We moved from Urbana to Geneva, Illinois in 1994, and during our three years there I worked for the Kane County Cougars (a minor league baseball team) in their group sales office. The staff was young, and refreshingly unimpressed by my blindness. Amy Mason, a recent college grad, was the one who hired me. She figured I could help answer the phone, route calls, and take ticket orders.

On my first day on the job, however, we discovered one small problem: their phone system used lights, rather than sounds, to indicate which line was ringing. Unfazed, Amy had me make outgoing calls instead. The kind of calls they hated making—contacting groups who hadn’t paid up, or trying to interest schools in special promotions. I didn’t much like these calls, either, but I figured it was a fair bargain. Free game tickets weren’t bad either!

That’s Flo throwing out the first pitch at the Cougars game on her 80th birthday. (Photo by Cheryl May.)

I made a lot of friends at the Cougars during my years there, but I felt especially close to Amy. During one summer when our then-rambunctious-now responsible-nephew Robbie was staying with us, Amy took him out of my hair by putting him to work as an intern. She was a talented athlete and had played high school and college sports, and she cheered on my great-niece Anita, who was a toddler then, to become the basketball superstar she is today. Flo turned 80 in 1996, and when we all decided to invite friends and family to join us in celebrating FloFest in a big tent at a Cougars game, Amy was instrumental in making everything go smoothly, including making arrangements for Flo to throw out the first pitch. It rolled right over the plate.

I sold a lot of tickets for the Cougars, and during my time there I helped the group sales office expand their schools program. Working with a minor league team’s energetic, upbeat and goofy staff helped rebuild a lot of the confidence that had slipped away when I lost my sight.

Today Amy Mason is the Director of Ticket Services and Community Relations for the Kane County Cougars, and the Cougars are now the A Team for the Chicago Cubs. The Pitch and Hit Club is honoring Amy with their Woman of the Year Award tomorrow night, and Mike, Whitney and I will be in the audience cheering her on.

Some other notables will be there as well: former White Sox manager Tony La Russa and Hall of Famer Rich “Goose” Gossage are the headliners, and the entertainment will be provided by, who else? My beloved baseball organist Nancy Faust. The biggest star there, of course, will be Amy Mason. She still stands out as a model for how, with a little patience and very little fanfare, hiring someone with a disability can work out well. For everybody.

If you follow this blog, you already know guest blogger Sandra Murillo. Sandra lost her sight when she was three years old. She has always attended regular public schools, and she’s known ever since she was in high school that she wants to be a writer. Her first guest post was about using assistive technology to vote in her first presidential election and was published here four years ago. A lot has happened in Sandra’s life the past four years, and she’s back with another guest post to give you the latest.

Networking to beat the startling odds

by Sandra Murillo

“How’s the job search going?” I’ve heard that question from family and friends many times during the last few months. I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in December with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and like any recent college graduate, I’m in the process of looking for a job, or, at the very least, an internship.

U of I graduate Sandra Murillo.

I, however, am not your average recent college graduate. I also happen to be blind. This means that finding a job can present some, shall we say, additional hardships. It’s not that I can’t get on the Internet to look for jobs or type resumés and personal statements independently. No, it’s much more complicated than that. Even though legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in the workplace, there are still many misconceptions that prevent many of us from being hired. Sadly, many employers believe that we are not capable of doing a job as efficiently as our sighted counterparts.

According to the American Foundation for the Blind, about 75 percent of blind and visually impaired adults are unemployed in the United States. I find this ironic, given that technology helps us be more productive and independent now more than ever before. I use my talking computer to send and receive Emails, type articles and blog posts and browse the web. The computer’s robotic voice announces each letter as I type and reads out loud what’s on the computer screen. I am bilingual, and my talking computer’s robotic voice even speaks Spanish for me when I want it to!

Journalism involves interviewing people, and I’ve learned to record the interviews with a digital recorder. That way I can make sure I won’t miss a good quote or bit of information. In some ways my blindness allows me to be a better listener during interviews. I can concentrate more on what’s being said rather than the visuals of the person or place. These and other tools have helped me in my job search.

Besides asking friends and family to keep an eye out for job leads, I also go online to sites like monster.com. I was also very fortunate to come across Career Connect, a website developed by the American Foundation for the Blind specifically for blind or visually impaired job seekers. It is full of helpful information on how to write resumés and personal statements, tips on how to make job interviews go smoothly and even information for employers.

I’ve known I wanted to be a journalist since I was a sophomore in high school. I think it’s a great career because I will get to do two of the things I enjoy the most: writing and informing and educating others. I have a particular interest in writing about people with disabilities — I feel we still need to educate the general public about our struggles and capabilities. Maybe that way employers will not be as skeptical about hiring blind and visually impaired people.

Meanwhile, I plan to continue on my job search, and I hope I will not be part of that startling 75 percent of blind and visually impaired people without a job for long.

Our presentation at Joseph Sears Elementary School yesterday started with me reading out loud from the Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound,

At Joseph Sears school yesterday.

and then I explained three rules the kids should keep in mind if they happen to see a guide dog with a harness on: don’t pet the dog, don’t feed the dog, and don’t call out the dog’s name. “Those things can distract a Seeing Eye dog,” I told them. “It’d be like if someone nudged you or kept calling your name wile you were working on your spelling words at school. You wouldn’t be able to concentrate on your work.”

A concerned kindergartner raised her hand. “Can you pet the dog?” I assured her I could, leaning down to do just that. “It’s part of the bonding,” I explained. “She has to know that I’m special. I’m the only one who can pet her when her harness is on, and that helps remind her to take care of me and help me stay safe.”

And with that, we were off. The kids wanted to know how I sit in a chair, if being blind was scary, do I watch TV, how I am able to drive, how I get dressed and whether I ever make mistakes. That last question made me laugh. “One time I gave a presentation at a school and I was wearing two different shoes!” The kids laughed, too, and then the whole conversation turned to, you guessed it: shoes.

• Kid: How do you tie your shoes?
• Me: How many of you know how to tie your shoes?
• Kids: I do! I do! I don’t! Yes! My sister knows how! No! I do!
• Me: Well, those of you who can tie your shoes, I bet if you close your eyes you could tie them, too.
• Kid: (background sound of quiet fumbling at feet) How many shoes do you have?
• Me: Well, after I made the mistake with the shoes that time, I got rid of a lot of shoes. I only have four pairs now: One closes with Velcro, another is a slip on, and two pairs that tie. One of the tie shoes has round shoelaces, the other has flat shoelaces,that’s how I tell them apart.

And that’s when I got the idea. Tell them how to play the shoe game. You form a circle, put blindfolds on, and everyone takes their shoes off and throws them in a pile in the middle of the circle. When the teacher says, “go” you have to find your shoes and put them on. First person with shoes on wins.

The teacher yesterday appreciated right away how this game might teach children how much they can determine from their sense of touch. She promised the kids they’d play next week. “I won’t tell you what day we’re going to do it, though,” she warned. “I don’t want you all wearing slip ons that day!”

Time was up already, but as we got up to leave one boy called out one last question. “What if you were a boy, and you put on Cinderella shoes, and you didn’t know you had them on and you wore them home by mistake?” Hmmm. Guess he’ll just have to wait until the Shoe Game next week to find out.

Remember my last post, the one where I wrote about all the young people in my 2010 Seeing Eye class using talking iPhones? Eliza Cooper was one of those young Seeing Eye classmates, and the very day I published that post last week she was featured in a story on Marketplace from American Public Media. The story was all about, guess what? Smartphones for blind users.

The story opened with reporter Meg Kramer explaining the many ways blind users find standard smartphones so helpful. “A phone’s camera can identify money and read text, and GPS navigation tells blind users where they are and what’s nearby,” she said. “Screen readers are second nature for someone like Eliza Cooper, Who has been using the technology since elementary school.” The reporter goes to expert Eliza for details about mobile accessibility, and then listeners follow along to observe how Eliza uses her iPhone as she packs for a trip with her Seeing Eye dog Harris.

This guy look familiar? He’s my retired dog Harper’s bro!

I liked Eliza Cooper from the minute we met at the Seeing Eye. She’s a talented drummer, an we had a ball jamming together at weekend parties during class. When we discovered her dog Harris is Harper’s brother, we knew it was destiny. We had to continue working together after graduation.

Eliza is a social media consultant, and I hired her for a few months back in 2011 to learn new ways to use my Twitter feed and my Facebook fan page. She’s come a long way, baby, since then. She picked up three new consulting clients last year and completed a number of short-term projects in social media and web consulting in 2012 as well. And get this–after completing her first two triathlons (you read that right, two triathalons) last summer, she began blogging for the Huffington Post about her experiences as a blind triathlete. Eliza also appeared in a profile in Triathlete Magazine last year and was featured as a triathlete in an ad for Volkswagen, too.

And now, she’s started 2013 with a bang, too. Her Marketplace story is called “Building a Better Smart Phone for Blind Users” and you can still hear it online. It aired in time for the annual Consumer Electronics show this past week and was heard on public radio stations nationwide. Go to Eliza’s blog to find out more about the Marketplace interview and learn more about her interest in social media strategy and management. Go, Eliza, go!

One of the many, many reasons I decided to buy an iPhone two years ago was to support the idea of universal design: the iPhone 3GS was the first touch-screen device that blind people like me could take out of the box and use right away.  It comes with speech software called VoiceOver — built-in screen access for people who are blind. Miraculously, it allows blind people to interact using the touch-screen.

The iPhone 4 came on the market in 2010, just before I left town to train with Yellow Lab Harper. During training at the Seeing Eye I could hear phones murmuring text messages to the younger students in class while we were waiting in the lounge. Carlos regularly updated his Facebook status from his iPhone while we commuted in the Seeing Eye van together. He and Marcus would point their phones at their dogs from time to time to take photos, then manipulate their phones to send the photos home to loved ones.

My classmate snapped this photo of Harper on his iPhone and sent it to Mike.

Apple drastically reduced the price of the iPhone 3GS to $49 the very month I came home with Harper. I bought one, and after learning how to use it to make a phone call (in case of an emergency) I put off learning how to do anything else with it.

My two-year contract ends next month. I finally devoted time over the holiday break to climb the very steep VoiceOver learning curve so I can decide whether or not to renew.

The simplest way for you sighted iPhone users to understand how VoiceOver works is to give it a try yourself. Here’s how you turn VoiceOver on :

• go to Settings
• choose General
• choose Accessibility
• choose VoiceOver
• turn it on.

Still with me? Okay. Now press the home key. Slide your finger around the screen, and Voice Over will call out the icon you’ve touched. Don’t worry, it won’t select that icon, it will just call it out so you’ll know where you are on the screen. Hold the iPhone so that the earpiece is facing up, toward the ceiling. If you touch the left edge of the screen about an inch below the earpiece, you’re likely to land on the top left icon. VoiceOver will call out what that is. Flick one finger right to select the next one. If you flick your finger four times to the right , you’ll get to the first app on the second row of apps. If you come across an app you want to open, tap the screen twice, and…voila! Note: If you open an app BY MISTAKE, just press the Home button and you’ll return to the home screen.

Is your head spinning? Then you can imagine what a dither I was in the past two weeks learning how to listen to voice mail, Google, send and receive email using my iPhone. I can get into all that in a future blog post if you are really interested, but I’m guessing that all you sighted folks want to do right now is learn how to turn the #(@%! VoiceOver off. If you follow the bulleted directions above, below the heading at the top of the VoiceOver screen you’ll hear a button labeled “VoiceOver on.” Notice that VoiceOver gives you a hint out loud by saying, “Double-tap to toggle setting.” When you hear that, go ahead and Double-tap to turn VoiceOver off.

I reached a big goal over the weekend when, ta-da, I exchanged a series of text messages withmy sister Marilee. I’m OMW. TTYL!