General Gale Pollock supports visually impaired kids affected by the earthquake in Turkey from WeWALK on Vimeo.

Last year, the Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind hosted its first annual “Lighting the Way” Gala at the French Embassy. Vietnamese-American chef Christine Ha received the Lamplighter Award and did a cooking demonstration for the audience. She has a long résumé of culinary accomplishments, including cookbooks, a food blog and an award-winning restaurant. In 2012, she won the MasterChef competition, of Gordon Ramsay fame. Christine is also blind.

Tony Cancelosi, the President and CEO of Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind, wants other visually impaired children to follow in her footsteps, achieving great things in spite of their disability. His organization is their support network.

A century ago, the world was an unfriendly place for the blind. Schools, the workplace and public infrastructure did not accommodate for them. The Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind (CLB), founded in the early 1900s, has been fighting to make the world friendlier for the visually impaired. First, it focused on helping the blind survive with life skills and, in recent decades, on helping them earn a stable living.

Tony Cancelosi, the current President and CEO, continues the fight. Before taking the helm 14 years ago, he served as CEO for several technology software companies, and before that, he was one of the founders   of education program now called Sylvan Learning. Helping others had always been a priority for Tony, serving on nonprofit Boards that fought for the disabled or for veterans.

Today the District is one of the most progressive places in the country for the visually impaired.
This is especially true in education. To help schools offer Braille instruction for visually impaired students, CLB trains and provides teachers. “Braille,” Tony says, “is what allows students to accelerate their learning. It’s how they will make it to high school and college.” It’s best to teach kids Braille when they are young so that they never fall behind. Tony and other community leaders are now working with Councilmember David Grosso to increase access to Braille instruction in D.C.’s public and public charter schools.

It’s also important to catch visual impairments early, preferably at preschool. That’s why the organization runs a mobile vision testing van, which offers eye exams. CLB looks forward to adding another Mobile Eye Care unit to the existing program, generously funded by Providence Health System and Ascension, to specifically serve Wards 5, 6, 7, and 8 in the District.

CLB also teaches life skills. It runs a youth pre-employment summer transition program where high school students spend three weeks at Catholic University. They do short internships, interact with faculty and learn how to live independently.

The organization fights for making day-to-day life easier to navigate for the blind, too. It developed an app for using the DC Metro and bus system and helps make websites more accessible. It’s engaging with Comcast to extend their messaging about the importance of accessibility.

Making a Treasured Painting Accessible This edition of 3DPhotoWorks’s accessibility newsletter focuses on the powerful impact one museum had using tactile technology to help visitors who are blind experience a painting by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Another article discusses how museums can work with the National Federation of the Blind to make museum exhibits more accessible. Buster Ratliff is the development officer at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, where one of the museum’s most treasured artworks was recreated in a tactile form, with sensors imbedded in the painting that revealed information as visitors explore the painting with their hands. Q. Buster, tell me about Art for Everyone, and how that initiative to make art more accessible to all museum goers, particularly people who are blind or low-vision, came to be at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. The vision started with seeing the 3DPhotoWorks booth at the American Alliance of Museums convention in Washington, D.C., in 2016. When we saw it, we knew it was something we had to do.  Q. Before you could launch this initiative, Panhandle-Plains needed to raise $25,000 to fund this project. John Olson, co-founder of 3DPhotoWorks, came to talk about the importance of making art accessible to blind visitors. Tell me how that talk was received by your members. John is such an amazing speaker and knows how to connect to an audience. His talk was a hit. In fact, we raised nearly half our goal that night and that would not have happened without John. Q. In 2018, you put on display a tactile version of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Red Landscape” to launch Art for Everyone. Why did you choose that photo to be the first to get the tactile treatment? “Red Landscape” is one of the iconic pieces in our collection. Besides being an O’Keeffe, it is inspired by Palo Duro Canyon, which is an important piece of our region. It’s a unique painting and not one that many would associate with the O’Keeffe style. And she painted it while she was a teacher at West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University) and our museum is on the WTAMU campus. For us, it was a no-brainer. Q. 3DPhotoWorks used its technology to produce “Red Landscape” in three-dimensional relief with imbedded sensors. When visitors run their hands over the painting, what information do they hear by activating the sensors? There are four sensors on the painting that describe the colors and look in that section of the painting. Below it there is some information about Canyon, Texas, in 1916 when the painting was painted; Dr. Amy Von Lintel, who is an art historian at WTAMU and an O’Keeffe expert, gives information about O’Keeffe; and then a reporter who interviewed her in the ’60s talks about what it was like meeting O’Keeffe. On top of that, all audio is in both English and Spanish. Q. How did blind visitors respond to “seeing” that famous painting for the first time? What about other visitors? The response was amazing. It was especially fun watching the first blind visitors “see” art. One visitor has been coming to the museum her entire life and had paintings described to her every visit. When she responded, “I now know what you’ve been describing,” we knew we were on the right path.  Q. Will you expand Art for Everyone and use 3DPhotoWorks technology to make other paintings accessible to visitors who are blind? Yes, we will. We have been renovating galleries over the last few years and the next step for us is adding more 3D reliefs of our permanent collection. We have four paintings we want to do that are important and iconic to our collection. I believe over the next several years you will see more and more 3D reliefs in our art galleries. Q. What advice would you give other museums who are trying to make their art and photography accessible to the blind? Do it. It is as simple as that to me. Art is something that in some form or fashion, whether people realize it or not, speaks to everyone. Everyone has a favorite painting. It could be “Red Landscape” or the “Mona Lisa” or even “Dogs Playing Poker,” but everyone has a favorite. And I am a firm believer that whether you are sighted or not, you deserve the experience of discovering your favorite.

...

ONE STEP FURTHER - Running Without Equal

Follow the link above to an inspiring article about two retired Army officers who finished one of the toughest ultramarathons despite the fact that one of them lost his vision while serving in Iraq.