Travel everywhere you go with the help of a guide dog, and strangers will feed you an earful of stories about all the other service animals they’ve read about. Helper parrots pecking at shoppers in stores, comfort pigs going crazy on airplanes, a therapeutic rat that quells anxiety in his owner, you name it. The […]

When I was newly blind and learning to use a white cane, orientation and mobility (O&M) instructors taught me to rely on the surge of traffic at my parallel to recognize when the signal is green and it’s safe to walk. That principle is reinforced every time I travel to Morristown, New Jersey to train […]

It seems like only yesterday: Beth’s Seeing Eye dog Harper saved them both from being run over at an intersection a couple blocks from home. Harper yanked Beth out of harm’s way—so hard that she fell to the pavement and that the sturdy metal harness snapped. It was a harrowing experience, but afterward Beth and Harper […]

Back in 2014 the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed piece I wrote that was titled “Should ride-sharing services adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act?” Five years have passed, and Lyft and Uber still claim they don’t have to follow ADA guidelines. A story in Politico last week reports that Lyft is fighting a federal […]

Lucky us! In the past ten days Whitney the Seeing Eye dog and I have had the privilege of visiting nine different classrooms at five different elementary schools. Somehow, some way, we also managed to wedge a visit to a college classroom in the midst of all those visits to third-graders –last Tuesday we gave […]