Mr. Peabody, set the wayback machine to 1986. After a year of weekly visits to read to a newly-blind woman, it’s time for University of Illinois senior John Foreman to graduate. John brings his girlfriend, a music performance major, along on his final visit, and when Lynn LaPlante pulls her viola from its case, the […]

Hey, I have a new book out! National Geographic School Publishing used a true story about my previous Seeing Eye dog Harper in a new supplementary textbook called Lend Me a Paw, and it was just published last month. Lend Me a Paw is part of National Geographic School Publishing’s new Ladder Series, which they […]

Whitney and I just got back last night from a web design conference in Dallas — my friend Sharron Rush gave the opening keynote yesterday, and when I heard she’d worked with Google to come up with a way to award conference scholarships to people with disabilities who wanted to attend, I went ahead and […]

When you’re born blind, Braille isn’t the only thing you need to learn to be able to read. Children born blind have a harder time comprehending visual words than their sighted peers. So in addition to learning Braille, they also have to memorize the meaning of things they’ll never be able to see. Take a […]

Both of the memoir-writing classes I teach are taking time off in June, and one of the last topics I assigned before the break was this: choose a photograph, any photograph, and describe it to me in 500 words or less. “But please don’t say, well, this is a woman in a yellow skirt with […]