Hello from the Pacific Northwest – my Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I flew here from Chicago Wednesday for Sisters Weekend. The long flight from Seattle to Chicago gave me time to write out answers to questions I get about how I navigate O’Hare alone with my Seeing Eye dog:

Whitney makes the most of travel time.

• How do you get to the airport? Many people who are blind use public transportation to get to airports, but I’m afraid of using the subway alone with my Seeing Eye dog – I’m nervous about falling into the tracks. I’d be open to taking a Chicago Transit Authority bus, but I’d want to do a trial run ahead of time to know exactly where they’d be dropping me off. I usually use a hotel shuttle, taxi, limo, or van service, and I tip well.
• Where do you tell them to drop you off? Before I leave home, I check and double-check which airline I’m using and have the driver let me off at that specific Curbside check-in. Even if I’m not checking a bag, the workers at curbside check-in can check me in, get my boarding pass and sign me in for airport assistance. The curbside check-in worker guides my Seeing Eye dog and me to a seat inside and lets me know what my call number is. I tip them well.
• What do you do in the waiting area? I empty my pockets and put my change, iPhone, keys, and all into a compartment of my carry-on (will make it easier to go through security). Then I listen for a red cap to come call out my assigned number.
• How do you get to security? When a red cap calls our number, I get their attention and have them place my carry-on bag onto the seat of the wheelchair they brought along. I give my Seeing Eye dog the “follow” command and we shadow the red cap to the security line.
• How do you get into the screening area? For obvious reasons, I don’t have a valid driver’s license. I use a State of Illinois ID card instead, and show that along with my boarding pass as I enter the screening area. I have a cool wallet with a long pocket that holds my boarding pass and ID in it, very handy if/when I need them again at the gate.
• How do you get through security? I take my laptop computer and hand it to my airport assistant to place in a bin along with my shoes, jacket, and carry-on bag.
• How do you get through the magnetometer? After giving my Seeing Eye dog the “sit” command, I lengthen her leash and give her a “rest” command so she’ll sit still while I let the TSA screener know how I intend on getting through. My dog sits while I explain, and her leash remains in my left hand as I extend my right hand to the scrrener and ask them to pull me through the arch. If I brush against the interior wall by mistake, the alarm sounds. I remind my Seeing Eye dog to “rest” where she is and I return, turn around, extend my right hand to the screener and walk through the arch again. Once I get verbal confirmation from the TSA agent that I’ve cleared successfully, I turn around and call the dog to come through. The alarm goes off when my dog comes through, but going through by myself ahead of my dog makes it clear to the screeners that her harness and leash set off the alarm, not me.
• So do they have to wand the dog, then? Sometimes the screener wands her harness, and they always feel around her collar and pet her to inspect as well. I often quip to the TSA worker that my dog is the only creature who actually likes going though security. “It’s the only time I let someone pet her when her harness is on!”
• How do you get your stuff off the conveyor belt? It’s important for me to remember what color jacket I was wearing, what shoes I had on and what type of laptop I use so I can describe them to the red cap helping me — they collect my things once they’ve cleared security. I’ve added Braille stickers to some of the keys on my laptop. So I often open it quickly and feel the keys to confirm its mine.
• How do you find the gate from there? The red cap knows where the gate is, so I give my dog a “follow!” command and we shadow them from there. Once we’re at the gate, the red cap finds me a seat, heads to the desk with my boarding pass and returns with a pre-boarding ticket for us. I tip my red cap well.

Usually at this point I wait for someone from the airline to approach us and let us know they’re about to announce pre-boarding. I give my dog the “follow” command and follow the staff member to the jetway, hand over the ticket, board the plane, find our window seat and position my Seeing Eye dog under the seat in front of me with her head sticking out between my feet

On Wednesday, my sister Bev would be boarding along with my Seeing Eye dog and me once her flight from Grand Rapids arrived. After saying good bye to the red cap, I took my iPhone out and used VoiceOver to send Bev a text: “At gate.” Bev’s text came back immediately. “At airport Cubs bar. Meet you at gate soon.” Right then I knew: it was going to be an entertaining weekend with the sisters!

I’ve already written a post here about how people who have visual impairments can use Siri to send text messages and make calls on iPhones. Now, after having broken some fingers in my left hand, I’ve started toying around with another dictation feature on my iPhone: the microphone on the keyboard.

So far, for me, dictating long emails and text messages using the microphone has been more accurate than using Siri. Don’t get me wrong, though. The microphone still comes up with some mischicvious typos.

Or would those be “talkos?”

A few examples. I thanked a friend for sending information on “that Jamaican author” and the text she received thanked her for sending information on that “Jamaican offer.” Maybe the microphone was suggesting I take a trip to the island.

And then, when I texted my sisters to assure them I was trying to keep my spirits up with this dang broken hand of mine, I wrote, “Eyebrows up!” The message read, “I grows up.” The microphone is a smarty-pants, reminding me that as the youngest of seven I remain a spoiled brat — I still have growing up to do.

By far the most embarrassing dictation mistake came when I wrote my boss at my Easter Seals job to tell her I was going to hear Itzhak Perlman give a presentation about disability and the arts in downtown Chicago at noon today. I suggested I might write a post about that event for the Easter Seals blog. The message she received? It identified the renowned violinist and conductor as “It sucked.”

My boss has a sense of humor, but odds are that she will not welcome me dictating any  posts soon.

And odds are you blog readers will not welcome a blog post where I just talk on and on and on and on and on and on, either, but if, after reading all this, you are still interested in giving dictation a try, here’s how :

1. Go to Settings.
2. Swipe until you get to “General.”
3. swipe to Siri, and then turn Siri on. (Even if you don’t want to use Siri at all, you need to turn it on for any speech recognition to work.)

From now on, any time you see the small microphone icon next to the spacebar on the iOS keyboard, dictation is available. . . Tap anyplace you can type text, and then tap the microphone icon to start dictating. When you’re finished, tap “Done,” and…viola!

Oops. I meant, “voila!”

Sigh.

If you are blind and use the speech synthesizer VoiceOver (like I do), listen for the space bar on any keyboard that appears, and swipe left once. You’ll hear the word “dictate.” That’s where the microphone is. Double tap there to start dictation, and then two-finger double-tap to finish.

For everyone, sighted or not, if you want to include punctuation in your dictation, all you need to do is say “exclamation mark” or “period” or “comma” and so on. You can say “new line” to dictate a return character, and “new paragraph” to add two returns. Best of all: if you are using the microphone rather than Siri, you can always go back to the QWERTY keyboard to fix typos or add a word or line the old-fashioned way. Now only if I’d done that when I wrote to my boss that the violinist sucked…!

Here’s the guest post you’ve been waiting for! Floey’s account of her tenth birthday celebration in Chicago Monday…

by AnnMarie Florence Czerwinski

Here we are at Chicago’s Christkindl Market after the polishing.

I experienced a birthday of a lifetime. I got to go to the ocularist with my great ol’ Aunt Betha.

It was a little freaky but it was really cool. First probably the weirdest part. The doctor pulled out her eye with a suction cup thingee! Then he let me watch him clean it.

He rubbed this gooey stuff on it rubbed it on different wheels and then rinsed it off then we left.

We walked to the Christkindl Market to eat some good food and then walked to the Bean.

By the way I fixed Betha’s cell phone, too.

The end.

Back to Great Ol’ Aunt Betha: It’s true! Floey did fix my cell phone – the VoiceOver app I use to make it talk wasn’t working, and like all ten-year-old kids in America in 2015, Floey knows how to slide and tap her fingers on an iPhone screen to make it do what it’s supposed to do.

PS: Janet, Floey’s mother, asked me to add one detail her ten-year-old neglected to mention in this guest post: before Floey and I left his office, the ocularist did remember to use that “suction cup thingee” to pop my prosthetic eye back in.

“Smiling face with squinty eyes.”

That’s what my talking iPhone called out after the Cardinals beat the Cubs in the first NL playoff game a few weeks ago. The text message came from Tom, a St. Louis fan who’s a friend from Hackney’s. He’s been known to say some goofy things after imbibing a few too many Anheuser-Busch products, but “smiley face with squinty eyes?” It just didn’t sound like Tom.

Life imitates emoji.

And that’s when the lightbulb went on over my head. He’d sent me one of those pictures you can text to show how you feel.

Wait. I need to look up how to spell it.

Pause.

Ah, yes. Here it is. It’s called an “emoji.”

Two years ago I published a post here about how some people who are blind access a program called VoiceOver to use an iPhone — VoiceOver parrots every letter we type into a text, but it wasn’t until I upgraded to IOS 9 last month that I came face-to-face with an emoji.

A key next to the space bar on the iPhone keypad lets users choose from lists and lisps and lists of emojis to use with texts. VoiceOver reads the images out loud for those of us who can’t see them, and to show you what I mean, here’s a sampling of what I hear when choosing from the list of “Smileys and other people” emojis:

• ”Smiling face with sunglasses”
• “Unamused face”
• “Winking face with stuck-out tongue”
• “Sleeping face”
• ”Nerdy face with thick horn-rimmed glasses and buck teeth”
• ”Neutral face”
• ”Excited face with money symbols for eyes and stuck-out tongue”
• “Expressionless face”
• “Smiling face licking lips”
• “Slightly smiling face”
• ”Smirking face”
• “ Face with rolling eyes”
• ”Face with no mouth”
• “Flushed face”
• “Thinking face”
• “Angry face”
• “Pouting face”
• “Disappointed face”
• ”Grinning face with clenched teeth”

Wait. Can a person clench their teeth and smile at the same time?

Pause.

I guess you can! But would I ever want to see a picture of that on a text message? Dunno.

After the powers that be added 150 new emojis to their operating systems last week, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Ouch blog asked Damen Rose, a BBC reporter who is blind, to demonstrate what emojis sound like on his Smart Phone. I listened to the podcast and found myself agreeing with Damen when he lamented how the emoji craze is just one more example of how the technological world is becoming more and more visual. “We’ve sort of arrived at this glance culture, haven’t we, where we take in so many things at a glance on a screen,” he said. “We’re supposed to keep up with various events, understand different memes, get the references, et cetera, and it all happened soooo quickly and sooooooooo visually.”

I gotta admit, I do feel left behind sometimes. People doing quick smart phone checks for sports scores or news. Looking real quick at Facebook. Checking text messages at a glance. I just can’t keep up. Without being able to see, I’m not part of the “glance culture.”

But wait. Maybe there’s an “Eyebrows up!” emoji, and if there is, I need one right now. I mean, maybe I can’t just glance at a written description of an emoji, but isn’t it pretty incredible that technology companies have come this far with accessibility? That they actually found someone somewhere to write hundreds (thousands?) of emoji descriptions for people like me, who can’t see them?.

If there isn’t an “eyebrows up!” emoji yet, I nominate my nine-year-old great niece to be the one to describe “eyebrows up!” once it’s added — she’s already pretty good at describing emoticons. I’ll end the post here with the closing of an email message she sent to her old blind Great Aunt Betha recently:

“Love, FLOEY :);) (smiley and winky face) I<3U (that means “I love you.”)

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.