What Can Blind People Do?Computer Programmer: LuAnne BullingtonPlumber: Allan GolabeckJudo Instructor: Lynn ManningMaster Chef: Danny DelcambreTV Network Executive: Jim StovallRelated LinksRelated Content
What Can Blind People Do?Do you wonder how a blind person carries out job responsibilities? Certainly the work you do is beyond someone with poor or no vision. How can someone possibly program a computer, do skilled trades work, teach a sport, prepare gourmet meals, or run a company if he can't see?
The reality is that most job tasks either have always been appropriate for qualified blind and visually impaired people or have been made so by recent and ubiquitous high-tech tools. There are blind doctors, blind lawyers, blind accountants, blind teachers, blind scientists and blind artists. Blind people work in trade, service and office occupations.
Blind people sometimes develop their own ways of doing the work. Often they turn to accommodations specialists to learn about and acquire adaptive tools. And often eyesight is not as necessary as you may have thought. As a computer programmer once said to me, "Really, a monitor is just an adaptive aid for sighted people. The monitor is not the computer. With speech or braille output, the monitor is just an extra piece of hardware you don't need."
I invite you to meet five blind or partially sighted people and hear how they have succeeded in their careers. They show that blind people can do the job in almost any field and, in the process, develop outstanding careers for themselves.
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Computer Programmer: LuAnne Bullington
LuAnne Bullington can list, among her many achievements, the simple fact that she's a computer programmer. "I was visually impaired, a woman, and pushing fifty looking for a programming job in a field that was, at that time, mainly a young man's turf." With two associate and two bachelor's degrees, Bullington took advantage of a college-sponsored work program to get her toe in the door. She stayed there four years. After other work opportunities, Bullington found a programming position through the newspaper at "a small local company which was desperate to hire a programmer -- any programmer -- on a very limited budget," she says. "I was willing to work cheap by industry standards, but it was a lot of money for the company."
- As a programmer, Bullington, who had severely limited tunnel vision due to retinitis pigmentosa, writes desktop Java applications, runs and manages a helpdesk and supplies office computer support. She explains how she works:
- "I set my computer and my code up so I can easily manage it. Since I have a very narrow field of vision, I keep the line of code I am working on in the upper left corner of my screen. I can only see a few letters at a time, so I have to keep a running tabulation of not just the letters that make up the words but the words that make up a sentence. It is tedious but faster than JAWS (a screen reader)."
Bullington's visual impairment actually makes her a better programmer than many sighted people. Her limited vision, she explains, requires careful organization of her code. "Many programmers write job security into their work so people have to go back to them to fix it or explain it," she explains. "Others just keep hacking their code until it works. Most people who work with me tell me my code is very clean, very easy to read, and extremely understandable. I don't have the vision or memory for either of those work approaches. Since my code is easy to read, short and to the point, it's also very easy to update and maintain."
Bullington has always been ahead of her time as a programmer. She was using Objects (
See Bullington Note below) long before it was common and sought peer review before it became standard practice.
She finds others who feel sorry for her quite amusing, since she has done well enough to buy a home and send her son to the University of Michigan. She also sits on a local advisory board that provides public transportation and works with local non-profits in a variety of ways.
Bullington is currently job hunting as the result of her company being bought out (she's in Michigan), so any employer there reading this article would be smart to snatch her up. She is currently developing web sites for non-profit organizations as a volunteer.
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Plumber: Allan Golabeck
High-achieving blind or visually impaired people don't have to be in high-tech jobs! I met Allan Golabeck through his passion for skiing, recognized by KeNevA, a business that sponsors diversity and environmental responsibility in the sport of water-skiing. Golabeck became totally blind as a result of a motorcycle accident.
Athletic even as a child, he spent many summers rock climbing with his father. Golabeck not only has not allowed losing his sight to stop him from participating in his favorite sports but has also pursued a career as a skilled plumber as well as woodworker and advocates for other blind people who likewise are interested in those specialties.
As an athlete, Golabeck has excelled on both a national and international level. He has received gold, silver and bronze medals in competition in the Paralympics for both water and snow skiing (including downhill, slalom, trick, and - yes -- jump. Asked if he is ever afraid during ski jumps, he jokes, "No, I close my eyes!" He is helping test a new device for visually impaired slalom skiers that helps them gauge their distances from slalom flags.
Golabeck is a licensed plumber and woodworker at his home in Connecticut. He relies largely on his own knowledge and skill in both areas but occasionally will ask to "borrow" someone's eyes. An all-purpose handyman, he has also dappled in auto repair; he has worked on friends' cars.
Golabeck is a member of America's Athletes With Disabilities and serves on Water Skiers with Disabilities Association's governing board of directors as co-director of the Eastern region and the equipment manufacturer committee.
Dedicated to public education, Golabeck is particularly interested in children who are blind. He demonstrates how he, a totally blind man, can participate in sports as well as do skilled work.
- The KeNevA web site provides this example:
- "Recently Al was contacted by an adolescent boy's parents because a wood shop teacher wouldn't allow the visually impaired youth to participate in operating power equipment. Al went to school, met with administrators, the teacher, parents and youth and showed them what he could do. The teacher was awed. You see the teacher was fearful of the unknown (as most folks are), but, once Al showed him this particular unknown was safe, the teacher was delighted to allow the youth to participate along with the other students."
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Judo Instructor: Lynn Manning
Athletic excellence and a desire to help blind children build skills are two of the characteristics Lynn Manning, a Californian, shares with plumber Golabeck. A talented artist, Manning lost his eyesight due to injuries sustained in a bar brawl.
Always physically active, Manning was looking for a way to keep fit after becoming blind when a friend told him about the Encino Judo Club. For more than 20 years, the club had worked with the Braille Institute youth center of Los Angeles to teach the principles of judo to visually impaired children and adults. He joined and, as they say, the rest is history.
- A profile published on the JudoInfo.com site traces Manning's path to a career as a judo instructor at the Braille Institute:
- "Those were the beginnings of a successful program that can boast sending five to seven athletes a year into international competition. In fact, the Encino Judo Club now serves as the host of the National Training Camp for Visually Impaired Athletes, which will begin instruction for this year's Paralympic team."
- Explains judo's founder, Jigoro Kano:
- "It's not a sport that relies on sight very much; it's more about feel and movement, like wrestling. It's a sport where a blind person can compete equally with someone sighted, which is rare. It gives the blind students a chance to feel capable and confident."
Manning has shared the benefits he gained from judo since first joining the Encino Judo Club. "The competitive aspect of a contact sport like judo really gives an outlet to the day-to-day frustrations of being blind in a sighted world," he says. "The sport lends itself wonderfully to the visually impaired. It helps you get from point A to point B with the ability to recover from unseen obstacles."
Now a former judo world champion, Manning is just one of hundreds of blind individuals who have trained at the Encino Judo Club.
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Master Chef: Danny Delcambre
The Seattle Times newspaper called Danny Delcambre "Seattle's can-do chef." And this is not the only recognition Delcambre has received. He has been recognized with the Award for Outstanding Small Employer of the Year, the 1995 Small Business of the Year in the City of Seattle, winner of the Washington Better Business Bureau Torch Award, the Gallaudet University's Amos Kendal Award and the Nordstrom's Salute to Cultural Diversity Community Service Award. Delcambre has served dinner to former President Bill Clinton and has been invited to the White House.
When Delcambre, who is both blind and deaf, applied to Paul Prudhomme's elite and exclusive cooking school, the colorful master (the famous Cajun chef) asked him two questions: "Are you Cajun? Can you use a knife?" Delcambre responded "Oui!" (yes) to both questions and was accepted. He now owns and operates The Ragin Cajun, known as "the most authentic Cajun cuisine in the Puget Sound area."
Delcambre, whose restaurant is located in Seattle's famous Pike Place Market, needs little more than an American Sign Language interpreter for his work, and that's only because he also is a motivational speaker known worldwide for his uplifting point of view. "I hang out with positive people!" he exclaims.
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TV Network Executive: Jim Stovall
Over-achievement appears to be the rule of the house for Jim Stovall. Another Olympic champion (in weightlifting), Stovall also is a motivational speaker, having shared the stage with the likes of Colin Powell and Christopher Reeve. He also has won an Emmy award. Stovall is totally blind.
A successful investment stockbroker, Stovall is co-founder and president of the Narrative Television Network (NTN). "Although originally designed for the blind and visually impaired," his site explains, "over 60 percent of NTN's nationwide audience is made up of fully-sighted people who simply enjoy the programming (and) has grown to include over 1,200 cable systems and broadcast stations, reaching over 35 million homes in the United States... NTN is also shown in 11 foreign countries."
Stovall not only leads the Narrative Television Network, which provides narrated descriptions of the visual content for the programs and movies it airs, but also appears as the host of the network's talk show.
He is an author as well -- with two books to his name so far: "You Don't Have to Be Blind to See" and "Success Secrets of Super Achievers."
So what was it you thought blind people can't do?!
Bullington Note:
"In programming and engineering disciplines, a component is an identifiable part of a larger program or construction. Usually, a component provides a particular function or group of related functions. In programming design, a system is divided into components that in turn are made up of modules."
- WhatIs.com
"In object-oriented programming (OOP), objects are the things you think about first in designing a program and they are also the units of code that are eventually derived from the process. In between, each object is made into a generic class of object and even more generic classes are defined so that objects can share models and reuse the class definitions in their code. Each object is an instance of a particular class or subclass with the class's own methods or procedures and data variables. An object is what actually runs in the computer."
- SearchEnterpriseLinux.com
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