Blind

MOSCOW -- In the blackness enveloping me, I can tell only that there's something squishy on my plate. Could it be a hard-boiled egg? Maybe it's cheese. No, it doesn't smell sharp enough to be cheese. I taste it meekly, which doesn't help. Another bite; I still don't know what it is, though I do know this: I don't much care for it. This reminds me of a third-grade Halloween party where I donned a blindfold and thrust my hand into a bowl of peeled grapes I was told were eyeballs. Basically, I feel like I am eating eyeballs.

Dave Wohlers leaned against the cold laboratory bench, gripping a white cane. He listened as the three blind girls across the bench struggled with their experiment. "Oh, I dropped the wire," one girl said. "I'll get it," replied another. Her stool screeched across the tile floor of the Johns Hopkins University chemistry lab as she climbed down to grope for the wire. The girls were building an electrolytic cell, a power source of the sort that might one day fuel ultra-green cars. Such technical projects are difficult, even for students with good eyes.

Louis T. Hardin was a gaunt, blind musician known as Moondog to New Yorkers who knew him as a gaudy, mysterious street performer from the late 1940s until the early 1970s. Later, he won acclaim in Europe as an avant-garde composer who conducted orchestras before royalty.Mr. Hardin died of heart failure Wednesday in a hospital in Munster, Germany. He was 83.Day in and day out, the man was as taciturn and unchanging a midtown Manhattan landmark as the George M. Cohan statue in Duffy Square.

Flash! The newsies were out in force for "Newsline Night '99" at the National Federation of the Blind headquarters in South Baltimore.Katharine Graham of the Washington Post spoke to the black-tie bunch about her years in the news biz. And Mike Waller, publisher and CEO of The Baltimore Sun, and Tom Curley, publisher and president of USA Today, were each honored for their contributions to Newsline, the electronic telephone system that NFB uses to deliver more...

The raised dots and flat areas of his Braille page take Jeremy R. Lincicome through the hills and plains of the stories he loves. He may be revisiting his favorite book, "Aliens for Breakfast." He may be reading about a hospital in a book by television's Mister Rogers. Or his fingers may be telling him about Stevie Wonder.Jeremy, an 11-year-old fifth-grader, is the only blind student at Johnnycake Elementary School in Baltimore County and one of about 200 visually impaired students learning Braille in Maryland.

Southwest Baltimore's Maurice Peret has a new baby and a new job. But at the beginning of the year, the government stopped sending him a large chunk of his income.Peret, 34, who is blind, is one of a growing number of visually impaired people who find themselves limited by a federal restriction on their earnings.Because he took a job that paid more than the annual limit for Americans receiving Social Security disability benefits, he was dropped from federal rolls.To raise blind Americans' earning threshold, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona introduced a bill in January that would put their earning limit at the same level set for senior citizens.

"Slackjaw," by Jim Knipfel. Tarcher/Putnam. 235 pages. $22.95 pages.Jim Knipfel has slowly gone blind over his 30 years, the light gradually fading from his eyes because he was born with a rare degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which attacks the rods and cones in the retina that make vision possible.Blindness, Knipfel says, is ultimately just another thing to deal with. Indeed, worse things have happened to him. Like madness. During his 20s, Knipfel also learned that his suicidal depression and emotional free-fall was the result of an inoperable brain lesion.

Members of the Maryland Association of Certified Public Accountants are answering readers' tax questions through April 15. Here, MDCPA members answer some basic questions.Q. When is it better to itemize rather than take the standard deduction?A. Itemize only if the deductions exceed the standard deduction. For 1998, the standard deduction has increased to $7,100 for married filing jointly; $4,250 for singles; $6,250 for head of household and $3,550 for married filing separately. For people who are blind or over the age of 65, the standard deduction is $5,300 for single taxpayers, $7,950 for married filing jointly (assumes only one taxpayer is over 65 or blind)

He works amid the guts and ghosts of the machines that changed our world forever.He paces feverishly down dusty aisles stacked with the innards of televisions and radios -- tubes, transistors, fuses, knobs, screws -- many of them decades old. He sifts among these parts, sometimes using them to make a TV hum again for one of his customers, sometimes finding them for repairmen thousands of miles away.When Donald Budreski does this, he imagines the workers who put them together. Their attention to detail.

The National Federation of the Blind yesterday filed suit in U.S. District Court in Boston seeking to force Internet service giant American Online Inc. to upgrade its system so that blind users can have full access to its Internet site and programs.In its suit, the Baltimore-based NFB and nine blind Boston-area residents said AOL, the nation's largest Internet service provider with 19 million customers, violates the Americans With Disabilities Act by discriminating against the blind. Its system is incompatible with software designed to make the Internet accessible to blind users, the suit argues.

HAROLD W. SNIDER, 61 Advocate for the blind Harold W. Snider, 61, a prominent advocate for the blind who helped craft legislation that expanded the civil rights of Americans with disabilities and aided in the launching of an audible newspaper service, died June 26 at his home in Rockville, Md., after a heart attack. While growing up in Jacksonville, Fla., Snider said he was forced out of regular third-grade classes because he was blind. His parents sued the Duval County school system, and Snider became the first blind student in the county to graduate from public school.

When the National Federation of the Blind held its annual gala this year, it introduced its new name: The Cane Event. "The cane, which is the symbol of blindness, is a symbol of independence," NFB president Marc Maurer said. "A lot of people think if you become blind, your independence is gone. But we celebrate this event because this cane, in my hand, means I can go wherever I want to ... whenever I'd like to be there. And this is a symbol of the work we do in the National Federation of the Blind."

I love to read, and I've been doing it ever since I was able. My wife is also an avid reader. But my wife and I are blind, and we can't get our hands on very much to read. There are services for us, of course. Government entities and nonprofit organizations convert books into Braille, audio, or digital form for our use. But only 5 percent of all books published undergo such a conversion. A few more are available as commercial audio books, but these are often abridged, and those that are unabridged are quite expensive.

It was an ordinary curb in southwest Baltimore, but to Michael Hutchison it felt like a cliff above the unknown. For minutes on end, his white sneakers flirted with the concrete edge as he contemplated the canyon beyond - a torrent of traffic called Patapsco Avenue. Hutchison was intent on bettering his fears. For the first time, he would try to cross all eight lanes of that canyon, aided by a long white cane, months of training and his teacher, Mario Carranza, trailing behind. Blinded by a stroke four years ago at 38, he badly wanted to win back his freedom.

Target Corp. will revamp its Web site to make it more accessible for the blind and pay $6 million in damages to plaintiffs who joined a class action lawsuit against the retailer, under a settlement announced yesterday with the National Federation of the Blind. The $6 million will be placed in an interest-bearing account so that plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in California two years ago, can make claims. Most plaintiffs will get about $3,500, an NFB spokesman said. Under the settlement, the Baltimore-based NFB will test the Web site for three years and certify it once it is completely upgraded.

Many Marylanders may not realize it, but blind people like to skate, and many know how to take to the ice safely. For years, the local affiliate of the National Federation of the Blind has held its annual convention at a hotel in Ocean City that features an ice skating rink, and the blind convention participants enjoy the rink along with other hotel guests without problems. Blind skaters use their canes on the ice, just as when walking, in order to avoid colliding with other skaters and to observe the boundaries of the skating area.

Michael Spriggs listens and waits for cars to pass one night at the intersection of Taylor Avenue and Old Harford Road in Parkville. Wearing thick glasses held on by a band, he's a short, slightly chubby, willful 11-year-old who's being told that he must learn to cross the street. Kelly Hamburg, his mobility and orientation coach, is there to guide him. Every day Spriggs' vision gets worse; every day he denies the inevitable - that he will one day be blind. As he steps off the curb, surrendering his trust to Hamburg, he turns his head to the left, and as he comes to the middle of the street, he turns his head to the right.

Courtney Despeaux picked up an object shrouded in bubble wrap at the National Federation of the Blind headquarters yesterday and tried to decipher the contents with a few quick squeezes. She couldn't. The blind junior from Severna Park High School found out she was holding a plastic dinosaur only after astrophysicist Simon Steel stripped off the packaging. As does bubble wrap to its contents, the Earth's atmosphere obscures distant stars and galaxies, the scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explained.

Tony Deifell spent years achieving the seemingly impossible: teaching photography to blind students. In April, he published Seeing Beyond Sight, a book of photographs his students took and the stories behind them. Now, Deifell helps share his students' experiences with the sighted. He hosts workshops where participants are blindfolded and sent into the community with cameras and guides. Today, he comes to the American Visionary Art Museum for two such events, which he said can be enlightening and disarming.

Rosemary Lerdahl, a pioneering advocate for the blind who founded a camp for blind teenagers and taught job and life skills to the vision-impaired, died of a heart attack Thursday evening while riding a city bus from the doctor's office back to her Arbutus home. Ms. Lerdahl was 59. Born on a farm in Auburn, Neb., the former Rosemary Johnson supervised services for the blind in Lincoln during the 1970s and '80s before she moved to Baltimore in 1989 to be assistant director of the National Federal of the Blind's job opportunities program.