Week Four Recap

I missed two days of classes this week. On Monday, as feared, my ankle was still too sore from last week’s Goal Ball injury to walk, so I mostly stayed home and kept off of it (though I did manage a trip to the doctor and grocery store). I returned on Tuesday, and had a pretty eventful day – but a little too eventful, it turned out, as I walked far too much and reinjured my ankle in the process.

I probably wouldn’t have made it to class Wednesday anyway, what with a necessary day of post-election mourning; but the re-incapacitation of my leg made it a fait accompli.

In spite of the missed classes, however, I had another solid week with a couple minor breakthroughs. I can definitely tell my confidence in traveling under sleep shades is growing. Intersections that might’ve seemed intimidating in the first week or two are becoming more second-nature, as I refine my ability to orient for street crossings based on the sounds of cars passing parallel and perpendicular to me. On Tuesday I walked nearly a mile to the local DMV to vote, and on Friday, a fellow student and I hopped on the light rail to complete an independent assignment by locating a coffee shop. As a matter of fact, I will be starting with a new travel instructor on Monday. I was told that I should be escalating my travel progress and working on some more advanced skills.

Home management continues to be my greatest challenge, but, as noted in today’s other blog post, I am definitely making strides and have solved one of the big mysteries of blind cooking by learning how to tell when a piece of chicken is done cooking without seeing it.

I spent a lot of time in tech class this week familiarizing myself with VoiceOver for iPhone, which allows me to do most things a sighted user can do on a phone without the benefit of sight. VoiceOver reads aloud every option or button, cycling through the screen via a series of swipes and other gestures. You can also skip the cycling and just select items using your own spatial memory of the screen layout, which I am mostly able to do (thanks in no small part to my years using my phone visually.) I’m even getting pretty good at typing without seeing, although it’s a bit slower.

When combined with Siri, Apple’s voice-activated operating system, the iPhone is a remarkably accessible device. On Friday, I was creating playlists in Spotify, downloading and listening to the latest New York Times in Audible (spoiler alert: we’re in trouble), and even jumping around in a voice memo recording of the open mic I played on Wednesday evening. Next week, I’ll begin learning VoiceOver on my MacBook laptop as well.

Finally, my progress in Braille has slowed a bit this week as I begin to read single-spaced paragraphs instead of the double-spaced lines I began with. It’s oddly difficult to keep your place with lines stacked on top of each other, and to get from the end of one line down to the beginning of the next without getting lost. I’m also working to solidify my grasp of punctuation, which is somehow more difficult to retain than letters. To assist in this enterprise, I wrote out my own punctuation cheat sheet that I can refer to for reminders.

A word on Braille writing: it requires you to reverse everything you know. To write Braille, you place a sheet of paper in a device called a slate, which holds the paper in place and offers small, grooved spaces with Braille’s six possible cells to allow you to write your characters. Then you use a small pointy object called a stylus (like the needle and point on a turntable) to poke the cells which correspond to the characters you’re trying to write.

The trick is, you’re poking the paper from underneath so that it will be raised into Braille dots, which means you have to write backwards – right to left, with all characters in mirror image. As if that weren’t enough, it’s a painfully slow process (at least for a beginner like me), which means that it’s very easy to skip letters when you’re writing because your brain has already moved on to whatever you’re going to invert and poke next. All of which is compounded by the fact that it’s not practical to erase mistakes, and that it’s very easy to lose your place – at which point, you’re really in trouble because your only hope then is to count back from the far right to try to reconstruct what letter you’re on (assuming you can remember how you began the line you’re writing).

Next week, as mentioned, I’ll be working with a new travel instructor. I’ll also be spending my home management classes working to prepare for a massive Thanksgiving meal on Thursday the 17th. It should be a challenging but rewarding week.