Fantagstic!

If you liked that guest post an engineering student wrote for the Safe & Sound blog last month, you’re gonna love this update on what Ebay and his classmates came up with as ways I can keep track of the colors of my clothes. Freshmen in other Design Thinking and Communication class sections were working on other projects for people with disabilities at the same time, and here are some examples

• A man who uses a wheelchair wanted an easier way to fold up the footrests when it came to transferring into a car or a regular chair
• A man with cerebral palsy was looking for a more efficient way to pull his trousers up on his own
• Occupational therapists asked for a device that might encourage their clients with Parkinson’s disease to do finger exercises on-the-go
• The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago hoped a class could figure out a way for clients with visual impairments to know how fast (and at what speed) they were walking on exercise treadmills
• a woman who uses a wheelchair and enjoys outdoor concerts was looking for a way to slide from her chair onto the lawn, then get back into her chair again on her own when the concert was over.

Ebay’s engineering class divided into four different groups to tackle my color identification problem, and Whitney and I traveled to a Design Expo at Northwestern Saturday to hear

A poster from the Fantagstic team’s presentation.

all of the students present their completed projects. Sixteen students had visited our apartment in February with prototypes ranging from carabiners to iron-on tags to QR codes that my talking iPhone could read to me, and seeing (okay, touching) what these four teams had come up with in the end made me glad I’d come out of the closet about my wardrobe woes.

Right now I put a safety pin in the tag of anything I own that is black, and a paper clip on anything white. I wear other colors, too, and I memorize what color those other things are by the feel of the clothing. On their February visit, the students watched me go through my closets and asked lots and lotss of questions. In the end all four teams expanded on my tried and true safety-pin method, each team inventing different things to hang from the pin to correspond to the color of the item.

Ebay’s team came up with acrylic shapes on cloth tags called “Fantagstic!” They reasoned that cloth tags would be lightweight, so I could use two or more at a time to identify multi-colored items. The tags another team came up with were laser-cut acrylic shapes called “Depindables”. The tags all the teams came up with had been tested to withstand high temperatures in the washer and dryer. “Tag Team” was the only team to use traditional Braille code on its tags – the other teams learned from research that a majority of people who are visually impaired do not read Braille. Ebay’s team designed its own palettes of shapes (lines, S’s, C-shaped arrows, dots, corners, and triangles) that they’d tested on me earlier to confirm the shapes were easy to feel and differentiate from each other. The “Code of Many Colors” team used small glass beads on the safety pin: one bead means black, two beads mean white, and so on. Judges from engineering firms were on hand to decide on winners for each proposal, and the winner for mine was…drumroll, please…Tag Team!

The winning “Tag Team” team

The Tag Team system is more than a label to safety-pin onto my clothes. It’s also a way to organize my closet and laundry. Tag Team includes a laundry hamper that holds a number of mesh bags, each bag with a tag attached that corresponds with a single color. They figure doing laundry will be easier if I don’t mix all my clothing in the hamper, only to have to resort it all again when the wash cycle is over. “All you do is put your clothes in the bag it belongs in, take the bag out, tighten the string, and throw the bag in the washing machine.”

What about times I’m too lazy to put dirty clothing into the proper mesh bag, you ask? “No worries,” said Tag Team with pride. With the Tag Team system, everything you wear has a tag pinned inside of it. ”Wake up the next morning, feel the tag on the shirt you wore the night before, and you’ll know which bag to put it in in your Tag Team hamper.”

I had to hand it to ‘em. But if you ask me, all the teams at the design expo were winners. These kids are just freshmen, and not only have they learned about design process, but also how much it can mean to work together to help people with unusual, unique, and unmet needs. I was the biggest winner of all, though: I got to work side-by-side with these talented and thoughtful young people, and when design expo was over Saturday afternoon, I walked out with custom-made prototypes of all the tags!

Folks I talked to Saturday from the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University told me they’re looking for new project proposals from people with disabilities and organizations who work with us. If there’s something you need and you live in the Chicago area, I encourage you to submit a proposal soon.

Let the Braille Games begin

Quick. How many people do you need for a team at a Braille Game?

Whitney, me and the Braille crew. Photo by Richard Robbins.

Six, of course. One for each dot in a Braille cell.

Whitney and I learned that, among many, many other things, at our very first ever Braille Games competition in Milwaukee last Friday. A story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel explains:

Teams of students rotated from table to table in a made-up world where Braille is written on money, on pizza boxes and orange juice bottles from the grocery store, on clothes in a department store, on “Go Fish” cards and other games.

Braille Games participants came from schools all over southeast Wisconsin, and all of them had significant visual impairments. As Judy Killian, a Braille teacher from Madison, pointed out in the newspaper article, blindness can be very socially isolating. ”After this, they’ll be really enthused,” she told the reporter. “It gets them pretty excited about learning Braille.”

Teams of six spent their morning buzzing from table to table to play Braille bingo, spin a Wheel of Fortune, and spend Braille money on groceries marked with Braille labels. My favorite game was Human Braille Cell, and to help you know how it’s played, here’s a beginner’s understanding of what a Braille cell is made of:

• A Braille cell is six dots arranged in two columns of three dots, just like the number six on a pair of dice.
• To make writing and referencing Braille symbols easier, each dot in the Braille cell has a number.
• Down the left hand side, starting from the top, the dots are numbered 1, 2, 3.
• Down the right hand side, again starting from the top, the dots are numbered 4, 5, 6.

The letter “A” in Braille is only one dot, and it’s the one on the very top of the left hand side, dot one. The letter “L” is a straight line down the lefthand side, dots one, two, and three.

To play Human Braille Cell, each team of six sits in two rows of three. You know, just like the Braille cell. When the emcee calls out “A,” the kid representing Dot One jumps up like a jack-in-the-box. If the emcee calls out “L,” the three kids representing dots one, two, and three all jump up at once. The June Taylor Dancers had nothing on these kids.

Whitney and I didn’t compete, but I’d say we won the best prize of all: we got to meet every kid there! Each one came to our table to have me sign (in Braille, of course) their grand prize for participating: a Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to read at home.

A big shout-out to my children’s book publisher, Blue Marlin Publications, and to each of you who have purchased copies of the print version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound in the past. Blue Marlin Publications donates a portion of the proceeds from every print book sold to Seedlings Braille Books for Children to help them produce high-quality Braille books for children who can’t read print.

This might explain why my tips weren’t so great

I was a very happy six-year-old any time Flo (that’s my mom) dropped me off at the library so she could run errands, and I was an absolutely elated six-year-old the night she dropped me off at the library, headed to the grocery store, drove straight home, pulled the car into the garage, put the groceries away and sat down with her feet up for a while before noticing how quiet it was.

Flo found me outside the library’s locked doors, smiling, sitting next to my pile of books, flipping through pages, anticipating which new book I’d start first. I was in seventh heaven.

That’s me in the middle, flanked by my sisters Bev and Marilee – they must not have gone to the library with me that night!

I met my dear friend Colleen ten years later. We were both waitressing at Marshall Field’s, saving our money for college. She says she knew I was cool right away when she saw me hide my paperback copy of Great Expectations in a pile of folded cloth napkins so I could sneak in a page or two between customers. Goes without saying. Colleen was a bookworm, too.

I lost my sight ten years later, in 1985. No iPhones, no digital recorders, no mp3 players, no laptop computers. Unabridged books on tape were hard to come by back then, and Braille was difficult to learn. How would I survive without being able to read? The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) came to my rescue. NLS mailed books and magazines on audio cassettes directly to our house at no cost, and now their books are available online for download.

The Daily Post reports that ebook sales recently trumped those of hardcover books. “The ease of digital books can’t be beat,” the post says. “How else can you hold hundreds of books in your hand so easily?” The post went on to admit that the sensation of reading a book by machine is undeniably different than cracking open a brand new book in print, and I have to agree. I’m grateful for technology for allowing me to keep up with my fellow bookworms, but if you want to know the truth, I do still miss cozying up in the corner of the couch to read words. In print. On paper. In a good, old-fashioned…book.

Blind like me

I didn’t need to be able to see to know that 11-year-old Ali Krage was hopping from one foot to the other when she introduced herself to me back in 2004. “I’m blind like you and I can read Braille and I go to the same school my twin sister goes to, but she can see, can you give me your email address? We can be pen pals!” Who could refuse an invitation like that? Ali and I have used adaptive technology to keep in touch ever since. The email messages she sends these days come with the tagline “Sent from my iPhone,” and when she left home to go away to school last fall, I kept up with her progress by reading her tweets. Here she is now with a guest post about what it’s been like learning how to live on her own.

Ali Krage, today’s guest blogger.

One of the best decisions I have ever made

by Ali Krage

My name is Ali Krage and I am 20 years old. I attend the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired and this is my first time being at a school with only blind and visually impaired students. This is my first year here. The school is far away from my home in the Chicago suburbs — it’s located about 30 minutes from Springfield, Illinois, and it serves elementary school, middle school, and high school students. They also have a transition program, where they teach us daily living skills, and that’s what I am a part of.

When I was in public school, they did their best to teach things like folding laundry and cooking, but in order to do these things, I’d have to be pulled out of classes. Here at ISVI, daily living is actually a class in itself. They have Life Management, where we learn how to do laundry and we learn different life skills. They teach us about self confidence and advocating for ourselves.

Like it goes with any new experience, I was nervous. I was nervous to be away from home for so long. I was nervous I wouldn’t make many friends. I was excited, though, too. I was looking forward to learning new things, and I knew that in the end this would turn out to be a worthwhile experience.

I have been here since August 19, and this is my home away from home, my second family. I have met a variety of different people — we come from different parts of the state, we have different visual impairments, and we have a wide range of interests. Such diversity is pleasant. It’s amazing how people with so many different personalities can get along so well. I actually heard from a teacher once that this is one of the most mature and nicest group of kids they’ve had so far.

In the beginning of January, I requested some job experience. I figured it’d help; I’ll be here for only one more year after this, and the more experience I get, the better. After filling some forms out, I got a job as a volunteer at the Jacksonville Area Center for Independent Living (JACIL). I am an office assistant. I work the front desk and manage the phones, and sometimes I put stamps on postcards or make Braille labels. It really depends on what they need.

I have gotten so much out of this experience so far. I love my job, I love my friends, and I love this place all together. Coming here was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

The Shoe Game

Our presentation at Joseph Sears Elementary School yesterday started with me reading out loud from the Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound,

At Joseph Sears school yesterday.

and then I explained three rules the kids should keep in mind if they happen to see a guide dog with a harness on: don’t pet the dog, don’t feed the dog, and don’t call out the dog’s name. “Those things can distract a Seeing Eye dog,” I told them. “It’d be like if someone nudged you or kept calling your name wile you were working on your spelling words at school. You wouldn’t be able to concentrate on your work.”

A concerned kindergartner raised her hand. “Can you pet the dog?” I assured her I could, leaning down to do just that. “It’s part of the bonding,” I explained. “She has to know that I’m special. I’m the only one who can pet her when her harness is on, and that helps remind her to take care of me and help me stay safe.”

And with that, we were off. The kids wanted to know how I sit in a chair, if being blind was scary, do I watch TV, how I am able to drive, how I get dressed and whether I ever make mistakes. That last question made me laugh. “One time I gave a presentation at a school and I was wearing two different shoes!” The kids laughed, too, and then the whole conversation turned to, you guessed it: shoes.

• Kid: How do you tie your shoes?
• Me: How many of you know how to tie your shoes?
• Kids: I do! I do! I don’t! Yes! My sister knows how! No! I do!
• Me: Well, those of you who can tie your shoes, I bet if you close your eyes you could tie them, too.
• Kid: (background sound of quiet fumbling at feet) How many shoes do you have?
• Me: Well, after I made the mistake with the shoes that time, I got rid of a lot of shoes. I only have four pairs now: One closes with Velcro, another is a slip on, and two pairs that tie. One of the tie shoes has round shoelaces, the other has flat shoelaces,that’s how I tell them apart.

And that’s when I got the idea. Tell them how to play the shoe game. You form a circle, put blindfolds on, and everyone takes their shoes off and throws them in a pile in the middle of the circle. When the teacher says, “go” you have to find your shoes and put them on. First person with shoes on wins.

The teacher yesterday appreciated right away how this game might teach children how much they can determine from their sense of touch. She promised the kids they’d play next week. “I won’t tell you what day we’re going to do it, though,” she warned. “I don’t want you all wearing slip ons that day!”

Time was up already, but as we got up to leave one boy called out one last question. “What if you were a boy, and you put on Cinderella shoes, and you didn’t know you had them on and you wore them home by mistake?” Hmmm. Guess he’ll just have to wait until the Shoe Game next week to find out.

From Spa Flo to Baby Flo

Spending an overnight with my 96-year-old mother is like staying at a spa. Flo keeps the thermostat in her apartment at sauna-high temperatures. She rarely drinks coffee or alcohol and offers green tea to guests. She doesn’t have a computer or wi-fi at her place, and there’s no T.V. in the living room. She creates a peaceful atmosphere by stacking traditional jazz and Christmas music on her record changer, sitting back in her favorite comfy chair and encouraging guests to take in the sounds of her console hi-fi with her. And then, when night comes, the slow, deliberate moves Flo makes to get ready for bed allows her guests plenty of quiet time to sit on the couch and meditate.

Whitney and I had a slumber party with Flo last Thursday night, and I was still in my nightgown finishing the traditional Spa Flo heart-healthy oatmeal breakfast when Chauffeur Cheryl showed up yesterday morning to deliver me to her granddaughter’s school.

That’s AnnMarie helping me to field questions from her classmates.

My great-niece AnnMarie Florence Czerwinski is the only offspring in our entire family to be blessed with my mom’s beautiful name. Her birthday was yesterday, and although she’s a big seven years old now, I still refer to her as “Baby Flo.” Baby Flo’s elementary school is relatively close to Spa Flo, and Whitney and I visited Westmore Elementary School yesterday in honor of AnnMarie’s birthday.

Realizing I wouldn’t be able to see when her schoolfriends raised their hands, the birthday girl volunteered to accompany me to all three first-grade classrooms. “Questions?” she’d ask. “Anyone have questions?” AnnMarie is not a shy child. Allowing her the opportunity to stand in front of class and choose who got to go next was the best birthday gift ever.

The first-graders had all read Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound before we arrived, which meant they had time to come up with some pretty thoughtful questions. Examples:

• “What happens if you go to the library and the book you want isn’t there in Braille?
• Why do you need a dog instead of a white stick?
• What if you go to the library and they told you no dogs allowed?
• What if you ate food and it wasn’t what you wanted and you asked for your money back?
• What if the dog is blind and the person can see?
• How do you know what your dog looks like?
• What was the last color you could see before you went blind?

Whitney was as spirited as the students we visited, sneaking out from under me to lick a first-grader in the front row, and somehow managing to roll over – even with her harness on — to beg the kids for a belly rub. We had a ball celebrating Baby Flo’s birthday at Westmore School, but I’ll be honest: two-and-a-half hours with first graders left me yearning for one more night at Spa Flo.

Thanks to Sasha and Katya

That’s Katya (l) and Sasha helping me out in class.

Our nine-year-old friend Sasha and our six-and-a-half-year-old friend Katya invited their third-grade and first-grade friends at Dewey Elementary School to gather in the multi-purpose room yesterday morning to meet Whitney and me.

I talked with them about Seeing Eye dogs, Braille, and about how I manage to write books without being able to see. It’s important to me that kids understand that a disability does not necessarily prevent a person from working and doing interesting things. we just use different tools — and ways — to do them, and just like everyone else, we need help sometimes, too.

”I get all over the city with Whitney, I teach writing classes, I interview people for stories, “ I told the kids at Dewey. “One thing I can’t do, though? See if you’re raising your hands to ask a question.” I asked if Sasha and Katya would be willing to come in front and call on classmates who had their hands raised, and they jumped at the chance.

I have Sasha and Katya’s dad, Dmitry Karpeev, to thank for introducing us to his two bright and beautiful daughters and arranging our visit to their school. Dmitry was born in Russia, and his accent makes him easy to differentiate from the cast of other colorful characters I’ve met at Hackney’s, our local tavern. His command of the English language is impeccable – he’s corrected my grammar more than once — but he speaks to his daughters only in Russian, so they are bilingual. Sasha and Katya spend summers with their grandparents in Montenegro, which helps their command of their second language, too.

Dimitry with Sasha and Katya.

Dmitry began his mathematics education at Voronezh State University in Russia and wrote his doctoral thesis while a Lab Graduate at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. Dmitry holds joint appointments at the University of Chicago/Argonne Computation Institute and at Rush Medical Center, but he talks more about films and art and language when we’re together than he talks about work, so I used Google to find out exactly what he does. You should hear my speech synthesizer try to pronounce words like “stochastic” or “homogenization analysis of suspensions of interacting protein polymers”! But who needs Google? Our visit to Dewey Elementary School yesterday confirmed what Dmitry specializes in: being a great dad.

Designed by Kayla

Whitney and I had a ball at the Youth Literature Festival in Champaign last week, and the highlight of the entire event was meeting Kayla, a delightful second grader at Westview

Whitney and Kayla took to one another…. (Photo by Chryso Mouzourou.)

Elementary School. I usually don’t let kids pet Whitney when she has her harness on, but this was an exception. Kayla is blind, and she’d never been near a guide dog before. The only way for her to see how Whitney’s harness works was to touch it.

This spunky little sprite slid right down to the floor to feel Whitney’s ears, too. And her tail. And her back. And her belly. At one point they were face-to-face. “She’s staring at me!” Kayla exclaimed in delight. “That means she likes me.”

It was true. And really, who wouldn’t like Kayla? The two of us had just met, and already I was learning a lot from her. “That must be why people stare at us sometimes,” I said with a laugh. “They like us, too!”

Before we visited Kayla’s school, Whitney and I had been treated to lunch with faculty, students and staff working on Special Friends, and they explained how the six-week program works to help average kids understand and appreciate children with disabilities.

For all six weeks, kindergarten teachers read stories about children with disabilities to their students three times a week. The Special Friends kindergarteners enjoy a 15- minute learning activity about disabilities three times a week, too. And then, the kids take home one of the books they read in class every week to read and discuss with family members. After this six-week concentration on disabilities, the Special Friends people I had lunch with Friday keep track of the kindergartners to determine the short- and long-term effects of this six-week program.

Westview Elementary, where Kayla goes to school, is one of the schools participating in Special Friends. If Kayla’s confidence and self-assurance is any indication, I’d say the six-week program is an unqualified success. When I complimented Kayla’s mom on what a terrific job she is doing raising her daughter, the mom told me Kayla has visited a couple special education students in college classes to give talks. “She comes in, says she’s blind, shows off her white cane, talks about learning Braille and tells them why they oughta like her,” her mom said with a laugh. “And by the end of the session, they do!”

And that’s when I got the idea. I invited Kayla to help us with our presentation during the festival Community Day. And so there we were the next morning, Kayla in one seat, me in the other, Whitney sandwiched between us. When it came time for me to show the SRO crowd how I use the “outside” command to have Whitney guide me to a door, Kayla whipped out her white cane to demonstrate how she finds doors, too. When we returned to our seats, a boy in the audience asked Kayla if she was going to get a dog.

Kayla didn’t answer right away, so I butted in and explained that you have to be at least 16 years old to train with a Seeing Eye dog. The Seeing Eye believes working with a guide dog demands a certain amount of physical, mental, and emotional maturity.

“In order to work with a Seeing Eye dog, you have to be with the dog all the time. You have to be the one who feeds the dog, grooms the dog, takes the dog to the vet when you need to – not your mom or dad, not your brother or sister or your grandparents – you,” I said, explaining how that’s all part of the bonding, how it helps the dog understand how important it is to keep their blind companion safe. “You guys in elementary school and middle school are busy all day learning stuff,” I continued. “You don’t get enough breaks during school to take your dog out to empty or give them the walks they need.”

Kayla is a good listener. She understood, and she had an answer for the boy’s question now. “When I’m 16, I’m getting one,” she declared.

I read from a Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to the audience, and then handed it to Kayla as a gift. ”Thank you!” she gushed, and as she busied herself running her fingertips over the pages, I answered questions and explained tricks I use to do things at home: stretching a rubber band over a bottle of conditioner to distinguish it from shampoo, putting safety pins on the tags of anything I wear that’s black (paper clips for white), choosing dresses and skirts made of unique fabrics and interesting textures so I can use my sense of touch to keep track of what I’m wearing.

And then came my favorite question of the morning. A kid in the back row asked, “Kayla, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

Kayla’s answer: a fashion designer. “I want to design dresses and skirts,” she told the audience. “I’ll give them to all the girls to make them look pretty.”

One last thing before we leave for Denver

Tomorrow morning Whitney and I head to Skokie for a “Mix ‘n Mingle” at National Louis University. Twenty children’s book authors have been invited to display our wares to school librarians who’ll be there, and before the mingling starts we each get one minute to stand by our table and give a summary of what we do during school presentations.

the event coordinator warned us she’ll be using the stopwatch on her IPhone to keep our speeches short. “What do you wish to accomplish — book school visits? increase the visibility of your books?” she wrote in an email. “Plan out your 1 minute in advance…and I do mean ONE minute!”

That's me at a booth at the IRC conference last March. Whitney's under the table. (Photo by Cheryl May.)

I’ve been at events like this before, and it won’t be Whitney’s first time, either – she wowed ‘em at the Illinois Reading Council conference in Springfield last March. After my one-minute speech I’ll do the same thing I did in Springfield: use my slate and stylus to braille out words for the librarians who stop by. The American Foundation for the Blind describes a slate and stylus like this :

This consists of a slate or template with evenly spaced depressions for the dots of Braille cells, and a stylus for creating the individual Braille dots. With paper placed in the slate, tactile dots are made by pushing the pointed end of the stylus into the paper over the depressions. The paper bulges on its reverse side forming “dots.”

Huh? Obviously using a slate and stylus to create Braille is something you need to see – or feel – in order to understand how it works.

The librarians who stop by our booth tomorrow will get a bookmark of the Braille alphabet to help them “decode” the word I’ve brailled out for them. I’m hoping they’ll share these treasures with their students back home and conjure up ways to use the concept of Braille to encourage the kids to read print. And then, well, they’ll just have to invite Whitney and me to come visit: I read from a Braille version of my children’s book Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound at all our school presentations.

Gotta go now and gather up all the Braille and print stuff to bring along tomorrow and practice that one-minute summary. Who knows? I may even learn to use the stopwatch on my talking iPhone!

Race: Out Loud

I published a post here back in March after Chicago Public Radio let me know they wouldn’t be airing pre-recorded essays like the ones I used to do for them. But here’s some good news: reports of my radio-essay death were greatly exaggerated. An essay I wrote aired on WBEZ this morning!

At the WBEZ studios, recording my essay. (Photo by Bill Healy, courtesy WBEZ)

I like working with public radio, so after I got that disappointing note I headed over to the WBEZ studios to meet with the Managing Editor of Public Affairs to see if I had any other options. She told me that in their new format they’d be covering topics in-depth from time to time, and that this summer Aurora Aguilar would be producing pieces on literacy, and Cate Cahan would be focusing on race issues. I told her I’d worked with Aurora and Cate before. She suggested I try pitching ideas to them. I pitched. They responded. I wrote. We recorded.

The piece I did for Aurora hasn’t aired yet. The one that aired today is about how blindness can change the way you look, ahem, at race, and Its part of Cate’s Race: Out Loud series. Here’s how WBEZ describes Race: out Loud on its web site:

We’re asking: What would it sound like if people said what they really think and feel about race, about ethnicity? What if they really talked about how it shapes them, their lives, and attitudes? What would we hear, if we listened?

That part about what we might hear if we listened is what motivated me to pitch my essay. And speaking of blindness, I can read Braille, but I’m painfully slow at it. WBEZ radio producer Joe DeCeault has been recording my essays for years, and the two of us developed a system where he puts me in front of a microphone, asks what the first paragraph in my essay is about, then what the second paragraph is about, and I retell the story paragraph by paragraph in my own words. Essays produced by Joe make me sound like I’m just sitting down talking to you, and we’re both pretty proud of how this works.

Race: Out Loud is a special project, though, so they have a freelancer doing the sound work. Bill Healy consulted with Joe about how to pull this off, but knowing that Cate Cahan and I had gone back and forth via email editing and rewriting the essay, Bill thought we needed to record it exactly how it had been written.

And so, after setting me up at the mike and testing my sound levels, Bill whipped out a printed copy of my essay and began reading it out loud line by line. I parroted what Bill said, and once I’d repeated all my lines, he spliced the sentences together, added sound effects and music, and…voila! When my essay aired on Morning Edition in Chicago today, It sounded like I’d read the whole essay all at once.

If you missed hearing the piece this morning, you can read the transcript and hear it online. Young Bill Healy sure rose to the task. He took photos for the online version and wrote some promotional copy as well. And now he can add “recorded a blind woman reading an essay” to his resume, too.