Transcriber: Paulina Kaniewska Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Hello.
I’m going to keep my sunglasses on while I talk to you,
and it’s not just because it makes me look cool,
(Laughs)
it’s also because these lights are a little bit hard for a blind guy,
but we’ll get to that.
What I want to start with here
is the idea that seeing less is not the same thing as seeing worse.
And that may be a little difficult for fully sighted people to understand,
but the big point I want to get across today is that if you’re visually impaired,
if you’re blind, if you have a disability, that means many things.
It means that you’ve learned to overcome some challenges.
It means you have a different perspective than a lot of folks do.
It means there’s a lot you can’t do, and some things that you can do.
Most importantly, it means that you can be involved
in helping to build a community.
But before we get to any of that, I’d like to start by explaining
a little bit of the nature of my own disability,
my own visual impairment.
So no matter what I do, no matter what kind of glasses I wear,
no matter what kind of low vision aids I use,
the best sight I will ever have is 20/200.
And if you know how the 20/20 scale works,
then you know that the higher that second number, the worse your vision.
But that might not tell you a lot.
So if you think about the 20/20 scale as a relativistic scale,
what it really means is that if you have 20/20,
or perfect vision,
what you can see from 200 feet away,
I would have to be 20 feet away from the same thing
to see it the same way you do.
This doesn’t mean I don’t see it at all.
And it certainly doesn’t mean the image is blurry or distorted, or confusing.
It just means I don’t really see it in the way that you see it.
So, for instance, with these trees -
if I was walking along with someone who was fully sighted,
and they pointed down the way, and said: “Hey, Jake, look at that tree down there!”
I’d probably look, and I’d squint,
and I’d shrug my shoulders, and I’d say: “Well, I believe you.”
And we’d keep walking closer and closer to the tree.
As we got closer and closer to the tree, I’d start to see some of it.
I’d see some green on the top and some brown on the bottom.
And as we got to that 20 foot mark,
that’s when I’d start to see all the different colors, the leaves.
I’d start to see all the details in the bark.
OK, again, at this point, I’m seeing it the way you saw it 200 feet ago.
But now the issue becomes: we’re no longer 200 feet away,
and what you see, again, is still not what I see
because I’m just now seeing what you could see way back there.
This is why it can be really difficult for me to answer the question:
“So what exactly can you see?”
Well, I don’t know how to answer that all the time
because I’ve never seen what the rest of you see.
I was born this way.
And the thing about that is I’ve now spent about 40 years trying to figure out
how to talk to sighted people
and how to explain what it looks like from my point of view.
So one more thing that you need to know about my visual impairment
is it’s a form of albinism - it’s called ocular albinism.
Like any other kind albinism, what that essentially means
is I don’t have much pigment,
and because I don’t have much pigment, particularly in my eyes,
not only do I have “poor vision,” but I also have extreme light sensitivity,
hence the sunglasses.
Some of you may be a little familiar with this, have a point of reference,
if you think about snow blindness.
If you’ve lived in Ohio most of your life,
you’ve probably been outside on a sunny winter’s day,
and then turned around and gone back into your much more dimly lit home.
And as you try to make that transition,
what you realize is it’s a little disorienting.
Everything’s a little out of focus. It’s not quite how it’s supposed to be.
And maybe there might even be a little bit of a headache for you
as you try to adjust your vision.
Those vision headaches are really familiar to me.
That snow blindness?
It doesn’t just happen to me once in a while in the winter.
It happens to me every time someone turns the lights on or off,
especially if I don’t know that that’s coming.
As a matter of fact, my family has taken to announcing all light changes.
So before they hit a light switch, they say: “Lights!”
and they do this so often that when my son’s friends come over,
they’ve often mistakenly thought our lights work on a voice command system.
(Laughter)
But I do appreciate their help with that.
So all of these things, this light sensitivity
and this theoretically poor vision relative to other folks, what it means
is that I have a disability.
And in my experience a lot of folks,
particularly sighted folks, particularly fully abled folks,
a lot of them really hate that word:
“disabled.”
They’re uncomfortable with that first part, that “dis.”
They want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
They want to forget that there’s things we can’t do.
They don’t want us to feel guilty or bad that we’re not able to do things.
But having a disability means embracing all of that -
it means embracing the things that you can’t do,
embracing the things that you can do,
and understanding how to bridge that gap -
how you’re going to have to do things differently
if you want be able to do them.
OK, there’s a couple of examples here.
I can’t drive a car.
Obviously, it’d be pretty dangerous if I did.
I can’t fill out paperwork at the doctor’s office usually.
For that matter, I can’t usually read the menu in most restaurants.
So does that mean that if I can't drive, I can't go to work?
Well, of course not. I have two feet - I can walk to work,
I can ride my bicycle to work,
or I can catch the RTA,
and join the beautiful community of people who ride the bus.
OK?
If need to go to the doctor,
I’m going to have to fill out their paperwork,
so I’m going to have to ask for some help with that
either from a receptionist, or if my wife is with me or a friend.
And if I’m at a restaurant,
it’s certainly not that I’m not going to figure out a meal -
I’m not going to miss a meal.
(Laughter)
What I’m going to do
is I’m going to ask someone at my table to help me read,
or I’m just going to ask the server what tastes good that day.
OK?
So it’s all about figuring out how you’re going to function in the world,
and when you do that, you start to develop a love of your disability.
No offense to any of you who have better sight than me,
but I would not want to see how you see.
If somebody could fix my eyesight tomorrow, I’m not interested,
for a couple of reasons.
I mean, first of all, I really like this unique perspective that I have.
But more than that, I like being who I am,
and a big part of who I am is being blind,
so I don’t want to change that.
And that kind of comfort with your own disability,
that’s something that does take work,
and it takes time,
and it’s something you need help with.
And a lot of people in my life have been very helpful to me.
Probably the most helpful person was the first and best teacher I ever had,
and that was my mom.
My mom had three children:
my older brother, my younger sister, and stuck in the middle was me.
I was the only one of her three kids that had a disability.
But my mom had a mission.
Her mission was to raise good, independent people.
And so that meant
I wasn’t going to be allowed to skip chores because I couldn’t see.
I wasn’t going to be allowed to not do well in school
because I couldn’t see very well.
I was going to have to learn how to compete
and how to do everything that my siblings could do, and maybe a little more.
So my mom got to work - she got creative and she got innovative.
For example, she taught me how to vacuum the floor barefoot
because she figured if I couldn’t see the mess on the carpet,
I could run my barefoot across it and feel it until I knew it was clean.
It’s actually worked really well. It’s how I still vacuum today.
The only time it got me into any trouble was when I worked at a pizza shop,
and they wanted me to vacuum the dining room.
(Laughter)
So I quickly got told that I didn’t have to do that good a job.
It wasn’t just with chores, though.
My mom also helped me with education.
It was sixth grade when we really started getting a lot of chapter books,
and a lot of like really heavy reading,
and I just physically could not read that much that long every night.
And so every evening my mom would sit at the dining room table with me,
and she would read novel after novel after novel
while I filled out all the book reports, and the study guides,
and did all the homework.
She got me through school like that.
And she also got me through school by helping me to navigate the IEP process.
If you’re a student with a disability, legally, you’re supposed to be given
what are called “reasonable accommodations.”
These are things that are supposed to make a fairly even playing field
between you and your peers.
The accommodations that I had mostly pertained to enlarging text for me.
OK?
When an IEP is written, especially when I was a kid,
the child was never involved in the process.
The parents would be there, the teachers would be there,
an intervention specialist would be there,
but no one ever was concerned about the student.
And that really bothered my mom.
She figured that if these plans were supposed to affect me,
then, at the very least, I should be aware of them,
but, really, I should have some sort of say in them.
So I've been going to IEP meetings ever since second grade.
And by the time I was in high school, I was running my own IEP meetings.
I was standing up to teachers and principals saying:
“Yeah, you really do have to enlarge my homework every single time.”
“And yes, if I can’t read your chalkboard, I’m going to get out of my seat,
I’m going to walk up to the board, and I’m going to read it.”
And I’d also say things like:
“Yeah, I actually can try out for the basketball team
and the track team, and you know what?
I might just be able to throw a shot put further than anybody else,
so maybe you want to let me.
Granted, I didn’t know where I was throwing it,
but I could throw it far.
(Laughter)
These skills helped me out a lot, not just as a student,
to give me confidence,
but since then, as I became a teacher, and I had my own students.
I’ve had a lot of students who had IEPs,
so they needed help in navigating that same system.
But it’s not just students with disabilities
that I’ve been able to be helpful to.
Every single semester when I get a new group of students,
I always tell them about my disability.
I tell them a lot of the same stories I’m telling you today.
What this does is it makes me vulnerable in front of my students.
They know that I’m going to have to ask for their help from time to time.
They know that I might teach class wearing sunglasses sometimes.
They know that if I can’t read their handwriting,
I might ask them to read it to me.
Every single time that I ask my students for help, they always help.
And because I’m willing to be vulnerable with them,
they’re more likely to be vulnerable with me
and ask for help when they need it.
This is why being blind has literally made me a better teacher.
And it's really come in handy in job interviews
because when you say those things to a principal or to a dean - trust me -
you almost always get the teaching job, which is wonderful,
but it’s also a little upsetting to me
when I read about the unemployment rate for the blind and the visually impaired -
it’s astronomically high.
And I think that the reason for that
is not because blind people don’t want to work
or because blind people can’t work.
It’s because when an employer sees a candidate who’s using a white cane,
or guide dog, or who needs adaptive software
loaded onto company computers, so they can function properly ...
When an employer sees that candidate, all they see are challenges and obstacles.
And furthermore, those are challenges and obstacles that one candidate has
And so their choice becomes really simple:
they never pick the challenge.
But that's exactly the problem.
What they haven’t seen is that overcoming that challenge
is itself a skill set.
It’s a skill set that just might be valuable
to you, and to your team, and to your community.
Not only that, but that person who is blind or visually impaired,
again, they do see less than you, but they’re not seeing worse than you.
They have a different perspective than you.
And while I have the chance, I do want to clear one thing up, too -
when I say that blind people have superpowers,
it’s not because we’re daredevil.
We don’t have echolocation hearing, no matter what folks tell you.
As a matter of fact, it’s not actually true
that one sense automatically improves when another sense diminishes -
there’s nothing automatic about it.
If you want that to happen,
you’re going to have to put in a lot of work to refine your hearing
and hear well.
And a lot of blind people just so happen to have done that,
which, again, is another benefit that they can bring to the table.
Our theme today is community,
and as I understand it, community is built
when people who have different perspectives try really hard
to understand what the world looks like from somebody else’s point of view.
I think blind folks could help a lot with that.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)