“If I decide to read a book in braille,” one lifelong braille reader told me, “it’s a badge of honor. It means I have a lot of respect for the literary merit of that book, and I want to savor it.”

Only 16 percent of blind Americans have a college degree (less than half the national average), and more than a fifth don’t finish high school (more than double the rate of their sighted peers). Blind people are twice as likely to live in poverty. But the really astonishing statistic concerns blind labor. The US unemployment rate usually averages

It occurred to me that the mind’s eye was the realm that Gossiaux was working in as well. But her work also raised a paradox: one of the wonders of art is this ability to represent visually things seen without eyes—but you still need working eyes to see it.

I spent a while deciphering edge. All the letters of the word seemed nestled and pressed together; in the beginning I had difficulty determining where one braille cell ended and the next began.

President Clinton had signed the Chafee Amendment in 1996, freeing all literary works in accessible formats from copyright restrictions in the US.

I sympathized with all of these positions, even as I wondered which attitudes I would adopt for my own life. I tried to understand how blindness was changing my identity as a reader and a writer, as a husband and a father, as a citizen and an otherwise privileged white guy.

Disability, like homosexuality, carries a stigma (a word that comes from the Greek for a mark made by a pointed instrument—a prick, a brand, a puncture—of the sort Oedipus applied to his own eyes). When I think of how that stigma can be overcome, the most powerful example I’ve found is in gay pride and the LGBTQ rights movement. I’m not yet

As with any great teacher, one can find the strongest evidence of Perry’s legacy in the success of his students: they became legislators, scholars, and businessmen. (CSB was coed, but Perry focused his efforts almost entirely on his male students; while he was ahead of his time in his thinking on disability, his views on gender were, unfortunately,

“talking book” that could bring literature to a greater number of blind people. Irwin worked with a veteran electrical engineer in the industry, and by the mid-1930s, they’d designed a record that played at a slower 33⅓ rpm, was pressed on a tougher acetate material, and fit fifteen minutes of audio on a single side. (In his history of the