Hear no evil, see no evil

Heard the one about the deaf girl showing up at the Blind woman’s doorstep?

In our case, this was not a joke. I’m trying to slowly get back into the swing of things, so I stuck with a plan to have 20-plus students from a disability studies class at DePaul University come visit last Thursday. My memoir Long Time, No See is required reading for this “Explore Chicago” class, and students hop on the Red Line from Lincoln Park every semester to come see where/how I live and ask questions about the book. A story in DePaul Magazine about the teacher, Karen Meyer, explains:

She requires her students to draw from an extensive list of books, articles and films-including familiar titles such as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” ”Sea Biscuit” and “Frieda” — which tell stories about people with disabilities.

“They tell me they pick movies they’ve seen before, but after they see it with a different understanding, they have a completely different perspective. They’re looking for themes that they’ve never looked for before,” she says. ”We meet the author of ‘Long Time, No See’-we go to her house,” says Meyer, who is friends with writer Beth Finke.

Mike has been reluctant to leave me at home alone since my surgery. I’d be safe with Karen Meyer and her class here, though, so he was going to take advantage of that time and head to the gym. Our doorman called while Mike was getting his gym bag together. One student was here early, and he was sending her up to our apartment. The student never knocked on our door, and when Mike took off to leave he saw her sitting on the floor in the hallway, looking at her phone. She pantomimed to him, and Mike understood right away. “Are you deaf?” he asked. She read his lips and nodded yes.

Most of the students in this Explore Chicago class are average kids who want to learn about disabilities. This is the first time one of them had a hearing impairment, and mixing a person who is blind with a person who is deaf can be, well…awkward. We disabled types are a resourceful bunch, though. I was confident we’d manage. I let Mike usher our guest to a seat at the breakfast bar, and I shooed him out the door.

The student was probably perfectly happy looking at her phone while she waited, but I couldn’t see to know that, and if I asked, she wouldn’t hear me. What to do? I gave her a copy of my children’s book Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound and headed to my room to change clothes.

I have a special clipboard that has a line guide. I used it to leave a note for Carla.

I heard her thumbing through the pages for a while, but by the time I returned to the kitchen, the page-thumbing had stopped. I still had some things to do to get ready, but I didn’t want our guest to feel like I’d abandoned her. Eureka! My clipboard!

I’d also hoped to get some quick email messages out when I’d finished in the bathroom, but with a guest sitting in the kitchen alone, I didn’t feel right hiding away in my office. Wait! My talking computer is a laptop. I could bring it into the kitchen! I started typing there , and it dawned on me. I used my pointer finger to call my guest over to the computer keyboard, then pointed at the screen. . “This is how I type,” I wrote. “My computer talks. What is your name? She came to the keyboard and started typing. C-a-r-l-a.

We were in business! It was like TTD, except Carla and I were in the same room. I’d type, she’d read the question and answer. I’d manipulate the keys on my talking laptop to hear what she’d typed, and type out a response. By the time the other students finally arrived (they’d been waiting for Carla downstairs, of course!) I’d learned she lives in Rogers Park, she has one sister who is  only two years old, and sometimes it gets tiring chasing her around the house. “Will you sign my book for me?” she wrote, placing a copy of Long Time, No See in my hand. I signed it in print and in Braille. “To my new friend Carla.”

A sign language interpreter had arrived along with the group of students and stood next to me as I gave my presentation. The only thing that might have tipped them off that I had open-heart surgery weeks ago was seeing the beginning of a scar at my neck. That, and my request to sit on the piano bench rather than stand as I spoke to them. Based on last week’s success, I’m keeping a commitment to speak at a retirement community tomorrow on the benefits of memoir-writing. This Friday Mike and I are attending a birthday party for one of my favorite 80-year-olds, and next Monday I have appointments with the cardiologists who saved my life last month. After all that? I think we’ll rest.

Thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts

Hi folks–it’s still Mike here, Beth will be back on the job soon. Meantime, thought I’d share a letter of appreciation she wrote to the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded her stay at the Vermont Studio Center — it gives a pretty nice summary of her time there. 

April 19, 2013

That’s us in Johnson, Vt., just outside my studio. Photo by Susie Cronin.

Dear National Endowment for the Arts,

I am writing from the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) to thank you for awarding me a Creative Access fellowship. My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I have been here a month now, and it’s been a privilege to share ideas with the 50 other poets, writers and visual artists who have come here from all over the world to work on their own projects.

It has also been a privilege to devote time to my writing in the quiet living and studio space the Vermont Studio Center provides. I take breaks from time to time, too: three times a day my clever three-year-old Labrador/Golden Retriever Whitney leads me down a path from our writing studio, over a river, across a highway, and up to the Red Mill building for meals. Trust me, the chef and his staff here make it well worth the journey! Sharing those lovely meals with Vermont Studio Center staff and resident poets and visual artists is a joy, and listening to their stories has expanded my appreciation for the arts.

Vermont Studio Center runs an ongoing arts program with Johnson Elementary School, and Whitney and I spent a lively afternoon there sharing my children’s book and answering questions about writing and what it’s like to be blind and work with a guide dog. VSC also sponsors lectures by residents for the community, and their reading resident night gave me an opportunity to try out new assistive technology with a friendly audience. The technology worked, and that success will encourage me to try it out at the talks I give at libraries, schools and other civic organizations when I get back to Chicago.

I lost my sight when I was 26 years old and took to writing after that. Over the years hard work, supportive friends and family, and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act have combined to help me create a busy, fulfilling life.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have two books published, I have a part-time job moderating a blog for Easter Seals Headquarters in Chicago, I write and record essays for Chicago Public Radio, I speak at schools and conferences about blindness and guide dogs, and I teach three memoir-writing classes for Chicago senior citizens every week.

I’ve been thinking about writing a book about all I’ve learned from the writers in these classes, and now, thanks to this Creative Access fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’ve started writing that book. In one month at the Vermont Studio Center I’ve accomplished far more than I ever could have in my busy life in Chicago, and I’ve developed some good writing habits I plan to take home with me as well.

It has been a real privilege spending every day here in a quiet studio space. I am composing this note from my usual perch here: a cozy chair right by the window. From time to time I take a break, turn off my talking computer and open the window so Whitney and I can stick our noses out and enjoy the fresh air and listen to the river rush by outside. I’m black and blue from pinching myself so much.

Thank you, National Endowment for the Arts, for awarding me the Creative Access fellowship. Look for a copy of my new book in the mail once it gets published!

Yours,

Beth Finke

 

Ebert’s number one fan

The show will go on at this year’s 15th Annual Ebertfest. Tilda Swinton, Shailene Woodley and Jack Black are among those expected to attend this year’s festival.

Hey, it’s Mike again–I promise I’ll fill you in on Montreal eventually, but the sad event  of yesterday — the death of Roger Ebert — changed my plans. My longtime and dear friend, Brand Fortner, was without question Roger Ebert’s biggest fan. FYI: I met Brand  back in 1990. He was a co-founder of Spyglass, a then tiny startup software company in Champaign, Ill., that was spun off from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. And he hired me. It remains the best and most fulfilling job I’ve ever had — it led to an unforgettable ride during the dot.com days, and the success of Spyglass changed my, Beth’s and our son Gus’s life for the better. Best of all,  Brand and I have remained friends.

I’m like a lot of people — I fully enjoyed Roger Ebert, even when I didn’t agree with him. But no one loved or respected Ebert more than Brand, who has also always attended and supported Ebertfest, a terrific film festival held in Champaign’s historic Virginia Theater each year.

After yesterday’s news, Brand was good enough to share a little essay his daughter Paula had written in college about what it was like to grow up with someone who worshipped at the altar of Roger. Paula—-now an accomplished adult (yikes) in her own right — was good enough to let me share it here on Beth’s blog. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Roger and Dad

My dad idolizes Roger Ebert. He has Ebert posters hanging on his walls and Ebert movie yearbooks filling his bookcases. Every year, my dad attends Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival and comes back laden with souvenir hats, bags and t-shirts. Above my dad’s desk hangs a signed, framed photo of Roger Ebert shaking his hand. “To Brand, on the occasion of HAL 9000′s birthday,” Roger wrote, adding a quote from HAL’s demise in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey… “Daisy … daisy …”.

When we were younger, my brothers and I needed my dad’s approval before going to the movie theater. My dad never cared about a movie’s rating, violence or explicit content. Rather, he needed to discuss whether Roger would approve of our choice.”You want to see that movie?” he’d ask. “Well, you know what Roger said about it, don’t you?” My brothers and I would look at each other and sigh. My dad would pull up the review and read to us from the holy word of Roger. We almost never made it to the theater by showtime.

My dad has bought nearly every film that Roger liked, and as a result, he owns hundreds of movies. Although my dad has barely seen a quarter of the movies he owns, he knows what Roger thinks of each one. For the movies my dad has seen, his opinion is intertwined with Roger’s. I remember my dad once telling me that he hadn’t enjoyed a movie that Roger rated favorably. After some consideration, my dad decided to watch the movie again to better understand Roger’s opinion.

When I was in high school, my friends would drop by to borrow movies from our massive collection. This pleased my dad to no end. He even made his own video rental cards and checkout slips to facilitate the borrowing process. And he loved spreading the gospel of Roger. If a friend wanted to borrow a particular movie, my dad would sit him down and walk him through Roger’s review. Then my dad would jump up. ”Oh, and if you like this movie, I know at least six more that you’ll love.” My friends always left with their hands full. Even now, I still turn to my dad for movie advice. Whether I’m in the mood for a mindless action flick or a foreign drama, he knows exactly what to recommend. My dad really knows his movies. Or, rather, he really knows his Roger Ebert.

Buy him some peanuts and Crackerjack

Here’s one last post I prepared before taking off for my residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Baseball season is finally here, and when I asked my friend Bob Ringwald to write a guest post about his love for the game, he willingly agreed.My brother Doug introduced me to Bob Ringwald years ago — they’re both jazz musicians, and they play together from time to time. Bob is blind, and it sounds like he’s looking forward to baseball season as much as – maybe even more than? – I am!

Take me out to the ballgame

by Bob Ringwald

The New York Giants moved to San Francisco In 1958, and that’s when I became a Giants fan. I was at a game at Candlestick park on a day when Willie Mays hit four home runs! But in the 60s and 70s, after Willie Mays left the Giants, I was working 6 and 7-nights a week as a musician. I had no time to follow baseball.

We moved to Los Angeles in 1979. One night I happened to decide to listen to a Giants – Dodgers game on the radio, and that was it: Vince Scully, the amazing Dodger play-by-play announcer, won me over. He is the best I have ever heard, and believe me, I’ve heard a lot of baseball announcers. I became a dyed-in-the wool Dodger fan.

We moved back to Northern California some 18 years ago, but I’m still a Dodger fan. I bleed Dodger Blue. Dodgers games are not heard this far north in Sacramento, but I can listen to the games using my computer on MLB dot com.

That’s Bob–Molly’s dad–announcing the lineups (reading from a Braille lineup card) at Dodger Stadium.

When we were still living in Tinsel Town, the Dodgers had a promotion once where you wrote in which baseball job you’d like to do: hang with the grounds crew, drag the base path during the 7th inning, sit with the sports writers and write your own story, hang out with the umpires, that sort of thing. I wrote a letter saying that I wanted to be the Public Address announcer. I knew someone in the P.R. department, so I handed the letter to him. That way it wouldn’t get lost in the thousands of letters I knew might come in.

On July 27, 1991 I used my Braille skills to announce the lineup for a Los Angeles Dodgers – Montreal Expos game. Guess I passed the audition: they invited me to announce the players as they came up to bat in the bottom of the 3rd inning, too, and when I put a little extra English on my announcement of Darrell Strawberry’s name, the 50,000 people in the stands went crazy. What a sense of power!

Later I was invited to go out onto the field at Dodger Stadium to see what the pitcher’s mound, bases, base path and home plate really felt like. I jumped up against the center field wall like a big league outfielder. I picked up the phone they answer in the bullpen when managers call from the dugout. I sat in the Dodger dugout alongside the famous drinking fountain that angry players have been known to destroy with their bats, and, as if that wasn’t enough, I also had the honor to sit in Vince Scully’s chair in the press box. My tour that day ended in the Dodger exercise room. Legendary Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda was on the treadmill, and we had a very interesting chat.

In the early 80s, my daughter, actress and author Molly Ringwald, sang the National Anthem at several Dodger games. Fernando Valenzuela gave her a signed baseball. Another time she was given a baseball signed by all of the 1981 World Series Championship Dodgers. I proudly display those autographed baseballs in my office.

From time to time people ask me, “If you can’t see the action, why would you want to go to the game when you could just as easily be at home listening to it on the radio?” I sometimes answer by saying “Why would you want to go to the game when you can see the action better, close up, at home on TV?” I do take a portable radio to the game to hear the play by play. But there is something more. There is the electricity of the crowd, the sound of the ball hitting the bat and mitt, the P.A. announcer, the venders selling programs, ice-cream, peanuts and other assorted goodies. And of course at Dodger Stadium there are the famous Dodger Dogs. Dodger Dogs are just regular Farmer John hot dogs. But, once you walk through the turn styles of the ball park, they become a gourmet repast.

Care to guess where I’ll be later today? Yes . . . . we’re traveling 400 miles south from Sacramento to Los Angeles to attend the Dodgers vs. Giants opening day game at Dodger Stadium. Care to take a guess which team I’ll be rooting for???

You can check out more photos of Bob’s baseball days on his web site. Play ball!

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.

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.

And now a word from a fellow University of Illinois alum”

If you follow this blog, you already know guest blogger Sandra Murillo. Sandra lost her sight when she was three years old. She has always attended regular public schools, and she’s known ever since she was in high school that she wants to be a writer. Her first guest post was about using assistive technology to vote in her first presidential election and was published here four years ago. A lot has happened in Sandra’s life the past four years, and she’s back with another guest post to give you the latest.

Networking to beat the startling odds

by Sandra Murillo

“How’s the job search going?” I’ve heard that question from family and friends many times during the last few months. I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in December with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and like any recent college graduate, I’m in the process of looking for a job, or, at the very least, an internship.

U of I graduate Sandra Murillo.

I, however, am not your average recent college graduate. I also happen to be blind. This means that finding a job can present some, shall we say, additional hardships. It’s not that I can’t get on the Internet to look for jobs or type resumés and personal statements independently. No, it’s much more complicated than that. Even though legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in the workplace, there are still many misconceptions that prevent many of us from being hired. Sadly, many employers believe that we are not capable of doing a job as efficiently as our sighted counterparts.

According to the American Foundation for the Blind, about 75 percent of blind and visually impaired adults are unemployed in the United States. I find this ironic, given that technology helps us be more productive and independent now more than ever before. I use my talking computer to send and receive Emails, type articles and blog posts and browse the web. The computer’s robotic voice announces each letter as I type and reads out loud what’s on the computer screen. I am bilingual, and my talking computer’s robotic voice even speaks Spanish for me when I want it to!

Journalism involves interviewing people, and I’ve learned to record the interviews with a digital recorder. That way I can make sure I won’t miss a good quote or bit of information. In some ways my blindness allows me to be a better listener during interviews. I can concentrate more on what’s being said rather than the visuals of the person or place. These and other tools have helped me in my job search.

Besides asking friends and family to keep an eye out for job leads, I also go online to sites like monster.com. I was also very fortunate to come across Career Connect, a website developed by the American Foundation for the Blind specifically for blind or visually impaired job seekers. It is full of helpful information on how to write resumés and personal statements, tips on how to make job interviews go smoothly and even information for employers.

I’ve known I wanted to be a journalist since I was a sophomore in high school. I think it’s a great career because I will get to do two of the things I enjoy the most: writing and informing and educating others. I have a particular interest in writing about people with disabilities — I feel we still need to educate the general public about our struggles and capabilities. Maybe that way employers will not be as skeptical about hiring blind and visually impaired people.

Meanwhile, I plan to continue on my job search, and I hope I will not be part of that startling 75 percent of blind and visually impaired people without a job for long.

A triathlete in more ways than one

Remember my last post, the one where I wrote about all the young people in my 2010 Seeing Eye class using talking iPhones? Eliza Cooper was one of those young Seeing Eye classmates, and the very day I published that post last week she was featured in a story on Marketplace from American Public Media. The story was all about, guess what? Smartphones for blind users.

The story opened with reporter Meg Kramer explaining the many ways blind users find standard smartphones so helpful. “A phone’s camera can identify money and read text, and GPS navigation tells blind users where they are and what’s nearby,” she said. “Screen readers are second nature for someone like Eliza Cooper, Who has been using the technology since elementary school.” The reporter goes to expert Eliza for details about mobile accessibility, and then listeners follow along to observe how Eliza uses her iPhone as she packs for a trip with her Seeing Eye dog Harris.

This guy look familiar? He’s my retired dog Harper’s bro!

I liked Eliza Cooper from the minute we met at the Seeing Eye. She’s a talented drummer, an we had a ball jamming together at weekend parties during class. When we discovered her dog Harris is Harper’s brother, we knew it was destiny. We had to continue working together after graduation.

Eliza is a social media consultant, and I hired her for a few months back in 2011 to learn new ways to use my Twitter feed and my Facebook fan page. She’s come a long way, baby, since then. She picked up three new consulting clients last year and completed a number of short-term projects in social media and web consulting in 2012 as well. And get this–after completing her first two triathlons (you read that right, two triathalons) last summer, she began blogging for the Huffington Post about her experiences as a blind triathlete. Eliza also appeared in a profile in Triathlete Magazine last year and was featured as a triathlete in an ad for Volkswagen, too.

And now, she’s started 2013 with a bang, too. Her Marketplace story is called “Building a Better Smart Phone for Blind Users” and you can still hear it online. It aired in time for the annual Consumer Electronics show this past week and was heard on public radio stations nationwide. Go to Eliza’s blog to find out more about the Marketplace interview and learn more about her interest in social media strategy and management. Go, Eliza, go!

How do blind people use iPhones?

One of the many, many reasons I decided to buy an iPhone two years ago was to support the idea of universal design: the iPhone 3GS was the first touch-screen device that blind people like me could take out of the box and use right away.  It comes with speech software called VoiceOver — built-in screen access for people who are blind. Miraculously, it allows blind people to interact using the touch-screen.

The iPhone 4 came on the market in 2010, just before I left town to train with Yellow Lab Harper. During training at the Seeing Eye I could hear phones murmuring text messages to the younger students in class while we were waiting in the lounge. Carlos regularly updated his Facebook status from his iPhone while we commuted in the Seeing Eye van together. He and Marcus would point their phones at their dogs from time to time to take photos, then manipulate their phones to send the photos home to loved ones.

My classmate snapped this photo of Harper on his iPhone and sent it to Mike.

Apple drastically reduced the price of the iPhone 3GS to $49 the very month I came home with Harper. I bought one, and after learning how to use it to make a phone call (in case of an emergency) I put off learning how to do anything else with it.

My two-year contract ends next month. I finally devoted time over the holiday break to climb the very steep VoiceOver learning curve so I can decide whether or not to renew.

The simplest way for you sighted iPhone users to understand how VoiceOver works is to give it a try yourself. Here’s how you turn VoiceOver on :

• go to Settings
• choose General
• choose Accessibility
• choose VoiceOver
• turn it on.

Still with me? Okay. Now press the home key. Slide your finger around the screen, and Voice Over will call out the icon you’ve touched. Don’t worry, it won’t select that icon, it will just call it out so you’ll know where you are on the screen. Hold the iPhone so that the earpiece is facing up, toward the ceiling. If you touch the left edge of the screen about an inch below the earpiece, you’re likely to land on the top left icon. VoiceOver will call out what that is. Flick one finger right to select the next one. If you flick your finger four times to the right , you’ll get to the first app on the second row of apps. If you come across an app you want to open, tap the screen twice, and…voila! Note: If you open an app BY MISTAKE, just press the Home button and you’ll return to the home screen.

Is your head spinning? Then you can imagine what a dither I was in the past two weeks learning how to listen to voice mail, Google, send and receive email using my iPhone. I can get into all that in a future blog post if you are really interested, but I’m guessing that all you sighted folks want to do right now is learn how to turn the #(@%! VoiceOver off. If you follow the bulleted directions above, below the heading at the top of the VoiceOver screen you’ll hear a button labeled “VoiceOver on.” Notice that VoiceOver gives you a hint out loud by saying, “Double-tap to toggle setting.” When you hear that, go ahead and Double-tap to turn VoiceOver off.

I reached a big goal over the weekend when, ta-da, I exchanged a series of text messages withmy sister Marilee. I’m OMW. TTYL!