Day 2 of Cinco De Goalball is underway and you can catch it here.

We can all use those boosts in our knowledge on how to work our smartphones and computer software. That’s why Freedom Scientific has the following events available for us in May. I’ve taken these from the Freedom Scientific blog and hope to attend a few myself.

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The Freedom Scientific training team offers ongoing opportunities for you to join us in live training sessions and advance your skills. We’re excited to announce our jam-packed May training schedule, where you’re sure to find something that will hel… Read on blog or Reader Freedom Scientific Blog Read on blog or Reader Join Us for Our May 2025 Training Events By Elizabeth Whitaker on May 2, 2025 The Freedom Scientific training team offers ongoing opportunities for you to join us in live training sessions and advance your skills. We’re excited to announce our jam-packed May training schedule, where you’re sure to find something that will help you at work, school, or play. If you have questions or need assistance with registration, email training@vispero.com. We also welcome your suggestions for future training events. Check the Freedom Scientific Training schedule for additional events we may post throughout the month. Schedule When What About Where Thurs, May 8 3:00 PM ET ACB Community Event: Access settings in Microsoft Edge with JAWS Learn how to access, search, and sync settings, plus manage important data in the Edge browser with JAWS American Council of the Blind  To request an invitation, email community@acb.org Thurs, May 15 Noon ET Software Webinar: Ten Tips for Managing Windows 11 with JAWS Learn how to manage notifications, use Focus Sessions, access settings, and more in Windows 11 with JAWS. ACVREP credits will be available for those who attend the live webinar. Freedom Scientific Register for this webinar, which takes place on the Zoom Conferencing platform. Thurs, May 22 3:00 PM ET ACB Community Event:  What’s New in the May Updates of JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion 2025? Join us to learn about new features and enhancements in the May updates of JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion 2025. American Council of the Blind  To request an invitation, email community@acb.org.   Comment

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When you think of Texas, you think big: big steers, big steaks, big prairies and deserts out West. This weekend, think big, fast-paced goalball in Austin as the Cinco De Goalball Tournament takes place from May 2-24. Games get underway 3:00 PM in Austin.

It’s going to be huge as eight men’s teams and six women’s teams are taking the court from all over the country. Check out these powerhouse names!

Women’s teams:

ECA Rampage

NJ HoneyBees

Philly Jawnettes

Lady Rattlers

San Antonio Fuego

BORP Renegades

Men’s Teams:

Manticores

Seattle King Cobras

BS PhillyJawns

ECA

Texas Rattlesnakes

Michigan Omega

New York

San Antonio Fuego

Players like Jordan Main, Josh Wellborn, Calahan Young, Jason Capati and many, many more will engage in some exciting competition and you can catch it live on the Texas Adaptive Play Initiative (TAPI) YouTube page.

So let’s let the good times and goalballs roll!

This thank-you Thursday is dedicated to you and your patience. Between last summer and this week, so much politics intertwined with a lot of blindness-related issues. Hence, in my desire to keep this blog as bipartisan or even nonpartisan as possible, I needed time to sort many things out. I took a long hiatus in order to do that.

Yet, I am so thankful that many of you stuck around and Boldly Blind is still in the top 100 blindness related blogs. What a joy and reinvigorated eagerness now has returned such that I am beginning to post again about blind athletics, guide dogs, mobility matters, and the other things that both encourage folks who are blind or low-vision and raise awareness of our capabilities and contributions among the greater public square.

After all, so much of real advocacy transcends bills, acts, and official decrees. Most real advocacy happens in doing blindness-throwing a competitor in judo, throwing or blocking that goalball, traveling on a walk with the guide dog, working, or  showing some class or group how your screen reader works-among many other things. Those things change hearts and minds!

Furthermore, while I myself love following political trends on both sides of the aisle, I don’t believe that interest needs to prevail here. There are much better venues other than here to get frustrated over who’s side  better favors the blindness community and which does not. Rather, being boldly blind is simply living out our capabilities, pushing ourselves to the max. As Anthony Ferraro says on his website, “The only disability is a bad attitude.” Being boldly blind, however we each express that, means we navigate life’s contours eager for what lies ahead as we desire to give the best of ourselves for one another and contribute to society at large.

So, let’s go to it! Time to keep on being boldly blind!

One of my favorite things to do on Boldly Blind is post about standout blind folks making a difference. So when I found out Anthony S. Ferraro will be the keynote speaker for the Braille Challenge in a few weeks, I had to find out more about him. Now, let me tell you, this guy is a badass, boldly blind, and doesn’t let anything get in his way. He’s a guide dog handler, does content creating and motivational speaking. He also does…judo! Yes, judo, and he’s training for the 2028 Paralympics which will be held in Los Angeles.

Check out this video about him and be inspired!

If you have found your way to this blog and have some degree of vision loss, no doubt you are using some form of screen reader. If you are navigating your smartphone to get here, perhaps VoiceOver has helped you along the way with a little bit of screen magnification.

Today we draw our attention to these techie bits because it’s a day after National Assistive Technology Awareness Day 2025, and who needs to stop celebrating though the official day is over. You can learn even more about the various State and national programs geared for getting the great talkie gadgets, braille displays, and magnification devices into our hands. There have been acts of Congress that have served our needs in this regard and help raise awareness of our capabilities among the sighted public. Check out this article here for more information on that.

Last year, I remember talking with the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired’s new computer teacher when we had our Last Blast gathering on March 23, 2024. It only took a half a second to see her enthusiasm for teaching kids of all ages the necessity of learning assistive tech since it permeates all areas of our lives. When I mentioned how I feel for those who try making it without screen readers or braille displays and so forth, she simply said, “You can’t.” And in today’s world, she is right. Assistive technology makes all the difference in our lives as people who are blind or low-vision.

So even today is ripe for keeping the celebration going. How? If you are going to your coffee shop or other location for a lunch break, take your computer or phone with you. Maybe, someone at the next table over will notice you typing and have some questions to spur on their curiosity. If you’re waiting in a doctor’s office, let your smartphone talk, even quietly. It’s okay that those around you see what’s going on. They will learn what help that voice gives you even if they are observing for a few seconds. Or if you are using your Kindle in public, don’t mind as someone who sees your cane or guide dog stops to take a look. They, too, can learn how we can read novels, textbooks, and manuals like anyone else just by sliding our fingers and double-tapping on the icons we need.

So Happy belated National Assistive Technology Awareness Day, everyone!

In the years, this blog has been on the web, no topic has excited me to cover than guide dogs. After all, how can you not love the big, furry friends that lead so many blind or low-vision people across streets, to and from work each day, while running errands, and any number of other of life’s activities.

Along with being great companions in harness, these loving dogs are great companions for their handlers/owners. It doesn’t matter if someone lives alone, has a spouse only, or has a whole family. Guide dogs add a tender and steady spunk for his or her person’s day. And for these reasons and more, we celebrate International Guide Dog Day on the last Wednesday of April each year.

Check out this fascinating article by the International Guide Dog Foundation. You’ll read of how these past few years have shown a recovery for the guide dog community since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21. While the pandemic was relatively short, the devastation society-wide was huge. Training, matching, and breeding guide dogs took a big hit. Raisers had to adjust their exposure of future guides to public events and gatherings. Now, however, much of normalcy is back in vogue and the guide dog community has proven resilient.

So if you are a guide dog handler/owner, hug your four-legged friend and tell him how good a job he’s doing for you. Brag him up to your friends and, when possible, show him off to some school, church group, or advocacy organization. If you are a raiser, love your pup with everything you’ve got. Give him all the attention, romp time, and obedience training possible. It will be worth it in the long-run. If you are a trainer, keep feeding, reliving, playing iwth, and teaching each dog as if he were your own dear child.

And we advocates of all stripes will continue standing up for access rights. We will recognize the great work that guide dog schools, matched teams, and raisers do.

So, “Juno, forward.” And we will follow our dogs along life’s contours.

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As the Paralympics wraps up for 2024, and Boldly Blind reignites, Fitness Friday hits the ground running with some great can-do encouragement toward boldness while navigating life’s contours.

I found this incredible article featuring several para athletes and along with some up-and-coming enthusiasts who have used their love for athletics to leap the hurdles resulting from their blindness head-on. Of course, you can check out the extreme sportsmen, too, like the great Erik Weihenmeier who lets no barrier stop him in staring down adversity.

Here’s the link to see these stories.

The Benefits of Staying Active in The Face of Adversity as Told By 16 Disabled Athletes

We’ve all heard the expression, There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Now, my wife and my furry felines would not so appreciate that one, but the saying is true, especially when it comes to navigating technology for us who are blind.

Let’s face it, most of us who learned how to use JAWS or NVDA or, if we are old enough, Windoweyes, learned one way of doing things for each task presented. While that’s helpful, that isn’t always practical.

For example, what’s the general method to save a document in Word?Many of us have been taught to hit Ctrl-S, type in the name of the document in the edit field and go to the button to save. That’s all fine and good. But what about using Word on the web or downloaded on your smartphone where the particular key combination may not be available? Double-tapping on an icon bringing you to the options for saving a document may work…or it may not.

It makes sense, then, that we do have as many ways of handling documents or saving files or other tasks as we have platforms where we interact with technology.

The difficulty that many blind people have is that we have been taught just one path for each command or sequence. Some people I’ve encountered have gotten frustrated when a job application or online portal will not respond to the commands they have learned. Having not gleaned more than one way of inputting information or saving their work, it’s easy to throw their hands up and wonder if the program or platform with which they are working is really accessible.

For the first-time blind or low-vision employee, this may create an unnecessary barrier of trust with a manager or team lead who is sighted. After all, many in the working public have the default setting that our desire or drive to be successful is all fine but our ability or resourcefulness is low. It’s easy for someone to think our job performance rests on how well we know our technology, let alone the tasks of collecting data, maintaining a caseload of clients, or fielding phone calls. So when we only know one way of handling key computer commands or our inability to trouble-shoot is deficient, suspicions will doubtless arise for those overseeing our performance. However, if we are taught more than one way of handling each task or learn it ourselves, we come to the office armed with a fare share of work-arounds and firmer grounding for the assurance we are bound to give our teammates and supervisors that we can handle our responsibilities.

Another benefit of having more than one way of handling each task at the desktop or monitor is that we won’t buckle under so easily if that dreaded blue screen of death freezes everything we are doing or the power goes out without warning. In today’s world of online storage options, we need to have our settings where everything we do for work or personal record-keeping gets saved for back-up use. With this in place, we won’t have to lose our cool. We won’t overreact when everyone else is tossed off-line and they need to use whatever click-point procedures to make sure what they have done doesn’t go into the unsaved cellar of cyberspace.

We have all been in those tight spots where our anxiety or exasperation is misinterpreted by some to be related to our blindness. Then comes the unnecessary hovering, doting, and questioning even though coworkers all around us are acting the same way in their frustration. So when we have to answer to our own pressure, having many ways of working the technology gives us that firmer cause to keep our heads held high.

So where do we get this ability to do things in more than one way on the web, in the MS Office Suite, and elsewhere? If you are being taught computers or are teaching someone who is blind how ot use the technology at our disposal, go beyond the bare minimum. Don’t rush through learning a task like saving a file or calculating data on Excel. Talk through points where you might need to trouble-shoot, especially when dealing with smart phones that get updates every time we snap our fingers.

Again let’s face it. As blind and low-vion users of technology, we need to know sometimes twice what our sighted counterparts do. We, like they, need to know what we are doing as far as the programs and platforms we are using. Second, we need to know our screen readers’ or magnifiers’ specific commands when interacting with Word, Excel, Power Point, and so forth. So find those creative ways of keeping up the skills in those programs that you normally don’t use. Make time to get a family budget on file, your to-do list in a bulleted or highlighted outline, your YouTube or Podcast library organized.

Then even when the braille display doesn’t show all the symbols, icons, or text,, you can still be refreshed to tackle by Screen reader alone what you can’t grasp when your fingers do the walking.

For lots of tutorials and other help with technology, visit http//www.freedomscientific.com or any other website for software adapted to navigate the web.

Since you are seeing a new post on Boldly Blind, you now know that I’m back in commission. For that, I say thanks to my Wife, Amy, who reminded me that I still hadn’t paid WordPress my upgrade fee. That meant the domain name would still be up for sale.

Now that I’ve made the annual payment for premium, it’s time to resume giving you the smattering of blindness-related news, trends, sports, culture, and the plethora of other good stuff that will hopefully get you thinking on matters pertaining to navigating life’s contours boldly blind.

Of course, this means I want to bring you up to date on the summer’s activities and highlights so we can get this fall semester rolling at a sprinter’s pace.

Update: Now you can get all the posts put to this site also on Facebook. The Boldly Blog and Podcast page will allow you to discuss things we talk about, ideas you would like to see and discussions with each other that I can join in and from which I can gain ideas for future posts.

Till next post, continue navigating life’s contours boldly blind!Thank You Thursday: For My Wife’s Reminder