AFB Blog

If you haven’t read this USA Today piece on what it’s like to be visually impaired, you should. Every year or almost every year, my friend Mickey Damelio includes me in his Florida State University class called the Blindness Experience, which he has designed over the years. I feel lucky to have gone to graduate school with Mickey at Florida State University. He became one of my first friends from the program when he asked me to attend the free MTV on Campus concert with his wife and him. He is…

Helen Keller fought for the rights of war veterans for over 40 years. The Helen Keller Archival Collection contains photographs and documents testifying to the extraordinary impact she had on the personal and working lives of the men and women who served and fought in the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War. One such document is posted and transcribed here. Written 94 years ago today, the letter is signed by 30 ex-servicemen who were tuberculosis patients. It is a thank…

We asked, you answered. Here are a collection of teacher comments made on the AFB Press Facebook page in response to the question, "What is your best advice or success about teaching reading skills to children who are blind or visually impaired?" “When I first became a TVI [teacher of students with visual impairments] I had a group of teens who were not very motivated to read or write. This was many moons ago and they wanted computer games for the brand new classroom computer (I won't tell…

Hello to all those Helen Keller aficionados out there! For this week’s look Inside the Helen Keller Digitization project, I am posting a newly photographed item (left hand image above) — it’s the receipt for an artificial eye for Helen Keller. On the right hand side is a photograph of Helen taken at the Perkins School for the Blind, circa 1888. The receipt is a wonderfully quirky piece of ephemera that made me stop and think – how did Helen wish to be perceived by an adoring public? In…

Struggles to achieve equality are never completely won. Allegations of bias and the tragic stain of racist violence dominate headlines decades after the Civil Rights Act was signed. American women strive—still—for equal pay in the workplace. And even as LGBT Americans celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmation of same-sex marriage, the response in some sectors of the country signals that their fight for acceptance is far from over. The lesson, always, is that no law or court decision…

Image: Inside pages from Helen Keller's passport issued December 1950, including headshot of Keller wearing a hat. This week on Inside the Helen Keller Digitization Project, University of California, Berkeley, English professor and author of Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller Georgina Kleege, describes her excitement at the prospect of gaining access to previously unavailable materials including transcripts of Keller's performances on the Vaudeville circuit, travel itineraries from her work…

Image: Helen Keller with Robert Irwin, feeling the vibrations from the speaker of a Talking Book playback machine in the library of the American Foundation for the Blind, no date. Welcome back to Inside the Helen Keller Digitization Project. Did you know that the American Foundation for the Blind was instrumental in creating the first Talking Book audio recordings? Mara Mills, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University has written this fascinating piece…

Image: Helen Keller holds baguettes and stands next to Polly Thomson, 1952 This week’s blog for Inside the Helen Keller Digitization Project is a wonderful piece by David Serlin, associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. Enjoy! One of my favorite objects in the Helen Keller Archives is this photograph of Keller and her secretary and companion Polly Thomson, taken in Paris in 1952. I discovered it, about five years ago, among a…

We are delighted to present the first of the many blog posts that will appear over the next two years as part of the Helen Keller Digitization Project. We are kicking off with a post by Kim E. Nielsen, professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo, and Helen Keller expert. Enjoy! Every year my spring is marked by phone calls, emails, letters and Skype conversations about Helen Keller initiated by nervous middle- and high-school students. These participants in National…