Story and Photos by Tri Duong, FOR THE SENTINEL
AURORA | Courage can be hard to summon knowing that death is at hand walking across a plank between skyscrapers — or just across a suburban street.
You don’t have to imagine the thrill and fear of seeing a wobbly plank at your feet, with miniature cars crawling along on the street far below. Superb virtual reality systems, complete with breezes and swooping birds, easily prompt racing hearts and ear-splitting screams.
The thrill and fear end as soon as the headsets come off. That’s not the case with unsighted people.
Colorado’s blind residents have been summoning superhuman courage for generations, and they continue to make history.
A blind woman from Aurora recently made history telling the tales of blind residents from long ago.
Three people with different perspectives about the “art” of blindness offer differing insights for everyone.
The Blind History Lady
Author Peggy Chong has penned a history of blind people across generations of Colorado residents, helping readers discover just how courageous so many have been. She says her ultimate goal is to make life better for unsighted people now.
In her book, “Cornerstones: Building the History of the Blind of Colorado,” she revisits heroic people like Judy Miller-Sanders. Chong recaptures Miller-Sanders’ journey to earning the right to be a blind teacher in the Cherry Creeks schools system in 1973.
For generations, assistance to blind people, and those with other disabilities came in drips and trickles, until July 26, 1990, when the Americans with Disabilities Act became law.
While the act was not a panacea, life for the blind before the vast federal mandate was filled with endless risks and few opportunities, Chong says in her book.
The book describes heroic Coloradans who didn’t wait for the ADA, they pushed toward it, one victory at a time.
In a society that is visually driven, and often barely accommodating to the unsighted, Chong says it would be wise to seek the insight of people who have a different take on “seeing is believing.”
In a home with walls painted bright blue and pink, Chong recalls how she came to dust off records of blind people.
The effort won her recognition as Aurora’s “Blind History Lady’ with the Jacob Bolotin Award at the annual convention of the National Federation of the Blind earlier this year. She won a $5,000 research grant for more work.
Peggy says she’s on a mission to document Colorado’s blind-residents’ achievements, helping to offer credit where it’s due.
With one partially-sighted eye and one blind from birth, Peggy builds a bridge between sighted people and blind people by writing about her historical data find.
It almost didn’t happen.
Under leaky water pipes at the Colorado Center for the Blind, a vast history was stashed in a void filled with letters and documents only threads away from disintegration, caused by a flood at the school.
“When we moved to Colorado five years ago, I learned of the flood, and from that unearthed all these papers…several were ruined but five boxes were not. Many of them were in handwriting, so we got it all digitized,” Chong said. “Even if they are digitized, the material was not accessible to blind people, our own history to read about.”
During the pandemic, volunteers worked on transcribing and uploading thousands of files to a free online library for the blind.
“One file was Elias M. Ammons, who was Governor as a blind person for the state of Colorado in 1913, which many people didn’t realize,” Peggy said. “He had no trouble going to the mountains, cutting trees and bringing the lumber back to Denver, but he didn’t think he could be a newspaper guy.”
Ammons was also responsible for the infamous Ludlow Massacre, ordering state troops to attack during a labor uprising. Ammons could see partially, but not enough to read or recognize people in a room.
“It is always the famous ones you hear like Helen Keller or Harriet Tubman; Hollywood gives a very inaccurate way of portraying life as a blind person; they like to think we are sexless or clueless,” Peggy said. “They were ancestors with talents and accomplishments who led a normal life. They have taken up jobs like piano tuners, movie theater owners, or sculptors.”
Cruise control was created for the sighted, it was made by a blind inventor, Ralph Teetor.
And not every invention for or from the blind is always helpful, she said. When it comes to the use of text to speech and speech to text, they are widely used, but there are flaws to the design.
“Not every website developer takes into consideration… how alternative text is implemented in their design. Sometimes the text-to-speech malfunctions and announces words like “click here,” “button” or coding languages,” Chong said.
Peggy said technology is a two-way street because it helps us communicate with ease, but it can also slowly take away jobs that blind people have adapted to in the past.
“Take for instance a piano tuner. There wouldn’t be a need for one if computers can do that with speed, accuracy, and it never sleeps,” Peggy said. “Jobs that we have learned with no sight are easily replaceable, so where does that leave us?”
Blind Motherhood – The Experiencer
Most people at the airport wear a deadpan face, their sight spent looking down at ubiquitous flooring bathed in artificial light.
Not Taylor Aguilar. She drinks in everything around her.
With bags packed, color coded and organized for travel, Taylor Aguilar’s newly found motherhood is an experience many would not imagine to be in, but her smile is unlike others.
Taylor’s loss of vision started in one eye when she was 13 and progressed to the other eye after a treatment for a medical condition known as pseudotumor cerebri in 2020, which further damaged her optic nerves.
At the time, she was pursuing a master’s degree in narrative filmmaking at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles — filming an autobiography titled “Sol” as her thesis.
Production came to a halt while Taylor went off to spend time at Colorado Center for the Blind. Her days of creating films slowly faded as a new reality of learning to live again became center stage – as if walking for the first time again.
Last year, there was a baby that came into the picture and her life.
With new insights into life from the unseen, she came back to finish the project, which required much traveling between her hometown of Pueblo and Los Angeles.
This journey to complete her project will soon be featured in a documentary known as “Taylor’s Vision.” A film by Steve Weiss, a former instructor of Aguilar in 2016 when she attended Colorado State University.
It was in stark contrast to days when she was losing her eyesight while undergoing treatment.
“After four weeks of treatment, I was at a complete loss of independence. My mom held onto my arms,” Taylor said. “I saw so many things, but it was not how you see reality, it was like someone kept switching out filters to different colors and focusing and unfocusing.”
Through the help of Colorado Center for the Blind programs, she has learned the modern braille system, and how to use a walking stick. She’s created a formula for environmental awareness in solo travels.
She has an Apple iPhone and watch and Siri with her wherever she walks — being able to use voice commands for a variety of tasks.
Life as a blind person came slowly and not altogether easily.
“It was harder to be distracted by social media, I didn’t have a fear of missing out when it started because everyone was locked inside, but that changed as the restrictions were slowly lifted and I never got to see what the world going back to normal looks like,” Aguilar said. “In dealing with classes, I was able to not skip a beat because of the privilege of having my family being able to hire a scribe.”
Taylor said that part of her journey now is being able to connect with her daughter, Violet, to make sure they can both navigate the two different worlds they see.
“I love to hold my baby, it is one of the most precious feelings, even though I might not see her, I talk to her and laugh with her,” Taylor said.
The Navigator – Mental health professionals
With experience of being a blind parent, Oleg Turayev, a psychiatrist based in Broomfield, has worked with the visually impaired for 15 years.
He knows what it’s like first hand.
His best advice? Parents should have more touch interaction while communicating with their children.
“My wife said that our sons started to talk to people as if they are blind, staring off into nowhere like how I look when I talk, so we had to teach them that it is still polite to look at people when talking,” Turayev said.
“In this case, because both parents are blind, it is important to teach the child to understand patience while growing up.”
Robin Ennis, a clinical social worker and therapist from Practice at a Glance in Englewood, recently went to a theater to watch the Barbie movie with the help of image and audio descriptions – she thought it was a wonderful storyline to experience.
Ennis’s complete vision loss started at the age of 18, however, she has managed to climb two mountain peaks and is continuing education to aid others to feel a sense of normalcy or to create grounding techniques through focused senses.
“The ADA is important, but another big one introduced is the 21st Century Communication and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), which by law states all movie theaters have to provide accommodation for disabilities,” Ennis said.
In the end scene of “Barbie,” the protagonist finally closes her eyes and realizes what it is to really feel and sense something different than the sight of Barbieland. It is an opening to the unknown that reveals to be the most meaningful metaphor.
Ennis and Turyev both agreed that it is blessed to not be able to use social media like everyone that was sighted. It felt freeing being able to stay in tune with what really mattered, they said.
Turayev, however, says he looks forward to creating new kinds of navigation for the blind, like wherever you point a phone it will recognizes objects and announce what is in front.
It would be a huge boon to helping blind people get work. According to the American Community Survey, 44% of people who are blind are employed and 10% are unemployed.
The blind, like the sighted, are among those who look back wistfully being careful what they wished for. The blind needs new technology that won’t make jobs they can do easier to do without humans.
“It is a fear to be replaced, but we should be optimistic to know it is only a tool to help people,” Ennis said.