The new Speak Up Skills page focuses on an essential issue for people who live with low vision or blindness: How to get your needs met when talking to people who see well and have never thought about not seeing.
How to manage these Frequent, almost daily interactions, always awkward and sometimes distressing, has been left out of training for both teachers and their students.
Here are posts about speaking up, and about interpersonal skills which includes what to do as well as what to say.
I will be adding more posts, plus ideas for groups who want to practice together.
Speaking into the Void
Speaking into the Void When you lose sight, you lose a big part of ordinary conversation. This is hard to recognize when your loss is new. There is so much confusion and change: But there’s a void in ordinary communication. Talking seems weirdly hollowed out! Of course it’s due to […]
Read more "Speaking into the Void"Speak Up Skills: The Big Hole in Education After Vision Loss
It can be hard to grasp how different speech is for someone who has always been blind compared with someone who has always been sighted, when both are referred to simply as speech. The vast majority of people who live with low vision or blindness lose sight in middle or later life. The great change […]
Read more "Speak Up Skills: The Big Hole in Education After Vision Loss"Speak Up Skills: How to Speak Up When You Can’t See Faces or the Visual Cues Coming Your Way?
Description: A woman with a white cane puts her credit card into the gloved hand of a cashier. People who see well (and maybe you in the past) use their eyes, faces, and bodies all the time to add to what they say. They make eye contact, turn towards you, or smile, but to you […]
Read more "Speak Up Skills: How to Speak Up When You Can’t See Faces or the Visual Cues Coming Your Way?"Retrieving Your Speak Up Skills Post-Pandemic
This hot summer is not over yet, and there may still be travel, family visits, parties, or shopping for a bigger hat! It’s 4 years since the worst stage of the Pandemic yet the effects (and the virus) linger on. We who live with low vision or blindness were severely affected even though many of […]
Read more "Retrieving Your Speak Up Skills Post-Pandemic"Balance, My Broken Arm and Blah: The Effects of Staying Home
All I have learned since falling over a parking block six months ago: It’s not so much the broken arm; it’s the staying home effect! Isolation has been the scourge of the pandemic especially for anyone with a disability, and isolation has affected many people with vision disability severely. The Covid situation is better now […]
Read more "Balance, My Broken Arm and Blah: The Effects of Staying Home"Self Advocacy When You Can’t See
I have been legally blind with the same little bit of vision for more than forty years. For many of those years self-advocacy seemed a good idea, but distant! It was my students at the Carroll Center for the Blind who realized that speaking up for what you need is a vital skill after you […]
Read more "Self Advocacy When You Can’t See"How To Find Out Who You Are Talking To, a Short Video
People just say “Hi” when they meet. They recognize each other’s faces, and connect with their eyes, smile and maybe nod too. All things you probably can’t see. It’s socially awkward when you can’t respond; can’t do the conventional thing. Some people can recognize close friends by the way they hold themselves or how they […]
Read more "How To Find Out Who You Are Talking To, a Short Video"How To Talk About Your Vision Loss – A Short Video
You need to talk about what has happened to your sight, but you also need to protect yourself especially at first. Here are tips on who to talk to and who to stay silent with, as well as how to “manage the message”. Here is a section from Chapter 4 of my book: When You […]
Read more "How To Talk About Your Vision Loss – A Short Video"ROLE PLAYING ASSERTIVENESS Update for Phone or Online Meetings
This article was first published back in February which was a different world. Now group meetings are online or on the phone, but role-playing is still a great way to practice speaking without visual cues. Here’s an update: Why does speech without visual cues have to be different? Without good sight non-verbal communication, which begins […]
Read more "ROLE PLAYING ASSERTIVENESS Update for Phone or Online Meetings"Missing the Meaning Part 2: Negative Reactions
“When someone wishes to avoid conflicting or embarrassing communications, they express their feelings non-verbally,” says a researcher in Non Verbal Communications. On Sunday I was at a socially-distant picnic. There was a red cloth on the grass, I anchored it with my purse against the gusty breeze. Everyone in the circle was a friend of […]
Read more "Missing the Meaning Part 2: Negative Reactions"