Coping with Blindness: Personal Tales of Blindness Rehabilitation

202 Pages·1998·0.51 MB·English

by  Alvin Roberts

Coping With Blindness : Personal Tales of
title:
Blindness Rehabilitation
author: Roberts, Alvin.
publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0809321602
print isbn13: 9780809321605
ebook isbn13: 9780585186443
language: English
subject Blind--Rehabilitation--United States.
publication date: 1998
lcc: HV1795.R63 1998eb
ddc: 362.4/1/092273
subject: Blind--Rehabilitation--United States.
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Coping with Blindness
Personal Tales of Blindness Rehabilitation
Alvin Roberts
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale and Edwardsville
Page iv
Copyright © 1998 by Alvin Roberts
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
01 00 99 98 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberts, Alvin.
Coping with blindness: personal tales of blindness
rehabilitation / Alvin Roberts.
p. cm.
1. BlindRehabilitationUnited States. I. Title.
HV1795.R63 1998
362.4'1'092273dc21 98-6840
[b] CIP
ISBN 0-8093-2160-2 (alk. paper)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Page v
To the few hundred committed teachers and counselors,
blind and sighted, who fan out across the nation every
morning, providing rehabilitation services to the sixty
thousand American citizens who become blind every year
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
Part One 1
Learning to Live with Blindness: Rehabilitation Teaching
1. Where's Willie? 5
2. The Braille Bible 12
3. The Missing Page 19
4. The Rehabilitation of Robert Ingersol 24
5. Color Blind 31
6. The Equal Opportunity Robbers 37
7. Beyond the Call of Duty 44
Part Two 58
Learning to Work with Blindness: Vocational Counseling
8. The Wrong Wright 61
9. The Wet Convertible 67
10. Behind the Shaking Door 75
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Part Three 81
Learning to Travel with Blindness: Orientation and
Mobility Instruction
11. Hold Old Sam 83
12. The Mobility Race 91
A Blindness Rehabilitation Glossary 105
Page ix
PREFACE
After forty years of enabling blind people to cope with the challenges
of living in a world of seeing people and striving to remove societal
barriers so that the blind could fully participate, I could not write a
book that did not convey a social message or intent. My intent (or, at
least, my hope) is that through these stories, some of the 1.7 million
Americans who are blind or are in the process of losing their vision
will be reassured that blindness need not be the end of active life but
rather the beginning of a life in which they will depend on their
residual senses. I hope that this reassurance will be conveyed by the
effectiveness with which the teachers and counselors portrayed in
these narratives assist visually impaired persons to reenter the
mainstream of society.
Beyond my desire to assure those experiencing visual loss that
competent professional help with the adjustment process is available, I
also wish to acquaint readers with the humorous aspect of the daily
work of this small, dedicated group of professionals. Those who
become blind bring to this unchosen condition the full array of
personality characteristics, including a sense of humor. In fact, some
of the funniest people I have known were blind. Take Bob Ingersol, a
blind man from my hometown, for instance. Many people who knew
and loved him were often the recipients of Bob's practical jokes. As a
high school student, far from home at the Illinois School for the
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Blind in Jacksonville, I looked forward to Bob's encouraging and
news-filled letters, which usually ended with such bits of earthy
humor as, "Some final advice from your friendly stock broker: Sit on
your American Can and hold your Water." Lloyd, a blind piano tuner,
would slip a few pieces of the family silver in the coat pockets of
friends who were visiting for the first time in order to enjoy their
reactions when he "accidentally" discovered these items while helping
them on with their wraps. Then there was Floyd, a lifelong friend,
who would respond to the inquiries of waitresses as to how much
cream he liked in his coffee with "just enough to see if there is a fly
floating in it." Of course, these people were serious, hard-working
folks most of the time, but, like their seeing peers, they had their
lighter side. I have observed that an active sense of humor is a definite
asset to those who are required to adjust to a life without vision, and it
certainly makes the work of the adjustment teacher or counselor less
stressful and more enjoyable. If these accounts can help to dispel a
commonly held notion that blind people are uniformly somber and
that those who assist them work under grim conditions, this book may
succeed in lowering society's generalized fear of blindness.
The motivation to write something that could provide emotional
reassurance to the public, particularly the elderly who are most at risk
of becoming visually impaired, has been with me for many years. The
problem was "packaging the message," as the advertising and public
relations people put it. My office and home library are filled with
books on how to live with blindness, including one I wrote,
Psychosocial Rehabilitation of the Blind, but, according to various
public opinion surveys, society's fear of blindness has not been
reduced by this wealth of published material. In order to succeed in
replacing fear, which creates myths and apprehension, with facts and
common sense, I believed it would be necessary to communicate
factual material about blindness by anchoring it to positive emotions
and optimisma formidable task.
We have known since antiquity that facts are remembered longer
when presented in stories of people and events. This is why most
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of us learn history better from historical fiction than from history
texts. At some point, it occurred to me that the most effective avenue
to the emotional acceptance of facts about blindness adjustment would
be to let the public read about real, believable people engaged with
their teachers and counselors in the process of learning to live with
visual impairment. Personal experience and conversations with
colleagues provided me with a wealth of incidents on which to base
stories of workers with the blind going about their daily tasks. My
task was to develop these incidents into believable stories, adding
descriptive material, action, and conversation to enhance plausibility
and create interest, amusement, or excitement. Although some
characters have been invented to round out the stories, several
colleagues who furnished material for a particular narrativesuch as
Louis Davis, Dorothy Dykema, Harker Miley, Edith Ingersol, and
Verle Wesselare named. And all of the accounts are factual and
accurate regarding counseling or instruction and blindness adjustment
techniques, strategies, and methods.