Loyal Safe & Sound blog readers might remember the angry post I published after I couldn’t vote for my favorite players to go to the All-Star Game in 2008.

You make your vote, then you have to enter the distorted characters you see into a form. Then, and only then, can you complete the transaction. But if you’re blind, you can’t see a dang thing in that box.

Well, I guess Major League Baseball subscribes to my blog! This month they sent out a press release announcing big changes to their site.

MLB.com has ensured that fans with visual impairments can participate in the annual online voting programs associated with the All-Star Game and will be providing an accessibility page on its site detailing information on accessibility, usability tips and customer service resources.

MLB.com utilized guidelines issued by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The web content accessibility guidelines are of particular benefit to blind baseball fans who use a screen reader, through which information on a page is read aloud, or magnification technology on their computers and who rely on a keyboard instead of a mouse.

The updates were made not only to MLB.com, but to all 30 individual Club sites. The press release says this is all the result of a joint collaboration between MLB Advanced Media, LP (MLBAM), the American Council of the Blind, Bay State Council of the Blind and California Council of the Blind. But we all know it’s the result of my kvetching when I couldn’t vote for Jermaine Dye back in 2008.

Now that I’ll finally be able to vote, I sure hope there’s a White Sox player in the running. Can’t wait for baseball to start up again this weekend. Hanni and I are looking forward to a season full of…you guessed it…Seeing Eye singles.

That's Dora -- my first Seeing Eye dog -- off duty during a stroll on the beach. She retired at age twelve.

The average working life for a Seeing Eye® dog is 7-8 years. Hanni turned ten in February. I was supposed to head back to the Seeing Eye next month to train with a new dog, but I postponed the trip. I can’t let Hanni go.

I had a hard time letting my first Seeing Eye dog retire, too. Dora worked until she was twelve. I know now that it wasn’t fair to keep her working so long — she needed a break. I don’t want to make the same mistake with Hanni, but I’m just not ready to train with a new dog. Not yet.

When I finally do let poor Hanni retire and enjoy her senior years, we’ll have three options:

• I can bring Hanni back too the Seeing Eye, and they’ll find someone to adopt her, or
• we can find a friend who wants to adopt her, or
• we can keep her as a pet, and when I bring my new Seeing Eye dog home we’d have two dogs.

Hanni is healthy. She is good in traffic, and still knows her lefts from her rights. Her tail still wags when I grab her harness off its hook and call her to go outside. But Hanni can’t keep a good pace anymore. Long walks make her tired. Most of her time at home is spent sleeping. As much as I try to avoid thinking about it, it’s time for Hanni to retire.

As if to remind me, an email from the Seeing Eye arrived in my “in box” this week. Subject matter: Seeing Eye grads invited to participate in study

The Seeing Eye has agreed to distribute information about upcoming research into the factors contributing to early retirement of service and working dogs.

The study is being conducted by the University of Pennsylvania. The research team at Penn Veterinary School is seeking the help of owners of service and working dogs. Specifically, they are looking for people whose current guide or service dogs are from The Seeing Eye, Guiding Eyes for the Blind, or Canine Companions for Independence, and are interested in participating in this important study.

Participants will be asked to complete online (web based) surveys about their dogs’ recent health, behavior and activities twice yearly for a period of 2-3 years. You may also be asked to comb some hair samples from your dog’s fur and return them to Penn Vet School in prepaid envelopes. These samples will be analyzed for the stress hormone cortisol.

Send dog fur via U.S. Mail? It sounds so…well..so voodoo! They had me right there. I wanted to sign up just for that. Hanni is so close to retirement, though, they couldn’t possibly want her as part of the study, would they? Yes, they would.

The researchers wish to collect data on working guide and service dogs of all ages regardless of their current health status or proximity to retirement.

I think I’ll sign up. If you happen to be a guide dog user, and you think you’d like to participate, too, you can go to the survey to provide your name and email address (as well as the name, breed and age of your dog) to indicate your willingness to be considered for the study.

When Hanni and I showed up to do a session at the bring books to life Book Fair last night, we were told that Grammy-award winner Ella Jenkins had confirmed with the Chicago Children’s Museum at the very last minute. “Do you mind sharing your presentation space with her?”

Mind? You gotta be kidding. It was our great privilege! From the Smithsonian Folkways web site:

“Literally thousands of musicians who now perform for children are indebted to Ella Jenkins for laying that groundwork. She has reached even more families through television appearances on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street, and Barney.

Ella arrived early and caught me frantically brailling out words on 3 x 5 cards to hand out to the kids. I poked out her name onto one of the cards, handed it over (along with a copy of the Braille alphabet) and told her to get to work decoding. She was tickled, and got to digging in her bag. She asked me to hold out my hand, then pressed a plastic harmonica in my palm. “That’s for you,” she said. “It has my name etched along the top.” A friendship was born. More from the Smithsonian:

Ella’s family relocated frequently, trying to move “uptown” from their {south side Chicago} neighborhood. Rhythms, rhymes, and games were different in each new neighborhood.
Ella shares with children of one culture what she’s learned from children of other cultures. She has gained knowledge and inspiration by performing and working with children on seven continents for four decades.

Winner of a Lifetime Achievement GRAMMY Award, Ella continues to perform and educate through music. The All Music Guide puts Ella “at the forefront of children’s music, one of the few musicians in the genre whose charms extended beyond her young target audience into the realm of adults and educators.”

I can vouch for that. When it was Ella’s turn to perform, she asked Hanni and me to stay on stage with her. Kids came up to play percussion along with Ella’s harmonica. One girl passed a tambourine my way. She wanted me to play, too. When it came time to coordinate hand gestures with songs, Ella encouraged the kids to come up and put their hands on mine to show me what they were doing. I clapped, palmed, snapped and clucked along with the best of them.

Ella was sly like a fox. She knew exactly what she was doing. Having me up there taking part in the songs and games taught the kids more about disabilities than any book or lecture could. a disability doesn’t have to prevent a person from participating – and having fun — like everybody else.

Ella asked us all to close the session by forming a circle and holding hands. Hanni chose to stay lying on the floor behind me. We sang He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands, and before we knew it, Hanni inched inside the circle and started pawing at me. She wanted to hold hands, too. Ella had even charmed the dang dog.

That's my great-niece Lydia showing off Anthony's illustrations.

Our eight-hour train trip to Minnesota on Thursday gave me lots of time to think. Doing the math on my fingers, I counted one, two, three, four years since our last trip to Minneapolis.

Our 2006 trip was all about meeting Anthony LeTourneau, the artist Blue Marlin Publications had chosen to illustrate Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound. Tony lives with his wife and three kids on a Minnesota hobby farm 12 hours away from Chicago. Early that summer, Tony had asked my husband Mike to take photos of Hanni and me and mail them so he could get to work. “I’ll send some sample drawings back from time to time,” he told Mike. “That way you can check to see if I’m on the right track.”

A couple of the sketches Mike got in the mail were just a teeny bit off. Hanni’s harness is made of leather, but in the drawings it looked like plastic. In the illustration of Hanni confronting a hole in the sidewalk, Tony had Hanni’s body horizontally in front of me. Hanni is always at my left-hand side, a little bit ahead of me. When she stops, she stays facing forward. I stop, too, gliding one foot along the surface ahead of us to feel what’s there. If I don’t find a curb or the top step of a flight of stairs, or a hole at my feet, I wave one arm back and forth in space. Maybe Hanni saw yellow construction tape stretched along our path. Or a low hanging branch. Or a sawhorse.

I knew Tony would get a better “picture” of how the two of us work if he saw us in person, so on a beautiful autumn day in 2006 Hanni and I boarded a Megabus full of college students and took off on a ten-hour trip to Minneapolis. My niece Caren, who lives in Plymouth, MN, delivered us to a coffee shop where Tony and his family were waiting to meet us. His sketch pad and pencils were all set up already, and he didn’t waste time before asking us to pose. He photographed us, too. When Hanni needed a break outside, Tony followed us, taking notes on how Hanni and I work together. People in the coffee shop thought we were from Hollywood, and, I must admit, we did feel like stars.

Just about everyone who sees Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound now gushes about the artwork. “The illustrations are beautiful!” they say, admiring each and every oil painting. “The drawings look just like you!” So last Thursday, four years after posing in that Minnesota coffee shop, Hanni and I were back in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes to show off our beautifully illustrated book.

My sister Cheryl accompanied Hanni and me on our Amtrak ride to St. Paul, and just like in 2006, my niece (Cheryl’s daughter) was our chauffeur. Caren and her husband Mark have two delightful daughters, and it was a joy to visit Lydia and Audrey’s classrooms at Zachary Lane Elementary School on Friday.

And Audrey got her turn in her kindergarten class.

It was Audrey’s job to sit at my side and choose which kindergarten classmate would ask the next question. My favorite came after I’d explained that Hanni doesn’t scratch the door when she wants to go outside. “I need to be sure to take her out every four hours, though” I said, hesitating a second to decide what wording was appropriate here with kindergartners. “You know, to give her a chance to go #1 and #2. I sensed the kids nodding their heads. Some typical questions followed. “How old is Hanni?” “Does she like to play with other dogs?” That sort of thing.

Then came the question du jour, from a boy near the front of the class. “What is #1?” he wondered. I turned to Audrey for help. “What would you call it?” I asked. She looked at the boy in the second row, and using her quiet inside voice, gave a one-word answer. “Pee.”

Some teachers struggle to get students to take part in class. Not me. My blindness sometimes makes class participation necessary. I take advantage of that.

Take the How to Get a Children’s Book Published session I gave this morning, for example. My publisher at Blue Marlin Publications generously provided me with handouts she uses during similar presentations. I especially wanted to share one called What The Author Might Be Thinking vs. Why The Publisher is Banging Her Head against the Table. Here’s an example from that list, just to give you an idea:

Myth: Publishers like to see the text and illustrations as a package. I’ll just draw some pictures to go with my text.
Fact: NO, please don’t do that unless you are a professional illustrator, and you have written a book to accompany your professional illustrations. Illustration is a career, and there is so much more to this career than just drawing pictures. Publishers work with their own illustrators who are very familiar with the needs and specifications of that publisher. Send only your text to the publisher.

Anthony Latourneau, our illustrator, is a real pro.

The handout listed so many myths that it was impossible for me to memorize them. Instead, I asked the student on my right to read from the top of the list. After we discussed the first myth, the student next to her read the second. And on from there. Voila! Class participation.

if you read the comments to my previous post, you know I was a bit anxious about the Getting Personal Essays on Public Radio session I’d been asked to give today. To start it off, I asked each student to give me their first name and tell me what they’re reading. This had absolutely nothing to do with my session, I just figured if the whole thing was a bust at least I’d leave with a good reading list for myself!

The students were not seated in even rows. Cocking my head to the left, I said, “Let’s start with you,” and prayed to the heavens that someone was sitting there. The heavens answered.

Kate told us what she was reading. Without much fuss, and without me directing traffic, the class intuited who should go next, and then who should go after that. When Kenya introduced herself, she said she was reading a book called White Like Me. “And I’m not White!”

Reading list completed, a student let me know my handouts were sitting on a table at the side of the room. “Would you like me to hand them out?” Humbled by how quickly everyone had adjusted to my blindness, I thanked the student. She introduced herself as Jane and said she’d been a teaching assistant for a long while. “I’m good at this!” she laughed. When it came time to play one of my public radio essays, Jane was at the ready, manipulating the CD player for me.

The session was fun and informal, with lots of back and forths. When it came time to do the writing exercises, we only had two minutes left. Oh, well. We kept talking instead. The students didn’t seem to mind.

I’d writemore, but I’m in my hotel robe, Hanni is already snoring, and I’m thinking about a luxurious afternoon nap myself. Zzzzzzz.