AFB Blog

In this new series, guest blogger and Center on Vision Loss volunteer Holly chronicles her experience attaining a new dog guide. Meeting Tyra on Monday I would like to introduce you to my very own runway model, Tyra! She is a yellow lab that is almost white. She has dark eyeliner and a pink nose. She is 21 inches tall at the shoulder and weighs 51 pounds. She is very responsive and heels very well. She waits for instructions when working, and is steady and fast. She already knows that my…

In this new series, guest blogger and Center on Vision Loss volunteer Holly will chronicle her experience in attaining a new dog guide. Day 1 I was in a hurry, as usual, when I left the house with my parents to go to the airport en route to the Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB) Oregon Campus. I left Pollyann, my retiring guide dog, at home because, I thought if she saw me walking away with my cane, she would get upset. I flew with a man from my area who will be training with his first dog. He…

Over the past couple of months, we at AFB have received a number of correspondences regarding the announcement and promotion of various Helen Keller-related projects. While we can't always honor every request, we have been impressed with what has crossed our desks. Crazy as it sounds, there are many out there who don't know who Helen Keller was. So to see so many creative projects taking place with Helen as inspiration makes us proud—and, we think, would have made Helen herself smile. Here'…

There are just a couple of other items I want to share from CES. I did get a chance to play with the Fleksy keypad from Syntellia. As many know, this is an app for Android and iOS that allows text input using a touchscreen keyboard using the relative position of your finger touches to mimic the qwerty keyboard. In other words, you start typing where you think the letters are, and Fleksy fills in what it thinks you're typing. It works quite well and I found the learning curve to be very short. I…

Day 2 at CES featured some TV, some audio, some speech and a nice little company making nifty headphones. OK, so I sort of surrender to the TV juggernaut that is CES with a visit to Panasonic. But, this is a blindness access story and not a (super high-def, screen as large as my garage story). Some of you have probably heard about television sets from Panasonic that are available in England with great speech output for on-screen menus, channels and the like. And, we've been asking, and…

After taking in a couple of sessions focusing on tech and seniors, William Reuschel and I tackled the exhibit floor (the lifeblood of CES). We got a chance to check out the Sensus from Canopy (a maker of game controllers for the iPhone), which has developed a nifty prototype for doing braille input on the iPhone using a touch-sensitive case. The input controls are on the top and back side of the case, with the fingers curled around the two ends of the phone). I was able to get the hang of…

I am heading out to the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas for my first visit. CES is a huge event, with just about every tech company (and a whole lot of non-traditional tech companies) showing off their new products. I'll try to let you know what I find regarding accessibility for people with vision loss. But first, a big shoutout of thanks to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) who is assisting AFB and the Hearing Loss Association of America to be able to get the most out of…

Today marks the 204th birthday of Louis Braille, the inventor of his eponymous code for people with vision loss. In celebration of his birthday and National Braille Literacy Month, we’ve assembled a roundup of braille-centric content throughout AFB's family of sites. Read up, reflect on, and appreciate what braille has meant to so many. Braille continues to be a driving force for people with vision loss. Throughout January, we will be sharing information relevant to braille—history,…

Convenient and affordable access to books in formats that can be read by individuals who are blind or visually impaired has long been a major struggle. With high-quality audio and braille production, and more recently, digital production, books are now far more available for those of us with vision loss, at least in the wealthier nations. Although copyright laws in many nations allow production of accessible books for people who cannot read print, it is quite difficult and often illegal to…