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!

After our fun visit to Dewey Elementary School in Evanston, Ill. last month, six-and-a-half-year-Katya Karpeyev told her Papa she felt special. “It was really neat to be up front assisting Beth with the other kids’ questions.”

Katya’s big sister was at the assembly with her third-grade classmates, too, and Sasha agreed to write a guest post so my blog readers could see a school visit from a nine-year-old point of view.

That’s Katya (l) and Sasha helping out in class.

Things I learned from Beth and Whitney’s visit

by Sasha Karpeyev

When I got into the multi-purpose room it was really nice to see Beth, Papa, and Carli at school. I learned a lot about blind people and Beth from the stories and things that she told us. I learned that only blind people have white canes with red tips, that Beth went blind when she was 26 (half of her life), and that it can be challenging to be blind.

At home, I tried some experiments like trying to go to the bathroom with my eyes closed to see what it was like to be blind. It was really hard because first I tried to turn on the light and turned on the vent instead when I did not even need the light. Second it was hard to find the toilet. Third I could not find the toilet paper very quickly. Fourth it was hard to find the sink and when I felt the sink, it seemed like it was crooked.

I also tried to slide my finger across the numbers on the phone to make combinations of numbers. I got every single one right.

The day Beth came, after we left the multi-purpose room, all of my friends were talking about how interesting it was to see someone at school besides the teachers and students. Everybody also thought it was fun to see a dog in school since no animals were allowed in school except service dogs. They also said it was cool how Beth could be a writer even though she can’t see at all. I hope Beth can come to see us again!

Thanks, Sasha. Whitney and I had a ball with you and Katya at Dewey School. Hope we can come again, too!

Some members of the memoir-writing class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center. Wanda is to my left in the photo (the far right as you look at it).

Wanda Bridgeforth has been coming to my writing class for so long that she’s working on the third volume of her self-published memoir. On the Move includes essays about her years at DuSable High School in Chicago: coming down from the ceiling in swings at a high school dance, schoolmates in tuxes tap dancing at formals, jazz bands performing at sock hops every Friday night and “Hi-Jinks” student talent shows that outshone professional theatre in Chicago during the 30s and 40s. “With such musicians as Nat cole and all of those guys, we couldn’t miss!” she told me with a proud laugh.

Singer-pianist Nat “King” Cole and Wanda weren’t the only superstars who attended DuSable High School in Chicago.  Master vocalist Johnny Hartman, piano whiz Dorothy Donegan and saxophone giants Von Freeman, Gene Ammons and Johnny Griffin all learned their chops at DuSable as well. Mayor Harold Washington went to DuSable, and so did Ebony and Jet magazine publisher John H. Johnson. Comedian Redd Foxx and Soul Train star Don Cornelius graduated from DuSable, too.

DuSable High School opened in 1935 and is described in Landmark Status reports as “the first high school in Chicago built to serve an exclusively African-American student population.” Wanda joined the DuSable High School Alumni Coalition for Action over a decade ago, when Chicago city leaders first started discussing closing the school. The coalition’s efforts finally convinced the city to designate DuSable as a landmark this year, and reporter Howard Reich was wise enough to seek Wanda out and interview her for a Chicago Tribune article about the landmark status, which will protect the building from future demolition:

”Because this was an all-black school, we did not experience prejudice there,” says Wanda Bridgeforth, class of 1939 — the first to complete four years at DuSable.

 “When the black kids went to the white schools, we were not permitted or invited to participate in their activities,” adds Bridgeforth, 91. “At DuSable, we did everything.

“When we came along, education was a big thing. That was the goal of almost every kid, of every parent. I know my mother and father always said to me, ‘I want you to do better than I did.’ …”My mother said, ‘I don’t want you to have to do house work. I want you to have a career.”

Bridgeforth did — as an audiometrist and bookkeeper — and she credits DuSable with helping to make that possible.

Wanda at her 90th birthday party with the writers.

Part of the neighborhood near DuSable was flattened in the 1960s to make room for the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project, and The Chicago Tribune reported that some of the people from the old neighborhood refer to the so-called urban renewal as “Negro removal.” The article said commercial life was driven away from the area,” in the process diminishing what so many had worked so hard to build at DuSable.”

Wanda was in the first class to start its freshman year at DuSable, and she often remarks how important her high school days were to her. Now, thanks to the personal essays she writes and her work to get it designated as a landmark, her beloved high school will not be forgotten. DuSable High School Alumni Coalition for Action hopes to stage a major celebration of the landmark status this spring, and if that happens, you know I’ll be asking Wanda to take me along as her date. If she gives me that honor, trust me: I’ll wear my dancing shoes.