Episode Transcript
[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 back to the show. This is Matthew Cooper. I'm so glad you're here for part two of let's get a few things straight.
My superstar guests Braylin, Avery, Tavri, Adalie, and Keeley will continue asking some of the questions that people often ask or are too afraid to ask about blindness.
Enjoy.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Combined. People play sports?
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So they tend to play. So I had an episode on the podcast about me playing golf. That's a very popular one.
A couple others that are pretty fun. There's beat baseball, which I played for a little while.
It's a little bit different because instead of fielding the ball and throwing it to a person at one of the bases, it's. We just have a first base and a third base. And if you get there before somebody, you know, fields the ball and has it in their hand, that's a run. So you don't, like, stay on the base and then run the bases. But when you're in the field, so the ball has a beeper in it that makes sound. It's very heavy, weighs over a pound, so it's bigger than a softball and very heavy. So when we're in the field, we wear a bunch of pads, and to field it, it's usually rolling on the ground because most people can't hit it very far in the air. And we dive on our side and make, like a wall and block it with our body.
So I find that blind people really like sports where you basically just have to jump on the ground and get hit by a ball coming at you. There's another sport called goal ball that's kind of like that.
So that's. Those are really common.
And then, you know, of course, I mean, there's all kinds of.
There are runners. They'll have a partner that they hold their arm or something like that.
So there are a lot of sports like that that people do.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: That's awesome. Kind of like a follow up on that question. Swimming. Can you swim not knowing where the sides of the wall are or.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Sure. So I've never been a great swimmer. There are actually blind swimmers who compete, and what they'll do, as I understand it, is so they'll have their lane right. And it takes a lot of practice to get very good at making sure you stay going in a straight line.
But they will, when they get to the end, there will be somebody at the far end of the pool with. It's kind of like.
And I may be a little bit off on this, but it's basically, they'll have, like, a pad on a. Almost a broomstick, and they'll kind of. You'll basically hit that. And that's when you do the turn where you sort of somersault the turn and go back. And so that's kind of a way of marking that for them before they actually hit the wall.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: That's cool.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: So, yeah, swimming is a good one, too.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: You've done archery before. Tell me about that, please.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Sure. So, in college, I. We had an archery team at Stanford, and that sounded like fun. So, hey, why not try it? And then I met another blind person who was really into it in the area and got connected with her and her husband, and they had kind of built a system for doing it. And you basically have a piece of metal on the ground that you put your feet against to align your body. And then we had a camera tripod, and we put a thing at the top that I would put the back of the hand that's holding the bow against.
And that was kind of to aim right. So you draw the bow back, and you always bring the hand holding the string back to the same spot on your cheek, and then the other hand is against the sight or device at the top of the camera tripod. So hopefully, if you are always in sort of the same posture, that will shoot in the same direction. Yeah, I found it definitely a challenge. It's. You're not quite in the best stance that most archers want to be in, where they kind of want their body at like a. Rotated, like, 45 degrees to the target because it makes you more stable. So it was challenging, but, yeah, it was a lot of fun.
The funny part about being on the archery team was people would say, isn't that dangerous? It's like, I'm very careful, and all these other fools are running around pretending they're gonna shoot each other. So they're all being totally ridiculous, and I'm just standing here being careful, you know, only aiming toward the target.
I actually, they had a student wanted to do a small article about me in the Stanford newspaper, and so she came to one of our practices, and she goes, so you're a trailblazer? And I said, well, most people don't think a blind person can do a lot of things. So if I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, they'd call me a trailblazer.
So that's kind of become a line. Me, I just. I think a lot of people don't expect you can do much, and so you do something that is more normal for other people, and all of a sudden, they're like, that's amazing. You're like, well, yeah, all right.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: She didn't know who she was talking to.
[00:05:47] Speaker D: How do you blind people read music?
[00:05:50] Speaker A: So you can actually, there's a system of braille for music, and so the dots can give you the different notes and how long they are and all of that. Now, you can't sight read because if your hands are playing the instrument, you can't read the braille at the same time. So you have to do a lot of memorization.
So, you know, you don't get to sit down at a piano and play and read the music at the same time. That doesn't really work. It can be hard to find braille music. There's not a lot of it made, but it does work, and then you can memorize from there. So I would say probably more blind people learn to play by ear, but it certainly is possible.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Speaking of music, do you play any instruments?
[00:06:36] Speaker A: So I have dabbled at soprano saxophone. Never been super serious or any good at it, but I enjoy it.
That's most of what I've done.
[00:06:49] Speaker D: How did you do math in school?
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Oh, how did I do math in school? So, so a couple things. So now it's a lot easier because, you know, we have all kinds of calculators, and we can do it all on our phone. Right. But I. So I have a couple things here. Show you guys today. So I used to use an abacus a lot, so you probably have never seen one of these, but you can use, you move beads on the abacus and to make different numbers. And I knew how to add, subtract, multiply, divide all on here. So this was kind of, this was often how I would do, sort of do the math, and then I would braille out my answers.
And there's, you know, system of called Nemeth braille to do all of different types of math. And I did all the way up through calculus in high school, and you can do all of that in braille. But so early in school, I would do the abacus, and then later I had, you know, tools on my computer and thing that would help.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: That's a good question. This was always, the abacus was always funny because nobody else used, and they never, you know, most people haven't, haven't actually used an abacus in many, many years. It's been a long time since they were very common, but it's still a good tool.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Do you still use it every once in a while?
[00:08:10] Speaker A: No. No. And I probably. It would take me a while to kind of relearn all the tricks to do division and stuff, but it was. It was a handy tool, for sure.
[00:08:23] Speaker D: How do you play board games or card games?
[00:08:27] Speaker A: That's good. So there are a couple different ways. So cards. You can get decks of cards with braille on them.
And so I actually have a deck here.
So they put the braille on two opposite corners, and it'll have, like, this one has a. And s for ace of spades.
And so they. You can do that with cards.
The one I always find funny is you can get braille decks of uno cards, but it doesn't seem fair because I can't tell when someone else has only one card left, right. I wouldn't be able to see that. So that always seemed a little bit difficult. That doesn't quite seem fair, but it does work. It is fun.
Plus, it's a game all about colors, but anyway.
And then with board games, you can get.
They might put braille on the board. Like, I have a monopoly and a scrabble. One tip.
If you ever play Scrabble with a blind person, know that they can put their hand in the bag of tiles and read them.
It took my parents a long time to learn that, and so they finally figured out that my hand was in there a long time looking for a particular letter, and we started laying them out face down on the table. So just a tip. I don't recommend cheating, but it is possible with braille Scrabble.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: That's funny.
[00:09:58] Speaker D: Did you go to prom?
[00:09:59] Speaker A: Oh, so I did.
A friend of mine and I went. We had a lot of fun.
And actually, she did something really cool, so she got me a boutonniere, right? And she specifically got one that would open. So they had a fragrance the day of prom so that I could smell it. That was pretty awesome.
So, yeah, I did.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: That's nice.
As a kid, did you ever like to color? And if so, how did you color?
[00:10:29] Speaker A: So when I was really young, because I was diagnosed with vision loss when I was three, when I was really young, I would do a little bit, but it wasn't. So I could only for color I saw kind of shades of gray, so it wasn't really full color vision.
So, like, I might be able to tell. You know, I could tell black from white and maybe red from green, but, like, blue and purple were too close. They were too similar, so I couldn't really tell them apart.
And I have to. You know, everything had to be kind of big. It was all about contrast. So I would do it just, if I was doing any kind of drawing, it would just be a black marker on white paper, so they had a lot of contrast for me.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: So I never did much, but I would do some that way.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:15] Speaker D: How do you feed walker?
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Mmm.
So, you know, I have just a measuring cup that I can measure it out and do that kind of thing. The one I have actually has raised lines on it, so I can feel, you know, wear half a cup, quarter cup, things like that. So that's really helpful.
And he also helps. I don't have to tell time to know when to feed him. He helps with.
He makes sure that it's on time or if he can. Early. Yeah.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: How do you write in braille?
[00:11:49] Speaker A: So, you know, nowadays, like I said, I have the braille display, but. And there are various tools like that. But in the past, there were a couple older ways of doing it, so the braille came about in the 18 hundreds. So the original way was the slate and stylus, and many people don't learn how to do this. For me, my braille instructor made it a sort of a prize. She said, once you can read braille normally and write it normally, you get to learn the slate and stylus.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: And so what you're doing is you have a stylus with, like, a little pen, basically, and a slate, which is like a stencil for the dots. And so you punch down to create the dots, but because you're punching down, and so to read it, you're gonna flip the paper over. It means you have to write right to left, and then you have to flip. You have to reverse all of the characters, all of the symbols.
So in your head, you have to do everything backwards so that when you flip the paper over, it's correct.
And so my braille instructor went to Berkeley, and she. Let's see, she would have been.
She would have gone to Berkeley in, like, the thirties, 1930s, or forties, and she did all of her college notes that way.
So she was flipping. You know, she was thinking of notes during a lecture and reversing everything in her head and doing it by punching all the dots.
She was incredibly fast. It sounded like a, you know, just as she would do it. And she said when she was in college doing all those notes, she actually got to the point where the stylist made, like, a dent in her hand from putting force on it all the time.
But she was really good at it. Yeah. So that's one of the oldest ways to do it. The newer way would be like, it's kind of like a braille typewriter.
A lot of people know him as the Perkins brailler. I have one here that they're pretty heavy.
This is an electric one, the original ones. You had to put a lot of force to manually punch a dot.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: And so as you braille, there are six braille dots. And so there are six keys, one for each dot. And so if you want, you know, three of the dots, you press those keys together.
And so, of course, it is a lot like an old typewriter, even have the bell.
So that's kind of the original way when I first started. Of course, technology's made it all different.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:33] Speaker C: Did your parents learn how to use that if they wanted to leave you a note or.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: So my parents started learning a little bit of braille.
They had some books that would actually just have, like, the dots drawn and they could learn the Alphabet. I think they got pretty much as far as learning the Alphabet and didn't get any further. So I don't think they ever left a note that way or anything.
But, yeah, they tried to learn some, but they didn't stick with it very long, I don't believe. Yeah, you have to do it a lot to practice.
[00:15:08] Speaker D: How big are braille books?
[00:15:10] Speaker A: So very big.
So, you know, the print in the textbook, you know, it's quite small. The braille symbols are much larger, and it also makes them thick. So, for example, in one of my math classes in high school, it was 80 books for the one textbook.
So we had like, two shelves in that classroom of just my textbook. Why?
So I, you can imagine that to get around school, I had like a rolling suitcase instead of a backpack.
The worst part was somehow they'd give us homework problems, and it always meant I needed two volumes because it would, you know, it would be like a few pages in this one and then a few pages in that one, but they're very big. And usually the braille volumes aren't the normal, like eight one, two by eleven, you know, printer paper, it's on a larger eleven by eleven inch, so it's more of a square. So it's bigger that way, and then it'll be 80 of them for a book.
And so I did a lot of. For some of my classes, we actually were able to get an extra copy of the book to have at home, which just meant we had boxes of the braille volumes at home.
And that at least meant I didn't have to carry them to and from school. But in college, they would have to braille for my engineering and math classes. And so I would have boxes in my dorm room of the braille books. And then there were braille diagrams that I would get that would be on, like, really long, wide paper, so they'd be rolled up like scrolls and I'd have boxes of those.
And we always joked that we could have a really awesome bonfire at the end of each quarter when the classes were done.
Exactly. Yeah, it was a lot.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: So do you like to read a lot?
[00:17:05] Speaker A: I do.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: When you read books, is it hard to get books that other people read in braille?
[00:17:12] Speaker A: So getting it in, like, you know, hard copy paper braille is more difficult these days. Thankfully, since I can get things electronically and download them and then read them with the refreshable braille display, that makes it a lot easier.
But it is, it is a challenge. If you actually want the hard copy, you know, book, that's definitely more difficult.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:35] Speaker C: Would you say you have stronger other senses?
[00:17:38] Speaker A: So that's probably one of the most common questions people ask in school. It wasn't asked quite that way. It was. So you're like daredevil, right?
It was like, well, yeah, there's like a knife in my cane. Yeah, sure.
And so that's definitely something most people assume. I always, I personally think it has more to do with your brain adapts to what it does most.
So it isn't that. It's not really the sense that, like, your hearing just improves, but if you focus on it, your brain is going to kind of rewire and put more resources toward it.
And so it's also just, you notice things like it's, you know, we're recording this on this 3d microphone, but I've talked to a lot of people and I'll say, you know, we hear in three d, and they go, we do?
And it's like, well, yeah, it's like, you know, if somebody's on a balcony above you and they say something and you look up, you know, how did you know to do that? And I was talking to somebody, he goes, well, I just. I got lucky, I guess. They were up there. It's like, well, no, your brain said they're up there, right? So a lot of people just don't pay attention to those kinds of things. But when it's your main way to interact with the world, you. You learn all of that a lot more.
[00:18:57] Speaker D: Do you blind people own a car?
[00:19:00] Speaker A: So I don't currently. I always laugh because I get calls saying that the warranty is expiring on my car.
So, you know, I always ask them, well, which of my cars?
You know, I've got fancy cars. Which car is it? But my braille instructor told me that the best thing to do as a blind person was to get a nice cardinal because you would never have to work hard to get your friends to give you a ride.
If they thought it was really cool to drive your car, they would do it all the time.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: And she actually lived kind of out about 1520 minutes from town, kind of out in the middle of nowhere. And so she had somebody that once a week would take her to town to get groceries and stuff. So she had her own car, and they would always take her car. So she was paying for gas. And, you know, it wasn't a. Putting more miles on her friend's car.
And so she did that as sort of a way that it was easy for them. It didn't cost them anything, but she had someone who was easier to get people to do that. So I don't currently, and who knows? But it was pretty funny. She definitely gave me that advice, get a nice car. You'll never struggle for a ride again.
[00:20:16] Speaker C: That's smart, because you have some girls in the room that would come down and drive.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I needed to go. I will.
Very good.
[00:20:24] Speaker C: I have a question about grocery shopping. Do you go into the grocery. Do you want to ask it? How do I go?
[00:20:30] Speaker D: Do you go into grocery stores? And if you do, how do you know what's on Pacific Isle?
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Sure. So I. These days, it's a lot easier to have delivery. You know, you can get your groceries delivered. That's usually the easiest I have before gone. You know, I'd walk to the grocery store and. And usually I would go to the customer service desk and ask for somebody to help me, and they'll. And I, you know, you would print out a list of what I wanted so that they could do it in, and they'll write order based on where things are in the store, and they would help me pick things out so that. That's usually how I would do it if I went into the store. Yeah, that's a good one.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: That's awesome.
Oh, how do you, so when you go to restaurants, how do you know what's on the menu? Like, how do you know what to order?
[00:21:20] Speaker A: So I am the kind of person that at 31, it's more like I'm 70 and I walk in and they just know what I want because I don't like having to figure that out all the time. But if it's a new restaurant, I'll have someone read the menu. If I'm by myself, the waiter or waitress will help with that.
Or if I'm with somebody, they'll read it.
And so that's kind of the typical thing. Of course, now you can get menus online, but some restaurants will actually have their menu in braille.
I have found most of the time it's not kept up to date, so that can always be kind of interesting.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: And like a textbook, they're very big. So there's a restaurant I used to go to a lot in California that their braille menu, I think it was about 100 pages. Whoa.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: So it had a table of contents in the front. It's pretty funny to open a menu and you've got to go through a table of contents and it's like pizzas and pastas and it's like page 64.
So, yeah, I actually, in high school for a little bit, I was experimenting with starting a business making braille menus.
Almost got a couple restaurants to do it, but, yeah, that's not super common, but when they have them, it's really nice.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I bet.
So I know you're like 100% blind, but do you see light and dark or do you see day and night? If that makes sense.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So when I was younger, like I said, I had some vision when I was really young and I was reading, like, letters would have to be, you know, three or four inches tall and pretty close to my face to read them.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: And then it sort of faded and I got to the point where I had a little bit of what we'd say, light perception, so I could see if the lights were on or off, that kind of thing, or I'd see shadows as I walked down the street.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: And that was kind of how I was when I got my first guide dog at eleven. And I had to do a lot of practice to not pay attention to it because when you have just a little bit of, it can almost be harder because it becomes a distraction.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: So I'll be walking down the sidewalk and I had enough vision that I'd see a shadow from a tree. But in my mind, it would say, ooh, a pull or an obstacle you might run into.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: And with a guide dog, they need to know that you're trusting them. So you can't react to that shadow and stop suddenly.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: You need to just say, if there's a something. If there is something I'm going to run into, this dog is going to go around it, and you have to trust. So when I was getting ready for that first dog I actually wore, we would go practice and I would wear a blindfold so that I just became completely comfortable with absolutely no light.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: And I would then take it off and I had to just say, okay, there's a little bit of light and shadows, but I have to pretty much just ignore it.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Today, I don't. I wouldn't be able to tell you if the lights are on or off or if you flip the switch. I wouldn't know what, you know, which way it went.
So today, nothing. But it's weird to me because I'm a very visual thinker, and I don't know if that's because I had vision before.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: But I always have a mental image, basically, of what's around me.
It's not detailed, of course. I don't know what people look like, but I kind of have an image of. There's a person there, my kitchen's over there, the tv's over. You know, a basic image of that.
So I do have that. So it's always kind of confusing. It's like, do you see? It's like. Well, no, I don't know that what I have in my head is correct, but there's always kind of something there.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: So it's kind of weird.
[00:25:04] Speaker C: Speaking of being a visual learner, let's talk about this microphone setup that you have.
Is that something that you see in your mind and then you put into action on how it would be suspended or.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Yeah, so most of what I do, it's sort of picturing in my head and sort of planning things out. Same as, like when I do 3d printing, I pretty much have to. Most people, when they design something, they'll, if it's software on their computer, they draw it and they can see what it will be.
I just have to have it in my head what I want and sort of do it that way.
So kind of the same with this. It's just thinking, okay, what's in the room, what's where, what could I connect things to all of that? Yeah, for sure.
[00:25:51] Speaker C: I love that I love that it goes along with defending the vision we talked about before, what a vision is, and that you still visualize things in your mind, right. Which is something I think we as sighted people take for granted.
[00:26:04] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Alright, well thank you guys so much. This was really fun having you guys on.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: You're all gonna be podcast stars now. Yeah, I really appreciate it. This is really cool.
Give a big virtual round of applause for these awesome guests. I hope you had as much fun listening as I did recording these two episodes.
Maybe we answered some burning questions or at least told some fun stories.
Come back next week for another awesome conversation.
If you would like to learn more, go to defendingvision.com and if you enjoyed the show, rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
