Spring 2014
Buckeye Bulletin
A publication of the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio
Barbara Pierce, Editor
237 Oak Street
Oberlin, OH44074
(440) 774-8077
Eric Duffy, President
(614) 935-6965 (NFB-O Office)
P.O. Box 82055, Columbus, OH43202
Voice of the Nation’s Blind
The National Federation of the Blind of Ohio is a 501 (c) 3 consumer organization comprised of blind and sighted people committed to changing what it means to be blind. Though blindness is still all too often a tragedy to those who face it, we know from our personal experience that with training and opportunity it can be reduced to the level of a physical nuisance. We work to see that blind people receive the services and training to which they are entitled and that parents of blind children receive the advice and support they need to help their youngsters grow up to be happy, productive adults. We believe that first-class citizenship means that people have both rights and responsibilities, and we are determined to see that blind people become first-class citizens of these United States, enjoying their rights and fulfilling their responsibilities. The most serious problems we face have less to do with our lack of vision than with discrimination based on the public’s ignorance and misinformation about blindness. Join us in educating Ohioans about the abilities and aspirations of Ohio’s blind citizens. We are changing what it means to be blind.
The NFB of Ohio has ten local chapters, one for at-large members, and special divisions for diabetics, merchants, students, seniors, parents of blind children, guide dog users, and those interested in Braille. This newsletter appears three times a year and is circulated by email, posted on NFB-NEWSLINE®, our digitized newspaper-reading service by phone, and can be read or downloaded from our website, For information about the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio or to make address changes or be added to the mailing list, call (440) 774-8077 or email . For information about NFB-NEWSLINE, our free digitized newspaper-reading service, call (866) 504-7300. Local NEWSLINE numbers are: 330-247-1241 (Akron), 330-409-1900 (Canton), 513-297-1521 (Cincinnati), 216-453-2090 (Cleveland), and 614-448-1673 (Columbus).
The NFB now has a vehicle donation program. For complete information go to < or call our toll-free vehicle donation number (855) 659-9314.
Table of Contents
From the President’s Desk
by Eric Duffy
Editor’s Musings
by Barbara Pierce
The Second BELL Will Soon Ring
by Debbie Baker and Mary Anne Denning
Toledo Blade Soon to Be Unavailable on NFB-NEWSLINE
by Eric Duffy
Committee Appointments 2014
Advances in Technology Can Leave Some Behind
by Kerstin Sjoberg-Witt and Michael L. Stack II
Pride: A First-Timer’s View of the Washington Seminar
by Arlie A. Ray Jr.
Odin Mobile: A Wireless Provider for People Who Are Blind
by Robert Felker
Every Dot Could Count
My Experience Teaching a Little Bit of Braille
by Deborah Kendrick
Need a Lyft? How about an Uber
by Eric Duffy
Recipes
Did You Know?
by Charlene Bolden and Rosa Jones
Buckeye Briefs
Activities Calendar
From the President’s Desk
by Eric Duffy
We in the National Federation of the Blind talk a lot about our philosophy of blindness. One definition of philosophy is a belief or system of beliefs accepted as authoritative by a particular group. On a personal level people also have a philosophy about how to live. This can include a philosophy about how to live as a blind person. Just because one says he or she believes in the philosophy of the National Federation of the Blind, the NFB philosophy does not necessarily govern all aspects of his or her life. There many reasons for this.
One is that we are all a product of the society in which we live. Sometimes no matter how long we have been active in the Federation, we find ourselves falling victim to one stereotype or another about blindness. It is also possible to apply our understanding of the philosophy to a given situation in such a way that we are contradicting that actual philosophy.
For many years I have struggled with a serious sleep disorder. When I was in college, a psychology professor told me that research indicated that many people who had little or no light perception had sleep problems. Although I heard no more about this research, I continued to battle erratic sleep cycles. I went to a sleep medicine clinic and tried various drugs. None of them worked, and some of them had negative side effects.
Much later in life my family doctor told me that my body was most likely not producing enough melatonin, and therefore my body clock was out of rhythm. For some time I experimented with taking melatonin but achieved no satisfactory results. I was delighted when about four years ago I learned that Vanda Pharmaceuticals was researching this problem in hopes of developing a drug to treat it. The problem is known as non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder (non-24). Those who have the non-24 sleep wake cycle often find it difficult to get to sleep at night. Our sleep is often interrupted by long periods of wakefulness. As a result we often find ourselves falling asleep or very tired during the day.
I know this problem has affected my life in negative ways. On the other hand it does not affect many people with no light perception. The drug, Hetlioz, was approved by the FDA earlier this year, and it will be available some time this spring. I have long said that I will absolutely be one of the first people in the country to get it when it comes to market. My doctor says he will prescribe it as soon as we know it is available.
What I have found surprising is the unwillingness on the part of several very bright blind people to acknowledge that non-24 even exists. These same people become upset when it is linked to blindness. I know that all too often doctors and other professionals want to attribute every problem in life to blindness. We certainly must do all that we can to resist this temptation on the part of society. But we must also be careful to acknowledge things that can be fairly and accurately attributed to blindness.
If the ability to see light triggers the production of melatonin and if the production of melatonin helps to control our circadian rhythm, it stands to reason that for those of us who have non-24, a drug that helps us produce melatonin might be beneficial. My blindness is the only reason I do not see light. I don’t want to have non-24, but neither do I want to be blind.
No, don’t think I am depressed, or that I hate my life as a blind person. That is far from the truth. I have learned how to live a productive and full life as a blind person. I could have chosen to feel sorry for myself and live a life of doom and gloom. Had I done so, most of society would have been none the wiser, for that is what much of the world still expects of us today. But the National Federation of the Blind gave me a different prescription, and I was eager to have it. It is our positive philosophy of blindness and a group of supportive like-minded Federationists that have changed how I deal with blindness. I have heard blind people say they don’t want to have to take a drug to deal with non-24. I wonder how that differs from those who say, “I don’t want to have to use Braille, a cane, a dog or a magnifier”?
I don’t write this to promote Hetlioz. I do not benefit from the sale of the drug in any way. I am simply saying that it is okay to be blind and that, if non-24 is a part of blindness for some of us, that is okay as well.
Some people have been upset because they believe that the radio commercials sponsored by Vanda portray blindness in a negative light. I disagree. The commercials present a problem that is connected to blindness and tell those who are interested how to get more information. Non-24 is not a condition that we should hide from; it is one for which we should acknowledge and embrace a possible treatment.
------
Editor’s Musings
by Barbara Pierce
People have been asking me to describe our trip to Malaysia in March, so I have decided to use this space to do so even though nothing noteworthy concerning blindness occurred. At the close of a winter like this past one, it sounds wonderful to contemplate spending two weeks close to the equator. The first problem arises when you are faced with deciding what to wear for the flight. Leaving home, the temperature was in the thirties with snow on the ground. We would emerge from the airport in Taipei to spend the night, where the temperature was sixty with drizzle. The next morning we flew to Kuala Lumpur, where the temperature and the humidity were both in the nineties. I decided to wear a T-shirt and a light sweater and run really fast into the Cleveland airport. That proved to be a good decision. San Francisco was probably about the temperature of Taipei, but we never set foot outside during our lay-over, so I was comfortable.
Let me tell you it is a long way from California to Taipei. We kept chasing the sun out across the Pacific Ocean and finally caught up with the sunset late Wednesday evening, March 5. Then we flew and flew and flew, fourteen hours in all, crossing the International Date Line. We had breakfast in the dark, and finally landed in Taipei, Taiwan at about 10:00 p.m. In effect we saw no daylight on Thursday. With the help of melatonin we actually slept that night in a hotel in Taipei and were back at the airport for a flight to Kuala Lumpur at about ten in the morning. That was a five-hour flight, but with no time change. We had already moved our watches ahead thirteen hours.
Our son Steven was waiting for us at the airport, bless him, because we of course had no ringits—the currency of Malaysia. We drove over modern highways to the city, and all the way there the road was lined with construction sites. Kuala Lumpur is a booming city filled with modern malls lined with western stores: Starbucks, Gucci, Hushpuppies, Toys-R-Us, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut—you name it. We checked in to a modern hotel for the first four days to catch up from the jet lag. KL has a modern light rail system that seemed pretty easy to use. We did not try the buses, but taxis are inexpensive and ubiquitous.
Malaysia is a cosmopolitan country. The Malays speak Malay and are for the most part Muslim. This means that five times a day the faithful are called to prayer by the amplified voice of the muezzin. The various mosques are not synchronized, so the calls linger in the air in what I found to be a very romantic and mysterious way. There is a large Indian population, Tamil in origin, and they speak Tamil. This means that there are Indian temples around. And because Malaya was a British colony, English is almost the lingua franca, and there are lots of Anglican churches. I understand that the Pentecostals are pretty well dug in as well, though we saw no sign of that influence. Finally there is a significant Chinese population, so Chinese is frequently heard on the streets and seen on signs.
The result of all these cultural influences is that the food is spectacular: Chinese, Indian, Thai, European, Malaysian and combinations of all the above. We had to be careful because much of it was spicy, but we never had a disappointing meal.
How, you may wonder, did people deal with blindness? Amazingly well. I was grabbed a few times when I was stepping up or down curbs on the street, but mostly folks left me alone. We went to a orangutan preserve during a visit to the city of Kuching on the island of Borneo—two Malaysian states are in East Borneo though the rest of the island is Indonesian. We had a hike up and then back down to reach the feeding station, where we could stand near a table spread with fruit for the animals. A staff member called them in, and they came swinging through the trees and lowered themselves on ropes that allowed them to land on the table and grab melons and bananas and carry them back up into the trees. Several mothers with babies and a juvenile helped themselves to lunch while we were there. The footing was quite uneven in the rain forest, but no one questioned my ability to get where I was going. It was a very live-and-let-live attitude.
I cannot end this travel log without mentioning the reason for our visit. Our son and his partner are adopting a darling little boy, who is four years old. His name is Elango. He is Tamil by birth, and a year ago he had never spoken anything but Tamil. He now speaks unaccented English, Malay, and a bit of Chinese because his daycare center is run by Chinese people.
Suffice it to say that we fell in love with him and are trying to persuade him that he should come to visit us and discover the joys of playing in the snow. Since he begins asking for his coat when the temperature falls to eighty-eight, we are finding the going slow, but we are hopeful that they will come for Christmas next year or the year after.
Elango loves all forms of transportation—the flight to Kuching was his first experience of flying, so the airplane trip to Grammy and Granddaddy’s house is the most attractive part of the proposed visit. My private opinion is that that long trip will probably cure him of his love affair with planes.
In some ways the flight home was even more tiring: five hours to Taipei, a layover of four hours, then eleven hours to Los Angeles, and five more hours home. That long leg was shorter because of tail winds, but we discovered the hard way how much help the night’s rest had been after fourteen hours in the air going east. Traveling the other way, we found that March 19 went on for twelve hours longer than it did for you. Jumping across the International Date Line does peculiar things to one’s sense of reality.
I admit that having a two-week break from the ice and snow was wonderful. KL had been without rain for several weeks, and water rationing was going on while we were living in Steven’s apartment, though the reserve tanks of water in the complex were large enough that we were not inconvenienced by it. They have a lovely two-bedroom apartment with a balcony suitable for drying clothes. There was no hot water in the kitchen or the sink in the bathrooms. To get a hot shower, you flipped a switch outside the bathroom door which turned on a heater for the shower. They have a washing machine, but no dryer. In the complex of five apartment blocks straggling up a very steep hill there are a play area, a swimming pool, the nursery school, and a little Thai restaurant. But, unless you snag a taxi on the way back from the grocery store, you get to carry what you have bought up an amazing number of irregular, outdoor staircases.
I hope you can tell that we had a wonderful time. It is always stimulating to rub shoulders with other cultures. We love our grandson, and it was wonderful to spend time with Steven and his partner, but we were glad to get home to hot water, a full-size car, and our lovely home.
------
The Second BELL Will Soon Ring
by Debbie Baker and Mary Anne Denning
The NFB of Ohio held its first BELL (Braille Enrichment for Literacy and Learning) Program in July of 2013. All who volunteered and attended thought it was a terrific experience. Most are returning again for the second BELL. This year’s program promises to be even better.
The Ohio State School for the Blind (OSSB) in Columbus will be our headquarters for this year’s program from July 21 through August 2. We extend our deepest gratitude to school superintendent Cynthia Johnson, her administration, and staff for allowing us to stay on campus and to use the wonderful facility.
In addition to old favorites from last year’s curriculum—baking cake in a cup, Braille Beach Ball, and Braille Twister, to name just a few—we will be swimming in the OSSB pool. We will attend COSI (Center of Science and Industry) museum for one entire day. Students will prepare their own lunches twice during the camp and will join volunteer staff in a walking trip or bus ride to a near-by fast food restaurant to buy their lunches.
Saturday, August 2, will be the last full day of BELL for 2014. That day is designated as a learning seminar for students’ parents as well as for parents of prospective students for future BELL programs in Ohio. In addition, volunteers and the students themselves will attend that day and be engaged in separate BELL activities.
Both the National Federation of the Blind and the NFB of Ohio recognize the vital importance of Braille literacy for those who are totally blind and those who have low vision. We know that the BELL Program will be both educational and a lot of fun for our students and volunteers. After all, most volunteers and four former students will be returning for the second year. Our excitement is building until we hear those first bells ring again at 9:00 a.m. on Monday, July 21. Be ready. You won’t want to arrive after the tardy bell!