BA Teen Cast

lopers and improving accessibility for all. I admire that and it was a pleasure Talking to Nimer about his devices and what his team at the Lighthouse Center for Vision Loss is doing for Transition age students, their parents and how they keep connected, informed and educate in rural Minnesota. Where distance and proximity makes for creative solutions. Join Nimer Jaber as he sits down with Blind Abilities and talks about Google devices, the LG Sport Watch and it’s accessibility, ChromeBooks and Amazon devices. you can follow Nimer on Twitter @nimerjaber Thank you for listening. You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities http://www.twitter.com/blindabilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com http://www.blindabilities.com Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. https://appsto.re/us/demUab.i

Earle Harrison sits down with Blind Abilities to introduce the newest Braille Notebook from Handy Tech. The Actilino is a 16 cell notetaker with ATC technology. That is Active Tactile Control which senses your touch and knows just when to refresh your next line, thus, no buttons to push to advance!  The Triumph Technology Team is all packed up and down in San Diego for the CSUN show so if you get the chance, stop by booth #515 and check out Handy Tech and Triumph Technology. You can also go on-line and find out more at www.ATTriumph.com Thank you for listening. You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities http://www.twitter.com/blindabilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com http://www.blindabilities.com Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. https://appsto.re/us/demUab.i

Sometimes you come across a person who is doing some remarkable work and facing challenges that would throw a person off coarse, Antyenette Walker, AKA Young Ant, is taking on all her challenges and enhancing her opportunities by doing the tough work of adjustment to blindness. Her words, lyrics and music is her way of coping and sharing her story while lifting up the spirits of her listeners and supporters. She calls Team Ant. Young Ant talks about her journey, her story and how her music has come to be. How she uses her music to inspire others and all this when just over a dozen months ago, Antoinette lost all of her vision. Join us as Young Ant surrounds us with beats, lyrics and words of inspiration. You can find Young Ant’s music on Soundcloud . https://soundcloud.com/young-a-n-t You can follow her on Facebook at TeamAnt1121 https://www.facebook.com/TeamAnt1121/ Follow her on Twitter @YoungAnt1121 https://twitter.com/youngant1121 Check out Young Ant’s YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq6eCl6LXxn6nVM8zRItJCQ Thank you for listening. You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities http://www.twitter.com/blindabilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com http://www.blindabilities.com Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. https://appsto.re/us/demUab.i

Sometimes you come across a person who is doing some remarkable work and facing challenges that would throw a person off coarse, Antyenette Walker, AKA Young Ant, is taking on all her challenges and enhancing her opportunities by doing the tough work of adjustment to blindness. Her words, lyrics and music is her way of coping and sharing her story while lifting up the spirits of her listeners and supporters. She calls Team Ant. Young Ant talks about her journey, her story and how her music has come to be. How she uses her music to inspire others and all this when just over a dozen months ago, Antoinette lost all of her vision. Join us as Young Ant surrounds us with beats, lyrics and words of inspiration. You can find Young Ant’s music on Soundcloud . https://soundcloud.com/young-a-n-t You can follow her on Facebook at TeamAnt1121 https://www.facebook.com/TeamAnt1121/ Follow her on Twitter @YoungAnt1121 https://twitter.com/youngant1121 Check out Young Ant’s YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq6eCl6LXxn6nVM8zRItJCQ Thank you for listening. You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities http://www.twitter.com/blindabilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com http://www.blindabilities.com Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. https://appsto.re/us/demUab.i

Earle Harrison sits down with Blind Abilities to introduce the newest Braille Notebook from Handy Tech. The Actilino is a 16 cell notetaker with ATC technology. That is Active Tactile Control which senses your touch and knows just when to refresh your next line, thus, no buttons to push to advance!  The Triumph Technology Team is all packed up and down in San Diego for the CSUN show so if you get the chance, stop by booth #515 and check out Handy Tech and Triumph Technology. You can also go on-line and find out more at www.ATTriumph.com Thank you for listening. You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities http://www.twitter.com/blindabilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com http://www.blindabilities.com Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. https://appsto.re/us/demUab.i

lopers and improving accessibility for all. I admire that and it was a pleasure Talking to Nimer about his devices and what his team at the Lighthouse Center for Vision Loss is doing for Transition age students, their parents and how they keep connected, informed and educate in rural Minnesota. Where distance and proximity makes for creative solutions. Join Nimer Jaber as he sits down with Blind Abilities and talks about Google devices, the LG Sport Watch and it’s accessibility, ChromeBooks and Amazon devices. you can follow Nimer on Twitter @nimerjaber Thank you for listening. You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities http://www.twitter.com/blindabilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com http://www.blindabilities.com Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Store. https://appsto.re/us/demUab.i

The following podcast was recorded for use by customers of Minnesota’s State Services for the Blind. You can get more information about State Services for the Blind and the services it offers by going to www (dot) mnssb (dot) org. (music) Minnesota’s State Services for the Blind brings you this announcement. Are you a high school or college student who is blind, has low vision, or is deafblind? State Services for the Blind is hosting an opportunities Fair on February 25, from noon to 4 p.m. with information about summer programs and internship options you might be interested in. Connect with your summer program options and hear from students, parents, and employers about how to have a successful work experience. The Opportunities Fair will be held at the Fairview Community Center, 1910 County Road B (as in boy) West, in Roseville, Minnesota, from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, February 25. To register and request accommodations, please visit our website at mn.gov/deed/events/opportunities.jsp – again, that URL is MN dot GOV, forward slash, D-E-E-D, forward slash, EVENTS, forward slash, Opportunities dot J-S like in Susan- P like in Peter - or, if you have any questions, please email Sheila Koenig at Sheila.Koenig@state.mn.us , that’s S-H-E-I-L-A dot K-O-E-N-I-G at state dot MN dot U-S. (music)

The following podcast was recorded for use by customers of Minnesota’s State Services for the Blind. You can get more information about State Services for the Blind and the services it offers by going to www (dot) mnssb (dot) org. (music) Minnesota’s State Services for the Blind brings you this announcement. Are you a high school or college student who is blind, has low vision, or is deafblind? State Services for the Blind is hosting an opportunities Fair on February 25, from noon to 4 p.m. with information about summer programs and internship options you might be interested in. Connect with your summer program options and hear from students, parents, and employers about how to have a successful work experience. The Opportunities Fair will be held at the Fairview Community Center, 1910 County Road B (as in boy) West, in Roseville, Minnesota, from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, February 25. To register and request accommodations, please visit our website at mn.gov/deed/events/opportunities.jsp – again, that URL is MN dot GOV, forward slash, D-E-E-D, forward slash, EVENTS, forward slash, Opportunities dot J-S like in Susan- P like in Peter - or, if you have any questions, please email Sheila Koenig at Sheila.Koenig@state.mn.us , that’s S-H-E-I-L-A dot K-O-E-N-I-G at state dot MN dot U-S. (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. (music) The AFB VisionConnect™ App The American Foundation for the Blind is pleased to announce a free, accessible app now available in iOS, and in Android versions. VisionConnect™, a prescription for independence for patients who are blind or losing vision, provides a searchable directory of services available in the US and Canada for children and adults who are blind or visually impaired. Find services such as computer and technology training, daily living skills training, braille and reading instruction, dog guide training, employment services, low vision services, and more. Individuals who are blind or have low vision can use this accessible app themselves to find resources and tips for living independently with visual impairment, including information on products and technology, personal stories about how people live everyday with macular degeneration or glaucoma, and advice on maintaining employment. Health care providers can use the app to create customized lists of rehabilitation service providers that they can email to their clients, and provide their patients with home survey checklists, ideas for managing their medications, and more. Key "Search" Features: • Select an age group: all ages, children, or adults (including seniors) • Select a service category (advocacy, assistive products, braille and reading instruction, etc.) • Select a state, zip code, or distance from service • Or select an organization by name • Customization: save your search results as lists (for example, “Children’s braille and reading instruction in California”), and e-mail them to yourself or clients. Key "Resources" Feature • Select an audience: information for doctors, children, adults, seniors • Drill down into resources such as tips for modifying your home, accessible products, medication management, a Getting Started Kit, information for veterans, stories about people living and working with visual impairment, and more (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. (music) The AFB VisionConnect™ App The American Foundation for the Blind is pleased to announce a free, accessible app now available in iOS, and in Android versions. VisionConnect™, a prescription for independence for patients who are blind or losing vision, provides a searchable directory of services available in the US and Canada for children and adults who are blind or visually impaired. Find services such as computer and technology training, daily living skills training, braille and reading instruction, dog guide training, employment services, low vision services, and more. Individuals who are blind or have low vision can use this accessible app themselves to find resources and tips for living independently with visual impairment, including information on products and technology, personal stories about how people live everyday with macular degeneration or glaucoma, and advice on maintaining employment. Health care providers can use the app to create customized lists of rehabilitation service providers that they can email to their clients, and provide their patients with home survey checklists, ideas for managing their medications, and more. Key "Search" Features: • Select an age group: all ages, children, or adults (including seniors) • Select a service category (advocacy, assistive products, braille and reading instruction, etc.) • Select a state, zip code, or distance from service • Or select an organization by name • Customization: save your search results as lists (for example, “Children’s braille and reading instruction in California”), and e-mail them to yourself or clients. Key "Resources" Feature • Select an audience: information for doctors, children, adults, seniors • Drill down into resources such as tips for modifying your home, accessible products, medication management, a Getting Started Kit, information for veterans, stories about people living and working with visual impairment, and more (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. At the Gateway to Blindness, by Maribel Steele 8 Threads to Weave into the Garment of Change , June 16, 2014 ??When I began to lose my eyesight, it was natural to fear losing so many other aspects of my life that I treasured. Becoming an artist and failing to see colour was one of them. But the hardest hurdle to overcome was knowing how to weave positive threads into the garment with the label of disabled.???Did you know that the dictionary defines disabled as: to make unable, weaken, destroy the capability of, to cripple, to have a lack of competent power or strength in either physical or mental abilities, to be disqualified and to make legally incapable: to be deprived of  the right to engage and, lucky last, to be rendered unfit.???Hmm, a pretty disturbing label to be given to anyone. No wonder, as an adolescent, it didn’t appeal as an image I wanted to aquire: but it seemed that Miss Puberty had other plans…??No one had warned me about the sneaky tactics of Miss Puberty, the way she could change the life of a perfectly normal teenager when she brought an exclusive offer to our household.??There she stood on the doorstep, bearing the garment of change, insisting I wear the new label of disabled.???‘Sign on the dotted line,’ she said, holding out an invisible pen. Miss Puberty worked with such authority, there was no option but to agree to the hidden terms and conditions of a membership I didn’t want but had to accept.???‘Welcome and congratulations,’ she said. ‘As you now have Retinitis Pigmentosa, whether you like it or not, you can spend the rest of your life freely indulging in any of the labels we proudly stock in our Blind-Bat Boutique. Please take your time to browse and choose carefully from our huge range of richly textured stigmas.’???I didn’t want a new image, or one of their ugly designer garments exclusive to Mademoiselle Black: Itza Shame: X-clude: Inferior Design: Kybosh: De Prive De Paris. I wanted to yell at Miss Puberty, “Take your unfashionable garment elsewhere and drape your labels over someone else’s life. I think you have the wrong house.”???She thrust the package into my hands. “Too late. Like it or not, it’s your designer image now, you have to wear it.” Fashion the garment ?Over many years of trying to cut the cloth to suit my image, with the label of disabled firmly secured to the fabric of my life, it has taken 8 qualities to thread the garment I can now wear with pride. ??If you find yourself having to wear a particular label you consider quite unfashionable, let me introduce you to 8 colourful qualities essential to transform your dreary cloak of despair with chic threads of elegance. 1. Attitude is the key to accepting change in your life. Cultivate a positive attitude and be aware of the choices you are making. Often it is fear and self-pride holding back your progress. When you take control of your attitude in a positive way, you begin to infuse your life with possibility. ?Thread the colour RED into your new garment: it is the shade of glowing embers that will keep your fire alight. 2. Gather your support team ? ?Don’t be afraid to gather around you a support team of loved ones, friends and colleagues and let them know how best they can assist you. In all truth, they really want to know how to co-operate in creating a balance in letting you take charge of your own life. ??Asking for help when you could honestly benefit from their genuine support is not a sign of personal weakness but can boost the morale of the entire team. With balance and flexibility, you reach your goals with team work.??Thread the colour ORANGE into your new garment: it is the shade of joyful co-operation. 3. Courage to commit and courage to be creative Once you have accepted a different way of doing things, and have a circle of supportive friends who understand your unique needs, you can begin to commit to certain tasks you want to achieve. You can set creative patterns into the fabric of your life. ?You have renewed confidence, you muster a sense of inner strength that enables you to find creative solutions to the task at hand. With courage, you dare to persist when things go wrong. With a bold heart,  you insist on finding solutions.??Thread the colour YELLOW into your new garment: it is the shade of radiant sunlight, teaming with confidence, hope and good cheer.??? 4. Tenacity, persistence and effort With any outcome you want to achieve, it requires a certain amount of focused effort. You may want to train to learn new skills, or adapt to a new way of doing familiar tasks. Effort, persistence, and tenacity can work together in shaping your reality by not giving up. ?Thread the colour GREEN into your new garment: be as tenacious as Mother Nature in her attention to detail, in her cycles of consistent renewal. 5. Independence and freedom ? ??Having woven the thread of acceptance, co-operation, commitment. courage and tenacity of spirit into the fabric of your life, you also can take brave steps toward reclaiming your independence. Again, this will require training, gathering of new skills but  you can make choices that best suit your lifestyle. You may want to have a guide dog as your seeing eyes or prefer to use a white cane in getting around. ??Maybe it is time to gain skills in new technologies that can enhance your independence – it is totally your choice. This is an empowering place to be. It is a time to express your talents, and appreciate just how far you have come. Enjoy the sense of freedom as you stride out to conquer those daily challenges.??Oh, and if by chance you find yourself falling into an embarrassing moment, as you will surely do, take along your sense of humour – it will get you out of any sticky situation! ??Thread the colour BLUE into your new garment: it is the colour of sky that will keep you boldly stepping onward over the horizon to meet your victories. 6. Organise the chaos ?In order to live confidently in a visual world when you are not equipped with sight, you will need a high?level of organisation. Not only do you need to be more mindful of just about everything you do and where you last put things, your support team needs a friendly pep-talk to understand how important it is for you to move through their sighted world. It is full of unpredictable obstacles. Much mental effort is required in remembering every inch of your dwelling place – bringing order into the world of chaos is a matter of your survival and happiness.??Thread the colour PURPLE into your new garment: it is the shade where two textures (of red and blue) combine to form one predictable strand. 7. Trusting your intuition ?Intuition is your inner voice, a direct perception of truth independent of any reasoning. Most people find trusting intuition extremely difficult, especially when eyes and brain dominate our sense of reason. As a person with very little sight however, I have learned to reflect and listen to the wise internal voice. It requires patience, stillness and letting go of reason and rationality. Sometimes it is a call to rest and place our own judgements to one side. ??Thread the colour WHITE into your new garment: clarity of thought will become clear as you trust the pure guidance of your inner vision. 8. It’s a multi-sensory garment ?You can touch your new garment of change, smell it, feel it, it has been skilfully woven by your life’s experiences thus far. It is your own designer garment fashioned from the threads of experience and skilled craftsmanship. Many threads are sewn into the fabric of your being, acceptance, co-operation, courage, tenacity, freedom, humour, patience, intuition,and trust.??How about you? What essential qualities have you woven into the fabric of your personal garment of change? Please share your comments, it would be great to know!??

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. (music) The Gadgets that Enable Blind People to See Inventions using sound and touch soon to be commercialized from Israeli professor’s lab will give unprecedented abilities to people with visual limitations. By Abigail Klein Leichman September 12, 2016, 9:40 am In Prof. Amir Amedi’s world-renowned Lab for Brain and Multisensory Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, people with vision impairment can “see” their environment with the aid of sensory substitution devices (SSDs) that provide visual information from sound and touch. Now, two of the lab’s groundbreaking inventions are being readied for the mass market in Brainnovations, Israel Brain Technologies’ four-month accelerator program. EyeCane, a flashlight-like orientation device, emits infrared rays to translate distance into auditory and tactile cues enabling the user to sense objects within an adjustable range of up to five meters. After brief training, EyeCane users can estimate distances, avoid obstacles and successfully navigate in simple environments. EyeMusic is an app and mini camera system that conveys colors, shapes and location of objects by converting images into “soundscapes” for the brain to interpret visually. Blind individuals can be trained to recognize the letters of the alphabet, “see” pictures of animals, and even find an object or person in a complex visual landscape. A version of the app is available free on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Commercializing and eventually combining EyeCane and EyeMusic could give unprecedented self-navigation capabilities to blind people, says Daphna Rosenbaum, CEO of RenewSenses, a pre-startup based on Amedi’s research in the medical neurobiology department of the university’s Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada. “The white cane is from 1921,” Rosenbaum tells ISRAEL21c. “The 21st century high-tech world hasn’t effectively answered the mobility needs of blind people.” Amir and his team have exhibited the EyeCane prototype at global conferences and exhibitions, and testers in Israel have given enthusiastic testimonials, she says. “What we offer is independence in understanding and interpreting one’s surroundings using the natural brain processing of interpreting the landscape and objects,” says Rosenbaum. “No machine is as sophisticated as the brain and our solution is based on its elasticity and sensory substitution abilities.” Amedi received a European Research Council grant to develop the SSDs, whose patents are owned by Yissum, the technology transfer arm of the Hebrew University. Yissum has spun out 110 companies including superstars such as Mobileye, BriefCam, OrCam and Betalin Therapeutics. Challenging conventional notions Yaacov Michlin, CEO of Yissum, says the Amedi lab’s “amazing” research challenges the conventional notion that the brain is divided into distinct sensory regions. “They demonstrate that people have the ability to take information from one sense and present it in another, thus enabling blind people to ‘see’ by using other senses such as touching or hearing,” he said. With the encouragement of Yissum, RenewSenses entered Brainnovations in May to build a business model and get the products to people who are waiting for them, Rosenbaum says. The initial version of EyeCane could be available within three or four months of raising production funds. “The Brainnovations accelerator helps us understand the medical ecosystem, including reimbursement and regulation, and governmental programs like the Innovation Authority [of the Ministry of Economy and Industry],” she says. “It also gives us access to mentors and impact investors, philanthropies, angel investors and VCs as we finalize our business plan.” Rosenbaum says that EyeCane and EyeMusic are based on different scientific insights than are potentially similar technologies under development elsewhere. Using infrared rather than ultrasonic rays gives EyeCane has superior accuracy, and it is expected to be more affordable than competitive devices. EyeMusic is the only system of its kind that can effectively convey color and brightness information. “We plan to combine the two products and when we do, we will have no competitors,” she says. “We’ll have a mobility aid with the option of understanding color, and other features like a compass and eventually image processing or object recognition. If a person detects an object he can zoom in, take a picture and EyeMusic will show him what it is. Instead of just being told there’s a chair, it’s like opening your eyes and seeing it.” RenewSenses currently has a fulltime R&D manager and Rosenbaum hopes to add a production manager and sales/marketing manager when it gets funded. All of the current eight Brainnovations startups will present at a pitch day on September 18 at Google Tel Aviv, where the accelerator is housed. The other seven are BioEye (developing a diagnostic device for cognitive decline using the front camera of mobile phones), Pauzzitive Life (developing a mobile application for treating lifestyle addictions), TailorMed (using machine learning to improve quality and speed of medical image diagnostics), InnoSphere (developing a brain-stimulating device to treat ADHD), MyDopa (using machine learning to adjust the medication dosage of Parkinson patients), Sentidio (developing software to improve the social skills of autistic children) and Re:Mind (developing an at-home diagnostic helmet to detect an early-stage stroke). (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. (music) Vision Aware – American Foundation for the Blind Dealing with Workplace Bullying When You Are Visually Impaired Posted on 10/19/2016?by Empish J. Thomas When I hear the word "bullying" I tend to envision a big size kid physically and verbally harassing a smaller size kid on the playground at school. Although this vision of bullying is not incorrect it is not the only kind of bullying that occurs. Bullying can also occur on the Internet via social media like Facebook. Additionally, I am coming to understand that bullying does not only happen to children at school but to adults as well. When bullying happens to adults a popular location is at work. You can experience bullying in the workplace and not have the tools to protect yourself. Or you can be bullied and not even know it because it can be subtle and not very obvious. But for those that are reading this blog post take courage. Below we will share useful tips, suggestions, and what the law says about protecting yourself as a person with a disability from workplace bullying. Definition of Bullying First let’s define what is bullying so that you are clear on exactly what it is. According to the Texas Council on Developmental Disabilities, "bullying in the workplace occurs when one or more people are hostile or mean toward another person on an ongoing basis. Bullying is not typically considered acceptable adult conduct. Workplace bullying is an effort to undermine and harm another person by threatening that person’s professional status, self-confidence, and/or ability to perform. Bullying is harassment and in severe cases can even be verbal or physical abuse and/or assault. Harassment involves annoying and continued actions, which can include threats and demands, as well as uninvited and unwelcome verbal or physical conduct. Verbal or physical bullying that is abusive is considered assault and there are criminal laws that can lead to the arrest and prosecution of a bully." How Do You Know that You Are Being Bullied? Now that you have the definition of workplace bullying; the next step is to figure out if it is happening to you or not. Sometimes it is hard to accept that bullying is taking place. A person might think they are over reacting or blame themselves for what is happening to them. People might mistakenly think that bullying comes only from their supervisor; but it can also come from co-workers, customers and clients. Here are some examples of what bullying actually looks like: • Uses abusive, insulting, or offensive language toward you. For example talking about your visual impairment in a negative or derogatory way. • Leaves you out of important work meetings. • Leaves you out of social circles or functions at work. • Gives you amounts of work that are not realistic. • Gives you jobs that are impossible to be performed in the time given. • Does not give you information you need to do your job. • Changes your hours or schedules your hours so that they are difficult to meet. • Gives you pointless tasks that have nothing to do with your job. • Unfairly denies personal leave or training. • Regularly threatens to reprimand or fire you. • Yells at you or criticizes you in front of others. • Uses or threatens physical violence toward you. • Pushes, shoves, trips, or grabs you in the workplace. • Requires you to do humiliating or inappropriate things. by Neva Fairchild What Can a Person Who Is Visually Impaired Do to Combat Bullying? Don’t be silent. Bullies control through intimidation, and they count on you to stay quiet. Talk to someone you trust about what is happening. This may or may not be your supervisor. Most employers have an Employee Assistance Program that you can contact confidentially when you need help or advice. Be honest, don’t exaggerate and keep talking until the bullying stops and you are comfortable with the situation. Bullies look for people who are not confident, who appear weak and who seem vulnerable. Talk to your friends and family about how others perceive you and make changes as needed. It’s essential that you work toward feeling comfortable about who you are as a person with a visual impairment. Sometimes talking with a counselor is necessary, but not always. Being around others who have low or no vision can also help you to discover that you are not alone, that others struggle with what you struggle with and yet they and you are okay. A confident reaction to a situation just might put a stop to the bullying. It is often helpful to talk to other people who are blind or visually impaired about how they have dealt with bullies in their past. Bullies are counting on you to feel like you are a second class citizen. You are not! You are just as entitled to walk down the hall, go to lunch and enjoy the rights and privileges of every other employee. Hold your head high, be proud to be you and take your rightful place. Help stop bullying where ever you are! (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. When You Don't Feel Worthy of Employment (or Relationships for that Matter) As an Individual Who Is Blind or Visually Impaired This was posted on AFB website on 8/29/2016?by Shannon Carollo Listen, this is a hard topic. I know it will not apply to all readers; many of you are already confident (or as I like to say, “ humbly-confident”). But it will apply to some; if it applies to you, it was worth every word. Don’t know if it applies to you? Take the three examples and see if any describes you. • You don’t want to pursue training in Orientation and Mobility or Assistive Technology because you don’t think you’d be hired or perform well regardless. • If you were told by your boss that you are an exceptional employee, you would not believe her. • You would apply for a leadership role or other more senior position if you thought you were qualified. (Did I mention you have worked in your field for years with positive performance evaluations?) Any of these statements sound like the war that wages in your mind? The war of worth. You struggle with a sense of worthiness. You know me, always listening to TEDtalks. Of course I heard a fantastic one yesterday: "The Power of Vulnerability" by qualitative researcher Brene Brown. Ms. Brown studied adults who feel worthwhile and those who don’t. She wanted to know what makes people feel “worthy”, and if those who lack a sense of worthiness could utilize strategies to begin feeling “worthy”. After years of research, she concluded, “A sense of worthiness comes from a strong sense of love and belonging.” So I wonder if you have a “tribe” in which you belong. Do you have a core group of friends? Alternatively, have you been feeling socially isolated? Ms. Brown would tell you that belonging to a group is imperative because it will give you: • Courage to be imperfect • Compassion to yourself and others • Connection as a result of authenticity, and • Vulnerability. Out of this safe and comforting place will rise, according to Ms. Brown, “a birthplace of creativity, belonging, love, joy.” Here are my suggestions for plugging into a group and finding your “tribe”: • Utilize AFB’s directory of services to find a local peer support group with others who are blind or visually impaired. • Volunteer in an area of interest and get to know those who you work alongside. • Get involved in the activities suggested in "How to Beat Work-Related Stress", such as joining a social club, hobby group, exercise team, etc. • Invite your neighbors to dinner. You’ll have to interact with a dozen or more social groups, I’d guess, before finding one that is a perfectly imperfect match with you. But do it anyway; Your mental health will thank you. After you are well-connected, I think you’ll see you were already worthy. You can be successful in the right workplace. You can get a job; you can be an exceptional employee; and you can advance in your career.

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. (music) The Washingtonian, September 2016 Meet an Amazing Blind Man Raising Blind Triplets Ollie Cantos was a workaholic lawyer—the highest-ranking blind person in the federal government. Then along came Steven, Leo, and Nick: blind triplets who needed a dad. What happened next changed their lives. By Sherri Dalphonse on September 7, 2016 On May 22, 2010, Leo, Nick, and Steven had pancakes for breakfast. The date is as easy for the triplets to remember as their birthday. Because on that particular Saturday, a visitor was coming, a man named Ollie Cantos. Ollie had something in common with the brothers. He was also blind. A government attorney, Ollie had learned of the family through a friend from church. The boys—born in Colombia three months premature and weighing about a pound each—were ten at the time and being raised in South Arlington by their mother and grandmother. Their father, who had come to the States to work for the Colombian Embassy, had moved back home when the boys were four. They hadn’t seen him since. Ollie’s friend believed that the brothers—who were being bullied by other kids and getting into fights—should meet him. Ollie had mentored children for years, and the triplets’ mother welcomed the visit. “I had heard that Leo was Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky but yearned for friends,” Ollie recalls. “Steven was very serious and, again, didn’t have a lot of friends. Nick was the one, I heard, who was the most angry.” Ollie, then 39, was confident he could make a connection, because his own childhood hadn’t always been easy. He had tried to hide his blindness for years, forgoing a cane and the use of Braille until he was an adult. “I was in denial,” he says. “I thought blindness was a bad thing. I thought it meant you were helpless and couldn’t do anything.” When Ollie arrived, the boys were playing a made-up game show on their Casio keyboard. They immediately made him a contestant. “The next question goes to Mr. Ollie,” Leo said. “Mr. Ollie, do you like candy?” The brothers fired off more questions. They wanted to know: What had Ollie’s childhood been like? Ollie told of the troublemakers who’d tripped him in the school halls or waved hands in front of his face and teased: “How many fingers am I holding up?” As intrigued as the boys were, says Leo, “the first feeling I had was that it was probably going to be one of those one-day relationships and then he’d be gone. “And then,” Leo goes on, “he introduced us to this thing called a shoulder ride.” One by one, Ollie hoisted each boy onto his shoulders, then spun in circles and flipped them down and around. It was terrifying and intense and amazing, but most of all confusing: How was a blind man doing this? • • • The triplets’ lives had been extremely sheltered: school during the week, church on Sunday. Teachers and Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind volunteers took turns helping them have experiences common to others their age, such as ice-skating and trick-or-treating, and they went to a weeklong CLB day camp five summers in a row. But by and large, Leo, Nick, and Steven didn’t stray much from their routine. Their mother, Ceila Gracia, says she was working two jobs and had little time. She was also cautious: “My mother and I, we wouldn’t let them do some things like go outside alone. Always in order to protect them.” The tedium wore on the boys. They say they could hear other children laughing outside the apartment windows—including their older, sighted brother—but weren’t allowed to join in when kids were playing in the snow or kicking a soccer ball. Even inside, they didn’t do much for themselves; their mother and grandmother took care of everything, including picking out their clothes. Steven fantasized about having a different life—he even thought about running away, although he didn’t fully understand what that meant. Nick says he wanted to die and go to heaven. Ollie’s boyhood had been different. The eldest child of Filipino immigrants, Olegario Cantos VII had been raised in Los Angeles by parents who saw no reason to give their blind son special treatment. “When I was a kid and there were chores around the house, I’d say, ‘Well, I can’t see the dirt.’ And my mother would say, ‘Well, use your hands to find it.’ My mom insisted: ‘You’re to wash the dishes. You’re to clean the floor. You’re to make your bed, and you’re to do it properly, and here’s how you do it.’ ” Ollie believed the bullies who called him worthless. But he also adored his mother. If she saw no limits to what he could do, who was he to doubt? One day when he was 12 and playing at a cousin’s, he thought: Hey, if these kids my age can ride bikes, I can, too. “That really did not turn out very well,” he laughs. Only about 40 percent of working-age adults with significant vision loss are employed. The unemployed majority was no place for Mrs. Cantos’s son. Ollie went to law school at Loyola Marymount University, then moved to Washington at age 31 to become general counsel for the American Association of People With Disabilities. He later worked at the White House under President George W. Bush and at the Department of Justice. Today he works at the Department of Education. At the time he met the triplets, his life was busy. He worked long hours, sat on nonprofit boards, and volunteered for political causes. His day often ended at midnight. Suddenly, that schedule changed. He had devoted years to his goal of shaping a better world for those with disabilities, and here were three kids he could help. “At first it was just fun to spend time with them,” Ollie says, “but it became clear very quickly that there was more to this—so much more than I could ever have imagined.” To free up time, he quit all his boards and volunteer efforts. He started visiting the boys every Saturday, then every Sunday, too. Eventually, he was also seeing them during the week to take them to doctors’ appointments and help with their studies. Teachers and volunteers who had worked with and cared about Leo, Nick, and Steven for years grew curious. Who was this man? As the boys spent more time with Ollie and less with them, some of the adults did a bit of sleuthing. Satisfied that the boys were safe, they also saw how happy the triplets were to have a father figure around. Ollie became like a coach, teaching the brothers all kinds of life skills. How to cut steak with a knife, how to make their beds, how to cross busy Columbia Pike. “I taught them how to network within two months,” he says. “I’d take them to an event and I’d say, ‘Okay, guys, the one rule: Do not leave this room. Other than that, I’m sending you in three different directions. Go meet people. Go talk to people. See you later.’ ” “The first time I did that,” Leo says, “it was nerve-racking.” But it paid off that fall: “We went into sixth grade, and we were very popular.” When Ollie took the brothers out to eat for the first time, he realized they had no idea how to order—or even figure out what they wanted. Shortly afterward, he came up with a new challenge. He decided to take each one to the convenience store near their apartment. Leo was first, and once they arrived, Ollie asked what he’d like. “He wasn’t used to making those decisions,” Ollie says, “so he said, ‘What do you think I should get?’ ” For a few minutes, it was like a Laurel and Hardy skit, with Ollie repeatedly saying, “Well, what do you want?” and Leo replying, “What do you think I should want?” Finally, Leo settled on a Coke. Ollie said, “Okay, go ahead and ask.” Leo: “Me? I have to talk to them?” Although the boys lived within a block of the mom-and-pop, the shopkeeper had never seen them before. She figured they’d just moved in. “Nope,” Ollie recalls telling her, “they’ve been here seven years.” The woman then asked Leo, “Is that your dad?” Before Ollie could respond, Leo wrapped his arm around him and said, “Yes, that’s my dad.” Ollie crouched down to the little boy’s level and rested both hands on Leo’s shoulders. “Do you know what that means?” he asked. Leo said, “Well, you take us places. You protect us. You help us with our homework. That sounds like a dad to me.” They had known each other only two months. • • • “Let me tell you about the first time we went to Crystal City. That was way awesome,” Leo says. “Crystal City is a full 12 blocks of underground. We walked all 12 blocks, and we found this place called Chipotle and it was really nice. Then we went to [Ollie’s condo], and we touched everything that was there.” The triplets opened every door and drawer at Ollie’s, grasping objects and asking, “What’s this?” One boy broke a $200 seal that Ollie—at the time a volunteer lawyer for the Coast Guard Auxiliary—used for official documents. Another locked the door to his clothes closet, to which he didn’t have a key. The third boy unscrewed the peanut-butter jar and dug in. This is the point where a lot of people might wonder what they’d gotten themselves into—Ollie included. I don’t know if I’m equipped to handle this, he thought. His parents wondered the same. Yet once Ollie had made the decision to go all in, he would not abandon these boys. He was determined to let them feel their way through the world. With a sighted friend, he brought them to a water park and let them splash around. He gave them a soccer ball with a bell inside so they could kick it around. Nick had dreamed of being in a boxing ring, so “Dad” arranged a lesson with a former welterweight champ. It’s easy to get lost when you’re blind—although Google Maps talking to you from a smartphone is a lifesaver—so as the boys grew, Ollie explained how he used the sun, as well as traffic sounds, to figure out direction. Sometimes when he’s with them, he lets them get lost on purpose so they have to find their way back. He made them memorize part of the Metro map. They also joined the Boy Scouts. Troop leaders didn’t say no when the boys wanted to cut wood with an ax, build a fire, or shoot an arrow like the other kids—instead, they found a work-around. At scout camp in the summer of 2014, they each built a shelter and slept in the woods for their wilderness survival badges. They got to shoot guns, too, each boy squeezing the trigger while someone else held the Glock. Said Nathan Graham, then leader of the church that sponsors the troop, who has since passed away: “You should have seen the looks on the faces of the employees of the shooting range when we brought Nick, Leo, Ollie, and Steven out.” • • • Ollie had always assumed he’d be married by that point in his life, with his own children. Although he’d had some serious relationships, it hadn’t worked out that way. But here were three boys bonding with him. “It’s the strangest thing,” he says, “but I felt like they’d always been my kids.” He also felt conflicted. Ceila, he thought, needed to know that her sons were calling him Dad. “What do you want me to do?” he remembers asking her. “I don’t want to be inappropriate.” At the time, she says, she thought it odd, but Ollie recalls she also said, “They need somebody. They need you.” Yet tension developed. Ceila admits it was hard at first to see her children getting close to Ollie. He and the boys, for their part, would often get frustrated at her understanding of what the youngsters were capable of, when she wouldn’t allow them to do certain things. There was also religion. Ollie is Mormon. Ceila is not. A year and half after they met, the boys asked to go to Ollie’s church. They say that when they went to the Salvation Army church with their mother, other kids excluded them when they played and also bullied them—yelling at them, for example, to “move out of the way” as the other kids ran around together. According to Ollie, Ceila put her foot down. Over her dead body, she said, would they miss church with her. Eventually, they compromised: If the boys went with her to services on Sunday morning, they could go to Ollie’s church in the afternoon. Six months into the arrangement, Ollie says, Ceila let them skip the Salvation Army services. At the Mormon church, Ollie and the boys became a fixture in the front pew—Ollie usually in the middle, with his arms around two of the boys and his hand on the shoulder of the third. The boys were baptized into the Mormon faith under the name Cantos. But in occasional disagreements with their mother, Ollie realized he had no paternal rights. Why not, he resolved, make it official? When he broached the idea of sharing legal custody of the boys with Ceila, she refused. “No Hispanic mother gives her kids to another person,” Ceila explains. By this time, Ollie was acting more and more like their father. They occasionally stayed with him on weekends—gradually it became every weekend. And there was little doubt the triplets were prospering. Before Ollie, they’d struggled more in school, despite having good teachers. (Mary Filicetti, their special-ed teacher at Barcroft Elementary, had learned Braille to work with them.) He met them almost daily to oversee homework and teamed up with their teachers to push them to excel—without special treatment. (Arlington County provides the boys laptops with screen-reading technology as well as talking calculators, and some assignments are translated into Braille.) When they started at Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Ollie required the boys to e-mail him weekly grade reports. Any grade below B means going the weekend without their audio-assisted video games. “The odds are against us,” Ollie says. “To counter those odds, my sons can’t be just okay. They have to be really good. Would I rather they not have to? Absolutely. It’s a lot of work. But I also don’t play the victim card. It’s not the world’s fault we’re blind. It’s not the world’s responsibility to give us a job.” Once when their grades were too low, Ollie forbade them to go on a field trip to a corn maze. The boys sneaked behind his back—neglecting to tell the teacher that Ollie had rescinded the already signed permission slip—and went anyway. When he found out, Ollie grounded them. He was livid, and Nick spit out: “What are you going to do—leave?” “It’s not like we’re not used to it,” Ollie remembers Steven saying. “I said, ‘Steven, just because something happens, that doesn’t mean I’m going to go off and leave. You might get in trouble, but I am not leaving you.’ ” In fact, even after Ceila rebuffed Ollie’s offer to share custody, he persisted in lobbying for the arrangement. Often it was the triplets’ grandmother, Margenia Pacheco, who acted as the buffer between her daughter and Ollie. One day several summers ago when Ollie telephoned the boys and Margenia answered, she summoned them by saying, “Su papá está en el teléfono”—“Your dad’s on the phone.” The boys were thrilled to hear their grandmother call Ollie their “dad.” They’d never met anyone like him—someone who truly understood their situation and wanted to help. “He has a large heart,” Leo says. Ollie seemed somewhat glamorous at first, this new friend who could do so many cool things, says Steven. They soon realized he was genuine. He never broke a promise he made to the boys—which is what helped win over Nick, the slowest to trust that this would last. Eventually, Ceila says, she also began to trust Ollie, especially when she saw how her sons were thriving. “It took time. First he won my mother over, then he won me over. I think that God sometimes sends someone to help us here,” she says. “Like an angel.” Last November, after about two years of back-and-forth and paperwork, Ollie, Ceila, Leo, Nick, and Steven stood before an Arlington County judge, who granted Ollie joint legal custody. “When the judge signed the order, I was crying,” Ollie says. So were the boys, then 16. Although, Ollie adds, “they said it was just something in their eyes.” • • • When Ollie, Leo, Nick, and Steven are out, it’s hard not to notice them. On several occasions at restaurants, a diner at a nearby table has paid their check. A few times when they’ve been out walking, strangers have offered to pray for them. “They’d say, ‘What should we pray for, your blindness?’ ” says Ollie. “And I’d say, ‘Forget the blindness. Pray that we win the lottery.’ ” By now, the brothers are used to sharing a public persona. “Here’s what I think,” Leo told me when I first met him. “I think that people like us for the reason that we’re blind. That’s basically all they come up to talk to us about. It’s frustrating at times because you try to have a regular conversation about something other than your blindness.” At school, they’ve been allowed to cultivate their individual identities by being assigned to separate classes. “We’re kind of happy about that,” Steven once explained, “because we hate being called the triplets.” Leo is considered the warmest and most extroverted. He has played the French horn in the school symphony (because, he says, it sounds “cool”), but he hates the stereotype “that most blind people go into music—like Stevie Wonder.” What he really loves is computers. He wants to practice technology law. Nick is the most athletic—he used to be on the crew team—and is the one always offering to help others. He hopes to become a prosecutor. Family friend Rodney Neely calls him the jokester of the family, “the one who will most likely be a salesman or politician.” Then there’s Steven, who comes off as stiff and gruff—the “Mr. Spock” of the group, Ollie says—but who mentors younger kids and is “a big, soft teddy bear,” says Alissa Salamone, Wakefield High School’s teacher of the visually impaired. The most ambitious of the three, he also wants to become a lawyer like his dad, but specialize in intellectual property. Steven plays the baritone and the euphonium, and this fall he’ll be one of two drum majors leading Wakefield’s marching band—as far as Ollie can tell, the country’s first blind drum major at an integrated public school. Ollie and his three sons credit some of their achievement to reading popular personal-development books—The Magic of Thinking Big, The Secret, Psycho-Cybernetics. Every night, they drift off to sleep with headphones on, listening to recordings about success, wealth, and other affirmations. The idea of thinking big has sunk in as they set their sights on college. “No one’s going to expect us to go to Harvard,” Steven says. “They’re going to expect us to go to some community college.” • • • One day this past spring, Ollie was napping when he started dreaming about food. He woke up hungry—and to the unmistakable aroma of cheese, which he loves. When Leo came into the room, Ollie asked if the boys had ordered in. “He said, ‘Oh, no, I made dinner.’ Then he came over with a plate, and he sat me up and gave me a sandwich he had made. It was a grilled cheese.” Thanks to Ollie and their orientation-and-mobility instructor, Nina O’Neill, the brothers had been learning to cook for some time—guy food like scrambled eggs, French toast, and hamburger casserole. But before that day, none had made anything on his own. His sons, Ollie knew at that moment, were going to be just fine. As would Dad, when it came time for him to send them out into the world and let go. “It’s funny—people say, ‘You’re so good with them,’ but I’m the one who feels like I get the better end of the deal,” Ollie says. “They give me such a sense of peace that I’ve never gotten any other way.” Sometimes, he feels so happy that he starts singing in the grocery store. He’s less serious, more playful. “One time—this is really bad, I shouldn’t have done this,” Ollie says, “but one time I was in this really goofy mood. We knew someone was staring at us. We went up to the person . . . and I said, ‘Be careful, it’s in the water.’ And we walked away.” Family friends are quick to underscore the sacrifices Ollie has made, the resources and time he has poured into making life better for the triplets. He still hopes to get married and have more kids someday but knows it will take a special woman to share life with him and the boys. “It’s really funny—they want me to get married, and they want to have other brothers and sisters,” Ollie says. “They’ll say, ‘Dad, any luck?’ And I’ll say, ‘I’m working on it, sons, I’m working on it.’ ” In the meantime, he’s forcing his sons to handle their own interactions at school and in the Scouts, and to make more of their own decisions—all to prepare them for the days when they could be practicing law, managing their own families, and who knows, maybe showing their children how a blind man can give a shoulder ride. “The thing I’m waiting for that hasn’t happened—and I’m glad hasn’t happened—is I expected teenagers to not want me around, to not want their friends to see me around,” Ollie says. “But every time I’m with them in a school setting, they are always excited to introduce me to their friends. They’ve said to me, ‘We know what it’s like to not have a dad. We’re never, ever giving this up.’ ” (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. When You Don't Feel Worthy of Employment (or Relationships for that Matter) As an Individual Who Is Blind or Visually Impaired This was posted on AFB website on 8/29/2016?by Shannon Carollo Listen, this is a hard topic. I know it will not apply to all readers; many of you are already confident (or as I like to say, “ humbly-confident”). But it will apply to some; if it applies to you, it was worth every word. Don’t know if it applies to you? Take the three examples and see if any describes you. • You don’t want to pursue training in Orientation and Mobility or Assistive Technology because you don’t think you’d be hired or perform well regardless. • If you were told by your boss that you are an exceptional employee, you would not believe her. • You would apply for a leadership role or other more senior position if you thought you were qualified. (Did I mention you have worked in your field for years with positive performance evaluations?) Any of these statements sound like the war that wages in your mind? The war of worth. You struggle with a sense of worthiness. You know me, always listening to TEDtalks. Of course I heard a fantastic one yesterday: "The Power of Vulnerability" by qualitative researcher Brene Brown. Ms. Brown studied adults who feel worthwhile and those who don’t. She wanted to know what makes people feel “worthy”, and if those who lack a sense of worthiness could utilize strategies to begin feeling “worthy”. After years of research, she concluded, “A sense of worthiness comes from a strong sense of love and belonging.” So I wonder if you have a “tribe” in which you belong. Do you have a core group of friends? Alternatively, have you been feeling socially isolated? Ms. Brown would tell you that belonging to a group is imperative because it will give you: • Courage to be imperfect • Compassion to yourself and others • Connection as a result of authenticity, and • Vulnerability. Out of this safe and comforting place will rise, according to Ms. Brown, “a birthplace of creativity, belonging, love, joy.” Here are my suggestions for plugging into a group and finding your “tribe”: • Utilize AFB’s directory of services to find a local peer support group with others who are blind or visually impaired. • Volunteer in an area of interest and get to know those who you work alongside. • Get involved in the activities suggested in "How to Beat Work-Related Stress", such as joining a social club, hobby group, exercise team, etc. • Invite your neighbors to dinner. You’ll have to interact with a dozen or more social groups, I’d guess, before finding one that is a perfectly imperfect match with you. But do it anyway; Your mental health will thank you. After you are well-connected, I think you’ll see you were already worthy. You can be successful in the right workplace. You can get a job; you can be an exceptional employee; and you can advance in your career.

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. (music) The Washingtonian, September 2016 Meet an Amazing Blind Man Raising Blind Triplets Ollie Cantos was a workaholic lawyer—the highest-ranking blind person in the federal government. Then along came Steven, Leo, and Nick: blind triplets who needed a dad. What happened next changed their lives. By Sherri Dalphonse on September 7, 2016 On May 22, 2010, Leo, Nick, and Steven had pancakes for breakfast. The date is as easy for the triplets to remember as their birthday. Because on that particular Saturday, a visitor was coming, a man named Ollie Cantos. Ollie had something in common with the brothers. He was also blind. A government attorney, Ollie had learned of the family through a friend from church. The boys—born in Colombia three months premature and weighing about a pound each—were ten at the time and being raised in South Arlington by their mother and grandmother. Their father, who had come to the States to work for the Colombian Embassy, had moved back home when the boys were four. They hadn’t seen him since. Ollie’s friend believed that the brothers—who were being bullied by other kids and getting into fights—should meet him. Ollie had mentored children for years, and the triplets’ mother welcomed the visit. “I had heard that Leo was Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky but yearned for friends,” Ollie recalls. “Steven was very serious and, again, didn’t have a lot of friends. Nick was the one, I heard, who was the most angry.” Ollie, then 39, was confident he could make a connection, because his own childhood hadn’t always been easy. He had tried to hide his blindness for years, forgoing a cane and the use of Braille until he was an adult. “I was in denial,” he says. “I thought blindness was a bad thing. I thought it meant you were helpless and couldn’t do anything.” When Ollie arrived, the boys were playing a made-up game show on their Casio keyboard. They immediately made him a contestant. “The next question goes to Mr. Ollie,” Leo said. “Mr. Ollie, do you like candy?” The brothers fired off more questions. They wanted to know: What had Ollie’s childhood been like? Ollie told of the troublemakers who’d tripped him in the school halls or waved hands in front of his face and teased: “How many fingers am I holding up?” As intrigued as the boys were, says Leo, “the first feeling I had was that it was probably going to be one of those one-day relationships and then he’d be gone. “And then,” Leo goes on, “he introduced us to this thing called a shoulder ride.” One by one, Ollie hoisted each boy onto his shoulders, then spun in circles and flipped them down and around. It was terrifying and intense and amazing, but most of all confusing: How was a blind man doing this? • • • The triplets’ lives had been extremely sheltered: school during the week, church on Sunday. Teachers and Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind volunteers took turns helping them have experiences common to others their age, such as ice-skating and trick-or-treating, and they went to a weeklong CLB day camp five summers in a row. But by and large, Leo, Nick, and Steven didn’t stray much from their routine. Their mother, Ceila Gracia, says she was working two jobs and had little time. She was also cautious: “My mother and I, we wouldn’t let them do some things like go outside alone. Always in order to protect them.” The tedium wore on the boys. They say they could hear other children laughing outside the apartment windows—including their older, sighted brother—but weren’t allowed to join in when kids were playing in the snow or kicking a soccer ball. Even inside, they didn’t do much for themselves; their mother and grandmother took care of everything, including picking out their clothes. Steven fantasized about having a different life—he even thought about running away, although he didn’t fully understand what that meant. Nick says he wanted to die and go to heaven. Ollie’s boyhood had been different. The eldest child of Filipino immigrants, Olegario Cantos VII had been raised in Los Angeles by parents who saw no reason to give their blind son special treatment. “When I was a kid and there were chores around the house, I’d say, ‘Well, I can’t see the dirt.’ And my mother would say, ‘Well, use your hands to find it.’ My mom insisted: ‘You’re to wash the dishes. You’re to clean the floor. You’re to make your bed, and you’re to do it properly, and here’s how you do it.’ ” Ollie believed the bullies who called him worthless. But he also adored his mother. If she saw no limits to what he could do, who was he to doubt? One day when he was 12 and playing at a cousin’s, he thought: Hey, if these kids my age can ride bikes, I can, too. “That really did not turn out very well,” he laughs. Only about 40 percent of working-age adults with significant vision loss are employed. The unemployed majority was no place for Mrs. Cantos’s son. Ollie went to law school at Loyola Marymount University, then moved to Washington at age 31 to become general counsel for the American Association of People With Disabilities. He later worked at the White House under President George W. Bush and at the Department of Justice. Today he works at the Department of Education. At the time he met the triplets, his life was busy. He worked long hours, sat on nonprofit boards, and volunteered for political causes. His day often ended at midnight. Suddenly, that schedule changed. He had devoted years to his goal of shaping a better world for those with disabilities, and here were three kids he could help. “At first it was just fun to spend time with them,” Ollie says, “but it became clear very quickly that there was more to this—so much more than I could ever have imagined.” To free up time, he quit all his boards and volunteer efforts. He started visiting the boys every Saturday, then every Sunday, too. Eventually, he was also seeing them during the week to take them to doctors’ appointments and help with their studies. Teachers and volunteers who had worked with and cared about Leo, Nick, and Steven for years grew curious. Who was this man? As the boys spent more time with Ollie and less with them, some of the adults did a bit of sleuthing. Satisfied that the boys were safe, they also saw how happy the triplets were to have a father figure around. Ollie became like a coach, teaching the brothers all kinds of life skills. How to cut steak with a knife, how to make their beds, how to cross busy Columbia Pike. “I taught them how to network within two months,” he says. “I’d take them to an event and I’d say, ‘Okay, guys, the one rule: Do not leave this room. Other than that, I’m sending you in three different directions. Go meet people. Go talk to people. See you later.’ ” “The first time I did that,” Leo says, “it was nerve-racking.” But it paid off that fall: “We went into sixth grade, and we were very popular.” When Ollie took the brothers out to eat for the first time, he realized they had no idea how to order—or even figure out what they wanted. Shortly afterward, he came up with a new challenge. He decided to take each one to the convenience store near their apartment. Leo was first, and once they arrived, Ollie asked what he’d like. “He wasn’t used to making those decisions,” Ollie says, “so he said, ‘What do you think I should get?’ ” For a few minutes, it was like a Laurel and Hardy skit, with Ollie repeatedly saying, “Well, what do you want?” and Leo replying, “What do you think I should want?” Finally, Leo settled on a Coke. Ollie said, “Okay, go ahead and ask.” Leo: “Me? I have to talk to them?” Although the boys lived within a block of the mom-and-pop, the shopkeeper had never seen them before. She figured they’d just moved in. “Nope,” Ollie recalls telling her, “they’ve been here seven years.” The woman then asked Leo, “Is that your dad?” Before Ollie could respond, Leo wrapped his arm around him and said, “Yes, that’s my dad.” Ollie crouched down to the little boy’s level and rested both hands on Leo’s shoulders. “Do you know what that means?” he asked. Leo said, “Well, you take us places. You protect us. You help us with our homework. That sounds like a dad to me.” They had known each other only two months. • • • “Let me tell you about the first time we went to Crystal City. That was way awesome,” Leo says. “Crystal City is a full 12 blocks of underground. We walked all 12 blocks, and we found this place called Chipotle and it was really nice. Then we went to [Ollie’s condo], and we touched everything that was there.” The triplets opened every door and drawer at Ollie’s, grasping objects and asking, “What’s this?” One boy broke a $200 seal that Ollie—at the time a volunteer lawyer for the Coast Guard Auxiliary—used for official documents. Another locked the door to his clothes closet, to which he didn’t have a key. The third boy unscrewed the peanut-butter jar and dug in. This is the point where a lot of people might wonder what they’d gotten themselves into—Ollie included. I don’t know if I’m equipped to handle this, he thought. His parents wondered the same. Yet once Ollie had made the decision to go all in, he would not abandon these boys. He was determined to let them feel their way through the world. With a sighted friend, he brought them to a water park and let them splash around. He gave them a soccer ball with a bell inside so they could kick it around. Nick had dreamed of being in a boxing ring, so “Dad” arranged a lesson with a former welterweight champ. It’s easy to get lost when you’re blind—although Google Maps talking to you from a smartphone is a lifesaver—so as the boys grew, Ollie explained how he used the sun, as well as traffic sounds, to figure out direction. Sometimes when he’s with them, he lets them get lost on purpose so they have to find their way back. He made them memorize part of the Metro map. They also joined the Boy Scouts. Troop leaders didn’t say no when the boys wanted to cut wood with an ax, build a fire, or shoot an arrow like the other kids—instead, they found a work-around. At scout camp in the summer of 2014, they each built a shelter and slept in the woods for their wilderness survival badges. They got to shoot guns, too, each boy squeezing the trigger while someone else held the Glock. Said Nathan Graham, then leader of the church that sponsors the troop, who has since passed away: “You should have seen the looks on the faces of the employees of the shooting range when we brought Nick, Leo, Ollie, and Steven out.” • • • Ollie had always assumed he’d be married by that point in his life, with his own children. Although he’d had some serious relationships, it hadn’t worked out that way. But here were three boys bonding with him. “It’s the strangest thing,” he says, “but I felt like they’d always been my kids.” He also felt conflicted. Ceila, he thought, needed to know that her sons were calling him Dad. “What do you want me to do?” he remembers asking her. “I don’t want to be inappropriate.” At the time, she says, she thought it odd, but Ollie recalls she also said, “They need somebody. They need you.” Yet tension developed. Ceila admits it was hard at first to see her children getting close to Ollie. He and the boys, for their part, would often get frustrated at her understanding of what the youngsters were capable of, when she wouldn’t allow them to do certain things. There was also religion. Ollie is Mormon. Ceila is not. A year and half after they met, the boys asked to go to Ollie’s church. They say that when they went to the Salvation Army church with their mother, other kids excluded them when they played and also bullied them—yelling at them, for example, to “move out of the way” as the other kids ran around together. According to Ollie, Ceila put her foot down. Over her dead body, she said, would they miss church with her. Eventually, they compromised: If the boys went with her to services on Sunday morning, they could go to Ollie’s church in the afternoon. Six months into the arrangement, Ollie says, Ceila let them skip the Salvation Army services. At the Mormon church, Ollie and the boys became a fixture in the front pew—Ollie usually in the middle, with his arms around two of the boys and his hand on the shoulder of the third. The boys were baptized into the Mormon faith under the name Cantos. But in occasional disagreements with their mother, Ollie realized he had no paternal rights. Why not, he resolved, make it official? When he broached the idea of sharing legal custody of the boys with Ceila, she refused. “No Hispanic mother gives her kids to another person,” Ceila explains. By this time, Ollie was acting more and more like their father. They occasionally stayed with him on weekends—gradually it became every weekend. And there was little doubt the triplets were prospering. Before Ollie, they’d struggled more in school, despite having good teachers. (Mary Filicetti, their special-ed teacher at Barcroft Elementary, had learned Braille to work with them.) He met them almost daily to oversee homework and teamed up with their teachers to push them to excel—without special treatment. (Arlington County provides the boys laptops with screen-reading technology as well as talking calculators, and some assignments are translated into Braille.) When they started at Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Ollie required the boys to e-mail him weekly grade reports. Any grade below B means going the weekend without their audio-assisted video games. “The odds are against us,” Ollie says. “To counter those odds, my sons can’t be just okay. They have to be really good. Would I rather they not have to? Absolutely. It’s a lot of work. But I also don’t play the victim card. It’s not the world’s fault we’re blind. It’s not the world’s responsibility to give us a job.” Once when their grades were too low, Ollie forbade them to go on a field trip to a corn maze. The boys sneaked behind his back—neglecting to tell the teacher that Ollie had rescinded the already signed permission slip—and went anyway. When he found out, Ollie grounded them. He was livid, and Nick spit out: “What are you going to do—leave?” “It’s not like we’re not used to it,” Ollie remembers Steven saying. “I said, ‘Steven, just because something happens, that doesn’t mean I’m going to go off and leave. You might get in trouble, but I am not leaving you.’ ” In fact, even after Ceila rebuffed Ollie’s offer to share custody, he persisted in lobbying for the arrangement. Often it was the triplets’ grandmother, Margenia Pacheco, who acted as the buffer between her daughter and Ollie. One day several summers ago when Ollie telephoned the boys and Margenia answered, she summoned them by saying, “Su papá está en el teléfono”—“Your dad’s on the phone.” The boys were thrilled to hear their grandmother call Ollie their “dad.” They’d never met anyone like him—someone who truly understood their situation and wanted to help. “He has a large heart,” Leo says. Ollie seemed somewhat glamorous at first, this new friend who could do so many cool things, says Steven. They soon realized he was genuine. He never broke a promise he made to the boys—which is what helped win over Nick, the slowest to trust that this would last. Eventually, Ceila says, she also began to trust Ollie, especially when she saw how her sons were thriving. “It took time. First he won my mother over, then he won me over. I think that God sometimes sends someone to help us here,” she says. “Like an angel.” Last November, after about two years of back-and-forth and paperwork, Ollie, Ceila, Leo, Nick, and Steven stood before an Arlington County judge, who granted Ollie joint legal custody. “When the judge signed the order, I was crying,” Ollie says. So were the boys, then 16. Although, Ollie adds, “they said it was just something in their eyes.” • • • When Ollie, Leo, Nick, and Steven are out, it’s hard not to notice them. On several occasions at restaurants, a diner at a nearby table has paid their check. A few times when they’ve been out walking, strangers have offered to pray for them. “They’d say, ‘What should we pray for, your blindness?’ ” says Ollie. “And I’d say, ‘Forget the blindness. Pray that we win the lottery.’ ” By now, the brothers are used to sharing a public persona. “Here’s what I think,” Leo told me when I first met him. “I think that people like us for the reason that we’re blind. That’s basically all they come up to talk to us about. It’s frustrating at times because you try to have a regular conversation about something other than your blindness.” At school, they’ve been allowed to cultivate their individual identities by being assigned to separate classes. “We’re kind of happy about that,” Steven once explained, “because we hate being called the triplets.” Leo is considered the warmest and most extroverted. He has played the French horn in the school symphony (because, he says, it sounds “cool”), but he hates the stereotype “that most blind people go into music—like Stevie Wonder.” What he really loves is computers. He wants to practice technology law. Nick is the most athletic—he used to be on the crew team—and is the one always offering to help others. He hopes to become a prosecutor. Family friend Rodney Neely calls him the jokester of the family, “the one who will most likely be a salesman or politician.” Then there’s Steven, who comes off as stiff and gruff—the “Mr. Spock” of the group, Ollie says—but who mentors younger kids and is “a big, soft teddy bear,” says Alissa Salamone, Wakefield High School’s teacher of the visually impaired. The most ambitious of the three, he also wants to become a lawyer like his dad, but specialize in intellectual property. Steven plays the baritone and the euphonium, and this fall he’ll be one of two drum majors leading Wakefield’s marching band—as far as Ollie can tell, the country’s first blind drum major at an integrated public school. Ollie and his three sons credit some of their achievement to reading popular personal-development books—The Magic of Thinking Big, The Secret, Psycho-Cybernetics. Every night, they drift off to sleep with headphones on, listening to recordings about success, wealth, and other affirmations. The idea of thinking big has sunk in as they set their sights on college. “No one’s going to expect us to go to Harvard,” Steven says. “They’re going to expect us to go to some community college.” • • • One day this past spring, Ollie was napping when he started dreaming about food. He woke up hungry—and to the unmistakable aroma of cheese, which he loves. When Leo came into the room, Ollie asked if the boys had ordered in. “He said, ‘Oh, no, I made dinner.’ Then he came over with a plate, and he sat me up and gave me a sandwich he had made. It was a grilled cheese.” Thanks to Ollie and their orientation-and-mobility instructor, Nina O’Neill, the brothers had been learning to cook for some time—guy food like scrambled eggs, French toast, and hamburger casserole. But before that day, none had made anything on his own. His sons, Ollie knew at that moment, were going to be just fine. As would Dad, when it came time for him to send them out into the world and let go. “It’s funny—people say, ‘You’re so good with them,’ but I’m the one who feels like I get the better end of the deal,” Ollie says. “They give me such a sense of peace that I’ve never gotten any other way.” Sometimes, he feels so happy that he starts singing in the grocery store. He’s less serious, more playful. “One time—this is really bad, I shouldn’t have done this,” Ollie says, “but one time I was in this really goofy mood. We knew someone was staring at us. We went up to the person . . . and I said, ‘Be careful, it’s in the water.’ And we walked away.” Family friends are quick to underscore the sacrifices Ollie has made, the resources and time he has poured into making life better for the triplets. He still hopes to get married and have more kids someday but knows it will take a special woman to share life with him and the boys. “It’s really funny—they want me to get married, and they want to have other brothers and sisters,” Ollie says. “They’ll say, ‘Dad, any luck?’ And I’ll say, ‘I’m working on it, sons, I’m working on it.’ ” In the meantime, he’s forcing his sons to handle their own interactions at school and in the Scouts, and to make more of their own decisions—all to prepare them for the days when they could be practicing law, managing their own families, and who knows, maybe showing their children how a blind man can give a shoulder ride. “The thing I’m waiting for that hasn’t happened—and I’m glad hasn’t happened—is I expected teenagers to not want me around, to not want their friends to see me around,” Ollie says. “But every time I’m with them in a school setting, they are always excited to introduce me to their friends. They’ve said to me, ‘We know what it’s like to not have a dad. We’re never, ever giving this up.’ ” (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. (music) Vision Aware – American Foundation for the Blind Dealing with Workplace Bullying When You Are Visually Impaired Posted on 10/19/2016?by Empish J. Thomas When I hear the word "bullying" I tend to envision a big size kid physically and verbally harassing a smaller size kid on the playground at school. Although this vision of bullying is not incorrect it is not the only kind of bullying that occurs. Bullying can also occur on the Internet via social media like Facebook. Additionally, I am coming to understand that bullying does not only happen to children at school but to adults as well. When bullying happens to adults a popular location is at work. You can experience bullying in the workplace and not have the tools to protect yourself. Or you can be bullied and not even know it because it can be subtle and not very obvious. But for those that are reading this blog post take courage. Below we will share useful tips, suggestions, and what the law says about protecting yourself as a person with a disability from workplace bullying. Definition of Bullying First let’s define what is bullying so that you are clear on exactly what it is. According to the Texas Council on Developmental Disabilities, "bullying in the workplace occurs when one or more people are hostile or mean toward another person on an ongoing basis. Bullying is not typically considered acceptable adult conduct. Workplace bullying is an effort to undermine and harm another person by threatening that person’s professional status, self-confidence, and/or ability to perform. Bullying is harassment and in severe cases can even be verbal or physical abuse and/or assault. Harassment involves annoying and continued actions, which can include threats and demands, as well as uninvited and unwelcome verbal or physical conduct. Verbal or physical bullying that is abusive is considered assault and there are criminal laws that can lead to the arrest and prosecution of a bully." How Do You Know that You Are Being Bullied? Now that you have the definition of workplace bullying; the next step is to figure out if it is happening to you or not. Sometimes it is hard to accept that bullying is taking place. A person might think they are over reacting or blame themselves for what is happening to them. People might mistakenly think that bullying comes only from their supervisor; but it can also come from co-workers, customers and clients. Here are some examples of what bullying actually looks like: • Uses abusive, insulting, or offensive language toward you. For example talking about your visual impairment in a negative or derogatory way. • Leaves you out of important work meetings. • Leaves you out of social circles or functions at work. • Gives you amounts of work that are not realistic. • Gives you jobs that are impossible to be performed in the time given. • Does not give you information you need to do your job. • Changes your hours or schedules your hours so that they are difficult to meet. • Gives you pointless tasks that have nothing to do with your job. • Unfairly denies personal leave or training. • Regularly threatens to reprimand or fire you. • Yells at you or criticizes you in front of others. • Uses or threatens physical violence toward you. • Pushes, shoves, trips, or grabs you in the workplace. • Requires you to do humiliating or inappropriate things. by Neva Fairchild What Can a Person Who Is Visually Impaired Do to Combat Bullying? Don’t be silent. Bullies control through intimidation, and they count on you to stay quiet. Talk to someone you trust about what is happening. This may or may not be your supervisor. Most employers have an Employee Assistance Program that you can contact confidentially when you need help or advice. Be honest, don’t exaggerate and keep talking until the bullying stops and you are comfortable with the situation. Bullies look for people who are not confident, who appear weak and who seem vulnerable. Talk to your friends and family about how others perceive you and make changes as needed. It’s essential that you work toward feeling comfortable about who you are as a person with a visual impairment. Sometimes talking with a counselor is necessary, but not always. Being around others who have low or no vision can also help you to discover that you are not alone, that others struggle with what you struggle with and yet they and you are okay. A confident reaction to a situation just might put a stop to the bullying. It is often helpful to talk to other people who are blind or visually impaired about how they have dealt with bullies in their past. Bullies are counting on you to feel like you are a second class citizen. You are not! You are just as entitled to walk down the hall, go to lunch and enjoy the rights and privileges of every other employee. Hold your head high, be proud to be you and take your rightful place. Help stop bullying where ever you are! (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. (music) The Gadgets that Enable Blind People to See Inventions using sound and touch soon to be commercialized from Israeli professor’s lab will give unprecedented abilities to people with visual limitations. By Abigail Klein Leichman September 12, 2016, 9:40 am In Prof. Amir Amedi’s world-renowned Lab for Brain and Multisensory Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, people with vision impairment can “see” their environment with the aid of sensory substitution devices (SSDs) that provide visual information from sound and touch. Now, two of the lab’s groundbreaking inventions are being readied for the mass market in Brainnovations, Israel Brain Technologies’ four-month accelerator program. EyeCane, a flashlight-like orientation device, emits infrared rays to translate distance into auditory and tactile cues enabling the user to sense objects within an adjustable range of up to five meters. After brief training, EyeCane users can estimate distances, avoid obstacles and successfully navigate in simple environments. EyeMusic is an app and mini camera system that conveys colors, shapes and location of objects by converting images into “soundscapes” for the brain to interpret visually. Blind individuals can be trained to recognize the letters of the alphabet, “see” pictures of animals, and even find an object or person in a complex visual landscape. A version of the app is available free on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Commercializing and eventually combining EyeCane and EyeMusic could give unprecedented self-navigation capabilities to blind people, says Daphna Rosenbaum, CEO of RenewSenses, a pre-startup based on Amedi’s research in the medical neurobiology department of the university’s Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada. “The white cane is from 1921,” Rosenbaum tells ISRAEL21c. “The 21st century high-tech world hasn’t effectively answered the mobility needs of blind people.” Amir and his team have exhibited the EyeCane prototype at global conferences and exhibitions, and testers in Israel have given enthusiastic testimonials, she says. “What we offer is independence in understanding and interpreting one’s surroundings using the natural brain processing of interpreting the landscape and objects,” says Rosenbaum. “No machine is as sophisticated as the brain and our solution is based on its elasticity and sensory substitution abilities.” Amedi received a European Research Council grant to develop the SSDs, whose patents are owned by Yissum, the technology transfer arm of the Hebrew University. Yissum has spun out 110 companies including superstars such as Mobileye, BriefCam, OrCam and Betalin Therapeutics. Challenging conventional notions Yaacov Michlin, CEO of Yissum, says the Amedi lab’s “amazing” research challenges the conventional notion that the brain is divided into distinct sensory regions. “They demonstrate that people have the ability to take information from one sense and present it in another, thus enabling blind people to ‘see’ by using other senses such as touching or hearing,” he said. With the encouragement of Yissum, RenewSenses entered Brainnovations in May to build a business model and get the products to people who are waiting for them, Rosenbaum says. The initial version of EyeCane could be available within three or four months of raising production funds. “The Brainnovations accelerator helps us understand the medical ecosystem, including reimbursement and regulation, and governmental programs like the Innovation Authority [of the Ministry of Economy and Industry],” she says. “It also gives us access to mentors and impact investors, philanthropies, angel investors and VCs as we finalize our business plan.” Rosenbaum says that EyeCane and EyeMusic are based on different scientific insights than are potentially similar technologies under development elsewhere. Using infrared rather than ultrasonic rays gives EyeCane has superior accuracy, and it is expected to be more affordable than competitive devices. EyeMusic is the only system of its kind that can effectively convey color and brightness information. “We plan to combine the two products and when we do, we will have no competitors,” she says. “We’ll have a mobility aid with the option of understanding color, and other features like a compass and eventually image processing or object recognition. If a person detects an object he can zoom in, take a picture and EyeMusic will show him what it is. Instead of just being told there’s a chair, it’s like opening your eyes and seeing it.” RenewSenses currently has a fulltime R&D manager and Rosenbaum hopes to add a production manager and sales/marketing manager when it gets funded. All of the current eight Brainnovations startups will present at a pitch day on September 18 at Google Tel Aviv, where the accelerator is housed. The other seven are BioEye (developing a diagnostic device for cognitive decline using the front camera of mobile phones), Pauzzitive Life (developing a mobile application for treating lifestyle addictions), TailorMed (using machine learning to improve quality and speed of medical image diagnostics), InnoSphere (developing a brain-stimulating device to treat ADHD), MyDopa (using machine learning to adjust the medication dosage of Parkinson patients), Sentidio (developing software to improve the social skills of autistic children) and Re:Mind (developing an at-home diagnostic helmet to detect an early-stage stroke). (music)

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind, and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can register as a customer of State Services for the Blind to access many other services that they offer by going to www.mnssb.org. Complete programming of the Radio Talking Book is available at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. At the Gateway to Blindness, by Maribel Steele 8 Threads to Weave into the Garment of Change , June 16, 2014 ??When I began to lose my eyesight, it was natural to fear losing so many other aspects of my life that I treasured. Becoming an artist and failing to see colour was one of them. But the hardest hurdle to overcome was knowing how to weave positive threads into the garment with the label of disabled.???Did you know that the dictionary defines disabled as: to make unable, weaken, destroy the capability of, to cripple, to have a lack of competent power or strength in either physical or mental abilities, to be disqualified and to make legally incapable: to be deprived of  the right to engage and, lucky last, to be rendered unfit.???Hmm, a pretty disturbing label to be given to anyone. No wonder, as an adolescent, it didn’t appeal as an image I wanted to aquire: but it seemed that Miss Puberty had other plans…??No one had warned me about the sneaky tactics of Miss Puberty, the way she could change the life of a perfectly normal teenager when she brought an exclusive offer to our household.??There she stood on the doorstep, bearing the garment of change, insisting I wear the new label of disabled.???‘Sign on the dotted line,’ she said, holding out an invisible pen. Miss Puberty worked with such authority, there was no option but to agree to the hidden terms and conditions of a membership I didn’t want but had to accept.???‘Welcome and congratulations,’ she said. ‘As you now have Retinitis Pigmentosa, whether you like it or not, you can spend the rest of your life freely indulging in any of the labels we proudly stock in our Blind-Bat Boutique. Please take your time to browse and choose carefully from our huge range of richly textured stigmas.’???I didn’t want a new image, or one of their ugly designer garments exclusive to Mademoiselle Black: Itza Shame: X-clude: Inferior Design: Kybosh: De Prive De Paris. I wanted to yell at Miss Puberty, “Take your unfashionable garment elsewhere and drape your labels over someone else’s life. I think you have the wrong house.”???She thrust the package into my hands. “Too late. Like it or not, it’s your designer image now, you have to wear it.” Fashion the garment ?Over many years of trying to cut the cloth to suit my image, with the label of disabled firmly secured to the fabric of my life, it has taken 8 qualities to thread the garment I can now wear with pride. ??If you find yourself having to wear a particular label you consider quite unfashionable, let me introduce you to 8 colourful qualities essential to transform your dreary cloak of despair with chic threads of elegance. Attitude is the key to accepting change in your life. Cultivate a positive attitude and be aware of the choices you are making. Often it is fear and self-pride holding back your progress. When you take control of your attitude in a positive way, you begin to infuse your life with possibility. ?Thread the colour RED into your new garment: it is the shade of glowing embers that will keep your fire alight. Gather your support team ? ?Don’t be afraid to gather around you a support team of loved ones, friends and colleagues and let them know how best they can assist you. In all truth, they really want to know how to co-operate in creating a balance in letting you take charge of your own life. ??Asking for help when you could honestly benefit from their genuine support is not a sign of personal weakness but can boost the morale of the entire team. With balance and flexibility, you reach your goals with team work.??Thread the colour ORANGE into your new garment: it is the shade of joyful co-operation. Courage to commit and courage to be creative Once you have accepted a different way of doing things, and have a circle of supportive friends who understand your unique needs, you can begin to commit to certain tasks you want to achieve. You can set creative patterns into the fabric of your life. ?You have renewed confidence, you muster a sense of inner strength that enables you to find creative solutions to the task at hand. With courage, you dare to persist when things go wrong. With a bold heart,  you insist on finding solutions.??Thread the colour YELLOW into your new garment: it is the shade of radiant sunlight, teaming with confidence, hope and good cheer.??? Tenacity, persistence and effort With any outcome you want to achieve, it requires a certain amount of focused effort. You may want to train to learn new skills, or adapt to a new way of doing familiar tasks. Effort, persistence, and tenacity can work together in shaping your reality by not giving up. ?Thread the colour GREEN into your new garment: be as tenacious as Mother Nature in her attention to detail, in her cycles of consistent renewal. Independence and freedom ? ??Having woven the thread of acceptance, co-operation, commitment. courage and tenacity of spirit into the fabric of your life, you also can take brave steps toward reclaiming your independence. Again, this will require training, gathering of new skills but  you can make choices that best suit your lifestyle. You may want to have a guide dog as your seeing eyes or prefer to use a white cane in getting around. ??Maybe it is time to gain skills in new technologies that can enhance your independence – it is totally your choice. This is an empowering place to be. It is a time to express your talents, and appreciate just how far you have come. Enjoy the sense of freedom as you stride out to conquer those daily challenges.??Oh, and if by chance you find yourself falling into an embarrassing moment, as you will surely do, take along your sense of humour – it will get you out of any sticky situation! ??Thread the colour BLUE into your new garment: it is the colour of sky that will keep you boldly stepping onward over the horizon to meet your victories. 6. Organise the chaos ?In order to live confidently in a visual world when you are not equipped with sight, you will need a high?level of organisation. Not only do you need to be more mindful of just about everything you do and where you last put things, your support team needs a friendly pep-talk to understand how important it is for you to move through their sighted world. It is full of unpredictable obstacles. Much mental effort is required in remembering every inch of your dwelling place – bringing order into the world of chaos is a matter of your survival and happiness.??Thread the colour PURPLE into your new garment: it is the shade where two textures (of red and blue) combine to form one predictable strand. 7. Trusting your intuition ?Intuition is your inner voice, a direct perception of truth independent of any reasoning. Most people find trusting intuition extremely difficult, especially when eyes and brain dominate our sense of reason. As a person with very little sight however, I have learned to reflect and listen to the wise internal voice. It requires patience, stillness and letting go of reason and rationality. Sometimes it is a call to rest and place our own judgements to one side. ??Thread the colour WHITE into your new garment: clarity of thought will become clear as you trust the pure guidance of your inner vision. 8. It’s a multi-sensory garment ?You can touch your new garment of change, smell it, feel it, it has been skilfully woven by your life’s experiences thus far. It is your own designer garment fashioned from the threads of experience and skilled craftsmanship. Many threads are sewn into the fabric of your being, acceptance, co-operation, courage, tenacity, freedom, humour, patience, intuition,and trust.??How about you? What essential qualities have you woven into the fabric of your personal garment of change? Please share your comments, it would be great to know!??