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VISIONS
Canadian Council of the Blind Newsletter
Summer 2021
“A lack of sight is
not a lack of vision”
Editor’s Message
The summer is finally here! As the country slowly opens back up, I hope all members are getting to spend some relaxing time with family and friends. This is a bonus summer newsletter edition to tie our members over until September, when CCB Chapters really get back into the swing of things!
Enjoy the read, and have a wonderful summer—Mike Potvin, Editor.
Announcements
In Memory: Bob Comba
It is with heavy hearts that we announce that on Friday June 11th we received news that Bob Comba had passed away. Bob had been in Kelowna General Hospital for a number of weeks after contracting Covid-19.
Bob is survived by his wife, Barb, who was also an active participant in the Kelowna Blind Curling program, in years gone by. Both Bob and Barb attended and participated in at least 10 Canadian Vision Impaired Curling Championships.
As lead, Bob played a key role in the tremendous success that the rink from Kelowna BC enjoyed, winning an unprecedented 7 Canadian titles in a row. As well, the rink added a silver and bronze to their list of outstanding achievements.
Bob was instrumental in establishing, retaining and supporting the Blind Curling Program in Kelowna. His tireless efforts in promoting the sport, locally, provincially and nationally were instrumental in growth and success of Blind Curling.
Along with his curling ability, Bob’s friendly demeanor, humour and love for entertaining us all with his vocal skills and guitar playing, will be sorely missed, but not forgotten.
RIP Bob Comba, a true Champion!
Submitted by the CVICC Organizing Committee
AIRA Provides Covid-19 Vaccination Support World Wide
As COVID-19 vaccination efforts expand, it has become clear that many websites and processes to register, set appointments and navigate spaces for the vaccine are not fully accessible to those in the blind and low vision community. While it is the responsibility of government and healthcare entities to comply with the law and ensure that their platforms and processes are accessible, and while the community will continue its advocacy efforts, we cannot wait to get the vaccine. Therefore, AIRA is introducing the COVID promo to assist the Explorer community in obtaining these crucial vaccines. For up to 30 minutes per day, Explorers may use Aira free for vaccine-related tasks.
AIRA agents can assist people in the following ways regarding their COVID vaccinations.
- Researching if Explorer qualifies and determining places to register and receive vaccinations
- Assisting with registering for and scheduling vaccination appointments using TeamViewer on the computer or TeamViewer Quick Support on the smartphone
- Navigating locations where vaccines are provided such as health care centers, public health facilities, and drive-up sites
- Assisting in scheduling second vaccination appointments
This promo does not cover:
- Non-vaccine-related COVID research
- Transportation to and from the vaccination site
- Registering others outside of the immediate family for vaccinations
COVID testing
In order to provide this promotion, AIRA will be limiting our promo to one 30-minute call per day through the end of 2021.
The staff and agents here at Aira wish you and yours the best of health.
Learn more about Aira at
IMAGE (Internet Multi-Modal Access to Graphical Exploration) Project
As is well known, the vast majority of internet graphics are not accessible to non-visual users. To tackle this problem, McGill University’s Shared Reality Lab, in strategic partnership with the Canadian Council of the Blind (CCB) and Gateway Navigation CCC Ltd, is working on the IMAGE project, funded by Innovation Science Economic Development Canada through the Assistive Technology Program.
The project’s objective is to develop multi-modal feedback (audio and touch) tools enabling users to gain a deeper understanding of internet graphics than is presently available to blind, deaf-blind, or low vision users. The project team is actively recruiting participants, inviting volunteers to complete the on-line survey (available both in English (https://forms.office.com/r/i6yNMKhBdA) and French
(https://forms.office.com/r/ubq0NHbdaQ)), to work with the researchers in developing tools to facilitate graphical exploration on the internet.
To get involved or for more information please visit the link below:
Government Engagement on the Disability Inclusion Action Plan
Opened on June 4, 2021 and will close on August 31, 2021.
The Government of Canada is consulting Canadians on how to improve the lives of Canadians with disabilities. Your feedback will support the development of the Disability Inclusion Action Plan.
The Disability Inclusion Action Plan will focus on:
- reducing poverty among Canadians with disabilities
- getting more persons with disabilities into good quality jobs
- helping meet the Accessible Canada Act goal of a barrier-free Canada by 2040
- making it easier for persons with disabilities to access federal programs and services
- fostering a culture of inclusion
How to participate
Share your ideas online
Please complete the online survey.
Participate by mail or video
You can also print, complete and mail the survey by August 31, 2021 to the address in the contact information below.
The pdf for printing can be found on our website at https://ccbnational.net/shaggy/2021/06/10/governement-engagement-on-the-disability-inclusion-action-plan/
Video responses
You can also submit an ASL or LSQ video of your responses to the email address in the contact information below.
Who is the focus of this consultation
We invite all Canadians to participate in this consultation. We want to hear from:
- persons with a disability
- organizations working with persons with a disability
- caregivers or family members of persons with a disability
- persons identifying as First Nations, Inuk (Inuit), Métis or Indigenous
- members of racialized groups, the LGBTQ2 community or an official language minority community
- all Canadians
Key questions for discussion
The survey asks questions about:
- financial security
- employment
- disability-inclusive spaces
- a modern approach to disability
Related information
ESDC Consultation and engagement activities privacy notice statement – Canada.ca
Contact
Disability Inclusion Action Plan
Employment and Social Development Canada
140 Promenade du Portage, Phase IV
Gatineau QC K1A 0J9
Email: Accessible-Canada@hrsdc.gc.ca
Library and Archives Canada launches the Price McIntosh Bursary to support diversity in Canada’s libraries and archives
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is excited to announce the launch of its new Price McIntosh bursary, which was made possible by the generous support of the Price McIntosh family.
This funding opportunity provides financial support to Indigenous persons (First Nations, Inuit and Métis Nation), persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities who wish to pursue studies in fields related to libraries and archives.
LAC will award up to $10,000 per funding cycle: $5,000 per selected student registered in full-time studies and $2,500 per selected student registered in part-time studies at Canadian colleges or universities for the 2021-2022 academic year, in a program that leads to a career in libraries or archives.
All eligible students are invited to submit their applications for the 2021-2022 academic year by October 15, 2021, at 11:59 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time).
Guidelines, eligibility criteria and the application form are available on the Price McIntosh Bursary web page. For any questions, or to request alternative formats, applicants may contact LAC:
Phone: 819-997-0893 (or toll-free at 1-844-757-8035)
TTY: 613-992-6969 (or toll-free at 1-866-299-1699)
Email: bourse-bursary@bac-lac.gc.ca
Website:
Canadians concerned about disability poverty, on-board with proposed new national benefit
Survey of Canadians living with disability underlines relative poverty, other social barriers
Recognizing the challenges faced by Canadians with disabilities — problems that have only been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic — the federal Liberal government laid out plans to help in its September 2020 Speech from the Throne. The government promised a new Canadian Disability Benefit, modeled after the seniors’ guaranteed income supplement. Details since the fall have been scarce, but in the spring budget the federal government set aside almost $12 million over three years to consult and reform existing programs and benefits with an eye towards the new unified benefit.
Support for the benefit is evident, according to a new study by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute in partnership with the Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network (PLAN).
Nearly nine-in-10 (89%) Canadians are in favour of a Canadian Disability Benefit. That overwhelming support comes perhaps because most (59%) believe the current supports and benefits available to people living with disabilities are inadequate.
It is also desperately needed, according to Canadians living with disabilities. Many of the more than 800 Canadians living with disability surveyed report experiencing financial stress, express less satisfaction with their personal life and have less hope for the future than those without disabilities. Respondents with disabilities also say they face barriers to employment, education, and activities they would enjoy. These barriers are even more pronounced for those with lower household incomes.
Here’s some more of what the survey had to say:
- Canadians understand living with a disability comes with a higher cost of living, and two-in-five Canadians living with a disability report that they are stressed about money often or all the time.
- People with disabilities are dissatisfied with their personal happiness (28%) and their outlook for the future (36%) at nearly the double rate of those without (15% and 19%, respectively).
- Awareness of current benefits is low. Both people with disabilities (67%) and people without (59%) say they are either not very familiar with the supports available or do not know anything about it.
- There is very little confidence in the provincial or federal government in managing current supports or benefits. Three-in-five (62%) say they have no or little confidence in the federal government to manage it while two-thirds (67%) say the same of their provincial government.
- The majority of people (57%) believe the Canadian Disability Benefit is the right thing to do, and 88 per cent agree with the statement “A CDB is an essential commitment for the government to make. It’s time the country came together to end disability poverty.”
- And nearly two-thirds (63%) believe the CDB should be set above the poverty level.
- Most people surveyed (74%) believe the three-year consultation timeline for the CDB is too slow.
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In The News
The Boy Who Learned to See—and What He Teaches Us About Vision
By Susan R. Barry, The WALL STREET JOURNAL
To ask a blind person to acquire the sense of sight after childhood is to ask them to reshape their identity. They may have functioned quite independently when blind but now find themselves as vulnerable as a young child. With their new sight, they can see but cannot recognize a flight of stairs or a loved one’s face. Bombarded by visual stimuli they don’t understand, many who gain sight in adulthood become despondent, reject their vision or even lose the will to live.
At first blush, vision seems a purely mechanical process. Photons hit the light-sensing pigments in the retina of the eye, triggering a cascade of electrical and chemical events that send signals to the brain about light, color and motion. Yet these events tell only part of the story. Even if we all possessed identical sensory structures, we would each perceive a different and very personal version of the world, a version built upon our experiences, needs and desires.
As the philosopher Alva Noë has written, “Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.” We move our body, head and eyes to look and listen, to take in information about the world. Since we direct what we see, developing vision as an adult is an intensely active process. A new pair of eyes won’t lead to vision unless the owner of those new eyes pays attention to what he is sensing and figures out its meaning.
I first met Liam McCoy in 2010, when he was 20, five years after he had undergone sight-restoration surgeries. The operations added a powerful artificial lens to each eye without removing the eye’s natural one. I was introduced to Liam through his surgeon, Dr.Lawrence Tychsen, a professor of ophthalmology at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. T. (as Liam calls him) cares for children with neurological impairments, often so severe that other doctors consider them too difficult to evaluate and treat.
From the moment Liam was born, it was obvious that there was something different about him. His hair was metallic silver, and blood vessels were plainly visible through his very light-colored skin. “Oh my God!”
the nurse exclaimed as she rushed from the delivery room. Moments later, she returned with the doctor, who took one look at the newborn and hurried out too. When the doctor returned, Cindy, Liam’s mother, now deeply concerned, asked what was wrong. “Oh, he’s a towhead; he’s a cotton-top,” the doctor responded.
Liam wasn’t completely blind, but his zone of clear vision extended only 3 inches from his nose.
From the start, Cindy suspected that her child had albinism, a diagnosis that was confirmed when he was 17 months old. Albinism, or a lack of the pigment melanin in the hair, eyes and skin, is a rare condition, affecting only one in 17,000 people. Since Liam’s eyes lacked melanin, he was extremely sensitive to bright light. He also had nystagmus, an involuntary oscillating movement of the eyes. As a child, Liam told me, he could not willingly look at anything.
Albinism wasn’t the only source of Liam’s poor vision. He was also extremely nearsighted. Dr. Tychsen explained that Liam was living in “a cocoon of visual blur.” He wasn’t completely blind, but his zone of clear vision extended only 3 inches from his nose. As a result, his visual development was severely disrupted, and the surgeries he underwent at age 15 were only the beginning of his vision restoration.
Liam had surgery on one eye in December 2005. Surgery on the second eye followed five weeks later. There was no sudden “I can see!”
moment. Liam’s eyesight was supposed to stabilize in six weeks; instead, it took months. But when it did, his visual acuity had vastly improved. Before surgery his acuity was 20/2000 without glasses and 20/250 with the thickest lenses. Six months later, with no glasses, he was seeing 20/50. His albinism prevented him from seeing 20/20.
Nine months after the second surgery, one of the lenses moved out of position, causing Liam to experience double vision. The lens was replaced, and this time the improvement in acuity was immediate. The gains in acuity after the first two surgeries may have occurred gradually because it took the brain some time to process all the new information that the eyes could now provide. Not only did his acuity improve tremendously, but his nystagmus was reduced. Reds no longer faded for Liam as the day wore on (though blue remained his favorite color). His binocular vision improved, as did his depth perception, albeit slowly.
But the improvements were discombobulating. Surgery plunged Liam into a world of sharp lines and edges. He now saw lines wherever there were changes in color, light or texture; where one object ended and another began; where an object in front occluded an object behind; and where a shadow was cast on a surface. While we all see lines at the boundaries of objects or shadows, we know where these lines belong. We recognize an object immediately—all of its parts combine together, instantly and effortlessly, into a single unit. But after a childhood of near-blindness, Liam did not recognize the lines as boundaries of known objects. Instead, he saw a tangled, fragmented world.
For most of us, vision feels so seamless because it results from a combination of “bottom-up” and “top-down” processing. “Bottom-up”
implies constructing the visual world from the smallest pieces of visual information. These details are, in large part, handled by neurons in lower areas of the visual cortex. But we cannot think of these neurons as responding only to the “bottom-up” stimuli that our eyes provide. Their activity is modified by input coming from their neighbors as well as from other regions of the brain.
Prior experience, past associations and our level of attention all influence the firing of lower-area neurons, a process that depends on feedback from higher visual areas and is therefore called “top-down.”
Since we all have different experiences, needs and desires, “top-down”
influences differ from person to person. We all see the world through our own perceptual lens.
After his surgeries, Liam’s eyes provided his neurons with the input they had long been waiting for. But he lacked the visual experience of seeing beyond a few inches, so he had not yet developed the “top-down”
processing that organizes these local details into coherent objects and landscapes. As a result, he had to rely heavily on “bottom-up” processing and consciously piece together the visual world from its parts.
“Up close,” Liam wrote, “things are more like objects than visual chaos, but there is a definite difference when I see something further away. Those objects have no meaning, and I struggle to tell if a bar of color is the front of a truck or side of a bus or roof of a building. If people even stand slightly further away and talk to me or say hi from down the hall, it has a very different feeling, and it doesn’t seem as real.”
Throughout childhood, Liam lived and went to school with sighted people; he had to infer what others saw, requiring great powers of analysis and imagination. After his surgeries, he used these same skills to decipher what he could now see. As he began to recognize individual objects among the confusion of lines, he most likely developed new networks in higher object-recognition areas of the brain. Neuronal connections, like ruts in the road, deepen with use.
With each day, Liam’s vision became more “top-down,” providing more meaning to his visual world. Although he can recognize many more objects today than he could right after his surgeries, Liam still struggles to recognize faces. Prior to receiving his intraocular lenses, he couldn’t see details on another person’s face; their nose and mouth were just a blur. Right after his first surgery, Liam was disgusted when he saw the way that his mother’s mouth moved when she talked. He knew that his mouth moved when he spoke, but it was a revolting shock to see the details of the red lips and tongue in others.
Indeed, without a holistic sense of a face, it was impossible for Liam to recognize people from moment to moment. Their faces transformed entirely when they changed expression or talked. Problems with recognizing faces and facial expressions are very common among people with long-term blindness who gain sight as adults. Even people blinded by cataracts from birth whose sight is restored within the first year show some deficits in face recognition.
Though we are not born with an innate ability to recognize household or most natural objects, we may be born with a rudimentary face-detecting skill. Infants just nine minutes old exhibit a preference for looking at a human face. This remarkable fact was discovered during an experiment in which different pictures were moved across a newborn’s field of view. When a face pattern (an oval for the head, enclosing shapes that looked like eyes, a nose and a mouth) was waved in front of the baby, the child would turn his or her head and eyes to follow the pattern. But if the features were all mixed up so that the pattern no longer resembled a face, the infant did not follow the pattern as reliably or for as long.
One area of the brain that is particularly active when we look at faces is called the fusiform face area. Intriguingly, this same area “lights up” when expert chess players look at a chess board. Why would an area of the brain important for the recognition of faces be activated in chess experts when they view a chess game?
To recognize a face, we need to see more than the eyes, nose and mouth. We must analyze the spatial relationships among all of these features. Similarly, an understanding of the spatial relationships among game pieces is crucial for winning at chess. The fusiform face area is good at recognizing global spatial patterns. Circuitry present at birth or soon after and an infant’s preference for looking at faces likely bias the fusiform face area to become a face recognition area.
That role is bolstered further by our lifelong experience with viewing faces and the importance of face recognition in everyday life.
Liam assigns the way people look to broad categories based on the features that he sees best—short or long hair, glasses or no glasses.
One of the first people he recognized with his new vision was his college professor, Joe. Here’s what Liam wrote in an email to Dr. Tychsen in 2012: “Joe has black and gray hair and a mustache, and I recognize hair best instead of faces. Especially mixed color hair and facial hair (even though when I look away I can’t definitely describe it). So when I recognized him automatically on campus outside of class, I had to go tell him how special it was and that he was the first person I recognized like that.”
With facial expressions, too, Liam ran into problems. Eight years after his surgeries, I showed him a set of cartoon faces displaying all sorts of emotions, including happy, surprised, skeptical, disapproving, confused, fearful and sad. He told me that the only expressions he really understands are happy and sad. But he may be picking up more information from faces than he is aware of. His own appearance has changed. When I first met Liam, he didn’t look directly at me, hardly showed any expression on his own face and spoke quietly.
He has since become more animated, and when I see him now, his face breaks into a big smile.
A person’s ability to adapt and learn involves more than structural changes at synapses. Every time we witness performers at a circus, symphony, ballet or professional ballgame, we are seeing the results of neuronal plasticity. While these performers may possess natural gifts, they wouldn’t have achieved the elite level without a singular focus and years of intense practice. Neuronal plasticity and learning require active training. In his book “Rebuilt,” about learning to hear with a cochlear implant, technology theorist Michael Chorost wrote that he had to become an “athlete of perception.” Only by tirelessly experimenting and practicing with his new sense, only by becoming an athlete of perception, could Liam begin to understand what he sees.
Liam worked so hard on his new vision that Cindy, his mother, sometimes wondered whether he should have undergone the sight-restoration surgeries at all. Despite these difficulties, there were times when watching Liam learn to see had all the magic of watching a very young child discover the world. Since vision for Liam is such hard work, he rarely describes what he sees as beautiful, but Cindy remembers one morning when she and Liam were up with the sun and he saw dew for the first time. “It’s like Christmas lights on the grass,” he said.
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