(Birds Chirping) (Music) There are various causes of low vision or vision loss or visual impairment or blindness.

The various causes can be in different eye diseases, eye injuries or brain injuries, and or congenital or hereditary conditions.

The sight center is a place of hope and we understand this can be a big change in their life.

We provide a listening ear.

We exist to help people get to a better place in their life.

The sight Center, now over 100 years old, is kind of the center place for 27 counties in northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan for people who are experiencing vision loss.

The mission of the Sight Center is to empower independence and enrich the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired.

We help people increase their leve of independence in their home, in their neighborhood, at work.

We pick u where the eye doctor leaves off.

The sight center definitely had a very significant impact on both of us.

Just knowing that we had this place that we could reach out to if we had a question or if we needed some support.

We always knew and still know that the sight center is always there.

In other places.

Is one orientation in mobility in one place, and then you go to another place to take your technology training.

You are so blessed in this area to have all those multiple programs and services just in one center.

There were some elements that have remained constant the idea of independence, of empowering individuals and enriching lives.

(Music) How different cultures have understood blindness and disability has really changed over time.

For some, it was considered a sign of evil.

For some cultures and time periods, it was considered a sign of special goodness or a gift from God or a belief that someone had higher spiritual powers.

Other times, it was a sign of just poverty and laziness and ineptitude.

People with blindness were simply considered to be objects of charity people and had to help.

If you were poor, it was simply meant that you become a beggar.

In the 80s, the 30s and 1840s in the United States.

Lead educators began to argue that blind people could actually be educated.

One could be taught to read and write.

One could learn history, mathematics, all the other things in life, and that one could be taught a trade so that you'd have an income.

Schools for blind children began to develop in about the 1830s 1840s.

And that spread across the U.S.

throughout the 19th century.

Institutions for blind peopl also tried to educate employers and to think about what jobs they felt blind people could do.

As public schools began to spread, a private schools began to spread.

I think ideas about who could do what jobs also began to spread throughout the early 20th century, as education began to be more professionalized for blind students.

Of course, those students grew up, and they began to organize politically and socially.

They themselves really pushed for better employment, often using the networks they developed in schools to create businesses, to create social clubs, you know, to flirt all those kinds of things that people do to make and control their own lives.

There was a lot of stuff going on in the U.S.

after World War One.

My understanding is a lot o people came back from the war, blinded or with eye damage, and as a result, there were movements around the country to start societies for the blind.

Helen Keller came, in essence, the most famous deaf blind person in the world, really, and traveled throughout the U.S.

beginning in the teens and 20s.

She came to the Toledo area and helped local organizations set up advocacy for blind people.

A young man named Joseph Clun came through the area advocating for such organizations, and the community rallied.

The Lions Club in 1923 had kind of taken on blind welfar as a cause in the state of Ohio.

Their founder, Edward Evans, was instrumental in founding what was then known as the Toledo Society for the blind.

He worked a lot with Frank Saxton, who was a secretary at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce, and they worked together with the Community Chest, which is now known as the United Way.

To establish the Toledo Society for the blind.

In November of 1923.

When it started, it was much more about recreation and socialization.

People didn't realize how many blind people there were in Toledo because nobody, quite frankly, ever saw them, because they were kind of keeping in their houses.

There was always Happy times, which was a group that met.

There was a progressive dinner.

So there were a number of social activities like that.

It was a nice thing to be able to just get together.

So for many people, that was the first time that they were seeing people in the community who had disabilities, who were actively participating in the community.

I was first introduced to the Sight Center way back when I was 6 or 7 years old, at one of the sight centers summer camps.

It was the very first time I'd been away from home.

One week was frequently for the kids, and then another week was for the adults.

You know, it was very interesting interacting with other people who are blind or visually impaired.

It'll b a pretty wild time, I believe.

For me, it was no rules.

At that time, I had some usable vision.

There were some fears again, just reaching out, meeting new, new people, interacting with kids and learning more.

So how the totally blind children were adapting to life.

They had handrails from the cabins to the dining hall and playing card with braille and print on them checkers with raised checkerboards.

So those kinds of things were all new and very different to me.

It was valuable in that I kne what was coming down the road.

As I continued to lose my vision.

Beginning in our foundation, employment services was another important focus.

So around this time, late 1940s, early 1950s, a man named John Goerlich started to become involved with us.

He was a very prominent businessman.

He would become our board president in 1957 and would be with u in that position for 20 years.

So as we sort of outgrew our facility on Michigan, we moved to our location on Canton Avenue.

We really had a large expansion of our workshop.

People would go ther and develop these work skills.

The sheltered workshop employed people for a number of years.

Very noisy place.

You know, because it was always busy.

I worked on a line.

I made 10,000 boxes a day.

Just made him, made a, made him, put them on the track and down, down, down it went.

I was on jobs that was U-bolts and saddles.

And they were in great big, huge bins.

And you had to use a rake and pull them down, and you had to put them together.

You got I used to get lots of steel in the tips of my fingers.

Everybody's familiar with the, when you get your laundry detergents.

Got that little, you know, the cap drains right back into the thing.

We did the prototype for that.

We had over 100 people working there at the time, and they were popping these three pieces together and shipping them off to Procter and Gamble to put them on their product.

That was pretty, pretty interesting.

It was disappointing when we had to close the sheltered workshop.

The reality there was we didn't have all of the people coming u who had been blind from birth.

People who had had vision and were losing it either were too old and they were retired or other income sources.

We kind of merged it with a group called Merritt Industries, and all of our workforce went with them.

The sight center did have the radio reading service.

Scan was run off the second program audio channel, and was offered with a unit that they put in sight challenged people's homes.

When we started scan sight center audio network, many of the, they were called radio reading services, and many of them used an FM band on a radio station as a thing called SAP, secon audio program, I think it was.

And you had to have a special receiver and you could pick that up.

Well, because we were working with WGTE and WBGU We were actually using a sub carrier under TV signal.

Geographically, we probably had the largest radio reading service in the world.

We could get you could hear us in Canada, all over northwest Ohio.

Madge Levinson was our volunteer coordinator.

Madge was a very, very sweet lady.

She could get a little feisty sometimes.

She would get feisty sometimes.

But she was a very sweetheart.

Madge was a superstar.

She could read anything, well.

There were people who were college professors.

There were people who were housewives or a lot of retired people.

And they came from all professions.

I was the Thursday morning blade reader.

So I read, Thursda mornings, I read the Blade live.

We read the funny papers.

We read sports.

We read international, national.

We read obituaries.

And other people throughout the scan, they would be reading the Wall Street Journal, magazines.

Just a plethora of things, a variety of things.

Well, I enjoyed it.

I think it was important because if you couldn't read The Blade, they would read it to you.

You know, what was going on in the city back then.

There were certain magazines that you liked.

I think Madge would pick them out, you know, and just read to us.

It opened a window and a door to people that wouldn't otherwise have access to these materials in their life.

They would have been left out in the dark.

To me, it was just very special to be able to offer that to people that window, window to normality for people who weren't able to see.

In the 1960s, we really begin to see the formalizatio of what we know as blind rehab.

Sometimes, though, the patients have heard that there's like nothing else that can be done for them.

And that's a little disheartening but, what we do here is the next step.

We're more like rehab facility versus a medical treatment facility.

Sometimes patients are no really ready at the beginning.

To hear that, maybe they need to come to a place at the sight center to have low vision care.

They have to be ready to accept their vision loss and accept that they're going to have to use these tools or these devices or these other kinds of aids or training or services or modifications to d the things that they used to do but can no longer do them the same way visually.

We gain an understanding of the person's situation.

We determine if there is function in that vision, or maybe there is a lack of function, and that helps us determine where to start the individual in the process.

Whether that be in our low vision clinic or in home services.

For the clinic, that is for someone who has function in their vision, who their eyeglasses may not be enough and they need a bit more.

We specialize in optical aids such as magnifiers, binoculars.

As you learn to accommodate.

You'll regain that self-confidence and you can do many more things.

The agency provides many, services for people who are blind or visually impaired.

Some of the main services currently include, the Low Vision Clinic.

Again, for people who have some useable vision.

A person meets with our optometrist, our occupational therapist, and our case manager, and we figure out what types of devices are most appropriate.

Rehabilitation professional will go into the home and wor one on one with that individual.

And if you think about all those things that you do, you you're cooking, you're matching clothes.

If you identify any of those things as being difficult.

We can then provide in-home services to you.

All of the things that we need to do in our daily lives to function, there are adaptive ways of doing tha and adaptive equipment to help.

Another important one is orientation mobility, and that's moving about your environment safely, with or without the us of a white cane or a guide dog.

The first person from our agency that got certified in orientation and mobility was a woman named Rosalyn Snow.

Rosalyn would walk behind you when she taught you.

Duh duh duh duh, with the cane.

If you made a mistake, she'd say, stop.

Okay, so you stop.

I think she trained me very well.

In the workplace or at home.

How how can you sit at your computer and have this screen of prin in front of you and do your job?

Well there's software programs that convert the text into voice.

They can convert the text into Braille.

So again, many different aspects of assistive technology are out there to help people who are blind and visually impaired.

It was quite a blow.

But really it was devastating.

It was just to, to us, you know, I mean, we had to look at each other and say you know what, what are we going to do from here?

Yeah.

I mean, where do we go from here?

When the A first contacted us, I was thrilled.

Really, because I thought, oh, good, someone's going to, you know, direct us which way to go.

They were there for us righ from the right from the start.

And they they told us how to handle it huge and explained to us and they held our hand.

So if the sight center hadn't been there.

We would have had problems.

I really you know, I believe that.

I'd say in a very small way, the sight center had a hand in my nuptials.

So they have a han in most of everything, including the development of true love.

I think that's there.

And I had a kind of idyllic childhood.

We, were born totally blind, right?

Yes.

But our parents didn't know that we were blind until we were six months old.

We were kind of a shocker.

We were twins.

We were blind.

We don't know where we came from.

The stork, like, took us t the wrong house, I don't know.

We were raised to be ver self-sufficient and independent.

And I think part of that is because my parents didn't know any other blind people.

They made an agreement, like right off the bat, that they were going to continue raising us as as they had before with you know, guidance from like the sight center and other places.

I mean, were we even, like a year old yet?

No, I mean, we were very young and, we had a wonderful woman name Cami who came out to our house, and she really, really helped my parents a lot.

I would say, my childhood orientatio mobility instructor, Dan Zink.

Yeah.

Also, Mary, she always called herself Mary the mobility Grinch.

So I, I used to know he last name, but I don't know it now, but it was two individuals specifically.

Gave us our really strong foundation for independent travel.

We were recalcitrant students.

We'd rather be doing something else, like walking around the block.

You can learn how to do that.

Or like standing at quiet street crossings.

I can still name all the streets that I learned how to cross when I was in junior high.

And, they used to have to brib us like six successful lessons.

And the next one we can go to the mall and, I and their patience and grace with us, I. Because of them, I still have the confidence to live life and travel and travel.

We're just very lucky that we had such a supportive place that we could always know.

We could turn to.

I/m so gla that you're with me in the dark.

I'm so glad you're with me in the light.

So the last few decades have seen all sorts of evolutions in technology.

In the more recent years, we've established a shop at the sight center.

So for a decade now, we've had, a retail stor that just provides another easy step into the worl of, low vision for our clients.

Assistive technology has made a lot of tasks easier for people who are blind or visually impaired.

They're a little slower than, like, computer technology or like, car technology.

Back in the day, it was like a Braille writer that was 12 pounds.

We carry it around our elementary school, and then it sort of went to, we learned about, like, the first Kurzweil scanner, where you could read a print book, it would read it back to you.

It had this very strange voice.

I can still hear it in my mind.

Me too.

Scanner moving to top of page.

And, you know, we we learned, a little bit about computers in the early 90s, but not much.

And then when we went off to college, we got our first, ginormous deskto computers, and, the sight center had someone showing us how to use them.

Some of the new things that have been exciting currently are all the the cell phone features, the voice assistants and even different apps for cell phones.

Things have really changed, but anytime there's any sort of assistive tech changes, I always call the sight center I am like help, I need help.

I don't know how to use this new thing.

I can't do it.

And and so they've been ther ever since the very beginning, when we were using clunky braille writers up to, learning how to use our iPhones and iPads back in the day.

(Music) So I do see our future in a lot of ways, going back to our past, connecting people, the social, the recreational.

I'll describe the future based on when I was on the board.

I recall a discussion where I posed the question, if we didn't have this building, if we had this mission and we had this, this, this team, but we didn't have this building, what would we look like?

And I think invariably we would look like an organization that was out in every county we serve.

We'd be out there, on a more regular basis with with more programing, support groups, activities, awareness events.

In addition to the the in-home services that we provide.

Technology sort of upgrades continue to, have more smart kind of devices, more I kind of devices that can help people.

I'm hoping that more wearable type, devices can be, sort of mainstreamed.

Well, it's.

I have a big dream for this height center.

I am very hopeful.

And, that the sight center will continue its leadership in promoting positive collaboration.

Older adult organizations, their area offices on aging, committees on aging, County committees on aging.

To to be partnering with groups like that in ways that make us both stronger, where we bring the we bring the vision, loss, expertise and they bring the older adults who are living with it.

And I think the sight center is, is really, in that direction of bringing everybody together and reaching for more, if not all people in the area.

And somewhere else that we might be able to serve.

The Sight Center is a very non-judgmental, supportive, and knowledgeable resource out in our community sites on our always has a very caring and empathetic staff who are not judgmental, who are there to support.

It was just a very nice place to work.

A lot of really nice people.

And the big thing was the positive impact you are making on people's lives.

This team, this multidisciplinar kind of approach to low vision, is my preferred method of of practice.

All these professionals are so important.

I'm important that therapists who go in the home are important.

The technology, trainers are important.

The orientation, mobility, trainers and evaluators are important.

The social worker is important.

Vision loss for people is not the end of, you know, it's a story.

It's the next chapter.

And there's ways to adapt to it.

With, grace and confidence.

If your blanket is short, you learn to bend your knees.

(Music)