:
We offer a wide variety of programs, activities, and training to families, children, and youth. One of our most exciting activities is our annual conference. Every year since it was established, the NOPBC has conducted an annual conference for parents and teachers of blind children as part of the national convention of the NFB. This conference has grown to include five exciting days of workshops, training sessions, activities for all family members, including sighted siblings, and countless opportunities to meet blind adults and other families and children from around the country.
Contact Us:
National Organization of Parents of Blind Children
[email protected]
www.nopbc.org
by Mark A. Riccobono
Reprinted from Braille Monitor, Volume 68, Number 2, February 2025
From the Editor: From November 11-13, 2024, the NFB’s Jernigan Institute hosted a conference for teachers of blind students and professionals in the field of rehabilitation. NFB President Mark Riccobono delivered the opening address.
Our nature as humans is to organize toward progress. Once we have met our basic needs, we desire, unless it is conditioned out of us, to explore, discover, and build something better than what has previously existed. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” It is for you who have dared to show up to seek, to redefine, and to be remarkable as blindness professionals. Thank you for being part of the dedicated core of people sacrificing to build a better future.
Winston Churchill said: “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Of course we know that perfection is, in reality, unachievable, but his point should be well taken. Change, or evolution, is essential for progress. What is right for the time may only be partly right in the future. If we fail to change while the world changes around us, progress remains elusive. In order to make informed decisions about where to change, we need to have some core beliefs that ground us in our work.
This brings us to how we change as dedicated professionals. An African proverb tells us, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Community is essential for sustained human progress. It is my belief that the community of practice that can best serve us in our effort to dare to be remarkable is the organized blind movement. In the brief time I have this morning, I would like to discuss the outline of our evolution as blind professionals and the next phase of our work.
Throughout history, the popular narrative about blind people has not been one of progress. That narrative has been centered on the success of non-blind people in inventing methods to provide some meaning to the lives of blind people. It has been centered on charity, not equality. The expectations have been low, and any success stories among the blind were mythologized as extraordinary.
This was the foundation for the development of the vision industrial complex, which came to maturity during the last century. The lack of a true belief in blind people, combined with a vision-centered approach, has limited progress within this system to a culture that has valued blind people as recipients of charity rather than leaders of innovation. Fortunately, blind people organized and resolved to dismantle the vision industrial complex through the building of our own community, where the culture deeply believes in the inherent dignity and talent that we possess as humans who simply happen to have the characteristic of being blind. This community became a movement as the National Federation of the Blind grew on a nationwide basis. Since 1940, three generations of blind people have cultivated, tested, built, and refined our own system to raise expectations and explore the limits for blind people. And those limits remain undiscovered for us.
As we consider a fourth generation of our community, we must recognize that systems that are not continuously built will go away, even if the reduction happens slowly. We must also recognize that it is much easier to tear systems down than it is to build them up. Therefore, failure to evolve can make the future rebuilding exponentially more difficult. Today, I am calling on each of us to recommit ourselves to the revolution of blind-centered and blind-led training programs.
The first revolution in our community-building effort was the early experiment with blind-centered training. Blind people began by making small attempts to put our shared philosophy about blindness into action. This happened through one-on-one mentoring, testing ideas, and learning by doing. These early efforts bloomed into what some called the Iowa Experiment—the successful program effort led by Dr. Kenneth Jernigan to put these ideas into formal programs of training.
Generations tend to meld together. The efforts of that first generation melded into the second generation, where our blind community developed more model programs, including innovating work with blind youth. This is best exemplified by the training programs that grew out of the Federation affiliates in Colorado, Louisiana, and Minnesota—training centers that get credit for multiple generations of highly successful blind people the world over, living the lives they want. These programs were hosting transition programs before transition was even a concept in rehabilitation and before piles of money were available for the effort. These programs intersected with work done by Federation affiliates in places such as Nebraska and New Mexico, where the blind asserted their leadership, their advocacy, and their authenticity. All of these programs are represented in our community at this conference.
The third generation of work has been best represented in the development of a new, nondiscriminatory system of accreditation, which the Federation initiated and entrusted in the National Blindness Professional Certification Board. Parallel to that effort has been the development of blind-centered university training, innovative professional development like this Dare to Be Remarkable conference, the coordination of blind-centered research questions, and the establishment of an open-access Journal of Blindness Innovation and Research. While more professional development efforts led by the blind are needed, and we are hungry for more university training programs that are rooted in the lived experience of the blind, we are emerging into the fourth generation of our blind-led professional systems. So what is next?
The emerging generation of work is building a more mature community of blind-centered practice that continues to evolve and advance the systems we have built while forging professional relationships that foster greater cooperation and partnership. Our community of practice must value sharing our blind-centered wisdom with the goal of diminishing the harmful influence of the vision industrial complex. Those of us who are committed to advancing a positive philosophy about blindness and to protecting the dignity of blind people must unite around our common aim of deconstructing the vision-centered approaches that are all too influential, even in 2024.
This blind wisdom community of practice will thrive if we can value challenging each other to be better without falling into the pitfalls of focusing on competing with each other. We are truly stronger together, and our deep belief in blind people is still far too rare among the vast systems that control much of the money and human resources in our field. Together, we can evolve and grow into an even more powerful force than we are today. We are the envy of those first-generation blind pioneers, but we cannot settle for what we have always done or we will be the shame of the fifth generation as it rebuilds. There are far too few of us in this community, so we have to work together to go further.
This community must be willing to test new ideas against our shared wisdom and recognize the value when those approaches fail. We must not be afraid to take risks and to evolve our approach, because that is precisely where innovation meets freedom for the blind. In testing these new ideas, the critical element is that we share in our learning, we evaluate what we could do differently, and we get right on with trying something else. As long as we stay centered on the belief that it is not the blind person who is broken, but the failure to find the right approach in the teaching, our community will continue to evolve toward being remarkable.
Let me say here that new is not always better. What makes our community particularly effective is that we are rooted in some core philosophical principles. How we apply those principles changes, but it is important that we maintain those values. Some people are always seeking the new thing, and that sometimes results in compromising the principles that serve as our foundation. The road to evolving and building our community should never—yes, I said never—begin with something other than our core belief in blind people.
Our community must stay strongly blind-centered, but it must draw inspiration, wisdom, and value from the shared knowledge of other communities. One example is the persistent idea that Braille is difficult to learn and that it is even harder for a person to become fluent in reading. Yet we have barely even utilized the best practices used to teach reading effectively in other contexts within our Braille teaching community. There are many other examples where we can borrow best practices and apply them to the shared wisdom of blind people.
Our community of practice must also lean into the idea of blind pride rather than continuing to default to non-blind norms that place blind people at a disadvantage in terms of advancement in the field. One example is that we should expect our community to grow the best blind leaders. We should expect those leaders to reach the top positions in agencies for the blind and in key government positions affecting programs for the blind. Our community should invest in raising a generation of blind leaders who are not only highly qualified to lead, but who proudly tell anyone they meet that it is respectable to be blind.
Finally, our community of practice must be prepared to be guided by the broader organized blind movement that is the National Federation of the Blind. Furthermore, each and every one of us need to be contributors to building that movement. If we stand outside the movement, if we wall off our community of practice from the diverse community of blind people, it simply becomes another system that is not truly blind-centered.
Let me call out many governmental agencies in this nation that tell blind professionals that it is a conflict of interest for staff to participate actively in the professional network that is the National Federation of the Blind, but then offer those same people paid time to participate in professional efforts such as the Association for the Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (AERBVI). I call for an immediate end to this discriminatory and harmful practice in the field. Agencies should encourage their staff to participate actively in organizations that benefit their professional development and growth. Thank you to those agencies that already allow their staff the power to make that choice. It is no surprise that the best among these have professionals choosing to participate in the National Federation of the Blind.
To be clear, the professional development choice of any blindness professional should never interfere with the right of the people receiving services from that professional to make an “informed choice” about their own professional network. Now is the time for agency leaders to stop preventing their staff from having access to our powerful community of practice within the National Federation of the Blind. Our community has been born from and evolved with the broader organized blind movement. That connection of being shaped by and contributing to the organized blind movement is the magic of our community of practice.
Do you dare to be remarkable? The question makes it sound much harder than it is. It is a choice: a choice to be blind-centered, a choice to challenge your own assumptions, and a choice to evolve in your own professional practices, regardless of how many decades of experience you have behind you. You can choose to be remarkable by choosing to be a contributor to our blind community of practice. Thank you to each of you for making the choice to be here and to be part of this powerful community. Let us take the rest of the steps required to give every blind person the opportunity to be remarkable in their own lives by gaining access to the training and connections that will allow them to live the lives they want. Let us go build our evolving blind community of practice.
by Danté Allen
Reprinted from Braille Monitor, Volume 68, Number 2, February 2025
From the Editor: November 12, 2024, the second morning of the recent Dare to Be Remarkable Conference, kicked off with remarks from Danté Allen. Mr. Allen was confirmed as commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) in December of 2023. A wheelchair user due to spina bifida, he has worked in healthcare, communications, and disability policy.
Good morning, everyone! I am so pleased to join you today. I’d like to thank Mark Riccobono and Anil Lewis for inviting me to speak with you. I truly appreciate their partnership and assistance in helping me prepare for today’s event.
The theme of this conference is “Evolving Principles, Practices, and Philosophy,” which really resonates with me. It fits quite well with my view of vocational rehabilitation, and I believe it is also reflected in my priorities. However, before I dig into those priorities, I want to take a moment to address the election.
As we know, come January, there will be a change in administration. With a change in administration will likely come changes in policies and personnel. I’d like to make clear that, no matter what happens, VR [vocational rehabilitation] will endure, and the mission of our work here in RSA will endure. Those things do not change. They endure because, as a country, we recognize the basic human and civil rights of Americans with disabilities and the importance of good jobs. Those are some of the rare things that we all can agree on. No election can change our beliefs around these things: around finding people jobs; around making the workplace as accessible and available as possible to as many people as possible; around achieving competitive, integrated employment (CIE) to gain and sustain independence.
While in some ways things may be different, in some ways things will not change at all. RSA will still provide leadership and resources to assist state and other agencies in providing vocational rehabilitation and other services to help individuals with disabilities maximize their employment, independence, and integration into the community and the competitive labor market. In short, the mission will endure.
I know everyone in this room believes in the value and the power of programs such as vocational rehabilitation. You have the wisdom to help create more equitable communities and a more equitable country by ensuring individuals with disabilities, particularly individuals who are blind or who have low vision, have access to quality employment and good jobs. People like you make programs like VR tick, and for that I am deeply grateful and appreciative. Your work and the results you produce are a big deal, and I thank you for everything you do. With all of this in mind, I'd like to talk a little more about the evolution of our work—of our principles, practices, and philosophy.
There is much to build upon from our past. The civil rights and disability rights movements of years ago are still very instructive, and they resonate strongly today. These movements changed policies and laws and—just as importantly—they changed hearts, minds, and attitudes toward individuals from marginalized communities, including those with disabilities. I recognize that the National Federation of the Blind has, over many decades, led the civil rights movement for individuals who are blind. We know from experience that we will not get progress without persistently demanding it. We know from our hearts that there is nothing about us without us. We know from research and practice that a key tenet of universal design—the importance of planning for the needs of the widest possible population from the start, rather than retrofitting—is the best way to ensure a maximally inclusive society. We all know just from living our lives the fundamental importance of being able to adapt to changing circumstances. More broadly speaking, we know and appreciate the invaluable insights that come from lived experiences.
This hard-earned wisdom is also reflected in the words and actions of the leaders who preceded us. Their guidance continues to illuminate important truths for us, helping us make sense of today as we endeavor to create a better tomorrow. I’ll share with you some examples.
The early leaders of the National Federation of the Blind, Dr. Jacobus tenBroek and Dr. Kenneth Jernigan, dared to be remarkable, disrupting the common notions of blindness. Today, the organized blind movement stands firm, and blind people rally to the words, “We know who we are, and we will never go back! We are changing what it means to be blind!” Through self-advocacy and innovation, the organized blind community is driving the progress in education, rehabilitation, and legislation—assuring first-class citizenship, equal opportunity, and full integration in society.
In a speech nearly sixty years ago, Mary Switzer, the first director of the federal vocational rehabilitation system, said that we cannot accomplish our mission for individuals with disabilities “simply by doing more of the same, in the same way ... It calls for the minds and the experience and the courageous determination of many people in many places to produce and use the improvements we will need.” The NFB has been at the forefront of innovation in delivering successful programs and services in both the educational and rehabilitation realms.
More recently, disability activist Judy Heumann, in her autobiography, wrote, “Change never happens at the pace we think it should. It happens over years of people joining together, strategizing, sharing, and pulling all the levers they possibly can. Gradually, excruciatingly slowly, things start to happen, and then suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, something will tip.”
We must recalibrate our practices and mindsets to adapt to a changing world, and we must do it in partnership with, as Mary Switzer said, many people in many places. We must do it together, in a coordinated and collaborative manner, with persistence and urgency. As Judy Heumann noted, change is hard, and it typically takes time.
I believe that we are rather clear-eyed about our present. At RSA, our expectation is that our collective efforts will result in increased numbers of competitive, integrated employment outcomes for those we serve. As many of you know, this represents a paradigm shift from years past. A big reason for this change is the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), which significantly raised expectations for employment of individuals with disabilities. No longer is just enough good enough. As a field, vocational rehabilitation is focused on maximizing quality services and employment. We don’t just want to go to school. We want credentials and degrees. We don’t just want jobs. We want careers. We don’t just want wages. We want competitive salaries. We know that quality employment outcomes come through meaningful participant engagement, informed choice, investment in postsecondary training, access to assistive technology and critical support services, work-based learning experiences and apprenticeships, and substantive partnerships within the workforce development system.
With this knowledge in mind, I set out three priorities for RSA earlier this year:
I am pleased to report that RSA is making substantial progress on all of these priorities. We are proactively engaging with VR agencies on a weekly basis to gain insight into their successes, challenges, and goals for the future. The focus of this outreach is not to monitor agencies, but rather to let them know that we are partners in this work and will highlight their achievements and promote their best practices. On a related note, we are bright-spotting VR agencies’ success stories through our website and email listservs. Each month we are amplifying the great outcomes our agencies and participants are achieving, whether it is working as an auditor for Dell or fulfilling a lifelong dream of opening a café. The stories are piling in, and we will share as many as we can.
This brings me to my last priority, which very purposefully is focused on the future. It is intended to be a catalyst for change—for new ways of thinking. As I mentioned earlier, it is about artificial intelligence. As President Biden has said, “Responsible AI use has the potential to help solve urgent challenges, while making our world more prosperous, productive, innovative, and secure.” I believe that, and I believe we can leverage AI to help improve VR services and outcomes. Some of us may be energized about working with artificial intelligence. However, for some of us, particularly the less technologically gifted among us (and I consider myself a part of that group) it may give us pause. It is something a bit foreign and decidedly out of our comfort zone. Please do not let that stop you! In fact, now is the time to lean in—to embrace the challenge and let it invigorate or reinvigorate your work.
We can all contribute to improving access, advocacy, and employment in this new environment. To be sure, it is your experiences, your determination, your solution-oriented mindset, and your values that have driven progress in VR. We need those qualities now, and we need them more than ever to shape a better tomorrow for individuals with disabilities.
In a Dear Colleague letter released last month, RSA has identified three ways that AI has the potential to support individuals with disabilities in achieving competitive integrated employment and solve urgent challenges in the field. VR should prepare individuals with disabilities for careers in AI. VR must provide the services and supports necessary for individuals with disabilities to gain the technical skills to achieve CIE in AI-related careers, if that is the individual’s choice. VR can leverage AI to support CIE in any career field that an individual with disabilities chooses.
AI has the potential to remove longstanding barriers to CIE by providing needed accommodations and support. For example, AI-backed software applications using speech synthesis and Braille, AI navigation for blind or visually-impaired users, and reasonable accommodations that leverage AI are all now available. States may use AI to create efficiencies in the operation of VR programs. Examples of this are surfacing with increasing frequency. AI chatbot tools can help agencies improve customer service, AI algorithms can be leveraged to enhance assessment and planning services, and AI-powered smart technology can remotely deliver VR services in hard-to-reach areas.
From our vantage point at RSA, we are seeing increased interest and enthusiasm for AI-related work in VR. However, for all of this interest and enthusiasm, there are still lots of unknowns about AI, and, if we are not vigilant, lots of potential pitfalls. We must give ourselves the time and the space to fully and deliberately consider how AI and other advanced technology can best support our goal—our expectation—of competitive integrated employment for all VR participants. We know—right now, in the present—that there are more questions than answers around the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Therein lies the challenge: how do we answer those questions? How do we ensure that artificial intelligence tools fuel competitive integrated employment in the twenty-first century for individuals with disabilities? How do we build for the future, with AI?
We do it together, in partnership. We do it by drawing upon our experiences, our values, and our determination. We do it before answers are handed to us by those who may not share our values, our lived experiences, or our vantage points. We do it by leaving behind the status quo and the idea of retrofitting, and by focusing on active, real-time participation in the development of the AI-influenced workplace.
AI is still in the early stages of its impact on the American and global workplaces. Let’s make sure that we are not only at the table, but that our voices are heard loudly and clearly as new AI-driven technologies take shape. If we want to empower future generations of individuals with disabilities to be prosperous and productive, we must act swiftly and persistently. And to be clear: now is the time to do it.
The voices of individuals who are blind are incredibly important in general, and your voices need to be heard now, for a variety of reasons. Two come immediately to mind. Number one, innovation is part of the DNA of the NFB and the blind community in general. It is difficult to name another population that has had to create so many solutions to make this world more accessible. Those skills and abilities are vitally important in this work. Number two, the sooner we get involved, the better our chances of mitigating and eliminating potential biases. Put another way, the sooner we get involved in this work, the more likely that AI tools and resources will be maximally inclusive in their scope.
If we do this right, AI can actually help us address longstanding biases. For example, we must recognize and support the certification of blind education and rehabilitation professionals in fields such as orientation and mobility, rejecting any notions that blind persons are incapable or unsafe instructors simply because they are blind. Better orientation and mobility tools, informed by AI, can help further this cause. Let us explore how AI may intersect with our current issues—around recruitment, retention and staffing challenges for teachers of the visually impaired and rehabilitation professionals; or enhancing the standing of strong blind professionals in the workplace, for example—and how it can potentially help us do our jobs more efficiently and effectively.
From a VR professional standpoint, I am hopeful that AI will allow us to focus on those core, fundamental aspects of our careers that drew us to the blindness field and to VR in the first place. I encourage you to find ways to ensure that your voice is heard. You can always reach out to us. Our contact information is on our website, which is located at rsa.ed.gov.
To return to the words of Mary Switzer, let us harness “the minds and the experience and the courageous determination of many people in many places to produce and use the improvements we will need.” Let us work together on the evolution of our principles, practices, and philosophy to push for excellence in vocational rehabilitation, and to meet the challenges of our incredibly important mission to empower this and future generations of individuals with disabilities.
I thank you for your time and attention today. It is certainly a privilege to speak with you.
by Carlos R. Serván
Reprinted from Braille Monitor, Volume 68, Number 2, February 2025
From the Editor: Carlos Serván has worked at the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired since 1998, and he has served as its executive director since 2017. Before he took a position in Nebraska, he coordinated transition from school to work programs in New Mexico. He holds a law degree and a master’s degree in public administration. On the final day of the Dare to Be Remarkable Conference, he gave the keynote address.
As I prepared for this presentation, I reflected on the name and meaning of our conference, “Dare to Be Remarkable.” It is more than a title; it is more than a buzzword. It is about striving for greatness, aiming to be extraordinary, and challenging ourselves to excel. It means embracing our uniqueness and going beyond the ordinary. It’s about having the courage to stand out and pursue excellence.
Each of us has the potential to be remarkable. It begins with a mindset—a belief that we are capable of more than we think. It requires us to step out of our comfort zones, take risks, and push our boundaries. It’s about setting high standards for ourselves and not being afraid to fail, because every failure is a steppingstone to success.
Remarkable people are not afraid to dream big and work hard to turn their dreams into reality. Being remarkable is not always easy, but it is always worthwhile.
Why do I start with these words? The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) mandates that at least 15 percent of basic support funds be expended on Pre-Employment Transition Services (Pre-ETS). Yet many state rehabilitation agencies are returning funds to the federal government because they don’t know how to utilize all of that 15 percent. They get stuck in red tape and fiscal obligations, and they become gatekeepers. While fulfilling these responsibilities is necessary, we must not allow them to paralyze us. Furthermore, some states are allocating funds in areas that do not yield meaningful outcomes. We need to focus on having high expectations, challenging ourselves, and being innovative.
For decades we have worked on transition services, investing time and resources into what we know is achievable. We uphold high expectations and determination, ensuring that our students master nonvisual skills and know how to deal with public misconceptions about the capability of blind people. It took several decades for the federal government to recognize that investing in youth is essential for successful rehabilitation. I recall being monitored in the early 2000s when the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) suggested we focus only on adults rather than providing services to those under eighteen. Today, the law requires us to allocate 15 percent of our budget to youth services.
While the law can influence behavior, it does not necessarily foster understanding. Many agencies allocate funds to unproductive areas. To shift attitudes and raise expectations, we must first recognize that blind individuals can live full, productive lives when given proper training and opportunities.
It is highly fitting to mention Dr. Kenneth Jernigan during a Structured Discovery conference, at the institute bearing his name, and especially on November 13, his birthday. Dr. Jernigan revolutionized the Iowa Department for the Blind, establishing the best services for blind people ever known in the nation. At a time when the rehabilitation system did not believe in the capabilities of blind individuals and most states considered them too severely handicapped to benefit from rehabilitation, Dr. Jernigan dared to challenge the system. He dared to raise expectations, dared to invest in quality services, and dared to confront federal officials who prioritized fiscal responsibility over innovation.
In February 2024, RSA Commissioner Danté Allen wrote a letter of introduction to the rehabilitation community. Some highlights from his letter and his remarks from yesterday include:
“Individuals with disabilities must experience equity in the workforce and every aspect of our society to take their rightful place as first-class citizens who lead purposeful lives. ‘Just enough is not enough.’ If RSA programs do not add value to the lives of those we serve, we are wasting our time and resources. We must raise our expectations, leave behind the status quo, and deliver on our nation’s promise of economic security, equal opportunity, and independence for Americans with disabilities... If you have not done so already, I encourage you to take steps within your programs to revisit longstanding practices and implement strategies to maximize VR services, fully engage with individuals with disabilities, and advance high-quality competitive integrated employment.”
In other words, Commissioner Allen urges us to rethink our methods and discover innovative ways to provide high-quality services for individuals who are blind. This includes helping them secure jobs on par with their sighted peers. He emphasizes the importance of engaging consumers—partnering with organizations of blind individuals—to foster new and creative ideas.
As society advances rapidly, we must prepare our students to succeed in various fields. Pre-ETS services are designed to equip blind students with the skills, knowledge, and confidence necessary for a smooth transition from school to the workforce. These services include a range of learning opportunities, including five required activities, four coordination activities, and nine authorized activities.
The five required activities are job exploration counseling, work-based learning experiences, counseling on postsecondary education opportunities, workplace readiness training, and instruction in self-advocacy. Instruction in self-advocacy includes peer mentoring. These categories offer a framework for innovation and diversity in service delivery. Examples include job fairs, university tours, college workshops, résumé writing, drafting cover letters, going on mock job interviews, meeting blind role models, finding mentors, attending placement conferences, gaining on-the-job experience and on-the-job training, participation in integrated summer work experiences, mobility training, social skills development, advocacy and self-esteem activities, networking with employers, training at orientation centers, technology training, and opportunities for integrated school or after-school activities.
The NFB’s National Student Seminar and Washington Seminar are well suited for many of these activities. Students have the chance to engage with blind mentors, learn about colleges and universities, practice social and mobility skills, network with peers from across the country, develop advocacy skills, and advocate for initiatives with US Congress members.
When contracting for these programs, it is crucial to collaborate with entities that believe in the capabilities of blind individuals—those who have high expectations and challenge us and our students. In Nebraska we have partnered with organizations such as the Jernigan Institute for our mentoring program for Pre-ETS consumers and job-hunting skills for center students; services for summer work experience, including attendance at national convention; retreats for independent living and advocacy skills; and national college workshops including the Washington Seminar; Independence Science for STEM activities such as organ dissection, chemical experiments, and forensics; and Blind Savvy and Sky’s the Limit for networking skills development; employment conferences, college workshops, financial literacy, and events for blind seniors. These organizations and events, led by successful blind individuals, share a core belief that blind people can live full, productive lives and perform on par with their sighted peers when given proper training, encouragement, and opportunity.
Now let’s discuss the importance of sending consumers and staff to state and national workshops and conventions organized by organizations of the blind. As directors or counselors, we often find ourselves buried under red tape, reports, and administrative tasks, leaving us little time or energy for innovation. However, these opportunities are knocking on our doors, reaching out via email, or presenting themselves during conferences and networking events such as this one. If we focus solely on what feels safe, we may inadvertently filter out valuable possibilities.
Some states hesitate to send staff and clients to national conventions of the blind, fearing RSA disapproval. However, in Nebraska, we have consistently sent staff and consumers to national conventions for over twenty-five years. Throughout this time, RSA has never questioned our decision, as long as we document how these experiences benefit our clients’ vocational goals. Like any other services, we simply need to document the benefits, emphasizing exposure to mentors, advocacy events, social skills training, mobility skills, job counseling, networking with professionals, and learning about new technology. Attending national conventions aligns perfectly with Informed Choice and the required Pre-ETS activities.
Initiatives by the National Federation of the Blind, such as science camps and leadership programs, provide substantial benefits that RSA and state auditors also recognize as valuable. They evaluate these experiences just as they would any other program and acknowledge the significant advantages they offer.
In addition to the five required activities, four Pre-ETS Coordination Activities help foster relationships between schools and businesses to support students. Collaborating with local educational agencies and American Job Centers is vital for creating work opportunities for students with disabilities. Furthermore, once a VR agency reserves sufficient funds for direct services to students, it may allocate any remaining funds for the nine authorized activities. However, the agency is not required to wait until all students have received direct services before spending on these activities.
The nine authorized areas broadly address activities that enhance support for Pre-ETS students in obtaining services. These activities can include financing agency staff and teachers of blind students to attend the same conferences to which we send our consumers.
When we examine WIOA, the letter “I” stands for innovation, and the letter “O” stands for opportunity. Innovation is the driving force behind advancements that shape our world. It ignites new ideas, powers growth, and transforms challenges into opportunities. In every aspect of our lives—technology, health, employment, and rehabilitation—innovation plays a crucial role in creating a promising future.
The enemy of innovation is complacency. We risk becoming outdated and disconnected from the realities of those we serve. It is about improving what exists and finding better ways to meet their needs. Collaboration with consumer organizations enhances our ability to innovate. As Commissioner Allen reminded us yesterday, innovation is in the DNA of the National Federation of the Blind.
Opportunity represents the potential for growth, change, and success. It allows us to step out of our comfort zones and embrace the unknown. In the context of rehabilitation, this is our greatest opportunity to be innovative.
Opportunities often appear as challenges. As Thomas Edison said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Our ability to see potential where others see problems sets us apart.
Three weeks ago, during a national conference, Commissioner Allen reminded VR state administrators to be bold and invest in clients. Yesterday, he quoted Mary Switzer, “We cannot accomplish our mission for individuals with disabilities simply by doing more of the same in the same way. It calls for the minds, experience, and courageous determination of many people in many places to produce and utilize the improvements we will need.”
Several organizations that have high expectations are already focused on developing innovative ideas and programs for the blind. We don’t need to “reinvent the wheel.” By collaborating, we can challenge and support one another, exposing our consumers to successful partnerships. In Nebraska, we actively seek diverse opportunities. If the NFB offers science training for youth, we send our students. The same applies to mentoring, advocacy, and employment programs.
Pre-employment services for blind students are not just about preparing them for employment, but for high-quality employment; they empower them to live fulfilling, independent lives. We need to reflect this belief through our policies, our training, our programs, and the risks we take. It is our collective responsibility to expose our students to high expectations—expectations drawn from the collective experience and wisdom of blind people. We need to be innovative, ensuring these services are accessible, timely, effective, and tailored to each student’s unique needs. We need a rehabilitation system that does not primarily see itself as a gatekeeper. While we must fulfill certain fiscal responsibilities, approaching rehabilitation solely from that perspective risks hindering our ability to be remarkable and help individuals reach their full potential. Such gatekeeping can lead to dysfunction. There are countless examples: if you’ve ever sought authorization from RSA or your state to implement a new idea, by the time you receive a decision, it may be too late. The funds could be returned to the federal government after navigating unnecessary red tape.
In conclusion, good rehabilitation means that consumers leave the system knowing they have received timely and valuable services that elevated their expectations. We need to provide innovative, high-quality services so blind youth will not just survive but thrive, not just get by but get ahead, and not just move forward but charge forward. As we look to the future, let us dare to be remarkable; let us embrace the spirit of innovation, nurture our curiosity, and work together in partnership with consumers to create new ideas and opportunities.
by Casey Robertson
Reprinted from Braille Monitor, Volume 68, Number 1, January 2025
From the Editor: Casey Robertson is a longtime teacher of blind students, and she is an instructor in the Teacher of Blind Students Program at Louisiana Tech University. She serves as First Vice President of the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC). This article is based on a presentation she delivered on July 6, 2024, at the NFB National Convention in Orlando, Florida.
I’m the lead instructor at the Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness at Louisiana Tech. Now, that’s a mouthful, so we just call ourselves PDRIB [pronounced pid rib]. We have existed since 1999.
The Institute on Blindness provides outstanding professional preparation for individuals entering the field and working with blind children and adults. Our graduates have been eagerly sought after by employers from across the United States in both the public and private sectors. We have some graduate students here, and they were swarmed the first night of convention because people want to hire them.
We train individuals in four pathways to reach certification to work in the field of blindness, and we do that training based on the Structured Discovery method of teaching. I am also an advocate for blind students and their families across the nation. Those families are seeking better services to provide independence for their blind children. Some of those families are here in the room with us today.
I also love volunteering my services to the National Federation of the Blind in any capacity that is needed. But if you really know me, if you really, really know me, I am an educator at heart. I love people, and I love literacy for all people.
I want to take a moment to share a story with you. This story is adapted from a children’s book by Amanda Gorman, a best-selling author. The title is Something Someday.
You are told that there is not a problem. But you’re sure in your heart and in your gut that there is a problem. You are told that you cannot fix that problem, but you know that you can help. You are told that this is too big for you. It is a very, very big problem. But you have seen the tiniest of things make a huge difference before. You’re told that this won’t work, so don’t even try. But how will you know if you never try?
You’re told to sit and wait, but you know people have waited for far too long. You’re told that what is going on is very, very sad, but you’re not just sad; you’re scared, you’re confused, and maybe you are downright angry. And maybe, just maybe, underneath all of that, you’re also hopeful.
You are told not to hope too much, because there’s no use to hope. But you keep hoping anyway.
Sometimes you may feel that you’re all alone, but someday, somewhere, you find a friend—someone who will help you and who believes in your dream, someone who will fight with you. You make a promise to each other, and you say, “This is a problem, but it’s our problem together, so we can fix it together. The problem is big, but together we are bigger.”
So together, working, and together, beginning, over and over again you keep at it, until you are no longer beginning. You are now winning. Suddenly there is something you’re sure is right. Something you know has helped—something small that has changed things in a big way, something that is no longer a dream, but the day that that dream becomes a reality that you live in.
I share this book with you because it describes the direction of the education of blind students in our country as we speak. It also describes how I feel so often in the field of blindness.
Just as the little boy in the story identified, we have several issues that just do not seem right. Currently, students are not receiving enough Braille. We have a shortage of teachers in the field, and a great number of teachers who are in the field lack the self-efficacy to teach Braille literacy to their students. Schools are not equipped to provide services, or they just feel that they don’t have to provide services. Sometimes they even feel that “just good enough” is good enough; we don’t need to do any more.
Parents do not have the advocacy that they need to advocate for students. Society, along with the education system, has set very low standards for our students based on their lack of knowledge. Research has proven that literacy is more than just reading and writing. At its simplest form, literacy is the way that we interact with the world around us—how we shape it, and how it shapes us. It is how we communicate with others via reading and writing, but also through speaking and listening and creating. It is how we articulate our experiences in this world.
Literacy has a direct impact on employment, better access to the economy, better opportunities, and even better nutrition and environmental stability. However, just as the little boy in the story was told “there is no problem,” parents are often told there is no literacy problem with their child. Education staff, along with professionals in the field, will state that the student is receiving the best education the school can offer. And, after all, parents, you should expect your blind kids to be slower and to perform with less ability than their sighted peers.
When parents are told there is no problem, deep in their heart they are sure that they know something is wrong. It’s not okay for third graders to be illiterate, not able to read or write or express themselves in a creative way just because they are blind.
So, you may ask, why would professionals in the field of blindness tell families this type of misinformation? I believe it flows back to our teacher preparation programs.
Just like the little boy in the story, in the teacher preparation sphere we recognize that there are problems. We can even state those problems. Others in the sphere would tell us the problems are too large for us to solve. It is often stated that the problems are just way too large, because there are not enough teachers, not enough funding, not enough time and, after all, Braille is too hard to learn, too hard to teach, and has so many rules! And, does anybody use Braille any longer?
As I stand here before you today and say these problems go back to the teacher preparation program, let me share the evidence for how I came to this conclusion. Let’s look at literacy requirements of the teacher preparation programs.
Currently, thirty-eight universities across the country have teacher preparation programs for teaching blind students. Most of them, outside of Louisiana Tech, call it “Teaching the Visually Impaired.” The programs include both graduate and undergraduate studies.
Research as recent as 2022 showed that the Braille code competency requirement is not consistent among universities, resulting in inconsistent expectations for those teachers they are turning out into the field. Most of the thirty-eight universities do not ask their aspiring teachers to show any Braille proficiency at the end of the program. Those that do show proficiency set a very low reading rate of approximately twenty words per minute for aspiring teachers to pass their course.
A 2019 study of undergraduate programs for teachers of the blind showed that 31 percent of the universities that offered Braille only offered one course. Teachers in personnel preparation programs are taught that Braille readers will read at one-third to one-fifth the rate of their sighted peers. Some of the universities are even teaching their teachers to accept that students will read one-half to two times slower than their sighted peers.
When we look at Nemeth Code, the math code for Braille, [Sheila] Amato examined colleges and universities that prepared teachers of the blind. She found that almost all of the teachers she interviewed had had a course in Nemeth. However, they still felt their skills to teach Nemeth were inadequate. We know by research that if teachers do not have the self-efficacy to teach a subject such as Braille or Nemeth, they are not going to recommend a student learn those skills. After all, if a teacher doesn’t know Spanish, do you think she is going to take a job teaching Spanish?
Currently we do not—repeat do not—have any national standards for what teachers of the blind are taught. Each university can apply its bias and expectations to determine what it will or will not teach. How can we expect our students to have a consistent education if we are not training our teachers in a consistent format with the same high expectations?
In the teacher preparation arena, I am often told that the problems are too large for me to solve. They’re too large for any university to solve. We are often told the problems are so large because, once again, there are not enough teachers, not enough funding, and not enough time. Just as the little boy in the story was discouraged from solving the problem he knew existed, he was told to sit and wait. Well, I stand here today and tell you this: blind people are met with daily access challenges in society, and they’re told these are minor problems. Blind people are asked to sit and wait, and we have waited far too long.
When I came into the field of blindness education many years ago, I was told that the problems in the blindness field was so large and had been going on so long that I could expect them to be here long after I was pushing up daisies. I was encouraged not to rock the boat, to let it float with the status quo. I was also encouraged not to educate the populace. On one hand that might have been advice to pace my work, but at the same time it was an expectation that things would not change in the education of blind children. It was a negative expectation based on a cycle that has gone on far too long for our blind children.
Just like the little boy in the story, I simply was not going to sit and wait for a change. I found partners who believed in my dream. I found the National Federation of the Blind.
So you might ask, what does it take to create change in the teacher preparation programs? It takes listening to blind people and valuing their words. It takes partnering with the organized blind movement, the NFB, to find out what teachers need to know to be able to teach children. In a majority of the programs across the United States that have teacher preparation programs, teachers never meet a blind person before they graduate.
We should be at the forefront of the education for blindness, because we are the organized blind movement. We are the ones who know what it takes to create a successful blind person. We don’t need people to tell us what we have to have to create a successful blind person. We know that. It also takes courage to step out of your comfort zone and be a leader in the field, even when the other entities, including universities, are telling you it will not work.
In December [2023], I traveled to a convention with a colleague of mine who is blind. We were met with less than a warm welcome. Every time the professionals in the blindness field saw us coming, they would quickly dart the other way. So the field is not as warm to blindness as it should be.
At Louisiana Tech, through the Office of Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness, we know, just as the little boy in the book knew, that taking action, one small step at a time, telling others and partnering with them, would be the best start to a solution. In our teachers of blind students program, we partner with the Louisiana Center for the Blind, and we expose our graduate students to some of the highest-quality Structured Discovery training that exists.
At the university, we set the highest requirements for Braille in the nation. Now, you remember that students at many of the other universities had to read a mere twenty words per minute in Braille in order to graduate, if they had any proficiency at all. My students leave our program reading a minimum of one hundred words per minute in Braille.
At a conference I recently attended, I sat at the table to share dinner with teacher preparation personnel from across the nation. They all told me these standards were not needed, that no one needed to read Braille at one hundred words per minute to be able to teach kids. If they had any sight, we didn’t need to teach them Braille at all. They went on to tell me that teachers in the field had full-time jobs, so why would I make them do ten pages of Braille homework a week? I told them that that is what I had found necessary to show proficiency and for them to retain the code. My message was not well received among the professionals.
Not only do our students leave the program reading one hundred words per minute; almost all of them hold the National Certification in Unified English Braille [UEB] before graduating. At that table that night, I mentioned that all of my students take the NCUEB [National Certification in Unified English Braille]. My comment was met with the question, “Why should they have to show proficiency to teach Braille?” Needless to say, they didn’t buy my dinner that night!
We employ the Structured Discovery method of teaching throughout our programs. We teach teachers how to teach literacy and orientation and mobility to blind students. We give them the self-efficacy needed to go out and not to be afraid to teach blind students. Recently, several of my students were in one of the Monarch trainings. I was getting text messages. “Hey, we can read the Braille without the screen on, and all the other teachers need the screen.” I enjoyed those text messages!
When our students complete our program, they know Braille is not too hard. It’s not too hard to learn, and it’s not too hard to teach. You can learn the rules, and it is still used by blind people.
We could not solve the problem alone, though. We have to have partners. So we recently partnered with the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland and the Maryland Department of Education to train a cohort of fifteen teachers from Maryland to go back into their state and teach Braille literacy to students. All of those teachers hold the NCUEB.
Because of this dramatic increase of teachers of blind students in Maryland, this past school year was the first year that the Maryland School for the Blind was able to meet required service minutes for their school districts. These teachers filled a huge void in the education of blind students in Maryland.
If we want students to receive a quality education, and the excuse is the shortage of teachers, then we need your help—the help of everyone in this room. I need your help in recruiting more teachers and more people to go into the teaching of blind students just as Maryland did. We would love to train more blind people to go into the field of education. Find a cohort in your state, get with me, and let’s educate them.
While training teachers is important, we also need to train the paraprofessionals. As you know, most of our students sit with a paraprofessional during the day more than they sit with a teacher of blind students. Parents also need to know Braille to be able to assist their children with homework. They need to know that, when a teacher says it will take a year for their child to learn letters A through J in the Braille alphabet, something is wrong!
Three years ago we decided to train parents and paraprofessionals at our office at PDRIB. This training is a fourteen-week class offered over the summer, and it particularly targets paraprofessionals and parents. The first year we had three members. Two of those members received their National Certification in Unified English Braille. The third entered the teaching program. This class has now grown from three members that first summer to twenty participants this summer.
I was once again met with educators across the field wanting to know why I was doing more. “Why are you doing this for parents and paraprofessionals?” “Where is the funding coming from?” “There’s no way you’ll be able to do this without funding.” I let them know we were volunteering our services and that the parents get classes for free.
We also recently partnered with the NFB and the Lavelle Fund to train sixteen IEP advocates to go out and train others to represent students in IEP meetings. There will be an additional IEP cohort coming next year. This effort will have a trickle-down effect. We train the advocate, the advocate goes and trains more advocates, and the education spreads.
Our office at the university offers student assessments across the nation to make sure that they have quality services. Recently, with some informal research on social media, I asked parents of blind students and blind students themselves to tell me what they wish their teacher of blind students knew. Some of the responses I received were, “I wish that my teacher had not been my friend but been my teacher.” “I wish they had pushed me harder.” And I think the most heartbreaking statement was from a three-and-a-half-year-old who said, "Please come see me more. I know I can learn to read.” We know these small steps have been taken at the university with our partners, and we know that they are the right steps to create change in a big way.
As I close my speech and my time with you today, I want to leave you with the thoughts of the little boy from our read-aloud. We need our dream of every blind student being a successful adult to come true. We need people like you to dream and dream big. We need you to recruit others to believe in our dream so that someday something will happen, and our dream will become reality.
Thank you!
by Sanho Steele-Louchart
From the Editor: Sanho Steele-Louchart is an attorney and the Legal Program Coordinator at the National Federation of the Blind. In this article he introduces readers to an important new program that has been launched by the NFB to help blind students and their families.
The Legal Department of the National Federation of the Blind receives dozens of requests for help each year from families of blind children. Often parents feel that their blind children face discrimination from their local school districts or that they are not receiving the services to which they are entitled under the law. We can hardly be surprised. Special education administrators receive no instruction in blindness, so they have little idea how a blind student can fully take part inside and outside the classroom. Furthermore, many professionals in the field of blindness receive limited instruction regarding age- and stage-appropriate expectations for blind people. Inadequate instruction often results in Braille teachers who don’t know how to teach Braille, access technology teachers who don’t teach technology, mobility specialists who don’t teach students to be mobile, and special ed administrators who have no idea what their teachers of blind students should be teaching.
Unfortunately, it is also the case that good teachers are sometimes hampered by district administrators who believe that teaching blind children is an unnecessary inconvenience or even a legal liability. Surely, they think, it would be easier for everyone involved if the blind child just sat and listened. Fortunately, the law disagrees.
When it comes to ensuring the rights of blind children, the old adage is true: there simply are not enough hours in the day. Therefore, when calls come in, it is standard practice for us to start by directing people to local resources for assistance. “Have you contacted your NFB affiliate?” “Have you contacted your state’s protection and advocacy organization, the law firm funded by Congress to advocate for people with disabilities?” Time and time again we hear, “I have, but the people doing IEP advocacy in my affiliate have retired, and our protection and advocacy organization has never worked with a blind person before.”
Thus an idea was born. It was time for our national organization to train Individualized Education Program (IEP) advocates who could work locally on behalf of blind students.
Enter Casey Robertson, a teacher of blind students; Karen Anderson, an educator and the NFB’s Education Program Coordinator; Justin Young, a doctor of higher education and a governmental affairs specialist; Carlton Cook Walker, an attorney and a teacher of blind students; and me, an attorney, our legal program coordinator, and a certified orientation and mobility specialist. Three members of this team are blind people. The other two are longtime leaders within the Federation and what we affectionately refer to as “honorary blind.” The team secured modest funding to start a training program, allowing for thirty participants across two cohorts. We created a curriculum spanning two-and-a-half days of nonstop, wall-to-wall IEP advocacy training.
We could not have predicted the interest we received! Within weeks of announcing the program, we had ten times more applications than there were openings available. Participants were carefully selected based upon location, background, and connection to blindness. Half of our eventual participants were blind people, and half were sighted parents of blind children. Although we could accept only a small percentage of our highly qualified applicants, we endeavored to ensure that people of as many backgrounds, locations, and personal skills were included.
Once we had selected our group members, the facilitators and participants gathered for an introductory call. We described the course content and the nearly three days of intensive instruction to follow. Participants left that call knowing the training would be akin to drinking out of a firehose, but that together we’d make it through.
After lots of calls, emails, and pre-teaching, the big day arrived. Time was of the essence. Our weekend in Baltimore was broken into three primary phases: foundation, strategy, and practice. The foundation phase saw participants learning about the anatomy of an IEP; the laws that control the process; and the terminology, history, and exceptions operating beneath the surface.
Next, advocates moved into the strategy phase. They learned about age-and stage-appropriate goals and how to write those goals into the IEP. They discussed the need for quality evaluations and assessments and the steps involved in client interviewing, setting realistic expectations, and handling contentious negotiations.
Finally, the participants broke into small groups, or teams, to practice IEP advocacy in real time. Having no idea what to expect, each team cycled through four real-world scenarios. In each session, the participants had an hour to assess the student’s needs, evaluate current goals, learn the relevant dynamics, and begin to negotiate a workable solution. Members, friends, and family acted out everything from coddling “helicopter teachers” who wanted to keep their students in protective bubbles, all the way to combative school officials who argued until they were blue in the face that blind children don’t need Braille, accessible technology, or mobility instruction. You can only begin to imagine the joy that rang through the halls each time our advocates left a meeting, knowing they’d gotten their pretend school districts to do the right thing. When our advocates felt uncertain, our facilitators helped them unpack, reframe, and troubleshoot to make the next session more successful.
The weekend came to a close with advocates feeling a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Everyone agreed that our practice day had gone extremely well, but the pressure was on. Could our advocates really do it? What if they made a mistake? They understood that being trusted to work with families on such sensitive issues would be both an incredible honor and a tremendous responsibility. Everyone was energized regardless. We assured one another that not only would we continue to train people before sending them into the wild, but that we could always adjust as needed. So, after tears, applause, and plenty of cookies, our advocates went home to decompress.
Training didn’t stop there. Participants who attended the national convention in July were asked to speak to the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC) at their annual IEP advocacy seminars. Trainees presented first on the basics of IEP advocacy, and then on the more advanced aspects. This structure allowed families with experience advocating to self-select into the session that best fit their needs. After convention, each member of the cohort was asked to do a one-on-one, one-hour interview with me to highlight any issues they might be having in their approach to advocacy. Then, in November, the participants again were broken into small groups to practice arguing around some of the most complicated issues we see.
Even now, the work is just beginning. Our IEP Advocacy Academy trainees will receive support for the foreseeable future. Families that utilize our advocates will sign releases of liability and information so that our facilitators can review draft IEPs before making any necessary suggestions. The expectation is that no IEP will be finalized by one of our advocates without first having been checked by a group facilitator. Once an IEP is checked by our facilitators and accepted by the IEP team, our advocate will remain available in case there are questions about implementation.
Consistent implementation of the IEP is vital for a child’s ongoing success. We all know that our rights are only as good as their enforcement. We encourage families to inform their advocates as soon as possible if they suspect that services aren’t being provided, minutes of instruction are being missed, or goals aren’t being met. The advocate then determines whether they should resume working on the case or need to contact the national office to see if the case can be reassigned. For those instances in which the parties believe litigation is the only option left, families can discuss their case with our legal department to consider changing the approach.
Unfortunately, we still don’t have the resources to assist with every case. Although another cohort is coming in 2025, that means we’ll have trained only thirty advocates nationwide. The reality is that programs like these require considerable financial resources, and this is just one of countless initiatives being offered through the NFB’s national office. If you would like to see programs such as these continue in the future, we urge you to donate to our cause. Contributions can be made online at nfb.org/contribute or by calling 410-659-9314 and pressing option 4. Questions about the IEP advocacy program, or IEP’s in general, can be directed to [email protected] or 410-659-9314, extension 2440.
by Julie Orozco
Reprinted from Braille Monitor, Volume 67, Number 8, October 2024
From the Editor: When we read a book for pleasure, we probably don’t have to know the number of the page we’re on or exactly where the fourth paragraph begins. In the classroom, however, the ability to navigate through a textbook can be crucial. In this article Julie Orozco shares the frustrating experience of struggling to use poorly formatted electronic textbooks as a law student. Even as she trained to be an advocate for others, she discovered that she needed to advocate effectively for herself.
I remember sitting in my first torts class on my second day of law school in August 2020. Torts felt like an intimidating subject, even though it was simply the study of legal wrongs like negligence. But my professor bellowed at us over Zoom as we tried to keep up. Everyone was lost and confused as he called out our names lightning fast, asking us questions we couldn’t pretend to understand, and then shouting, “Wrong!” when we couldn’t answer adequately. Then he started asking students, by name, to read sections of our textbook aloud. The moment he asked the first student to turn to page 25 and read the third paragraph, fear coursed through me. What if he called on me? What would I say? I couldn’t find page 25, and I certainly couldn’t read a paragraph out loud in front of my class. I had already answered one of his questions wrong. What would this professor think when I couldn’t do something as basic as read words in a textbook?
When I began my law school journey, I did not anticipate the accessibility battles that awaited me. After successfully completing two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree, I was confident in my ability to advocate for the accommodations I needed in school.
I was also reassured by the nature of the law school curriculum itself. Two of my previous degrees had been in music, which required a variety of unique accommodations, including specialized Braille music software.
Law school, I thought, would be all printed text, and it couldn’t be complicated. Our law school’s accommodations office met with me multiple times before the beginning of the semester. They seemed to have a solid process in place for furnishing accessible textbooks to students and granting other accommodations. My access coordinator reassured me that the books would be in accessible formats and told me I would not need a reader for my classes because everything would be accessible for me with high-tech solutions.
I was wrong to place my trust in professionals who did not know what made a book accessible and did not understand the limits of screen reading and OCR technology for the blind. I discovered how wrong I was at the beginning of the first semester. When I tried to open my torts book, my computer froze. The PDF file our accommodations office sent to me was so large my computer could not open it. When I finally discovered a work-around for opening my book, I was astonished to find that I could not locate page numbers anywhere in the file. These huge files, containing over a thousand pages, did not include page numbers that my screen reader could read. In addition, my screen reader read the file in long blocks of text rather than paragraphs, encountered plenty of typographical errors, and would sometimes refuse to read by paragraph altogether. My torts book was the worst offender, but all of my textbooks presented similar challenges. My civil procedure book only gave me a page number at the beginning of each chapter. Most of my books omitted charts entirely, and forget about photo descriptions!
When I approached our access office about the problems I was having with the books, they brushed off my concerns and assured me that they received these books directly from the publishers. Our university believed that the publishers were sending accessible books because that was the publishers’ duty. The publisher was required to send accessible copies of print textbooks upon request and with proof of purchase. However, these books were not fully accessible. They did not give me the same reading experience my colleagues enjoyed.
Our access office listened when I sent them a panicked email after the torts class described above. I attached the book and explained that I could not read aloud because I could not find the referenced page numbers. My accommodations office suggested that they tell the professor not to ask me to read aloud. This accommodation did not sit well with me. I wanted actual solutions, not exemptions. When I mentioned to friends and family that I could not read the page numbers in my books, I was almost universally met with blasé attitudes and dismissive shrugs. Some of these individuals had to scan their own books or dealt with texts they could hardly read, and all I was complaining about amounted to a fraction of my reading experience. Was I really dying on a hill made up of inaccessible page numbers?
I chose to push back against our accommodations office about these page numbers for a few reasons. First, I paid over $200 for some of these books, and I believed that I should have the same access to the text, including page numbers, as everyone else. I wanted to make things easier for blind students to come, rather than falling in line with the inaccessible standard. Second, most of our assignments were built around page numbers. Our civil procedure professor would give us reading assignments in chapters that were hundreds of pages apart. Our torts professor gave us complicated instructions, asking us to skip some pages and read others. I didn’t know which cases and sections to read without the accommodations office speaking directly to my professors.
Page numbers are also reference points. In study groups, in class, and in office hours, we all found cases and issues we wanted to review by turning to the relevant page.
It wasn’t only about the page numbers. These books were clunky. They were formatted in such a way that I spent much longer on assignments than I should have. I wanted the conversation around these books to change, and the page numbers were an easy starting point.
Despite my advocacy, the access office seemed reluctant to reformat my books as I suggested. I started to speak to some of my academic advisors about my textbooks and get their input and support. At the same time, I began to realize that I needed a human reader as an accommodation.
In the middle of the semester, I received my first grade on a legal writing assignment. I had worked hard on this assignment, writing and revising long into the night and making all the changes my professor recommended. I was not expecting perfection, but when I saw my barely passing grade, I started to feel discouraged. Many of the errors for which my professor took off points were formatting mechanics. This was the semester when I learned about the difference between straight and curved apostrophes. Did you know there are two types of apostrophes? I also learned that the information my screen reader was giving me about heading formats was not entirely accurate. Some of my quotes were the wrong kinds of quotes. The list could go on. Some of the mistakes I made I could learn to seek out with my screen reader, but others amounted to aesthetics that I could not detect with my access technology.
I presented my disappointing legal writing grade to the accommodations office and began to lobby for a human reader. They refused. In their words, I could not have an “assistant” because it would not be fair to the other students. I attempted to explain that plenty of blind professionals use readers to adjust formatting in their written work, but the office did not budge.
At this point, I was terrified. My legal writing class was only increasing in intensity, and I didn’t want to fail a class in my first semester of law school. Since it took me longer to complete my reading, I spent additional time with our teaching assistants to work on my legal writing. I began to miss required scholarship activities and internship fairs. I knew that I couldn’t continue doing school like this, but I felt alone. I didn’t know where to go for advice. Most people seemed to understand that law school was hard, particularly during the pandemic. My battles for accommodations seemed insignificant when compared with the accessibility challenges faced by others.
I didn’t know where to begin, so I started talking to my professors on my own. My legal writing professor let me work with our teaching assistants longer than the other students did. My civil procedure professor began modifying assignments by describing videos or condensing our readings so that I could have a lighter load. I did not ask for this, and she modified these assignments for everyone. I also continued discussions with my academic advisors, who started sending emails on my behalf. Once the accommodations office started hearing from my advisors, they changed their tune about negotiating with me. It helped that I also emailed one of the assistant deans to describe my situation.
I could not do anything to change my first semester grades or experience, but in the second semester, I started to receive textbooks as Word documents, broken up by chapter with page numbers written out. The access office also granted me a human reader as an accommodation. The reader reviewed my formatting, helped me fill out inaccessible forms, and even typed out entire inaccessible sections of one of my textbooks. Not surprisingly, my grades noticeably improved in the second semester.
Throughout the remainder of my law school career, I continued to fight for the accommodations I needed. The access office experienced a lot of turnover, and its policies changed as it integrated with the undergraduate office for accessibility. For the last two years I was in law school, I was given an Aira plan instead of one human reader. Aira is a service that allows a blind person to connect with a sighted assistant via a smartphone.
I will never get back my first semester of law school. The grades I got are alive and well on my transcript. But I hope I can help other students advocate for the accommodations they know they need. Law school is a challenging environment. Students read hundreds of pages a night, preparing to be called on in class to recount all the facts and outcomes of legal cases they may not even fully understand. They face increasing pressures to find internships and build their résumé. Blind students shouldn’t be expected to spend our time worrying about how we will learn when the learning itself is hard enough.
Afterword: I am delighted to report that Julie Orozco has graduated from law school, and she passed the Bar Exam on the first try!
Photo/Caption: Ivan Bobnar reads a print/Braille book with Grandma.
Photo/Caption: Ivan holds a Dr. Seuss book.
by Amber Bobnar
Reprinted from wonderbaby.org
From the Editor: Sharing favorite books at bedtime, and at any other time of the day, is a pleasure for parents and children alike. For the sighted parents of young blind children, however, reading together may raise some challenging questions. In this article, Amber Bobnar offers practical tips on how sighted parents can read with their blind children and provide them with early exposure to Braille.
“Our baby is only one year old, but we already know he will be a Braille reader. Is there anything we can do now to prepare him for reading Braille later?”
YES!
Parents of sighted babies are encouraged to read to them from a very early age—some studies even suggest that reading to your baby in the womb can help boost literacy!
Braille readers also need early exposure to reading materials, but there are other special considerations to take into account. Here’s what you can do now to help get your baby off to a great start.
And we mean everything!
Think about how sighted children learn to read. From the moment they’re born, they’re surrounded by print words, and not just in their baby books. From TV to toys to cereal boxes, sighted children see the printed word everywhere. By the time they’re learning to read, words are already very familiar things (and they know that learning to read will unlock the code to all those words they see every day!) Why should it be any different for blind children?
Get a Braille label maker and label anything you can think of. Toys, buttons on the TV or stereo, light switches, bowls and cups, drawers and cabinets, etc. Have your baby touch the Braille around the house as well as Braille you encounter every day on elevators or signs.
Of course, you’ll also want to Braille your baby’s books. You probably have a whole shelf of beautiful baby picture books, but without Braille, they’re no better than blank pages to your baby. You can purchase baby books with Braille set over the print (these are called print/Braille books) so that both you and your child can read the books together.
You can borrow a Perkins Brailler from your Early Intervention Program, and with some clear adhesive Braillable sheets you can Braille those books yourself! You may encounter resistance to Brailling books for your baby because, as most professionals argue, by the time your child is old enough to read Braille they won’t want to read baby books anyway. Well, by the time a sighted child is reading on their own they may not be interested in Hop on Pop, but we give them these books to read anyway. Why? Because it’s been proven again and again that exposure to reading material at an early age encourages early literacy skills. Plus, simple baby books are easy to read. It’s best to begin learning to read with easy books. This encourages fluency and speed, which in turn boost your child’s reading self-confidence.
And what if your children grow up to have sighted children of their own? Wouldn’t it be great to hand them a supply of Brailled baby books they can read to their sighted kids? What a great gift!
You may be wondering if you should use contracted or uncontracted Braille when Brailling baby books. Uncontracted Braille is a simple letter-for-letter code. The word “shout” would be Brailled s-h-o-u-t. Contracted Braille, on the other hand, uses abbreviations in order to save space. The word “shout” is reduced to three symbols: sh-ou-t. Most Braille books use contracted Braille. There are different opinions on how to teach children Braille, but most programs begin with uncontracted Braille and then gradually introduce abbreviations over time. As a parent Brailling books for your child, you should probably begin with simple books in uncontracted Braille (this will be easier for you, too). Bigger books with more words can be contracted, since your child will probably be reading them at an older age.
When you first begin reading books to your baby, start the custom of having them touch the top, sides, and spine of the book. Explain that we open a book on the right and read left to right. These are cues that your child might miss without vision.
Also, read the whole book to your baby. Read the title, author, and illustrator. Read the copyright and dedication. Read the back panel and publisher’s notes. Try to fill in the gaps your child might be missing since they can’t see the book. How else will they learn how books are designed?
Encourage your baby to turn the pages by himself. Board books are great for beginning page-turners, but even these hard pages can get a little stuck. Try gluing a small piece of soft Velcro or felt to the top right corner of each page. This will separate the pages just enough to help your baby get their fingers in there. The Velcro can also act as an orientation marker, letting your child know they are holding the book open correctly.
Your baby will need to be able to move their fingers along the Braille lines and differentiate each dot when they get older. Help them now by encouraging them to touch Braille (and other textures), so they get used to the feel.
Also, try to have your baby use each finger separately by playing with small objects or by manipulating little buttons or levers on toys. For example, encourage your baby to press buttons with the tip of their index finger rather than their whole palm.
Braille reading also requires two hands: the left usually guides and keeps your place while the right reads. Encourage your baby to play using both hands. For example, they may hold the box with their left hand while they grab the blocks out of the box with their right.
If your baby has never experienced a pig or a zebra, then a book about pigs and zebras will be pretty meaningless to him, no matter how pretty the pictures are. Try to find books on topics your baby is familiar with, such as mommies and daddies, the beach, or the pet dog—whatever fits your life. If you do have a book about pigs and zebras, maybe a trip to the local petting zoo will help make that book more meaningful for your baby.
Another approach is to bring real objects to your child while you read the book together. Goodnight Moon is a great example of a book with many real-life objects in it. As you read the book, you can touch a telephone, a balloon, mittens, a bowl, a brush, a comb, and many other simple everyday household objects. Be sure to use only real objects, because models such as a toy telephone may just confuse your baby.
Teach your child from a very early age that books are to be respected. Keep books upright on a low shelf, turn pages carefully, and never chew on books!
Use Braille language with your baby. Talk about “reading with your fingers,” and be very positive about the experience. Tell your baby how cool they are because they read with their fingers and how proud you are of them. Point out Braille on signs or at the park so they will understand that Braille is found everywhere and that Braille reading is an important skill.
It may seem silly at first, but you can also pretend to read the Braille with your fingers while you read to your baby. Babies learn by copying what their parents do, so give your baby the impression that you read with your fingers, too. Have your baby touch your hand while you “read” the Braille so they will understand how it’s done. Don’t worry about technique at this point. You’re just trying to convey a simple message to your little baby: People read with their fingers!
As your baby becomes more accustomed to Braille, you can also take their fingers and move them over the words as you read. One great approach is to choose one or two special words in each of your baby’s favorite books and then read those words together when you get to them. For example, our son always laughed at the word lullaby in one of his favorite nighttime books. Every time we came to that page, I took his finger and helped him “read” the word. Eventually, whenever he heard the word lullaby in his book, he would lift his right hand so that I could take it and place it on the word.
Could you teach a sighted child to read if you were illiterate? Probably not. So how can you really help your blind child learn Braille if you aren’t familiar with it yourself? You don’t need to be fluent in Braille, nor do you have to be able to read it with your fingers, but you should know the basics.
Read our article on How to Teach Yourself Braille for some good advice.
You want your baby to be exposed to as many Braille books as possible, but how can you possibly Braille all those books yourself? You are not alone! There are many great resources online for parents of blind children. Here are our favorites:
American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Braille Books Program
https://www.actionfund.org/programs/braille-books-program
Each month provides a free Braille book from a popular children’s book series.
Braille Institute of America
https://www.brailleinstitute.org
Provides free Braille books for children on a monthly basis.
Braille Reading Pals Club
https://nfb.org/programs-services/early-childhood-initiatives/early-childhood-application
Introduces young blind children and their families to literacy through Braille, encourages shared reading of Braille books between blind children and their families.
National Braille Press
nbp.org
Sponsors Print-Braille Book of the Month Club for $100 per year or free for eligible families.
ReadBooks! distributes free bags of beginning Braille materials to families with blind and low-vision children ages birth to seven.
National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled
https://www.loc.gov/nls
Has an extensive collection of Braille titles for children and adults that can be borrowed free of charge; also allows readers to select up to five free Braille books per month that may be kept indefinitely.
Seedlings Braille Books for Children
seedlings.org
Braille children’s books in English and Spanish at reasonable prices.
by Norma Crosby
Reprinted from The Voice of the Nation’s Blind, Thursday, April 11, 2024
From the Editor: Norma Crosby is a longtime Federationist who has worked tirelessly to promote opportunities for blind children and adults. She currently serves as president of the NFB of Texas.
In the spring of 2023, the National Federation of the Blind of Texas hosted our first Blindness Outdoor Learning and Development (BOLD) project. As the name implies, Project BOLD provides blind children with an opportunity to experience the outdoors by spending a full day in one of our state parks. The program was sponsored through a co-op grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). This statewide grant program is intended to introduce our state parks system to underserved populations, including people with disabilities.
Our program took place at Palmetto State Park, which is located between Austin and San Antonio. We didn’t camp outdoors. Instead, we spent Friday night at a local hotel and spent about twelve hours in the park on Saturday. During the program, children ages seven through seventeen participated in activities such as kayaking, hiking, fire theory, and tent building. The state park staff provided a touch table that allowed our kids to learn what armadillos and other wildlife felt like. Rather than tactile graphics, the touch table had animal skins for an immersive experience.
Sighted siblings and parents were invited to participate alongside our blind students. The blind kids were separated into pods, and the sighted siblings had their own pod led by two blind mentors. Sighted siblings were not asked to use learning shades; the idea was not to make them experience temporary blindness, but to teach them how to be better allies for their blind brothers and sisters. We allowed parents to watch their children as they participated, but they were asked to stay back and let their children learn from their blind instructors. We wanted the kids to learn from their blind instructors, rather than relying on their parents as they might do at home. We also felt that the parents needed to understand that nonvisual techniques are safe and effective. The parents did a great job of following that rule, and they were all happy at the end of the day when they saw what their kids had accomplished with the help of blind instructors.
After a full day of outdoor fun, the kids helped cook their hotdogs and s’mores. They shared dinner with their families and with our staff and volunteers. Following dinner, everyone helped clean up. Then we all went back to the hotel tired, but excited by what the kids had learned and experienced.
While the kids were preparing to cook their hotdogs, the parents spent about an hour with Federation leaders, reviewing the day and discussing the Federation’s high expectations of blind people and positive philosophy about blindness. The parents asked great questions and expressed a new understanding of what they could expect of and for their kids.
I think the most interesting question that a parent asked was, “What can I expect my child to be able to do when they grow up?” Most of the parents had expected very little before coming to Project BOLD. After meeting competent blind people working in a variety of fields, they were relieved that they didn’t have to adhere to their previously low expectations. We told them about ourselves and about other immensely successful blind professionals. The parents were surprised to learn that professional options were open to their kids, and they went away with a sense that the future was not what they had thought it was likely to be. They were filled with the love, hope, and determination that is our Federation philosophy.
Our Project BOLD program was incredibly successful. Recently we applied for and received a second co-op grant from TPWD. Our new project is called BOLDER, which stands for Blindness Outdoor Learning and Development Extended Reach. The new program will happen in the spring of 2025. It will include three tracks: a training weekend for instructors, mentors, and other volunteers; a weekend for blind children and their families; and a weekend for blind adults and their children.
Texas is very fortunate to have a diverse group of talented leaders who work hard to make programs like BOLD possible, but we could not have done it without the assistance of a few gifted Federation leaders from around the country. Audrey Farnum of Oklahoma, Lisamaria Martinez of California, Ben Schuler and Georgie Sydnor of Louisiana, and Karen Anderson of Baltimore were all critical to our mission—we appreciate their contributions! Emily Gibbs, Mika Baugh, Haley Spencer, and the rest of our team did an amazing job, and they deserve kudos for all their hard work.
Project BOLD and similar programs share the philosophy of the National Federation of the Blind by teaching other blind people and members of the general public that high expectations should be the norm and not the exception. These programs also allow blind people to learn from one another. They build our community. They allow blind people to gain experiences that will create future opportunities, and they teach everyone that nonvisual tools are just as good as those used by sighted people. They build confidence, and they change what it means to be blind.
To learn more about Project BOLD and Project BOLDER, you can visit the Texas Park and Wildlife website, https://tpwmagazine.com/archive/2023/nov/ed_3_bold/index.phtml.
Photo/Caption: Olivia Cichowlas stands on a rock, holding a net.
Photo/Caption: Olivia Cichowlas stands among foliage near the water’s edge.
by Olivia Cichowlas
From the Editor: Olivia Cichowlas is a recent graduate of the Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB). She has attended Washington Seminars representing Colorado and Illinois. Olivia has a lifelong passion for animals and nature, which she embodies in her chosen field of nature education.
My love of the outdoors began with my interest in animals. When I was growing up everyone joked that we had a zoo at our house. At various times during my childhood I had a rabbit, some ferrets, and an assortment of hamsters. When I was in high school I even had a hedgehog. All of these pets were in addition to our family dog and cat. I wanted to be a marine biologist or a dolphin trainer when I grew up.
A wealth of outdoor experiences deepened my love of nature. I helped my mother tend our back-yard garden, played outside until the sun went down, and went on countless walks in the nearby forest preserves. Family camping trips were a high point of summer vacations. To this day I love the feeling of the sun on my face, the crunch of dry leaves underfoot, and the delight of playing in newly fallen snow.
In grade school and high school I was drawn to the sciences. I was fascinated by genetics, environmental biology, and physics. I loved to ask questions and seek out answers, and that has never changed.
Horseback riding was another fun activity. During middle school and high school I volunteered to help with kids’ parties at the stable. I also helped with programs for riders with disabilities. Ironically, I didn’t realize that I had a disability myself.
When I was growing up I had low vision due to glaucoma, but I had no accommodations to help me at school. I still had some usable vision, and I figured out ways to make it through school without Braille or access technology. Finally, when I was in college, an ophthalmologist told me I had only ten degrees of peripheral vision, meaning that I was legally blind. Looking back, I realize I had probably been blind for quite a while.
When I started at North Central University in Naperville, Illinois, I had no idea what I should study or what sort of job I could hope to find after graduation. Due to my low vision I didn’t know what sort of work I was capable of doing, but I figured I might as well major in something that truly interested me. My college offered a major in environmental science, which had three tracks to choose from: business, science, and sustainability. I chose the science track, which seemed like a good fit with my passion for the outdoors.
My major encompassed much more than the biology of plants and animals. I learned how organisms work together to keep an ecosystem healthy. I learned about the factors that can throw an ecosystem out of balance. I learned about populations in certain parts of the United States that face environmental injustice, and I studied the complex interactions between legislation and environmental factors. I was excited about all the new things I was learning, but I still had no idea what I could do with my major.
Though I loved my studies, college was a struggle in many ways. I had no idea about the nonvisual skills that could have helped me, so I experienced a lot of visual fatigue. Sometimes I feared that a career in science was not really a possibility for me. Still, I knew that my school offered some amazing opportunities, and I determined to take advantage of them.
During my junior year I took a class based on my school’s partnership with the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. I spent every Saturday at the Shedd or at one of its suburban restoration projects. It was a very cool experience! However, at that time I didn’t have the confidence to advocate for myself in order to get the most out of the program.
Another wonderful opportunity through my college was a study abroad program in the rainforest of Ecuador. We prepared with a semester-long course on tropical ecology. My professor was very supportive, and we worked together to figure out how I could be fully included in the fieldwork experience. For instance, even though I was using my cane, sometimes I needed a human guide when we walked on narrow, slippery trails.
Each student in the program had to plan an experiment that could be conducted in the rainforest. I could have done something that involved plants, studying which ones grew in a particular area and how far apart they were under certain conditions. But I really wanted to do a project that involved animals. I ended up designing a study about insects called stick bugs. Some are blue, some are green, and some are brown. I wanted to determine whether insects of a particular color preferred environments with plants of that same color. My teammates found the insects and gave me the information, which I recorded and tabulated.
During the summer after my junior year at North Central I landed an internship as an environmental educator at a small state park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I got one day of training, and I observed two lessons. After that I was teamed with a co-teacher and sent out to teach kids about the natural world. One co-teacher had a lot of experience, and I learned a great deal from her. Sometimes, though, I was paired with a park employee who had no teaching experience, and I was the main educator. I did a lot of learning on the job!
Each day I had a brand-new group of kids, usually second- and third-graders. Most of the time they were in summer day-camp programs, and the visit to the park was a field trip for them. The day-camp counselors came with the kids, but when they got to the park, it was as though the counselors turned off their brains! My partner and I were the ones in charge. I found out that lessons seldom go the way you think they will.
That summer I learned to be more open about my blindness. I used my cane on the trails in the park, and the kids asked me a lot of questions. Once a child grabbed my cane and darted off with it! That was a bit of an adventure! Fortunately another instructor stepped in and brought my cane back.
Though I faced a lot of challenges, I have some very wonderful memories of my work that summer. One day I had a girl in my group who was very afraid of insects. I showed her one of my favorite bugs, a harmless little red insect that lives on milkweed plants. I picked one up and showed it to this little girl to prove that it wouldn’t hurt her. Later, as I was busy with some other children, the little girl ran up to me, fearlessly carrying five of the little red bugs on her hand. That really made me happy!
A lot of the children I met came from inner-city neighborhoods, and they had had very little exposure to the outdoors. I could tell they were thrilled to be out in nature! They were very gentle when they handled insects and plants, as though they were in awe of everything around them.
Taking kids fishing in Lake Michigan was quite an experience for me! I discovered right away that they had to go one at a time when they cast their lines, or else it wouldn’t end well! Sometimes a child caught a fish that was an invasive species, and we had to explain that we couldn’t put it back in the lake. We’d put the fish in a bucket of water and tell the kids we were taking it up to the office for research. If we admitted we were going to put it out for the birds to eat, the kids would have been really sad.
Toward the end of the summer my boss encouraged me to design a program. I advertised a hike for blind and low-vision visitors that would focus on nonvisual aspects of the park’s environment. For example, I took people to areas of the park that had mint and other aromatic plants. We listened to bird calls and other sounds of nature.
At my college everyone in my major had to do a Capstone Project in order to graduate. My project focused on inclusivity in environmental education, drawing upon my experiences during my internship. My advisor wanted me to work with the park in Milwaukee and design something that could be used in the future. I suggested turning one of the prairie trails into a Braille trail with tactile markers and Braille plaques on some of the trees. The park turned down that idea; they didn’t want to have to maintain the trail. Then I suggested adding QR codes to the signs in the park so blind people could get access to information using their smartphones. The park didn’t want to take on that project, either. Finally I designed six lesson plans that would be inclusive for visitors with disabilities. I included ways the park could accommodate students with hearing impairments, blindness/low vision, or mobility impairments. For example, I designed a lesson on photosynthesis that included a tactile diagram.
I graduated from North Central in May of 2023, and I applied to the Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB) to get intensive training in the skills of blindness—orientation and mobility, Braille, access technology—all of the things I never really learned while I was going through school. While I was waiting to start the program in Colorado I found a job as a nature educator at Spring Valley Nature Center in the town of Schaumburg, not far from my home. I went for an interview and they hired me on the spot! It really helped that I had some experience through my internship! I only worked there for a couple of months before I got the call from CCB, letting me know I could begin my training.
I spent nine months in Boulder, and when I came back to Illinois I started to look for a full-time job. While I was searching I returned to my old part-time nature educator position. I started by going to the park to observe lessons that were being taught by other educators, and I spent time exploring with a sighted friend who showed me features I can point out when I took visitors on walks. I teach about ecosystems and how plants and animals work together. We hike around the park and identify the difference between prairie, woodland, and wetland ecosystems. We also do hands-on activities such as looking for insects and learning about plants and their seeds.
From time-to-time I struggle with the reality that some things in nature are inherently visual, and I cannot spot them right away on my own. But there is so much I can show my students—animal footprints in the snow, the textures of bark on different kinds of trees, the cocoons of insects hanging on twigs. I keep finding new strategies for working with my students, helping them experience the natural world with all of their senses. Every day is a new day, and when we explore the outdoors we can always find something interesting.
by Henry Young
From the Editor: At the 2024 National Federation of the Blind Convention, Henry Young was awarded the Betty Allen Scholarship, one of the thirty scholarships presented by the NFB to outstanding postsecondary students each year. Each award is valued at eight thousand dollars. When he introduced himself at the meeting of the NFB’s National Board of Directors, Henry Young explained that he is preparing for a career with the National Park Service. In this article he explains how he arrived at this career choice and describes some of the work he is doing and planning to do.
I grew up in New Jersey, in the shadow of the great skyscrapers of Manhattan. It’s quite a journey from the New Jersey suburbs to the mountains of Montana, where I live today! A childhood visit to Yellowstone National Park was the key.
My experience with blindness began in December of 2014, when I was near the end of middle school. I had a lot going on already in terms of life changes, and vision loss came as a real blow. In the adjustment process I went through a lot of trial and error—especially a lot of error! I had orientation and mobility (O&M) instruction, and I learned some basic Braille. I got very good at using VoiceOver to read my textbooks, listening to everything at double speed.
After graduation from high school I attended Drew University, a small school in Madison, New Jersey, not far from my home. I did abysmally my first semester, mostly because I was having a lot of fun and wasn’t focusing on my classes. Then, during my second semester, COVID happened, and everything went online. Online education didn’t work well for me either. When the world opened up again I took courses at a community college for two years.
Ironically, COVID had some positive effects for me. It forced me to slow down. It gave me time to think about who I am and what my aspirations were.
In my room I had a poster I got at Yellowstone National Park. My trip to Yellowstone was a life-changing experience. I also had a poster of the Grand Canyon. Those posters inspired me to watch a documentary series by Ken Burns that I remembered from years before. The series was called The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. I was deeply moved by the stories of the people who created the parks and by the natural wonders the parks preserve, and I yearned to be in those environments. Somehow the parks felt authentic to the person I was and the person I wanted to become. I made up my mind to complete my college education out west.
Missoula, Montana, home to the University of Montana, is the only city in the mountain west that actually stands in the Rockies. In the lower forty-eight, Missoula is the closest city to a wilderness area. There is a two-thousand-foot peak five minutes from my front door. If you’re so inclined, you can put on a backpack, walk out of your house, and disappear for weeks on end.
The great environmentalist John Muir said, “Climb their mountains, get their good tidings, and their peace will flow into you as their breeze and their autumn leaves.” Those words describe the way I feel when I’m out there.
Missoula became home for me as soon as I arrived. I joined the hiking club on campus and connected with a group of wonderful new friends. I also made friends with people in my dorm, which was called the Tower. On weekends I visited Glacier National Park and some of the nearby Alpine lakes. Over spring break some of my friends and I went to Sedona, Arizona, and visited the Grand Canyon.
Some of my courses at the university gave me the opportunity to do very meaningful projects. Through my class on environmental history, I worked on a project with the Montana Natural History Center down the river. Most of the other students on the project sorted through old photographs, which wouldn’t work for me. I developed a project doing an accessibility review for the Natural History Center. I explored the possibility of having an audio guide to the exhibits—the animal specimens, the maps, and the videos. I felt very connected to every aspect of this project—socially, geographically, and academically.
At this point I’m a senior, with only one more semester to go. The thought of leaving breaks my heart! I love Missoula, and I dearly love the whole region. I tell people they couldn’t pay me to leave.
I hope to continue my education here by earning an MA in history. I’d like to write a thesis on the history of Americans with disabilities in the National Park Service (NPS). Actually, the National Park Service already has done some significant work in this area. They’re bringing out a handbook on how to interpret disability history throughout the parks system. There’s even a page about disability history on NPS’s website. There is serious momentum for getting those stories out to the public.
As part of my investigation, I want to look at how the idea of accessibility has evolved, going all the way back to the conception of the national park in the 1850s and 1860s. Yosemite National Park was set aside by Abraham Lincoln in 1864. If I’m not getting too ambitious, I’d like to compare the US park system with the national parks in other countries such as Canada.
I think Americans with disabilities tend to feel a lack of ownership when it comes to the parks. Part of that disconnect comes because they do not feel themselves represented in those narrative spaces. By telling the stories of people with disabilities who have played a role in the parks through the years, I can help people find themselves reflected in these spaces today.
Already I have found a few examples of people with disabilities who played important roles in the history of the parks. A wonderful man named Steven Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, had debilitating mental health episodes throughout his life. Today he might be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. Between 1916 and 1929, he oversaw the largest expansion of the parks system in history.
I’ve learned a lot about the blind man who hiked the Appalachian Trail with his guide dog. That’s an impressive feat for anyone, blind or sighted! The trail runs more than two thousand miles, with two hundred thousand feet of elevation gain from one end to the other.
I’ve also learned about a blind woman named Clara Corbin. She managed a site in New Mexico, an ancient pueblo called Gran Quivira. She knew the site extremely well, but she also strung up cords that she could follow from place to place.
For a lot of reasons, people with disabilities have not enjoyed ready access to the parks over the years. There are monetary barriers—it’s expensive to get to a lot of these spaces, and many people with disabilities have limited incomes. During the twentieth century the parks catered to middle-class visitors; you needed a car to get there and move around.
For three months last summer I worked as a park ranger at Salinas Pueblo Missions, a small park in central New Mexico. On a daily basis I was responsible for opening the trail, the visitors’ center, and the bookstore. I raised the American flag in the morning and took it down at the end of the day. Aside from those responsibilities, I interacted with the public all day long. People arrived, full of questions about the park. I was just as curious about our visitors. I enjoyed learning everything they were willing to share about their lives, the places they came from, and the things that brought them to Salinas Pueblo.
I led tours that I designed, weaving in various narratives about the park’s history. We had tens of thousands of visitors in the course of the year, which actually is a low number compared to many of the better-known parks. I memorized the locations of points of interest in the ruins of the pueblo so I could point them out when I showed people around. Fortunately, I never ran into a rattlesnake!
Incidentally, Gran Quivira now has audio description for the park’s brochure and some of the museum exhibits and interpretive panels around the site. We also have tactile models of a couple of locations.
I think it’s tremendously important for parents to give their kids experiences in nature during their formative years—and I mean Nature, bolded and with a capital N! Early experiences can be transformative. That trip to Yellowstone when I was thirteen truly changed my life!
Working in the national parks is not the typical career choice for a blind person or for anyone with a disability. I hope that is going to change. By 2050 I hope it will be unremarkable to walk into a visitors’ center and be greeted by someone who uses a wheelchair, a long white cane, or a guide dog. Right now, though, that certainly is not the usual scenario. By working in the parks, I hope I can help blind people realize that the sky’s the limit when it comes to careers. Not everyone will want to work in the national parks, of course, but the possibilities out there go on and on.
If you would like to contact me, you can reach me at 908-577-2223 or [email protected].
Editor’s Note: The John Muir quotation can be found at https://www.nps.gov/jomu/learn/historyculture/john-muir-quotes.htm.
by Cole Carper
Reprinted from Voice of the Nation’s Blind Blog, December 6, 2024
From the Editor: Cole Carper was the winner of an NFB National Scholarship in 2024. When he introduced himself at the meeting of the NFB National Board, he explained that he aspires to a career in the aerospace industry. Here is the essay he submitted with his scholarship application.
While most people think of being blind as some kind of tragedy, I don’t always see it that way. My name is Cole Carper, and I have been legally blind since birth. I attended Arkansas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired until third grade, when I transferred to public school. After I learned basic skills, my parents felt it was best that I attend a traditional school that represented the real world. I now know this was the right move for me.
I’ve always been involved in activities that interest me, such as mountain biking, snow and waterskiing, competitive swimming, cross-country, and track. I’ve found that people, if allowed, will limit me more than my blindness justifies. Pushing the limit is often met with surprise or questions about how I can do these activities. Sighted people will handicap me if I let them.
Early on, my family worked hard to find a sport in which my sister, also blind, and I could compete and excel with sighted peers. After discovering that ball sports were not my strong suit, I tried martial arts. Eventually I found my home in the pool.
I started swimming in sixth grade. Swimming a single lap of the pool seemed a daunting task. From that point on, I started swimming almost daily to improve my ability. Through hard work and diligent practice, I have qualified for the state championship meet in all four years of high school. I am now best at the fifty-yard freestyle and the five-hundred-yard freestyle, the shortest and longest races in my high school league. I swim because I enjoy the competition, but also because swimming allows me to educate people about the abilities of blind individuals. People are surprised to see the blind guy touch the wall before those who can see it.
This year I have grown my leadership skills as captain of my high school swimming team. While the team has been relatively small in the past, it has doubled in size through my constant recruiting efforts. As captain, I also worked to ensure that students did not miss their races, helped coordinate transportation, and worked with inexperienced swimmers on technique. I believe my abilities as a blind swimmer and leader motivated my teammates.
I have been a committed member of my church youth group since sixth grade. This program has allowed me to serve on many mission trips: two to Kentucky, one to Guatemala, and many around Arkansas. On these trips I learned how to use drills and other power tools to build and repair houses, roofs, and wheelchair ramps. In Guatemala our team built an entire house, from the concrete foundation to the electrical wiring. In Harlan, Kentucky, my group installed a tin roof for a family in need. I was able to work on the roof safely, which somewhat concerned my mom upon my return. For some tasks, such as hammering and measuring, I had to adapt the standard method. It took me slightly longer to complete those tasks—but complete them I did!
I have been on the church youth group leadership team for five years, and I am currently the president. The team’s purpose is to plan events, fundraisers, and volunteer opportunities for students. As president, I’ve collected information from members for trip planning and decision-making. I’ve also created announcements for events and recruited students for service projects.
These interactions with sighted people have helped me educate others about what it means to be legally blind. People are constantly surprised that I can cook, do handiwork, and even do my schoolwork without assistance. Their surprise is surprising to me, because these skills, or adaptations, have always seemed natural to me.
Through my activities and experiences, I’ve learned the importance of self-advocacy and independence. My vision to become a successful aerospace engineer is not limited by my limited eyesight. I know that I have to work hard and be well educated to achieve this goal, which is why I am submitting this scholarship application.
Thank you for considering my application for this award.
Photo/Caption: Kyle Chellino fills orders at Chick-fil-A.
by Kyle Chellino
From the Editor: Future Reflections often includes the stories of blind people who work in professional fields—lawyers, teachers, social workers, scientists, and performers. However, blind people work effectively in a wide range of fields that don’t require an advanced degree. For the past two years Kyle Chellino has worked at Chick-fil-A, and he loves his job. Here is his story.
I grew up in Will County, a semi-rural area south of Chicago. I’ve been totally blind all my life, and when I started out in public school it didn’t turn out very well. I ended up transferring to the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired (ISVI) in Jacksonville, where I learned Braille and mobility besides my other subjects. After I graduated, I stayed on campus for two more years in their program that teaches daily living skills.
When I finally left Jacksonville I started looking for a job, but I didn’t have any luck. I looked for sales jobs in stores, and I applied at Subway and McDonald’s. Nobody was interested in hiring me. I didn’t know that Rehab Services is supposed to help you find work, so I just floundered around on my own, not getting anywhere.
Finally, in 2022 I moved up to Chicago and got connected with the Department of Rehab Services. My rehab counsellor connected me with an organization called Jewish Occupational Services. It was through them that I got the job I have now.
Jewish Occupational Services gave me a job coach. His name is Mike, and he’s been great! They helped me get an interview at Chick-fil-A.
I got a ride to the interview, but the driver dropped me off at the wrong place. I was out on the street with no idea where I was, and I was scared I’d be late! I ended up calling the police, and an officer came and helped me get to where I needed to be. I was only one street over, but I didn’t know that. Even with all that confusion I got to the interview on time, and Mike was there waiting for me. What a relief!
My interview went really well. A few days later they called and told me they’d like to have me on the team. I was so excited!
I’m a member of the front house crew, serving the customers. The food comes down a big chute. I can tell which order is which by touching the boxes, because they’re different shapes. They’re very hot, though, so I have to be careful when I touch them.
To perform my job I use some special equipment for access. One thing I find very helpful is a liquid level indicator. It beeps when I fill a cup to the right level. I also use a device called the OrCam ReadMe. It takes a picture of the customer’s ticket and reads it aloud.
I really love the people I work with. They’re super nice and considerate. I’m so happy that I have this job, and I always give it my best.
I know for us blind people it can really be hard to find a job, but it’s worth the effort. I want to tell people not to get discouraged. Keep looking, because there’s always something out there waiting for you.
by Katelyn Siple
From the Editor: Katelyn Siple completed adjustment to blindness training at the Louisiana Center for the Blind in 2022. She holds a BA in communications from Lancaster Bible College, and she is active in the NFB of Maryland. In August Katelyn will leave for Honduras, where she will spend ten months teaching English and studying Spanish. With two of her friends she contributes to a blog, boldstrongandfree.com.
It was my first week of training at the Louisiana Center for the Blind (LCB), and I was searching through the West Kitchen from top to bottom. I wanted to see what I could discover in all the cabinets and drawers. I’m sure I asked my home management instructor, Cameron, a lot of questions that week, but there’s one I remember most.
“Where are all the Braille measuring cups and adaptive tools for blind people?” I asked. I expected to find knife guards, locking lids for draining, and the other implements I’d always been told were necessary for blind people who wanted to cook. I was shocked and excited when I found out there weren’t any.
My family was very hesitant to let me cook, afraid that I would get hurt or burn the house down. I wanted to help my great-grandparents with the cooking when they were alive, and I asked my grandmother endless questions while she cooked. I always wanted a job in the kitchen, and I hovered whenever someone was cooking. I didn’t really start cooking for myself, though, until the day I walked up to the stove and told my dad I was going to learn to cook, with the stubborn attitude I’ve always been known for.
Family and state rehabilitation teachers tried to show me the safest and most effective ways to cook, which often included buying the latest gadgets believed to help blind people in the kitchen. Everyone tried to help me learn what I could, but there were frustrating moments when I couldn’t figure things out because of what I didn’t know. I remember trying to drain pasta, cut out cookies at Christmas, or flip basically anything on the stove.
Despite all those frustrating moments, when I started training at the LCB, I figured I didn’t have much to learn in the kitchen. I was so wrong!
Cameron’s calm, supportive attitude and expertise in the kitchen made it easy for me to learn and become confident in my own skills. During training we were allowed to choose the things we wanted to make beyond the basics of scrambled eggs and rice. After my exploration of the kitchen, one of the first things I learned was how to use standard measuring cups and spoons, simply by memorizing their order in the stack. I conquered my fear of hot oil popping on me when I fried bacon and other meat on the stove. I had to deep fry as one of my training requirements. Although the food wasn’t healthy, it was delicious and fun to cook. I would definitely do it again!
We spent a lot of time cutting and preparing herbs, fruits, and vegetables. I learned to cut them safely and quickly, without using any guards or losing my fingers. I use my left hand as a guide, curling my fingers in to make sure they are safe while I cut. In cutting and cooking, it’s helpful to have your hand or a utensil as a guide. Cameron called this our kitchen cane, a concept that stayed with me after training.
I learned countless nonvisual techniques during training, and they are invaluable to me now. I learned to tell whether food is done by its texture when you lightly tap it with your finger or with a fork. I’ve learned to check for doneness based on the smell coming from the oven or the way the sizzling sound changes in the pan. I learned to do the things that frustrated me in the past, such as draining pasta. I even had the opportunity to bake cut-out cookies at Christmas.
During training I went through an entire carton of eggs, learning to make the perfect egg over-easy. I went through several bowls of pancake batter and survived a big mess before I made anything that remotely looked like a pancake. I also lived through the Waffle Explosion of 2021; I spent three days cleaning the waffle maker!
I learned something through those frustrating experiences. Even when I wasn’t entirely successful, such as when I grilled burgers for the first time, I learned skills that have stayed with me.
As one of my graduation requirements, I had to make a meal for eight and a meal for forty. I love cooking for others, and I was excited to have that opportunity, but I was a little nervous, too. My meal for eight was a tribute to my family and the southern cooking handed down to us through the generations, with a little of my own personality thrown in. I made chicken glazed with molasses, brown sugar, and orange juice, a dish I adapted from a recipe. I also made mashed potatoes, green beans, and my great-grandmother’s biscuit recipe, with vanilla ice cream for dessert. I put a lot of thought into the decorations, music, and invitations, and I had so much fun!
I made chicken and dumplings for my meal for forty. I chose this dish because I could throw it all into one pot, and it’s easy to make. It was a time intensive project, and I never knew that the hardest part would be cleaning up afterward.
When I came to training, I thought I would learn everything I would ever need to know in life, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, I learned how to problem solve calmly and to figure out how to do new things on my own. I still can’t make the perfect pancake, and there are still things I haven’t learned—and that’s fine.
Since training I’ve learned to do even more in the kitchen. Those nine months in Louisiana changed my life in every way possible. Instead of being defeated by frustration, I have freedom and self-confidence in the kitchen and beyond. I will be forever grateful for the skills I learned, the role models I met, the experiences I had, and the relationships I forged during that time. They helped shape me into who I am today.
by Merry-Noel Chamberlain
From the Editor: Dr. Merry-Noel Chamberlain is an Orientation and Mobility (O&M) instructor with the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired. She has written numerous articles for Future Reflections, as well as several books. Her most recent title is Structured Discovery Cane Travel Approach to Orientation and Mobility Concepts (2023).
While I was attending the master’s program in Orientation and Mobility (O&M) at Louisiana Tech University several years ago, I went on a five-mile walk under learning shades. With other students in the program and students attending the Louisiana Center for the Blind, I walked from Ruston to the neighboring town of Grambling. The Grambling Walk involved a bit of friendly competition, and it helped all of us build confidence in our O&M skills. What a great opportunity—to walk independently, without a guide, from one town to another, using the one true mobility tool—the long white cane!
Because the walk was such a wonderful confidence-building experience for me, I longed for a comparable event in my home state of Nebraska. I wanted to find a way to encourage Nebraska students to enhance their navigational skills by using their canes. Thanks to my employer, the Educational Service Unit #3 of the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and thanks to the help of several volunteers, the Nebraska Cane Walk was born.
The Nebraska Cane Walk was designed to promote independence for students between the ages of five and twenty-one. The Cane Walk promoted mobility via the long white cane. Participants moved independently, without the assistance of a human guide. The Cane Walk was not a competition with winners in first, second, or third place. It was simply an opportunity for participants to build confidence in their mobility skills.
The Nebraska Cane Walk was held on April 24, 2024, at the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired (NCBVI). It encompassed two structured sessions. The morning session covered basic O&M skills, while the afternoon session offered more advanced O&M opportunities and challenges. Many of the stations were operated by instructors with National Orientation and Mobility Certification (NOMC) or who were Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialists (COMS). Rehabilitation counselors and staff from NCBVI, a current O&M student from the University of Nebraska/Lincoln, and blind adults who travel with the long white cane in their daily lives also staffed stations. In addition there were volunteers from the Educational Service Unit #3, Outlook Nebraska, and the public schools.
Each of the participants visited ten morning stations, and the older or more advanced participants ventured on to ten additional stations in the afternoon. Participants maneuvered independently to targeted stations, earning a variety of tactile, scented, or Braille stickers upon arrival. These rewards were placed inside passports, which the participants carried in zipper pouches attached to lanyards. Although many of the stations involved participants in activities, the main goal was for the participants to enhance their mobility and independence skills by traveling through a variety of real-life environments. At the end of the day participants received gift bags filled with fidgets and games.
Participants took part in a variety of activities. They went “fishing,” fine tuning tactile awareness with the cane. Some played the Cardinal Direction Tic-Tac-Toe game and/or a game called Left, Center, Right. Overall, the participants were involved in the following activities during the Nebraska Cane Walk:
Parents attended a roundtable discussion with Jeff Altman, NOMC, in which they learned about the alternative skills of blindness. In addition, parents learned more about O&M, the long, white cane, and Structured Discovery Cane Travel. They got new ideas on how they might help their children or students reach their mobility goals.
Participants who had any amount of usable vision wore learning shades. Wearing learning shades prevents students from trying to use inconsistent or unreliable vision. When O&M instruction includes the use of learning shades, students develop skills that they may use outside class, regardless of lighting conditions or fluctuations in their vision. By wearing learning shades at the Nebraska Cane Walk, all participants are at an equal level. The removal of the visual component supports consistency when comparing a student’s growth in confidence during future Nebraska Cane Walk events.
The Nebraska Cane Walk event had many goals and objectives.
Participants were given an opportunity to practice their O&M skills in a challenging new environment.
Participants were given an opportunity to meet and interact with other participants outside their school district.
Parents and participants were given an opportunity to meet and learn from successful adults with visual impairments (besides their O&M instructor, in some cases).
An opportunity was given to the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired to meet prospective clients.
Parents of children with visual impairments were able to meet the vocational rehabilitation agency that is serving or will serve their children.
Several organizations were involved to help make the Nebraska Cane Walk possible. We extend a special thanks to the following: Educational Service Unit #3; Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired; National Federation of the Blind of Nebraska; National Federation of the Blind of Nebraska, Lincoln Chapter; and Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (AERBVI).
Following this Cane Walk, parents of the students who took part made suggestions for the next Nebraska Cane Walk. Our next Nebraska Cane Walk will be held on April 22, 2025, at NCBVI. It will include opportunities for parents to have hands-on experience using a long white cane. Our goal is eventually to include a third extended session for participants who have surpassed the afternoon skills addressed in the Nebraska Cane Walk. This remarkable session will loosely model Louisiana’s Grambling Walk with, we hope, the same amazing results. Would you like to be included? If so, contact me at [email protected].
by David Meyer
From the Editor: For most teens, fitting in with the crowd takes on consuming importance. Some blind teens become convinced that “fitting in” means traveling without a cane. O&M instructors have endless stories about students who find every excuse to leave their canes at home. In this article David Meyer shares an adventure from his teen years. Fortunately, he lived to tell the tale! He worked for many years as a music therapist, and he is an active member of the NFB of Illinois.
I still remember the night vividly. I was eighteen years old, and I was a student at a rehabilitation facility in Minnesota. I had been introduced to the cane approximately a year earlier. I hadn’t thought much about how the cane could help me, and I did not know anything about how using the cane might protect me legally. I’d been told that I needed to use a cane when I traveled, so I did so—for the most part.
I have been blind since birth. I attended a school for the blind for many years, yet it is probably fair to say that I still did not accept my blindness. I had several blind friends, most of whom had attended the school for the blind with me, but I was highly interested in making it in the sighted world. To me that meant traveling the same way my sighted peers traveled. Did I really need to use a cane?
Somehow I convinced myself that I would be a superior traveler if I could get from place to place without a cane in my hand. Why not try it? I needed a few groceries. I had the perfect opportunity to travel just as a sighted person would travel.
Though I only had to walk a block to find the local superette, it was a journey with several potential risks. First of all, it was dark out. I had no idea how good the streetlights were, whether drivers would be able to see me. Furthermore, I had to cross the street at a busy intersection with a traffic light. None of these things entered my thoughts when I embarked upon my journey.
Things seemed to be going well, as I didn’t even run into any obstacles. I got to the intersection and crossed it without difficulty, listening to the pattern of the traffic.
It was then that someone came up to me and asked where I was going. After I told him my intentions, he gently took my hand. “This is my uniform, this is my badge, and this is my gun. I am a police officer. Where do you live?”
Why did he do this to me? After all, I was doing just fine, so I thought. The obvious answer, which of course I never thought of at the time, was that he was looking out for me. He was doing his job, and he was doing it well. We went back across the street together, and he walked me home.
Looking back on this incident, I can think of a number of things that could have happened to me, none of them good. I could have been struck by a car. Had I been struck and injured, a court could have ruled that I was the one at fault. But had I been struck by a car when using my cane, I would have been protected by the state’s white cane law. I could not have been cited for contributory negligence.
For those who may think it’s cool to travel in a busy area without a cane, please don’t do so! The cane will help you find steps and curbs. It will help you get around obstacles, and it will identify you as blind so that drivers will be more mindful when they approach you. If you ever are involved in an accident, you will have the law on your side.
Though I did not get my groceries that night, I began to learn something far more important. I began to understand that using a cane would enhance my life rather than detracting from it.
American Printing House for the Blind (APH) is pleased to announce that it is the recipient of a five-year $10 million federal grant from the Department of Education. This is the largest grant APH has received in its 166-year history.
APH is one of twenty-seven grant recipients awarded under the most recent Disability Innovation Fund (DIF) program. The DIF program focuses on preparing individuals for competitive, integrated employment, enabling youth and adults with disabilities to be paid fair wages while gaining employment in some of today’s most in-demand fields.
In September 2024, APH introduced the Monarch, a groundbreaking assistive technology Braille device that renders tactile graphics integrated with Braille on a first-of-its-kind multiline display. Braille access has long been recognized as critical for individuals who are blind, low vision or deafblind in achieving and maintaining competitive integrated employment.
This project, known as Monarch RISE (Resources for Inclusion, Skills, and Employment) will evaluate the effectiveness of the Monarch in supporting competitive integrated employment and identify targeted improvements for future advancements in technologies that support Braille and tactile graphics.
Empowered by the DIF grant, APH will distribute 250 Monarchs to employment and educational professionals and individuals seeking competitive integrated employment who are blind or low vision across the United States.
“This grant gives us the opportunity to test how our new innovative Braille and tactile graphics technology will create access to gainful employment for individuals who are blind, low vision, or deafblind,” said Paul Schroeder, Vice President of Impact and Outreach. “With this grant, we can demonstrate how the Monarch will provide the support for young adults to pursue higher education and rewarding careers through the power of ready access to Braille and tactile graphics.”
Monarch RISE’s five-year grant will
APH’s goal is to break barriers and broaden access for employment and education for individuals who are blind or low vision. APH is working to create a 21st century workforce of people with disabilities through innovative applications of advanced Braille technology like the Monarch.
Email questions to [email protected].
Access On is the latest addition to the selection of podcasts from the National Federation of the Blind. Hosted by Jonathan Mosen, Executive Director for Accessibility Excellence, Access On reviews accessible apps and devices, interviews movers and shakers in the access tech world, and talks to blind people who are using technology in exciting new ways. Whether you’re a technology guru or a technophobe trying to make sense of it all, Access On has something for you.
“We tap into our extensive networks in the tech center and the experiences of our listeners to bring you technology news, reviews, and interviews,” Jonathan Mosen explains. “Even though we’ve only been up and running for a few months, already we’re seeing a lot of interaction with listeners. People write in with answers to tech questions, suggesting lots of tips and tricks. Young people are especially active and enthusiastic. We’ve even heard from students in junior high school! Kids very naturally understand the technology environment; they’re tech natives.”
Each week Access On presents a program in three segments. Recent programs cover the NFB’s Center for Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility, a review of the Meta Smart Glasses, and a tribute to Ed Potter; accessible shopping with InnoSearch AI, podcast apps for your phone, and organizing your travel with TripIt; and the Plaud NotePin, the most accessible way to learn a language, and smart glasses feedback. Topics in earlier podcasts ranged from funding for the purchase of access technology to what’s new in the Victor Stream, with a world of other tech topics in between. Each episode is segmented by chapter, making it easy to move between segments of the podcast if your player supports such navigation.
The voice of Jonathan Mosen, with its distinctive New Zealand accent, was familiar to blind people throughout the world long before the advent of Access On. With the help of a dedicated team of blind assistants, he created the podcast Living Blindfully, which reached listeners in 113 countries. At the 2024 NFB National Convention, Jonathan Mosen and Living Blindfully received a Jacob Bolotin Award for innovation and service to the blind community. “I interview a lot of movers and shakers for the podcast,” he explained as he accepted the award, “and I take a long time before each interview to do my research. I ask the questions that I think listeners want me to ask. I aim to be fair, but also fearless.”
Since the launch of Access On, no new episodes of Living Blindfully will be produced. However, the 305 existing episodes will be available on Spotify, YouTube, and other apps for the foreseeable future.
“When I was a teenager I had kind of an epiphany,” Mosen explained in an interview on The Nation’s Blind podcast. “[I realized] I was being held back by people telling me that I couldn’t pursue this career or that option. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it, it was because of people’s perception of blindness.” Opening up possibilities for blind people became Mosen’s life work. He studied the writings of Dr. Kenneth Jernigan and other NFB leaders, and he became the president of the blindness consumer organization in New Zealand. “I tried to pass along as much of Dr. Jernigan’s philosophy as I could,” he explained. “If you’d asked me what my dream job was, I would have said working in a capacity like this.”
He went on to explain, “Access On will sometimes challenge developers. The NFB needs to be there as AI and other new technologies appear. NFB has to be strong. We need to be at the table. I’m confident that Access On will be the definitive technology podcast in the blind community... It will be kind of like the Consumer Reports in blindness technology.”
“The whole tech world is advancing at a truly dizzying pace,” Mosen reflects. “For decades it always seemed that we in the blind community were trying to play catch-up. Today the NFB has built relationships with Apple and Microsoft and other leading tech companies. We have much better opportunities to make sure that accessibility is built into a new product, not just bolted on as a last-minute thought. When we get in on the ground floor, it’s much more likely that things will work well for us.”
Follow Access On to keep up with the latest developments, questions, and controversies in the world of access technology, and feel free to add your voice to the conversation.
You can learn more about the NFB’s Center for Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility at nfb.org/cena. You can listen to Access On on any of the following podcast clients: RSS feed, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, Podchaser, and more.
Photo/Caption: Anna Adler, Courtney Kahlil, and Moe Kahlil get ready to start the Bay Bridge Run.
Photo/Caption: NFB participants wear their medals at the end of the Bay Bridge Run.
by Cassie McKinney
From the Editor: As President of the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children, Cassie McKinney is a tireless advocate for blind children and their families. In this article she recounts her experience crossing the Bay Bridge, which connects Annapolis with Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She undertook this challenge as an exciting fundraiser for the NOPBC.
As Federationists we embark daily on endeavors to change misconceptions about blindness. Frequently we cross metaphorical bridges that have been created between blind people and our dreams. On November 10, 2024, a group of Federationists joined more than eighteen thousand others in the physical challenge of a 10K walk that included crossing the four-mile Bay Bridge in Maryland. Our participation in this event was spearheaded by the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC) and expanded to include other members of our Federation family. While its initial purpose was community involvement, the walk soon blossomed into a fundraising activity that helped support our organization.
The dream of crossing the Bay Bridge started with a few of the parents who planned to be in Baltimore for the NOPBC board meeting. We wanted to take part in the event, which has become a wonderful way to showcase the magnificent bridge and the community support that it brings to the area it touches. Corrigan Sports is the company that has backed the walk/run since 2014. Over time the event has grown, and more and more people take part every year. In 2024 the organizers anticipated that more than eighteen thousand people would be involved, both in person and virtually.
Our team, the NFB Dreamers, was branded with our NFB mission statement in mind. Federationists walked to show the community that blind people can take part in the event and can do so on the same level as sighted participants. As parents we walked for our blind children, who face challenges in everything from education to extracurricular activities. For my part, I didn’t just walk as a blind person or as the mom of my son, Robert, who is blind; I walked for those parents and blind people who haven’t found us yet, the ones who don’t know that they can find a voice through the support system of the National Federation of the Blind.
Our team did more than just walking; through our participation we raised money for the Federation. Our efforts brought in several thousand dollars in pledges from our supporters, which were matched through a generous donation from HumanWare. Our walking didn’t just raise awareness for our Federation family; we were able to bring in the revenue that we need to fuel our work.
Many people have asked me, “What was it like to cross the Bay Bridge?” For me, the journey was full of emotion: a sense of triumph, self-awareness, accomplishment, endurance, and adversity. Let me begin with the adversity.
The overwhelming sense of accomplishment was foremost in my mind as I completed a 10K for the first time in my life. However, I also experienced the physical pain that came from a foot injury that I did not know I had until the walk was completed. I have suffered from issues with plantar fasciitis for several years. While I participated in the walk I assumed this condition was causing the pain I experienced. Two days after the walk I learned that the pain was actually caused by a stress fracture!
In spite of the pain I walked across the Bay Bridge with my white cane in my hand, putting one foot in front of the other. The passion that is in my heart for the work that we do in the Federation was the motivation and driving force that pushed me on.
From time to time along the journey I paused to stand by the railing of the bridge. All that my limited vision allowed me to see was the vastness of the water beneath us. My thoughts went to the endless numbers of people the Federation has not yet reached. My heart and my spirit were uplifted by our members who were supporting what we hoped to accomplish through this event. I knew that what we were doing was far more than crossing a bridge.
Stepping across the finish line was one of the most emotional moments of this journey. Although I had finished the task at hand, it was a metaphorical beginning, leading to the next bridge that will come. What will I be asked to do next to change the life of a parent in need, and how will I face that struggle with them? I know that this work of changing lives does not rest solely on my shoulders. It rests in the hearts of Federationists everywhere.
The work we do will go on, and we will cross many more bridges, both physical and metaphorical. We will take one step at a time, joined by others who are dreamers, too. We will make a difference in the world we live in, as blind people and as parents of blind children. The National Organization of Parents of Blind Children is proud to be a division of the National Federation of the Blind. We are devoted to finding more opportunities like the Bay Bridge Run, through which we can bring in funds for our organization and be part of our communities. When we take on challenges together we share the love and philosophy at the heart of our movement.
No matter how you are able to be out in your community, be active and push yourself in new ways. For many this may not mean walking or running a 10K, and that is perfectly acceptable. Sometimes it is in small ways that we have the greatest effect on changing the misconceptions about blindness. Always remember that you can achieve anything you put your mind to. You will do it by putting one foot in front of the other. Some day you will be able to reflect on your accomplishment and see the bridges that you have crossed. Keep on dreaming!
https://nfb.org/programs-services/nfb-bell-academy
Contact: 410-659-9314, extension 2418
[email protected]
“My child had an enjoyable time, and her confidence has grown. My favorite thing that has come out of this camp: you remove the fear and anxiety she had about going blind! She now knows she will be okay and will have the skills to succeed. I think that alone is worth everything!”
The NFB Braille Enrichment for Literacy and Learning® Academy is a nationwide summer program that prepares blind and visually impaired children to grow into competent and independent blind people who live the lives they want.
Blind and low-vision children, ages four through twelve who:
“To be honest, as a mother with a low-vision child, I was very uneducated about the word blind, and I didn’t think he could attend a program like this. A friend who was taking her son told me we should try, and we did. The first day was like a whole new world of possibilities and knowledge opened up for me.”
NFB BELL Academy in-person programs provide activities in a day program or residential setting, depending on location. In addition to Braille, crafts, games, and other engaging projects, children learn vital independent living skills, interact with blind adult mentors, and enjoy field trips to sites related to the NFB BELL Academy curriculum. Day programs typically run Monday through Friday for six hours each day for two weeks. Residential programs usually run for one week.
Thank you to the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults and the Beulah Reimer Legacy for their generous support of the NFB BELL Academy.
“As a parent of a blind child, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to receive these books for free. Reading is a crucial component of my child’s education and development, and having access to a diverse range of books will undoubtedly have a positive impact on their learning journey.”
The American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults is dedicated to fostering literacy and joy through its Free Braille Books Program. Each year, we place thousands of Braille books in the hands of blind children and youth across the country, nurturing a lifelong love of reading and learning.
This program offers more than books. It strengthens family bonds. The thrill of discovering a new Braille story, the shared laughter during a favorite tale, and the excitement of reading together create priceless memories for families with blind children.
By promoting Braille literacy and supporting blind students in their education, the American Action Fund is building brighter futures. This work is made possible through the generosity of people like you. Your tax-deductible gift to the American Action Fund helps expand the reach of the Braille Books Program, bringing the joy of reading to even more families.
Together, we can open a world of imagination, knowledge, and connection for young blind readers. Join us in making homes and classrooms more inclusive and joyful, one Braille book at a time.
Recently we announced our book selections for 2025. They include the following:
Jo Jo Makoon’s Rule School by Dawn Quiggly
Magnificent Makers #9: Rolling Through the Rock Cycle by Theanne Griffith
My Fox Ate My Homework by David Blaze
My Fox Ate My Cake by David Blaze
My Fox Ate My Alarm Clock by David Blaze
Cooking Class: 57 Recipes Kids Will Love to Cook and Eat by Dianna F. Cook
My Fox Begins by David Blaze
My Fox Ate My Report Card by David Blaze
My Fox, My Friend Forever by David Blaze
My Pokemon Cookbook: Delicious Recipes Inspired by Pikachu and Friends by Victoria Rosenthal
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood by Fred Rogers
Super Fun Family Card Games: 75 Games for All Ages by Corinne Schmitt.
Read the 2025 Braille Books Program Press Release here: https://actionfund.org/2025-braille-books-program-announcement.
By supporting the American Action Fund, you’re not just helping a program; you’re investing in making family lives better and creating a more inclusive world for the blind community. Join us by having a lasting impact, ensuring that Braille books continue to bring joy, connection, and shared experiences to blind people and their families across the nation.
Your support helps us keep our resources free of charge for blind children and adults. You can contribute to the Action Fund in three easy ways.
Make a gift online by visiting https://actionfund.org/donate.
Give over the phone by calling 410-659-9315.
Send a check made out to “American Action Fund.” Mail it to 1800 Johnson Street, Baltimore, MD 21230.
Often the simplest and most significant way to make a charitable contribution is to plan a legacy gift. Creating a lasting impact is easier than you might think. Choose an option that works best for your circumstances.
You can plan to give all or part of a bank account, insurance proceeds, investment assets, real estate, or a retirement account. You can even give a required minimum distribution from your IRA directly to charity and avoid taxes on the distribution. After taking care of your loved ones, you could bequeath a specific dollar amount or a percentage of your estate to an organization whose mission is important to you.
The American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults Legacy Society recognizes and honors the generosity of friends of the Action Fund who have chosen to leave a legacy through a will or other planned giving option.
If you wish to give part or all of an account, simply fill out a POD (payable on death) or TOD (transfer on death) form. For pensions and insurance assets, simply designate a charity as a beneficiary. If you would like to leave a legacy to the Action Fund in your will, simply include the following language:
I give, devise, and bequeath unto the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults, 1800 Johnson Street, Suite 100, Baltimore, Maryland 21230, a Maryland nonprofit corporation, the sum of $______________ (or) _________ “percent of my net estate” or “the following stocks and bonds”: ____________________, to be used for its worthy purposes on behalf of blind persons.
If you have questions or would like more information, please reach out to Patti Chang at 410-659-9315 or [email protected]. If you have included the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults in your will or have made some other provision for a future gift, please contact Patti so we can recognize you as a member of our Legacy Society.
Legacy gifts carry the values and ideals that have been important to you throughout your lifetime and provide for generations of blind children and adults. Please consider the American Action Fund in your future plans.
On October 1, 2024, the Library of Congress implemented a new policy that applies to both new applicants for NLS services and existing patrons under the age of eighteen. Following is a summary of the changes:
To receive Braille and talking-book service, all new applicants will be required to provide their date of birth.
To be considered valid, new applications for persons under the age of eighteen must include a Parental Acknowledgment for NLS Services and Devices, signed by the applicant’s parent or legal guardian.
As the parent/guardian of the applicant, I acknowledge that my child will receive services and equipment and that my child will have access to the entire NLS catalog of reading material. All materials and equipment (including digital talking-book cartridges, hard-copy Braille, players, and accessories) must be returned when no longer needed.
Name (Last) ____________________ (First) _____________________ (Middle) _____
Relationship to patron___________________________ Email _______________________________
Parent/Guardian signature _________________________________________
Patrons enrolled prior to October 1, 2024, who are under the age of eighteen and wish to continue to receive Braille or talking-book service will be required to provide a signed Parental Acknowledgment form. Written acknowledgment may be provided by mail or email to your local network library. Parents of existing patrons can find the form at www.loc.gov/nls/paform.
Why is NLS requiring new applicants and existing patrons under the age of eighteen to provide parental acknowledgment for NLS services and devices? The policy is being implemented at this time to bring NLS into compliance with a new Library of Congress policy that took effect in March of 2024.
What is required under the Parental Acknowledgment for NLS Services and Devices policy?
Parents/guardians of minors are asked to acknowledge and accept the NLS program terms:
My child is already a patron. What do I need to do?
For existing patrons, you may do one of the following:
If a valid email address is associated with your child’s account, NLS will send a link for a parent / guardian to complete the required Parental Acknowledgment form.
My child is not yet a patron, but they would like to enroll. What do I need to do?
You may provide parental acknowledgment by completing the “Parental Acknowledgment” portion of the NLS Application for Free Library Service. Information on how to apply for service is available on the NLS website, www.loc.gov/nls/how-to-enroll/apply-for-nls-services.
Applications in digital format are available on the NLS website, www.loc.gov/nls/how-to-enroll/apply-for-nls-services/application-in-english-spanish-and-for-institutions.
Paper applications are available through your local network library.
Applications may be submitted electronically through email or in hard copy through mail to your local network library. Find contact information for your local network library on the NLS website, www.loc.gov/nls/find-your-library.
What are accepted formats for providing parental acknowledgment?
Parental acknowledgment must be submitted in writing. Written acknowledgment may be provided by mail or email to your local network library. Please see above for specific instructions on how to provide parental acknowledgment. Parents of existing patrons can find the form at, www.loc.gov/nls/paform.
What will happen if I do not provide parental acknowledgment for my child who is already a patron?
If parental acknowledgment is not provided for existing patrons your child’s account will be suspended, and they will not receive any materials. Your child’s account can be reinstated after that date by submitting the parental acknowledgement form found here: www.loc.gov/nls/paform.
If you do not wish to provide the signed form, NLS devices and reading materials utilized by your child must be promptly returned to your local network library.
If I provide parental acknowledgment, will I have access to my child’s reading/circulation history?
No, access to patron records is not governed by the Library of Congress and is determined by local State Law and network library policies.
When my child is no longer a minor, will they have to reapply for services?
No, your child will not be required to reapply for service upon turning eighteen. However, the responsibility for NLS services and devices must be transferred to your child.
Who should I contact if I have additional questions about the parental acknowledgement requirement?
Contact your local network library with any questions you may have about the parental acknowledgment requirement or for assistance submitting parental acknowledgment. Find contact information for your local network library on the NLS website, https://www.loc.gov/nls/find-your-library.
Alternatively, you can contact the NLS Information Services Section by email at [email protected] or by phone at 800-424-8567.
NFB National Scholarships
https://nfb.org/scholarships
Every year the NFB awards thirty merit-based scholarships of $8,000 to postsecondary students who are legally blind in both eyes; who reside in the United States, the District of Columbia, or Puerto Rico; and who will be at least eighteen years of age by July 8, 2025. Applicants must be pursuing or planning to pursue a full-time postsecondary course of study in a degree-granting program at a US institution in the fall; and must participate in person in the entire NFB National Convention and in all of its scheduled scholarship program activities. Some exceptions may be made for part-time students.
In addition to the NFB National Scholarships, academic scholarships also are available through many NFB state affiliates. Check your affiliate webpage to learn about scholarship opportunities.
Scholarships for Students with Disabilities
https://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/college-resource-center/affordable-colleges-for-students-with-disabilities
This site offers a compendium of resources for students with a full range of disabilities, including blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, hydrocephalus, autism, and traumatic brain injury.
No Limits to Learning
Colorado Center for the Blind
http://cocenter.org
Contact: Chaz Davis, [email protected]
Dates: June 4-July 2, 2025
Ages: 15 and older
Application Deadline: April 18, 2025
The Colorado Center for the Blind is excited to offer again its No Limits to Learning program for blind teens and young adults. The program encourages and challenges students every day and helps them come to understand their potential as they build the skills and confidence to live the lives they want. Students connect with a positive community of thriving blind people who teach nonvisual skills and foster confidence.
Summer EDGE Program for Blind and Low-Vision High School Students: Exploration, Determination, Growth, Empowerment
Louisiana Center for the Blind, Ruston, LA
https://www.louisianacenter.org/edge
Contact: Rosy Carranza: 410-493-9584
[email protected]
Dates: June 15-July 5, 2025
Application Deadline: March 14, 2025
EDGE is an independence-building program and career-focused residential training program for blind and low-vision students in grades 9-12. Throughout the program students will explore career paths and participate in work-based learning opportunities; cultivate the motivation, self advocacy, and motivation and perspective to achieve their goals; boost their blindness skills, increase their independence, and gain confidence; and obtain the tools and mentorship to shape their future. Staff include experienced teachers of blind students and blind mentors who will provide support and guidance. Students will participate in fun evening and weekend activities to make their time extra memorable.
Funding for these programs is typically available through state vocational programs under the Pre-ETS or transition programs.
NFB STEM2U
https://nfb.org/programs-services/education/nfb-stem2u
NFB is excited that program dates for the 2025 youth STEM program are now available. Blind youth are invited to embark on a transformative day of discovery and innovation as they dive into the world of the scientific method. Participants will engage in hands-on, accessible experiments that harness the power of observation, prediction, and testing to solve real-world challenges. From physics and technology to chemistry and engineering, this year’s activities are designed to inspire curiosity and ignite a love of STEM. Families are encouraged to register their children (K-12) and seize this unforgettable opportunity to fuel their passion for exploration.
Early Connections
http://perkins.org/earlyconnections
Date: May 3, 2025
Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, MA
This conference is designed for families and professionals who have children in their lives ages birth through seven who are blind, deafblind, or low vision, including those who have complex multiple disabilities. The conference offers parents an opportunity to connect with other professionals, access valuable tools and resources to support your child’s growth and development, and join presentations led by experts in the field. This year’s theme, “Expression,” is a celebration of the many ways children and families communicate, connect, and share their unique journeys.
Erica C. Vaughn’s NLS Aspiring Leaders Internship Program
[email protected]
Application Deadline: March 1, 2025
The Erica C. Vaughn NLS Aspiring Leaders Internship was established in 2020 to provide legally blind individuals opportunities to work at NLS in areas of study or interest. Assignments may include data input and migration of information for the Braille certification learning management system, development and scanning of Braille music material, writing and editing content for NLS-Produced material, translating written content into various international languages, and more. NLS is a national program that requires staff with diverse skills and educational backgrounds. Applicants must be legally blind, must be US citizens, and must be able to work remotely.
Textbooks in eBRAILLE Format
https://www.aph.org/meet-monarch/mspp/#main
[email protected]
American Printing House for the Blind (APH) will convert textbooks into eBraille format for students using its new Braille and tactile graphics product, the Monarch. The converted file will be sent via email in two to three business days.
Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards
https://nfb.org/form/bolotin.main-content
Contact: Everette Bacon, 801-631-8108
[email protected]
Application Deadline: April 15, 2025
The Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards honor individuals and organizations that make a positive impact on the lives of blind people by raising the expectations of blind people and encouraging blind people to achieve new heights. Winners receive a cash award. Past winners include entrepreneurs, volunteers, filmmakers, authors, and more. The awards are presented annually at the NFB National Convention in July. The Jacob Bolotin Awards are funded by the National Federation of the Blind with assistance from the Alfred and Rosalind Perlman Trust.
Distinguished Educator of Blind Students Award
https://nfb.org/programs-services/scholarships-and-awards/distinguished-educator-blind-students-award/application
Contact: Carla McQuillan, 541-653-9153
[email protected]
Application Deadline: May 1, 2025
Every year the Distinguished Educator of Blind Students Award recognizes an outstanding teacher of blind students. The education of blind children is one of the NFB’s highest priorities. Please help us recognize dedicated and innovative teachers who provide quality education and meaningful experiences and opportunities for their blind students. Anyone who is currently a teacher, counselor, or the administrator of programs for blind students is eligible. Applicants do not have to be members of the National Federation of the Blind, but attending the NFB National Convention is required. Applicants can be nominated by colleagues, parents, supervisors, or friends who have first-hand knowledge of the individual’s work with blind students.
2025 Schneider Family Book Awards
On January 27, 2025, the American Library Association (ALA) announced the recipients of the 2025 Schneider Family Book Awards. These awards honor an author or illustrator for the artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences. Recipients are selected in three categories: young children (birth through age 8), middle grade (age 9 through 13), and teens (age 14-18). Winners receive $5,000 and a framed plaque. The 2025 winners are as follows:
Best Young Children’s Title:
A Little Like Magic, written and illustrated by Sarah Kurpiel (Rocky Pond Books/Penguin Random House)
Honor Titles:
Monster Hands, by Karen Kane and Jonaz McMillan, illustrated by Dion MBD (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin Random House)
You’re So Amazing! by James and Lucy Catchpole, illustrated by Karen George (Little, Brown and Company/Hatchette Book Group, Inc.)
Best Middle Grade Title:
Popcorn, by Rob Harrell (Dial Books for Young Readers/Penguin Random House)
Honor Titles:
Louder Than Hunger, by John Schu (Candlewick Press)
Shark Teeth, by Sherri Winston (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
Best Teen Title:
Chronically Dolores, by Maya Van Wagenen (Dutton/Penguin Random House)
Honor Titles:
Light Enough to Float, by Lauren Seal (Rocky Pond Books/Penguin Random House)
On the Bright Side, by Anna Sortino (G.P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Random House)
Bricks for the Blind
https://bricksfortheblind.org
Bricks for the Blind is a nonprofit organization that brings the joy of building LEGO® sets to blind people. By following free text-based instructions, blind and low-vision LEGO enthusiasts can build LEGO sets and enjoy hours of relaxation, independence, and empowerment. Each set of instructions includes information on how a sighted assistant can sort the colored pieces so the blind builder can build independently. The website includes downloadable instructions for 265 LEGO builds, including movie characters, vintage automobiles, forest animals, cityscapes, and more.
Blind Birder Bird-a-Thon 2025
https://www.birdability.org/blind-birder-birdathon
Date: May 18, 2025, 12:01 AM to 11:59 PM
Location: Anywhere
The Blind Birder Bird-a-Thon is a 24-hour birding event designed for participation by birders who are legally blind. This inaugural event encourages participants to identify as many bird species as possible by sound (or sight, as able), celebrating accessibility and the joy of birding. Any legally blind individual in the United States of any age and any level of experience is welcome to participate. Participants can bird solo, with a team, or alongside a sighted assistant. Back-yard birding, traveling teams, an outing on a trail—it’s all welcome. Registration is free.
Educational Technology Survey
https://nfb.org/legal/surveys
The NFB is gathering information regarding the accessibility of educational technology used in our nation’s schools (kindergarten through graduate level). If you are a student, parent, teacher, or administrator who uses screen access software or other accommodations to participate nonvisually in educational programs or services, or if you are the parent, teacher, or administrator of someone who does, please complete the Education Technology Survey once a semester and contribute to this important research.
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