Beth’s written here more than once about attempts – some successful some less so – to make visual art accessible to people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired. My take is that working too hard to translate visual phenomena into something Beth can understand in a way that we sighted people hope is some sort of equivalent—well, that’s fruitless. But, every piece of art tells some sort of story, and the creation of every piece of art is a story in itself. And so, perhaps ironically, efforts to make visual art more accessible in general – to tell those stories of creation – to everyone, sighted or unsighted, also work best for the visually impaired.

We’ve been lucky of late to encounter two visual artists who have wonderful stories to tell about their work. I ‘m going to introduce you to one of them—and his story—today. Beth will follow up with another story about another artist on Wednesday. Meantime, thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!

Our friend Steve Wierzbowski has a lot going for him. To start, he’s married to Lora Delestowicz- Wierzbowski (and you thought Knezovich was a mouthful), who’s an extreme White Sox fan and a talented artist in her own right. Steve’s a native Pittsburgher, which in my book buys him bonus points since my parents hailed from Western Pennsylvania and I like anyone who knows what yuns means. And he’s a talented architect who also does these wonderfully distinctive architectural sketches – or maybe he’s a talented visual artist who also happens to design buildings. Either way works.

Steve also loves to ride his bicycle—he lives in our building and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen him in his cargo shorts, helmet, and satchel—about to embark for a lakefront ride. What we didn’t know is that on many such trips, that backpack carried a sketchbook, and on his rides he’d stop to create some of those lovely drawings I mentioned.

Steve teamed up with a couple other artists – one works in video the other is a musician – and the three of them collaborated on a delightful and an enlightening video about Steve, his bicycle, and the creation of two drawings. I’d say more, but I can’t really do it justice – please use the embedded link below, or go straight to YouTube and give it a watch – you’ll love Two Sketches, I promise.

That’s Mike with Gus during an earlier visit.

2014 marks the year we inaugurated our “Mondays with Mike” feature on the Safe & Sound blog. My husband Mike Knezovich had been writing guest posts here for years (particularly when I was away training with Seeing Eye dogs), and it was high time to make his posts a regular feature. You blog readers reacted favorably, so to celebrate, today I’m sharing links to my seven favorite “Mondays with Mike” posts from 2014. Those of you who missed them the first time around can read them now, and those of you who liked them when they were originally published can link to them again. Cheers!

• Mike hit the ground running – his initial post was a tribute to troublemakers. We published it when the 2014 celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday came on the heals of Nelson Mandela’s death.
• I especially liked his post about the kindness of strangers and how grateful we are to the people who have helped us get where we are today. Mike wrote this one after a visit with our son Gus in his Wisconsin group home.
• A number of you ordered Boy in the Moon by Ian Brown after reading Mike’s review of that book here. The book, and Mike’s post about it, are two very honest and heartfelt accounts of what it is like to be the father of a son with a disability.
• My mother died earlier this year, and Mike’s post about Flo during her final days was so beautiful that my brother and sisters and I had him read it out loud at her funeral.
• His Thanksgiving post was a tribute to the parents we’ve lost, the work we still need to do to make our country better for everyone, and the babies who give us hope. Mike’s an award-winning photographer, and along with that particular post we published a very cute photo he took of Whitney the Seeing Eye dog with one of our great nieces. We’ve learned that posting photos of dogs and babies always results in a lot of hits!
• We also received lots of positive comments when Mike took you along on his morning commute. We live in Printers Row, a Chicago neighborhood so close to the Loop that Mike walks to work.
• And speaking of lots of hits, as NFL’s regular season draws to a close (thank God) all of us in Chicago look forward to the 2015 baseball season. Take a look back at Mike’s 2014 Time begins on opening day post, and I dare you to claim Mike’s cup is ever half-empty. When it comes to spring and baseball, the man is forever an optimist.

Mike, Whitney and I head off to Union Station for our train ride to Wisconsin later this afternoon – we’ve got a Christmas visit with our son Gus planned. If you want to keep up with what happens afterwards, consider signing up to follow the Safe & Sound blog (enter your email in the box at the upper right of the blog and hit enter to receive email updates anytime we publish a new post). Mike will be back with a new MWM post this Monday. Thanks for reading, everyone, and…happy holidays!

Glass half-empty.

Glass half-full.

Which is it? I’d wager that a lot of my acquaintances would peg me for the former. And for much of my life, I think I have been a half-empty guy. I think it’s partly owed to brain chemistry, and partly to a set of values that I owe to both my parents, but particularly to my mother. She would not allow herself or her children to, for example, take pride in our country without also taking open-eyed stock of its evils — and taking responsibility for them.

As a result, I’ve spent much of my life suspicious of half-full people. The way I saw it, they were not facing some of the ugliness in the world.

You know, I do think some half-full types are actually full of it.

But no longer is that my default stance. It’s not an either or thing, but a both thing. The glass is half-empty and half-full, all at once.

The daily news certainly makes clear the empty part. But if you read carefully, it can also illustrate both. Here are four bits about four people who recognized ugly and also did and are doing something about it.

They’re very different.

One is a retired Naval Officer who has quietly led enormous gains in the fight against malaria. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer was originally appointed by George W. Bush, and the Obama administration wouldn’t let him leave—they refused his letter of resignation. Ziemer’s a Viet Nam vet with an incredible set of life experiences of his own. It’s a remarkable story worth the read.

Bryan Stevenson is a Harvard educated lawyer, and he is black. A terrifying experience at the hands of a police SWAT team galvanized his thinking and feelings about law enforcement and the justice system in our country, and fixing the system has been his life’s work. He is articulate, he is quietly brilliant, he is committed, he is rationale, and he is dead right. He runs the Equal Justice Project based in Alabama, and he has a book out called Just Mercy. This excerpt and accompanying interview from Fresh Air is worth your time. I promise.

It’s hard to count anything out of the Ferguson, Mo. ordeal as good news. But this piece, about Lt. Jerry Lohr of the St. Louis County Police, comes close. Lohr never wore riot gear, and he did his part to keep constructive communication with community members, one human at a time.

Finally, Scott Bonner is Director of the Ferguson Public Library, and its only full-time librarian. He steadfastly kept the library open during the unrest, providing an oasis of civility in the middle of it all.

None of these stories is wholly rosy. And none result in final triumph. But they do remind that what any of one us does can make some difference, and perhaps an enormous difference, and that half a glass is a start, but shooting for a full one is worth the effort.

I know, I know. You were so mesmerized by the sweet photo Mike published with his December 8 post that you missed the part about my upgrading my iPhone. I went from a 3gs to a 4, which means…I have Siri now!

Here’s the photo I’m talking about, my 5-month-old great niece with my five-year-old great Seeing Eye dog.

Plenty of people who are blind have been using speech synthesizers to type text messages into their phones for years now — I’m just not one of them. I learned how to use VoiceOver, the speech synthesizer that comes with every iPhone, And it lets me type texts, but I found it too difficult.

VoiceOver parrots every letter the blind user types into a text message, but have you ever heard the term PICNIC? It stands for “Problem In Chair Not In Computer.” I found typing into a phone cumbersome. I was so slow at it, it made better sense for me to phone my friends rather than texting them.

Siri to the rescue! I’m so tickled by how she helps me text that I’m spelling out the easy way you can use her, too. (Not sure, but I think Siri might be particularly helpful for older adults who are diagnosed with macular degeneration, we’ll see.)

So let’s get started. If you are blind and have an iPhone, or you are helping someone who is blind use their iPhone, you need to make sure you have VoiceOver turned on — go to my How do blind people use iPhones post to learn how to turn VoiceOver on.

Got VoiceOver on? Okay, now for my “Text with Siri” lesson. For this lesson, I assume you already have some people in your “contacts” List, so we’ll start with learning how to turn Siri on.

• Press down the home key to get your iPhone going –that is the big round button (well, It’s about ½ inch in diameter, I guess) right below your iPhone screen. You can actually feel this button go down if you press it, it’s a real physical button.
• Double tap anywhere on the screen to unlock the screen. VoiceOver will call out “screen unlocked.”
• Swipe your pointer finger quickly from the left of the screen to the right of the screen a few times until you hear VoiceOver call out “settings!”
• If you get overzealous and go past “settings,” swipe your finger from the right side of the screen to the left to go back until you hear “settings.”
• Once you’re sure you’ve heard settings, double tap anywhere on the screen to activate settings.
• Now swipe your pointer finger quickly from the left of the screen to the right of the screen over a few times until you hear VoiceOver call out “general!”
• Double tap anywhere on the screen to activate the “general” button.
• Swipe your pointer finger quickly from the left of the screen to the right of the screen a few times until you hear VoiceOver either call out “Siri on” or “Siri off.”
• If VoiceOver says “Siri on” that means Siri is already turned on.
• If VoiceOver says “Siri off” you need to double tap on the screen, and when it says “Siri on” you know Siri is on.

Phew. Still with me? Okay, Siri is on your phone now. Here’s how you use her to send a text message.

• Hold down the home button (remember that’s the button you can feel below your phone screen) and keep holding it down until you hear a double bell sound.
• Don’t let go of that button! Hold it down while you tell Siri who it is you want to text (if the person you want to text isn’t in your “contacts,” you can say their cell phone number). For this exercise, I said, “Text Mike.”
• When you are finished giving your command, release the button.
• You won’t have to hold the button down anymore, Siri knows you’re there now. you’ll hear another double bell tone, and Siri will ask, “Okay, what do you want to say to Mike?”
• Remember, you don’t have to hold the button down anymore, just hold the phone and tell her what you want to text. For this lesson, I simply said “Practicing.”
• Siri comes back to tell you what your message reads “Your message to Mike says, ‘Practicing.’ Ready to send it?”
• You say “yes.”
• Siri says, “Okay, I’ll send it,” and sure enough, in mere second or two, you hear a whoosh sound. Your message is sent.

You can say no to sending, of course, and I’ve even learned how to change the wording when I misspeak or cancel the message altogether. But that’s a lesson for another post. I’ll leave you here with one last tip: If you are not blind and have been helping someone try this out, all you have to do to take VoiceOver off your iPhone is tell Siri, “Turn VoiceOver off.” She’ll do it for you. HTH & TTFN.

When we lived in Urbana, Ill., I had a morning radio show on a local community radio station called WEFT (WEFT, rhymes with LEFT). WEFT Radio was a nearly anarchical operation, run by citizen volunteers, meagerly funded by donations and grants, but thanks to dedicated people over the years, it
survives to this day.

Check out Beachwood Reporter, you’ll be glad you did.

WEFT carries some syndicated programming, but mostly it is local volunteers who piece together each week’s shows. You find blues shows, jazz shows, old time country shows, political shows, gospel shows, GLBT shows. It’s sort of a grand mess, the airwaves version of a community parade.

So like I said, back in the 90s (boy, it hurts to write that), I was in the middle of it with a morning show, once a week, that I called Adult Children of Parents (ACOP). You may recall that the terms dependent, co-dependent,
enabling, adult children of (fill in the blank) and recovery-speak was entering the vernacular back then. The title was my snarky response.

I read headlines from the Chicago Tribune and sometimes the local paper, I commented, I played music, I had guests, Beth played the accordion during fundraisers. I came to love it. Put me in front of a large live audience and my palms sweat and my voice cracks like an adolescent. Put me in a studio with a microphone and I become, as one friend once put it, verbally incontinent.

So, last week, when I got an email blast from Steve Rhodes of The Beachwood Reporter linking to his latest podcast – and inviting volunteers to appear as guests on The Beachwood Radio Hour and The Beachwood Radio Sports Hour – I stepped up to the plate.

He wrote back right away and suggested we get together to record a show this past Saturday. Which gave me a quick shot of sweaty palms, I mean, in concept it sounded fun..

About Steve: He’s first and foremost a smart, affable, honest, witty and likable guy. He’s also a superb and accomplished journalist – he’s worked at dailies, at Newsweek, Chicago Magazine, among others. And he cares, deeply, about journalism. That led him to create The Beachwood Reporter, a Web publication that rounds up pivotal Chicago (and sometimes national) stories. (The name is borrowed from a classic old Chicago tavern called the Beachwood Inn, so named because it’s at the corner of Beach and Wood.)

The Beachwood Reporter is an indispensable resource for anyone who cares about public and cultural affairs in Chicago and beyond, and it’s a one-of-a-kind resource for people who care about the state of journalism.
Reading it gives you a sketch of the current news, but also tips you to what the reporter may have missed, the questions they should’ve asked, and what the politicians and bigwigs are getting away with as a result.

We got to know each other years ago when Steve began linking to my now dormant blog called Reading with Scissors. We’ve stayed in touch since. Steve knows I’m a White Sox fan, and with the Sox making a series of big
trades and free-agent signings at Major League Baseball’s annual winter meetings last week, he suggested I join him and regular sports contributor Jim Coffman to the Beachwood Sports Hour to add a Sox element. He also
invited me to join the Beachwood News Hour, which I did.

It was a gas. Jim’s a churning, burning urn of Chicago sports, we mostly good-naturedly talked about the Cubs-Sox rivalry, and a good time was had. The News Hour with Steve was a little more serious in tone: We talked about the Illinois Office of Comptroller, Torture, and the Chicago Mayor’s race. Also enjoyed that, but in a different way.

You can listen to the Beachwood Radio Sports Hour (free) here — there’s an audio player plus show notes.

You can listened to the Beachwood Radio Hour (also free) here–Steve also provides show notes for the news.

I’m not sure if or when I’ll be back on, but meantime, I hope you’ll give it a listen, and I hope you’ll become a Beachwood regular.