AFB Blog

Image: Helen Keller with children in Adelaide, Australia, 1948 The American Foundation for the Blind is committed to promoting the life and legacy of Helen Keller. We are the proud caretakers of her archival collection of over 80,000 items including documents, photographs, photograph albums, press clippings, scrapbooks, architectural drawings, artifacts and audio-video materials. The archives were first made available to researchers during the 1970s. Since then, historians, writers, film…

Everybody who works with people who are blind or visually impaired knows those reluctant technology adopters, or complete non-technology adopters. When the Pew Research Center says 15% of Americans are not connected, who are these people? They're in my singing group. Since I love technology more than singing, I at first found this puzzling. Technology is a tool to let me do things. I can listen to the songs I want to learn, record lessons and practice sessions, and listen to the key parts…

I learned a lot at the 2014 AFB Leadership Conference, but overwhelmingly people tell me that the conversation on leadership between AFB's CEO, Carl Augusto, and the J.W. “Bill” Marriott, executive chairman and chairman of the board at Marriott International, stood out as the conference highlight. Personally, I walked away from that session with some new tools in my career toolbox. Most of you know what a big fan I am of Marriott International and the Marriott family, but this conversation…

For today, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I'll try to answer a question I get a lot: "What can I send this webmaster to give examples of how to fix a broken site?" Here's what happens. You are a user of assistive technology, or a person who has low vision and benefits from well-designed, well-executed websites (have I described everybody? Who doesn't benefit from things being done right?). You visit a site that is important to you—your banking site, an e-commerce site where you want to…

I was delighted to see this article from the Nielsen Norman Group on why Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful. Placeholders are those words that lurk in your online forms, frequently an almost unreadable pale gray. The example the author provides in the article is a password field where the label "Password:" appears above the form field, and the hint "Must have at least 6 characters" appears as light gray placeholder text inside the form field. The intent is to help users, by giving an…

I like to talk about technology...but sometimes the outdoors just takes over. Last Sunday was the TD Five Boro Bike Tour, a fabulous event here in NYC, in which about 32,000 people ride bicycles through the city. I rode on the back of a tandem bicycle. See this great VisionAware article about tandem cycling to get inspired. So, what technology comes into play when cycling? Let's start with the bike. I rode with a new group in town, InTandem, which provided about twenty of us with bikes,…

Laura Bridgman, photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Ever heard of Laura Bridgman? Bridgman is generally acknowledged as the first deaf-blind child to be successfully educated. Here's an interesting article from Slate about her life titled "The Education of Laura Bridgman. She was Helen Keller before Helen Keller. Then her mentor abandoned their studies." As I read the piece, excerpted from the book For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches From the World of the Blind by Rosemary Mahoney,…

It's Teacher Appreciation Week, and we want to highlight one of our favorite teachers: Emily Coleman is a mother of three children, one of whom is visually impaired, and a teacher of the visually impaired (TVI). She is also the voice behind Raising a Child Who Is Blind and...", a popular FamilyConnect blog. We asked her to tell us what the Cogswell-Macy Act would mean to her as a parent and as a teacher. As part of a national campaign to better meet the special needs of students with visual…

This day in history (May 4th, 1897) New York City's five boroughs were consolidated. Helen Keller beautifully describes her love of the Big Apple in her 1929 biography "Midstream." Enjoy! I Go Adventuring Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream. In order to…