In many ways they are more fortunate than any generation of blind people before them. Technology gives them more access to Braille and enables them to produce print more easily and quickly than my generation would have thought possible as we struggled to learn to type accurately. Closed-circuit television systems enable students with some useful vision to read print material that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. In addition, the involvement of specially trained education professionals in decision making about and instruction of blind children can be a gold mine of information and expertise for parents that previous generations never had available at all. Too often technology is misused to prevent students from learning the skills they need.
Laws are only as good as their enforcement.
And we have all learned to our cost that, though few things are more valuable to parents than wise professional counsel, all too often such expertise is shaky at best and often misguided. But beyond the issue of the quality of the professional advice actually available to parents is the temptation for them to abdicate their responsibility and discount the value of their personal views about what their children need and how to achieve it. An incident at the 1995 National Federation of the Blind Convention will illustrate my point. National Board of Directors member Gary Wunder and I led a discussion on July 1 as part of the National Organization of Parent of Blind Children's afternoon of concurrent workshops. The topic of our discussion was ensuring that blind youngsters develop good social skills.