If you’ve never seen (and heard!) a blind person using a talking computer, it must be hard to imagine how we manage a Web site without seeing the screen. Or without using a mouse. How do we find the buttons we need? What does a voice synthesizer say when it comes across a link? A picture?

Thanks to the wonderful geeks at the Trace Research and Development Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison, now you have an easy way to find out! They’ve put together a short video demonstrating how screen readers help those of us who are blind.

The narrator of the video has been blind since birth and works at Trace, a center known as a pioneer in technology and disability. I’ve seen (okay, heard) other screen-reader demonstration videos before, but this is my favorite. It’s so well-organized that you learn a lot in a very short time, and narrator Neal Ewers has such a pleasant voice that he makes the demonstration downright entertaining!

A CNN story last week called Web accessibility no longer an afterthought estimated 60 million people in the U.S. can’t use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion. As of now there are no explicit laws to force companies to design Web sites that are accessible to people with disabilities — the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was written in 1999, several years before the Web became an everyday phenomenon. The CNN story pointed out that whether web accessibility is covered by the ADA or not, one thing will continue motivating businesses to comply: money.

Yahoo’s Brightman estimated that there’s about $220 billion in discretionary spending available to disabled people.
Making a Web site accessible to as many people as possible isn’t just the right thing to do, it also makes business sense, he said.

Also, with a rapidly aging population in many parts of the world — notably the U.S. — accessibility requirements will become useful for today’s crop of baby boomers as they grow older.

People over 65 are increasing their use of the Internet, according to Nielsen, and features designed for accessibility could aid those who aren’t technically disabled but wouldn’t mind a little extra help.

The story reported that two of the biggest Internet companies in the world are starting to view accessibility as an important part of what they do. Yahoo requires every new hire to receive accessibility training from Alan Brightman, senior policy director of special communities, and accessibility manager Victor Tsaran, who lost his sight at age five. Yahoo also books engineering teams for tours of their Accessibility Lab. Google just rolled out a service that will let YouTube users add captions to their videos, giving people who are deaf a chance to take advantage of distance-learning opportunities, among other things.

As the Web moves more from an era of presentation to an era of two-way “data-driven” communication, accessibility becomes even more important, said Jonas Klink, accessibility program manager.

Web accessibility has come a long way in the decade since many of these proposals were first floated.

I have people like Neal Ewers and his colleagues at Trace Center to thank for advocating long and hard for Web accessibility. Trace Center opened in 1971. That’s 38 years ago, folks. If Trace and all the other thousands of organizations and advocates hadn’t had the forethought to work on technology and disability issues early on, we might not have even had the technological capability we have today to make Web sites accessible, much less the ability to convince companies that taking the time and energy to make their sites accessible is worth it. THANK YOU, Trace and all you other wonderful advocates. Without you, I might not be a writer. Or a teacher. Or a public radio commentator. Or a blogger!

A whole slew of generous hotels across the United States are participating in this very cool Give a Day, Get a Night program — if you give eight hours of community service to a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization, you can stay overnight at a participating hotel — for free! Sounds too good to be true, but I tried it. And it’s for real!

To qualify, your volunteer hours have to be completed between July 1, 2009 and March 29, 2010. You call a participating hotel, tell them when you want your complimentary room, and then all you have to do is show up at check-in with a letter on non-profit letterhead verifying your eight hours of unpaid volunteer service, and…you’re in!

That's Hanni and me luxuriating in our lovely Blackstone room.

Hanni and I volunteer for a literacy program called Sit! Stay! Read!, and the volunteer coordinator was happy to provide me with the letterhead note I needed. Hotels in San Diego, Portland, Denver, Las Vegas, Tucson and countless other cities participate in the program, but I decided to stay right close to home. I booked a room at the Blackstone, a 99-year-old four-star hotel on Michigan Avenue that was recently renovated. Here’s a description from a magazine called “Hotels:

The extensive nature of the renovation shows in many of the details, including the richly detailed brass wall sconces that McHugh refinished in many public areas. When originals could not be salvaged, the team worked with specialty contractors to cast molds to create duplicates. In other historic portions of the hotel, McHugh removed decades-old carpeting to find that the marble floors underneath had been damaged by carpet tacks. Fortunately, the team was able to repair the floors by salvaging the hard-to-match marble from other areas of the hotel where it would not be visible.

While large-scale reconstruction of a century-old building is bound to turn up unexpected issues, the most significant one was positive, said Brian Hardy, McHugh’s project manager for the Blackstone work. “The biggest surprise of the building was that it is unbelievably well built,” Hardy said. “It’s extremely sound, structurally.”

I can vouch for that soundness — I somehow managed to bang my forehead on one of those structurally-sound surfaces in our room. Ouch! Not to worry – the room service folks deliver ice to each room every night, you know, when they bring your bedtime chocolates!

I wondered how I’d be received–staying free, and all–but the Blackstone staff knew exactly what the Give a Day, Get a Night program was all about, and they seemed tickled that someone was taking them up on the offer. Hanni and I were treated like gold; so many of the staff helped us out in oh so many ways. One of them, named Arturo, was especially kind. He escorted Hanni and me all the way to the nearby Starbucks to pick up our morning coffee, stayed with us as we ordered, held my coffee cup as we got back into the hotel elevator and accompanied us all the way to the sixth floor.

Arturo marveled when Hanni led us off the elevator and guided us right to room #610. We had fun discussing how Seeing Eye dogs are trained, when it’s okay to pet them and when it’s not, stuff like that. Before he left I fished in my wallet for a tip, but Arturo refused the money. “This was my pleasure,” he insisted.

But the pleasure was all mine. A big thank-you to the Blackstone and to Sage Hotels for sponsoring this generous program. And an especially huge thank-you goes out to Sit! Stay! Read! for giving Hanni and me the privilege of volunteering.

The kids at Schechter were great listeners...and they asked some great questions.

Hanni and I did a presentation at the Solomon Schechter Day School in Skokie, IL right before Thanksgiving. The kids were great fun, they were very curious about how Hanni does her job, and how I manage to do all the things I do without being able to see. The hour flew by so quickly we didn’t have time to answer all their questions. Sensing the disappointment in the room, I suggested they email me. “Send me all your extra questions,” I said. “I’ll use my talking computer to write you back.”

The notion of a computer talking to me struck them as very cool, and two different classes took me up on the offer. Both email messages were downright endearing, and hearing my talking computer read the second one, all the questions running together in a stream-of consciousness robotic voice, gave me a laugh. The email is a perfect example of the sorts of questions I get from kids when we do school presentations:

Thank you for coming to our school. You are both very cute. If you ever come to our school again, can you take your fake eye out for us? You write the best books I ever read. What is your middle name? You are the first blind person I ever met. Did Hanni ever make a mistake? I have a dog named Mocha. What is your favorite candy? Thank you for coming to our school telling your wonderful stories. We had a great time meeting you. Did you have a great time meeting us? Please thank Mike for bringing you to school and helping you too. with love and thanks, The Children of 2B

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably know the answers to most of the questions the kids asked. Except for that one about the fake eye, I guess. So many of the questions I get come from a question another kid asked earlier. The fake eye question in the email, for example –this was a pretty bright group of kids, so I decided in my presentation to explain the laser zaps I had to my eyes to try to save my vision, and then all the surgeries I’d had later.

After a series of regular questions, you know, does your dog sleep with you in your bed, that sort of thing, one boy asked, “Do your eyes hurt?” It was such a sweet, caring question. I reassured him right away that no, usually my eyes do not hurt.

“But here’s something you might not have guessed,” I said. “One of my eyes –my right one –is fake.” I told them sometimes that fake eye gets sleep in it, or teeny bits of dirt or dust in it. “And when that happens, then yes, my eye hurts. I have to take it out and clean it!”

Hence the “Can you take your fake eye out for us” question in the email message. When I wrote them back, I answered like this:

Answer: Hmm. Maybe. I guess we’ll just have to “see”!

In October I got a message that my blog had been nominated for a “Lovely Blog” award. I figured the comment was spam. Not that I don’t think my Safe & Sound blog is lovely. It’s just that I’d never heard of a “Lovely Blog” award. And the nomination came from a lawyer. Not to be trusted, right?

Wrong. Turns out that both the lawyer guy, and the nomination, are legit. Matthew Stoloff is a civil rights attorney with an interest in disability discrimination law. He wants to change the way the public thinks about people with disabilities, and he nominated the Safe & Sound blog because he thinks it helps the cause.

In order to accept a “Lovely Blog” nomination, a blogger has to follow three rules:

• Post the news of your nomination on your blog together with the name of the person who nominated you, plus the link to their blog.
• Pass the nomination on to 15 other blogs you’ve discovered.
• Contact your 15 bloggers to let them know they’ve been nominated for the award.

That requirement to nominate 15 other blogs really stumped me. There are so many good blogs out there, how do you decide? After two months of contemplation, I’ve finally managed to home in on my 15 Lovely Blogs. Here they are — along with their tag lines.

Blogs about Writing

The Empty Pen “The thrill of writing, the agony of editing”

Smells like happy “I don’t have all of the answers. Neither do you. As long as we
both can admit that, we can have some pretty fantastic conversations, don’t you think?”

Sandra the Future Journalist “The purpose of this blog is to share my experiences (both positive and negative) as a college student with a visual impairment.”

Teaching authors “ Six children’s book authors who also teach writing.”

Defective Yeti “Haphazardly Spellchecked Since 2002”

Dogblogs

Bark “Bark is the magazine (and blog) of modern dog culture—it speaks to the serious dog enthusiast.”

Paws for Thought “A diary of a woman in Northern Ireland training and working with her first guide dog.”

Shandy Dog at Work “In 2003 Shandy was the inspiration for starting Sit Stay Read, a literacy organization here in Chicago that brings kids and dogs together for reading fun.”

Disability-related blogs

American Foundation for the Blind blog “Expanding possibilities for people with vision loss”

Easter Seals and autism blog (In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit: I am paid to moderate this blog, so of course I think it’s lovely!)

In the Center of the Roof “The day to day ramblings of a young woman who used to be able to see and now is blind. It sounds much more dramatic than it is.”

Matthew Stoloff’s blog “I hope I can help change the way the public thinks about people with disabilities.”

Other blogs

Sloopin “A South Loop Blog”

Truthful Enthusiasm “Discussing Contemporary Issues through The Arts”

Reading with Scissors (Another disclosure: This is my husband Mike’s blog)

Congratulations, nominees. Happy blogging!

Blind advocates in Chicago are handing out free Pocket Money Marker Braillers this Wednesday morning, encouraging the public to use them to mark their paper money on behalf of those of us who can’t see. Hanni and I are doing a school presentation that morning, so we won’t be able to join the demonstration. We’ll be with them in spirit, though!

The demonstration – and the brailler giveaway — is intended to make the public aware that the Treasury Department should mark U.S. currency in order to prevent discrimination against those of us who are blind. An op-ed piece I wrote about this issue appeared in Friday’s Chicago Tribune:

180 countries use printed paper money, and the United States is the only one that prints bills all the same size and color, no matter how much each bill is worth.
Last year a federal appeals court ruled that the U.S. currency system discriminates against blind people. The court decision was not a unanimous one, and some high muckity-mucks weren’t exactly happy with the ruling, either. The National Federation of the Blind, for example. NFB strongly opposed the 2002 lawsuit that led to the ruling. They figure that most blind people have found ways to cope with paper currency and say there are other, more pressing needs to address. Treasury Secretary
Henry M. Paulson, Jr. testified against it, too. He said the blind can function fine using credit cards or electronic scanners to identify different bills,
and if that didn’t work they could rely on help from others.

The NFB and Paulson do have a point. In the 20+ years I have been blind, I have never been shortchanged by a cashier. Even Chicago cab drivers – who have an undeserved reputation for being rude – have been honest with me, correcting me when I’ve made mistakes and tried to pay them too much. Still, I feel pretty stupid sometimes when a bill unfolds itself, or gets mangled up in my wallet, and I have to ask what money I’m carrying.

You can read the entire editorial online — it’s called Paper Money that Works for the Blind –and leave comments there at the Tribune site if you’d like. And hey, if you happen to be out shopping in Chicago this Wednesday morning, word has it that most of the free money-braillers will be handed out in front of Water Tower Place – check it out!