Summer Tuesdays are gardening days at the Center, but with all the rain (and even a couple of late snows) it came down to June 2 as the drop-dead date for planting this year. It was just too wet till that late Tuesday to consider digging and planting.

For the second year, the Colorado Center for the Blind has partnered with MasterDrive to take students with sleep shades for practice driving in a dual-control car.

Our students always look forward to this training and test of confidence, and on Saturday six students got the chance to practice while MasterDrive instructors were in the passenger seat to keep them safe.

After a brief orientation on the physical configuration and handling of the car, students practiced in a parking lot with gradually increasing levels of challenge … till they were out on the access road, the speed limit sign obscured by tarps (for safety, not secrecy), and the students were navigating on their own and making adjustments.

“Is that 35 miles per hour?” one student asked, pointing.

“No. It’s much slower,” replied the instructor, with a light laugh and steady hands.

That brief exchange captures what happens during these sessions. Not many times does a student ask a question with a smile right after setting off on the road on their own.

On January 4, 1988 two feet of snow lay on the ground in Denver, and the temperature was around ten below zero. It was the first day of classes at the new Colorado Center for the Blind. Miles “Tom” Anderson was there. In fact, it fell to Tom as Residential Manager to help Travel Instructor Duncan Larsen shepherd the Center’s first five students from their apartments on South Elati to the Center at Elati and Broadway.

“The light at Broadway and Powers was frozen,” Tom recalls. “We had to walk down to Littleton Blvd. to cross Broadway so we could catch the 0 bus north.”

Once arrived, cold fingers and all, Tom began his first day as Braille Instructor/Typing Teacher. He’s been here ever since.

Maybe that’s when the oh-so-familiar summons, heard coming over the Public Address from Dr. Dots first got started:

“The dots await your fingers!”

(For the past year or so, Wayne Marshall has been sharing a “word of the week” on Wednesday and then discussing it on Friday. Below is an article Director Julie Deden included about this in the January-February CCB Newsletter. We’ll begin posting Wayne’s Words on Face Book and Twitter.)

Message from the Director

Every week at announcements on Wednesday mornings, Wayne Marshall presents us with Wayne’s Wise Word of the Week. His words and quotes are thought provoking for all of us. He gives us a couple of days to think about what the Word of the Week means and then on Friday mornings we have a short discussion.

Some of the Word of the Week thoughts have included:

March’s FAST Saturday will involve taking a journey through prehistory with our hands at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Blind kids participating will be putting their hands on actual fossil bones as well as plaster cast replicas – it might even mean holding fossilized dinosaur poop.

I said it’s fossilized! it’s all coming about thanks to the presence of Cat Sartin as a guest researcher at the Nature & Science Museum this winter. Sartin, a doctoral candidate in paleontology at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, has worked with the National Federation of the Blind’s Jernigan Institute in its STEM-X programs, providing hands-on learning about evolution and paleontology to blind youth.

Museums have traditionally kept artifacts such as fossils and skeletons just out of reach of patrons, if not behind glass, meaning that blind visitors could enjoy a long walk through cool galleries, but not much more.

COMCAST BRINGS VOICE GUIDED TELEVISION TO COLORADO

Company Partners with Local Disability Groups Across the Country to Introduce New Technology to More People

“Talking Guide” Reads Aloud Channel Names, Show Titles and DVR Commands; National Commercial Set To Air During Academy Awards

DENVER, CO – February 20, 2015 – Comcast today announced it is partnering with local disability groups across the country – including the Colorado Center for the Blind in Littleton – to bring the company’s new voice guidance technology to more people.

The “talking guide” is a feature on the X1 platform that reads aloud selections like program titles, network names and time slots as well as DVR and On Demand settings, giving users the freedom to independently explore and navigate thousands of shows and movies.

When Comcast’s Mary Spillane called earlier this month to ask if we would work with them to test and improve the Talking Guide for the X1 cable box, we were naturally excited. Comcast gave us an X1 box with a year of cable service – and a new TV – so we could use, evaluate and demonstrate the accessibility. Mary said they wanted us to give feedback, and we’ve already begun to do so.

Mary was excited to have us on board, but I think she was just as excited about tonight’s Oscars broadcast, when Comcast’s new commercial “Emily’s Oz” will debut,” with narration by Robert Redford. Woo! This is big stuff!

On Friday Comcast issued a press release regarding the upcoming commercial, intended to highlight its accessibility offerings to customers, and to push the conversation about disability and entertainment a bit further. Emily is a blind 7-year-old whose favorite movie is “The Wizard of Oz” … Well, go see this short, “The Making of Emily’s Oz” and more on Comcast’s Emily Oz page to get the picture – or the audio-description.

And you can watch the actual “Emily’s Oz” commercial as well!

(Editor’s Note: We are delighted to be partnering with the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind on this year’s Braille Challenge, a nationwide competition sponsored by the Braille Institute. It’s the first time that a test site has been located in the Denver Metro area. Below is the press release.) We’re all going to have a great time with Braille!

Braille Competition to Test Skills of Metro Kids:

CCB Partners with CSDB to Host Nationwide Program

Contact: CSDB: Diane Covington, dcovington@csdb.org or 719-661-0941
CCB: Brent Batron, bbatron@cocenter.org or 303-778-1130 x222

We’re off for the holiday break, so it seems like a good time to share Breaking Bad’s virtual tour of the Center from YouTube. It’s not really as quiet at the Center right now as the day the video was shot — a remodeling project started on Monday, December 22.

It’s also a lot colder!

Thanks to 67 generous donors we raised $12,901 online on December 9, and received another $520 in checks and cash, bringing our total to $13,421!

In addition, the online figure makes us eligible for a small portion of the $1 million incentive fund put up by FirstBank and Community First Foundation. A total of $26.2 million was donated to more than 1600 Colorado nonprofits on Colorado Gives Day 2014

We are grateful to all of our friends who continue to support us with donations ranging from $10 to $3000, but it’s also exciting to be part of the largest giving day of the year in Colorado!

And of course, we were given the opportunity to be featured on 9News with Gregg Moss during the Where in the Town segments on the morning of November 24!

Thanks to our students and staff who passed out flyers, to all of our social media friends who shared our posts, thanks to Gregg Moss and 9News for having our great Center staff members on Denver’s morning TV, and thanks most to FirstBank and Community First for making all of it happen!