Tag: Accessibility

A Quartet of Image Descriptions for Paul Strand’s “Blind Woman” (1917)

A picture speaks a thousand words, so lay them on me! Paul Strand’s “Blind Woman” is the first photograph I wrote about as my writing sample for Face of the Blind: Essays on Photography, as part of my successful application to be a New York Public Library Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow this year. As I wrote in my proposal, image description is… Read more

Blindness, Disability, Accessibility, and Innovation * ACT Talk +Essay

ACT Equity Keynote, May 23, 2023 My flurry of travel speaking gigs in the spring finished with an online presentation for ACT (known for their college test). It touches on a lot of the #DownWithOcularcentrism/up with #BlindPride points I discuss in much of  my writing and have been developing in recent talks, where I also incorporate storytelling techniques to keep… Read more

Footnote on ‘Year of the Tiger’ by Alice Wong

Year of the tiger: An Activist’s Life (Vintage, 2022) by Alice Wong (editor of Disability Visibility) is funny and angry and silly and deadly sobering and so much more. It’s a collection of essays, interviews, and images on subjects ranging from accessible and inviting coffee experiences to the Chinese Lunar New Year, from media representations of disabled people to the… Read more

Looking at Ebooks & Accessibility With 20/20 Vision in 2020

One definition of legal blindness is having a visual acuity that is best corrected to only 20/200. That means that even wearing glasses, a person can see no better than 20/200 using the standard eye chart. It also means that a person who is legally blind may walk around without a white cane or guide dog, but nonetheless cannot read… Read more

Submitting: A Day in the Life of A Blind Writer, Essay 24 of #52essays2017

Yesterday I sent off a story–a rather sick and twisted tale that has disturbed the dreams of more than one workshop companion–to a reputable UK horror magazine using Submittable. If you’re not a writer, Submittable may be new to you, but if you are a writer, you can hardly avoid it these days. Submittable is the online hub of submitting… Read more

Rocky Mountain Coyote Motel, Liquor, Pawnshop, Cannabis, Essay 17 of #52essays2017

We left our friends and drove according to my awesome navigation (with a little help from my iPhone) through Rocky Mountain majesty, seeking a place to stay. Using the fully accessible Google Maps I found and wanted a cabin on Bear Creek, but we were too late for that–disappointing not only because Bear Creek provided a marvelous soundtrack of white… Read more