EP 8: Let's Get A Few Things Straight - Part 1

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Most people don't know much about blindness or how a blind person lives on a daily basis, and that's fine. But everybody makes assumptions. So before this show goes any further, let's get a few things straight. Welcome to the Defending Vision podcast, where this blind man shows you exactly how he sees it. Hardship, humor, and keeping a vision alive. Throw on some headphones for the full audio experience. Welcome to the show. This is Matthew Cooper. Thank you so much for listening. If there's any upside to being blind, it's the stories. After roughly 30 years, I have plenty of them. The questions people ask, the things they say, the assumptions they make in the moment. It may be frustrating, but after a while, it's always there for a good laugh. I wanted to do an episode to answer some questions, bust a few myths, and hopefully provide just some helpful advice for people when they interact with a blind person. And, of course, tell some funny stories. But let's be honest, an episode of me just rambling on, telling some of those stories, that'd get boring. So I recruited the help of a few family members who are here today in the studio. This is one of the episodes where if you listen on headphones, you'll get to fully enjoy the 3d experience. This is part one of let's get a few things straight. Make sure you come back next week to hear some more. All right. Awesome. So why don't we go around real quick? Each of you can just do it. Introduce yourselves really quick. [00:01:46] Speaker B: Okay, I'll start. My name is Braylon. I am seven year old and I'm in second grade. [00:01:55] Speaker C: I'm Avery. I'm 15 and I'm a rising sophomore. [00:01:58] Speaker D: I'm Tavory. I'm eleven and I'm going into 7th grade. [00:02:03] Speaker B: I'm Adley. I'm nine and I'm going into fourth grade. [00:02:07] Speaker E: And I'm Keeley. And I'm the mom who's not giving her age. I have three of these ones in here and Matt's cousin. [00:02:15] Speaker A: Perfect. Awesome. There we go. Okay, who wants to ask the first question? [00:02:21] Speaker C: Oh, okay. Do you care if people call you blind, visually impaired or sight impaired or something else? [00:02:29] Speaker A: So I personally tend to find blind the simplest. Since I don't see at all, then I think blind is a really good description of that. Blindness, or legally blind is a very large range from can almost drive to nothing at all. So visually impaired is useful because it kind of describes that range. I don't know. I haven't really used sight impaired. I did have one experience at an airport and I was checking in. I was flying by myself, so I asked to have someone assist me through security into the gate. And the person checking me in said, so you sight impaired. Right. And I said, you can just say blind. And she was very nervous, and so she got on the radio to call somebody and said, I need assistance for a. And she paused. Sight impaired person. And, you know, if I've told you, you can just say blind, that's fine. So some people are still very nervous about it, but that's. That's what I usually just find easy if you know when I'm talking. [00:03:45] Speaker C: Yeah. Do people think it's like a bad word to say blind, or is it just like. It's like one of those where they think it's, like, rude to say you're blind even though you are blind? [00:03:57] Speaker A: I think it's one of those. It's probably that people don't want. It's sort of the. I don't want to assume how blind. [00:04:05] Speaker C: Right. [00:04:06] Speaker A: I also think just the word scares people. [00:04:08] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:04:09] Speaker A: I think it's scary to people to think, oh, they're blind. But if you say visually impaired, it's like, well, that sounds nicer. It's sort of a softer phrase. I think that's some of it. I think blind is just very unique in that it really scares people to think of not seeing anything. [00:04:27] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:04:29] Speaker D: My question is, if you see a blind person, should I grab their arm and help them cross the street? [00:04:34] Speaker A: Ah, that's a good one. So I. So the first thing is, you always ask if they need help. I have had people. I actually had someone at a stoplight. He was on the street waiting I was gonna cross. He actually got out of his car and ran from his lane to the corner to help me cross the street and then had to run back to his car before the light turned green for him. That's not a good idea. Yeah. My usual question is, how do they think I got to that intersection on my own? Right. They're getting out of their car saying, I'll help you cross. It's like, well, I've crossed like, ten streets to get here. How did I do it without you? But I understand people want to help, but if you think a blind person needs help, ask first. Is always the best thing to do. [00:05:35] Speaker B: Is being blind scary? [00:05:37] Speaker A: That's a good question. So for me, because I've been blind so long, no, one of the things, a lot of times if a parent has a kid and they find out they're going to be losing their sight, they'll go to events for groups that try to help the blind. And one of the things they often do is they'll have the parents maybe put a blindfold on and eat lunch and try doing that. And that usually, I think, really scares the parents because if you haven't done it before, you make a major mess when you eat food and don't see. Because even if it's like pizza, they'll eat pizza with a blindfold on, and they'll take it off afterwards, and there'll be food everywhere, and they'll think, oh, how could my kid ever do this? Right? How could they eat food? How could they cook? How could they go to school? And it's like, well, but you had a blindfold on for 30 minutes. And so guide dog trainers, one of the things they have to do to become a trainer is they spend a couple weeks with a blindfold on 24/7 so they actually have to go a couple weeks with the blindfold on because that long, you start to really understand it and learn how to get around and all of that. So they actually have to spend a lot of time. But if you just do it really quickly, I think it would make it very scary. That's a good one. [00:07:05] Speaker B: How do you know where food is on your plate? [00:07:10] Speaker A: So the. The method I usually use is it's like a clock, and people can tell me where on the clock. So they'll say your chicken is at 06:00 and your potatoes are at 02:00. And so, of course, that means you have to know how to read an older clock, not like a digital clock that everybody has now. So that's the usual method. Now, I've had some really funny stories with people not giving me the food I asked for. In college, we go to the cafeteria for food, right? So I went in once for breakfast, and I said, I would like some scrambled eggs and some other things. And I sit down at the table, and the woman helping me goes to grab my drink, and I. And I check my plate, and there are no scrambled eggs, but there's a big pile of tater tots. And she comes back and she says, is there anything else I can get you? And I said, you know, I asked for scrambled eggs, not tater tots, if you don't mind. She says, oh, sure. Okay. So she goes and she brings another plate back, a big dinner plate, and it's piled with more tater tots. [00:08:29] Speaker D: Oh. [00:08:31] Speaker A: So I had a lot of tater tots for breakfast that I didn't really want anyway. So I've had some funny experiences like that, for sure. But normally somebody will just tell you, like, it's a clock, where it's at. Everybody is a little different. And most people, it's funny, they won't say, food is at 12:00 everybody either says midnight or noon, and everybody's different. Which one they tend to say, so it can be kind of funny. Cool. [00:08:58] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:09:01] Speaker D: How do you know what time it is usually? [00:09:03] Speaker A: So today, of course, our phones can talk and things like that, but the other way. I've had braille watches, and so you can open up the COVID over the watch and feel the hands, and then it has bumps at all the numbers. I have a watch that I have not been able to confirm or get more details on the story, but when I got it, supposedly british pilots used to wear them for night missions so that they didn't have to turn the light and the cockpit on to check the time. So I have one that supposedly is one of those watches. It's been hard to find a lot of details on that, but, yeah. [00:09:51] Speaker C: What's the funniest thing people do when they learn you are blind? [00:09:55] Speaker A: They talk loud and slow. I don't know why. Oh, that's so sad. No, I can hear you very well. [00:10:08] Speaker C: Right. [00:10:08] Speaker A: And I understand what you're saying. So for some reason, they tend to think you're deafening. I call it the Helen Keller effect. It seems like those go together for people. So, you know, I'm blind, not deaf, and can understand you just fine. So people can be. They definitely have some funny reactions at times. Yeah. The other one I get a lot is. And I've had this different places I've lived actually happened recently. I was talking to somebody. I was out on a walk down to a coffee shop here, and I go in, and there's somebody there from the neighborhood, and they said, you know, we see you walking with your dog. It's so good that you get out. And it's like, you know, they don't just, like, let me leave. Like, I actually live, you know, and do my own things and go places. [00:11:01] Speaker C: Right. [00:11:02] Speaker A: But it's very funny. It's so good that you get out. Yeah. Every now and then they say, okay, you can go now. Be back soon. [00:11:09] Speaker C: Right. Kind of forget you're an adulthood. [00:11:13] Speaker A: Well, oh, gosh, you know. Yeah, people are pretty funny. [00:11:17] Speaker D: How do you cook? [00:11:19] Speaker A: Okay, so first I should say I'm not a very good cook at all. Now, the person who taught me Braille, who was blind, she was an incredible cook, and she was always very angry that I did it, that my mom didn't spend more time teaching me how to cook. She wasn't happy about that. But there's a lot of techniques, and, you know, you can get measuring cups and spoons with braille on them. The hardest part when you read a recipe is when it says cook until lightly brown. Well, thanks. So you have to learn a lot of techniques. My favorite that I do for cooking is sous vide cooking, and it's an old french technique that you basically heat up a tub of water and you put, like, a steak in a bag and put it in there, and it cooks it to a perfect temperature. And the best part is the water might be 140 degrees, but, you know, if you do it on a grill, it might be 400 degrees. So you're not going to really burn yourself with 140 degree water. So it's safer. And you don't have to be as perfect on how long you wait. [00:12:33] Speaker C: Right. [00:12:33] Speaker A: So I don't have to be able to see that it's got, you know, the perfect amount of pink in the middle of a steak. Right. So that makes it a lot easier. So that's. That's my favorite thing to do. [00:12:42] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:12:43] Speaker B: Do you live with your parents? [00:12:44] Speaker A: I don't. A lot of people, when they find out I'm blind, guess that I probably do. But since high school, I've, you know, I went to college, lived in the dorms there and then have had different apartments and now my own house. So I live by myself, don't live with my parents, but live near them where I'm at now. But, yeah, a lot of people assume that I have to live with other people to help me do those kinds of things. Yeah. [00:13:19] Speaker D: I have a question in your mind. When you meet somebody, how do you go about imagining how they look? [00:13:25] Speaker A: Oh, that's a good one. So the awkward situations are when people ask you, what do you think I look like? And so it's hard because you really can't tell from a voice if I'm standing in front of them. I can get a sense of how tall they are, but it's hard to tell much more than that. Of course, back in college, people would want to play games and, okay, tell me, what color hair do I have? And, you know, just for fun, you'd guess. And, you know, sometimes you were right, but it really didn't mean anything, you know? Right. But so some blind people will. You'll see them use, like, the back of their hand to kind of feel a person's face. I personally don't do that. But some people do. But, yeah, that's a good one. [00:14:19] Speaker B: Do you watch movies? How does that work? [00:14:22] Speaker A: Okay, so I do. And. But a lot of people get very nervous to say, did you watch a movie? Or they'll say, did you see? And they'll stop and they'll go, oh, I'm sorry, you know, did you observe that movie? It's like, no, I saw the movie. It's English. Those are the words we use. You know, it doesn't bother me, but I do. And a lot of movies now, some of the older ones, it's harder to find, but they're described. And so as you watch the movie, in between the characters talking, there's a narrator describing what's happening. And so they'll say a person walks into the room or a car drives down the road, or they'll describe the scenery a little bit. It's very short because they don't want to talk over dialogue. [00:15:12] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:15:12] Speaker A: So it's very short. Little descriptions. They can be very funny sometimes with the words they choose. And you'll also have cases where, like, I've watched movies that were, you know, about the south and NASCAR or whatever, and the person describing it has, like, a british accent and it doesn't really fit, you know, it just sounds kind of funny. So sometimes the descriptions make the movie even more hilarious just because they add a little extra to it. But those can be really fun since you watch movies. [00:15:45] Speaker D: What's your favorite movie? [00:15:47] Speaker A: Top gun. [00:15:48] Speaker C: That's a good one. [00:15:49] Speaker A: That would be it. Now, when I was younger, so if we went to the movie theater or watching a movie at home, my parents would describe it to me because they didn't have descriptions as much then. And one time we were at the movie theater, and I was sitting between my parents, and they were both describing the movie. And I finally had to tell them to stop because they were describing it differently, you know, because different people watching the movie, they focus on different things. And so my dad would notice one thing, my mom would notice something else, and that's what they would describe was like, okay, guys, you're watching two different movies. I need one description only, please. Yeah, that's good. [00:16:28] Speaker E: Where do you go? Sorry, I'm cutting it. Where do you go to find those movies that have the descriptions? [00:16:34] Speaker A: So these days, they're much more common, even on all the streaming services, they're pretty good about putting them on. Now for older movies, I mean, I actually have a couple old vhs tapes that my braille instructor got for me and there were specific services that were describing them for the blind. Now, it's, I would say most new movies and tv shows have descriptions. So I can just, like, turn it on, on my tv and get those. So it's much easier to find now, for sure. [00:17:09] Speaker E: I can only imagine the dialogue with Top gun. [00:17:13] Speaker A: Yes. Extremely fastest. They do a good job, actually, on that one. They do a decent job. And, like, with the new Top Gun maverick, those were very good descriptions, for sure. Yeah. [00:17:26] Speaker C: How do you pick out and match your clothes? [00:17:29] Speaker A: Okay, well, so for one thing, my general rule of thumb is everything should go together if possible. So all shirts will go with jeans. I'm not exactly one to have a whole lot of style, but. So some of it's just kind of keeping track of that. But in the past, what I've done and what I know other people will do is they'll, you come up with some way of kind of labeling your clothes. [00:17:56] Speaker C: Right. [00:17:57] Speaker A: So you can either, you know, make labels that you can read with your phone or something and do that. Or the, the older technique I did in high school was my mom would tie little french knots inside all my clothes. And you knew that if it had two dots that went with, you know, if your shorts had two knots, it went with shirts with two. And so you do that kind of thing. [00:18:18] Speaker C: That's smart. [00:18:19] Speaker A: And so you would. That. That was a really common way to do it before. [00:18:22] Speaker C: Yeah. Is there, like, an app you can use? Like I've seen on social media? It's like colorblind, but sure, she doesn't see color, but, like, do you use, like, a certain app that can help you pick out clothes or just, like. [00:18:35] Speaker A: Your day to day life? These days? I don't too much just because all my stuff's pretty easy. I don't have a ton of, you know, really specific colors that won't go with other things. Yeah, but, yeah, I know there are tools like that for sure, but I think any blind person with a really sort of involved wardrobe is going to be finding a good way to label them and keep them set up that way. That's usually the easiest. [00:19:02] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:19:03] Speaker D: My question is, do you have a phone? And if so, what you're reading, do you have a little braille bar, like your computer? [00:19:11] Speaker A: So, yeah, so with my computer or my phone, I have a device called a refreshable braille display. And so it has dots that go up and down for the braille. And as those dots go up and down, I'm able to read what's on the screen, but they can only fit. The biggest ones can fit 80 characters, and so I only see a little bit of the screen at a time. So I always tease my colleagues at work who want really big monitors. You know, they'll say, oh, this is only a 21 inch monitor. I want a 30 inch. And it's like, well, I should just, you know, hack your computer and have it just show 80 characters in the middle of that big screen. Cause that's all I get on there. So sometimes I tease them about that, you know, and then they want two monitors, and. [00:19:59] Speaker D: Do you drive a car? And if not, how do you get places? [00:20:03] Speaker A: So I don't. I suppose we're waiting for driverless cars to be able to do that, but I think we're still a little ways off before they're gonna be okay with a blind person just hopping in and going somewhere. [00:20:13] Speaker D: So do you have someone usually pick you up, or do you still. [00:20:15] Speaker A: Do you know, all the different services? Uber, Lyft, you know, used to do a lot of cabs back in college, so that kind of thing. The hardest part, it's better now, but occasionally you'll have a driver that will refuse the guide dog, which they're not supposed to do, but sometimes it happens. Yeah, that's the hardest part. But otherwise, that works really well. I have had a couple times, though, where I requested a ride, and it notified me, which I understand, that they. Why they notify riders of this, but it told me that the driver was deaf. Oh, that would not work very well. I don't think we would be able to communicate and make sure I got where I needed to go. And usually when I get there, I have to ask them, okay, I need to go in the front door of this building. Is it on the left side of the car or the right side of the cardinal? That wouldn't work very well. It would be very difficult. So there are some challenges there, definitely. [00:21:16] Speaker B: And waka, lead stoplights? [00:21:20] Speaker A: Oh, that's a good question. So a lot of people think the guide dog decides when we cross the street, so they don't. I have to tell them when to cross, so I have to tell him, okay, forward. And then he crosses, except trained disobedience, where if he's trained, that if he sees something that might be dangerous, so a car coming in front of us really quickly, he actually has to stop. Or if we've already started crossing, he may have to actually start walking backwards to get us away from it. And that's really hard to train a dog to do. Right. Because normally we teach them. If I say sit, you sit. Yeah, but with this, we're actually teaching them. I'm gonna tell you to go forward. You figure out that it's not safe, and then you disobey and start getting, you know, moving in the correct direction to get out of the way. And we practice that. When we get the guide dog, we actually go into town and we have a trainer walking behind us, and they're on the phone with another trainer in a car. And we'll be in a neighborhood where it's really quiet. And so we'll be walking and we'll hear the trainer behind us go now. And this car will swerve in front of us around a corner or start pulling into a driveway in front of us, testing the dog. So those are, those are really challenging exercises, but they're, they're important. [00:22:40] Speaker C: Do guide dogs like working? [00:22:43] Speaker A: So some people would think, oh, it's work, you know, and sometimes we don't love our doing work, but they really do. I've actually, they really do enjoy it. I actually had one, I was at a work event, and some of my colleagues really wanted to pet the dogs. I took the harness off for a little bit so they could do that, and a little bit later, I was gonna put it on. I just kind of held the harness up and the dog literally jumped, like 5ft into the harness. Like, they really do enjoy, they get a purpose. [00:23:15] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:16] Speaker A: And it's very hard for them when they retire because they don't have that anymore. [00:23:20] Speaker C: Right. [00:23:21] Speaker A: And so, like, one of my dogs, thankfully, when, when she retired, some friends adopted her and they were actually able to take her to work with them, and so she got to feel like she was still going to work like she used to. [00:23:34] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:35] Speaker A: But it's hard for them because they've had, you know, they've spent so many years with a purpose, something they, they're responsible for your safety and they know that. [00:23:42] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:42] Speaker A: So. Yeah, but they enjoy having that, going along with that. [00:23:46] Speaker C: Do guide dogs ever misbehave? [00:23:48] Speaker A: Yes, for sure. They definitely do. There's, there's still a dog. And so they might see distractions like dogs, squirrels, a leaf, and get distracted or they'll really drive you crazy. For example, I had a final exam in college. And in college, my exams were very long, especially in engineering classes. So I would have, in some of my classes, I would have up to two and a half times the normal exam time. And some of those exams were normally 3 hours. So I had a physics exam on a Saturday, seven and a half hours. And that was long enough that I was required by employment law to take a lunch break, even though I just wanted to be done. Right. But before lunch, I had to go to the bathroom. So I went out, used the bathroom. I came back, and my dog loti had eaten my lunch. Oh, I was not happy that day. So they do. Exactly. I was, you know, it was a long day that was required to have lunch break, and I was probably hungry after 3 hours. But the dog ate my lunch. She ate a subway tuna sandwich. She also learned that if I was talking on the phone while we were walking around campus, that if she just veered a little bit, I might not notice. And so I would be on the phone, and all of a sudden, I'd be like, where am I? And I was always at one of the restaurants. She would just veer a little bit and find our way to food. [00:25:31] Speaker C: Oh, my goodness. [00:25:32] Speaker A: Always. And I go, call you back. I got to get back on the right path. [00:25:36] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:25:37] Speaker A: So they do, for sure. [00:25:42] Speaker B: Why can't I pet the guide dog while it's working? [00:25:45] Speaker A: So when, when the dog's working, it has to be. Why? So when a dog is working, it needs to be focused on, on keeping me safe and going where we need to go. Right. And if you pet the dog, what will happen is it will start looking for attention. And so if we're walking somewhere instead of going down the sidewalk and being focused, it might see people and say, ooh, I could go get attention from them. And so we want the dog to learn and remember that when that harness is on, that goes over its back, that that means it's time to focus and work. So it's kind of. It's. It's business suit. We put that on, and the dog says, it's time to work. We take it off, and it says, oh, I'm just a regular dog again. Still has to behave, but it can relax, and it knows that it can, you know, it be more of a dog then. And so that harness is really the signal to the dog. So that's always, always the key. If that's on, can't pet them. [00:26:53] Speaker E: Matt, you mentioned retiring a dog. Is there a certain time frame that a dog has that it's willing to work, or are there certain characteristics that it might start portraying that would require it to retire or retire early? [00:27:08] Speaker A: So it all depends on the dog. It's typically a physical thing as they get older, you know, either hips or whatever it might be that they can't keep up with the walking you do occasionally, it'll be, they may develop a fear. One of my dogs was in the car, and my dad and I had just a minor car accident, and he became very nervous about traveling, which I was doing a lot. And so that doesn't work. So that's the typical thing, is either a health physical thing or some kind of fear or just mental thing that becomes difficult. I think they say the average, we usually get the dog when it's about two to three years old, and I think the average at most schools is, like, six to seven years of working after that. So I've had dogs that only worked about three years, and I've had another one that made it all the way to seven or eight. So it just depends. [00:28:13] Speaker B: Why can't guide dogs eat people fish? [00:28:17] Speaker A: Because they go to restaurants, and we don't want them to think, ooh, all my food is here. So when I go into a restaurant, I don't want the dog trying to get people's food. And there are a lot of stories that I've heard from other people with guide dogs about walking through a restaurant and them not even knowing that the dog had, like, grabbed a steak off of somebody's plate as they walked by their table, and they didn't even know that the dog had done it. And so you have to be really careful to make sure the dog knows it eats dog food. And when it goes to a restaurant, it has to lay on the floor and not want any of that food. Some of the schools will actually, when they're puppies, put them in a room with people food. And if the dog drools and is really focused on it, they won't let them train as a guide dog because they say it's just too much of an instinct to train out. [00:29:07] Speaker C: Right. [00:29:08] Speaker A: That's pretty harsh on a puppy to say you can't drool and focus on this big pizza I put on the table. You certainly couldn't do that with some breeds of dogs. [00:29:18] Speaker E: Yeah, you girls would all fail, that's for sure. [00:29:23] Speaker C: Is braille a foreign language? [00:29:26] Speaker A: So I always thought in high school that I should get to count it because I didn't want to take a foreign language class. But it's not, because really what braille is, is it's. I almost think of it as a, like a font. It's just a different way of writing a language. So instead of the, you know, the ink on paper, it's the dots for each of the different letters of a language or things like that. And I've. I've learned some of braille for French. I've known someone who actually studied Chinese. And for that they use what's called, I think it's pronounced pinging that's uses sort of the roman characters, the normal letters to sort of spell out. So they don't, they don't braille out the actual chinese symbols. But there are ways to do chinese and other languages. So it's more of just a way of displaying the language, whereas sign language is often counted as a foreign language in school because it actually has slightly different grammar in some cases to try and make it shorter and things like that. So there is a little, it's more different than braille. Just, you know, you read it, it's English or it's Chinese or it's Spanish or it's French. Yeah, that kind of thing. 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