Outlook on Radio Western

We’re back this week for another episode of Outlook, another Mixed Bag Monday, Home Edition this time as colds, flu, and Covid pile up.

We’ve been off and on air these last weeks, since Covid finally caught up with us both last month, and as we’re transplant patients we’ve had to give ourselves the time to recover slowly.

Happy to be back on air though, since our last live in studio show in early October, to catch up on all that’s been going on with us and also all that’s happening in the world. That’s what Mixed Bag shows are all about around here.

With this one we talk Covid up close and getting a better view of the state of Canada’s healthcare system, highlight some good things for past guests of the podcast, and Brian’s cough was our only guest on this one. Hopefully not for long as we’d rather not share the airwaves with such visitors.

In the second half, we talk audio description (an ongoing theme) as Kerry recently worked on a political ad for Vote Now Oregon and their Roe Rage campaign. It makes for a nice brief example for AD critique purposes as it’s all a never-ending learning process for those who do it.

So tune in to the episode and you’ll find the ad Kerry worked on that we’ve been discussing. Or else you can find it below. During this week where the States holds their midterm elections, we’re sharing this ad with AD:

https://www.votenoworegon.org/videos

Plus go to the following two links to check out two-time Outlook guest, musician, and mental health advocate Heather Hutchison’s recent CBC appearances:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-93-all-points-west/clip/15935735-musician-author-nanaimo-takes-social-media-share-experiences

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-52-radio-active/clip/15934515-what-blind

From old episodes of Perry Mason on AMI to the 2011 Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate on CBC to Love On the Spectrum on Netflix. Our latest guest has described it all.

This week on Outlook we speak with Ruth Barrett, who attended the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, who started out as a performer, in the theatre, as a voiceover artist, but she eventually found her way into the world of doing closed captioning work first and then audio description.

She loves English and history and her curiosity, all helpful interests and qualities for a describer to have. We speak with Ruth about how her previous skill set was applied to becoming an audio describer and writer, for Accessible Media Inc. and other networks, which led to her doing this work for live performances at the Stratford Festival which began offering selected audio described shows around 2012.

Ruth loves to speak with users of her live theatre audio description and shares how she likes meeting with them after the show and receiving their feedback.

With terms like forced naming, Barrett tells us what she’s learned about best practices over her years doing this work and how she’s loved getting to do more work collaboratively on a team along with the others over at Descriptive Video Works based in BC, but virtual has allowed people, like Ruth who live all the way back over in Stratford, Ontario to be on that team.

Our guest this week explains how she works diligently to provide the best possible audio description experience for the users of the service that she can.

Shawn Marsolais learned about her Retinitis Pigmentosa at age twelve and started attending a summer camp for blind children shortly after that. It was there, for the first time, Shawn finally felt like blindness didn’t have to be a big deal and meeting her blind peers made coming back every summer a thing to look forward to all year. At Camp Bowen, blindness was irrelevant because all the kids lived with it and got to just be kids.

Growing up, Shawn dealt with internalized ableism and the fear that if she didn’t do things for herself, she wouldn’t be seen as successful or capable. So whether it was in school or when becoming a parent, her drive to be independent was strong and accepting help was avoided wherever possible.

Describing herself as someone with a chip on her shoulder for a long time, this experience is what led her to starting her nonprofit, Blind Beginnings, which offers parental support groups, relationship and confidence building activities, and involvement of the whole family (including siblings) in outings and events for fun and for developing skills for a limitless life and so hopefully future generations of blind children and youth don’t have to go through what she did.

Of course, we all have limits, but this week on Outlook we speak with Shawn about the limits we put on ourselves when the world tells us that blindness is not as good as sight and being sighted.

Check out all discussed on this week’s show including their Limitless podcast and the Limitless Beauty Fashion Show, taking place Sunday, October 16. The show will include fashion by inclusive fashion and clothing companies Two Blind Brothers and Aille Design with their new braille beaded blue dress. It is also being described by Descriptive Video Works and being made into a documentary by Accessible Media Inc. to be released sometime in 2023.

Find more info on Blind Beginnings' official website:

https://www.blindbeginnings.ca/

The blind leading the blind.

One of our guests this week on Outlook says: “That is like the best idea ever!”

On our first episode of October’s Blindness Awareness Month (or what we like to call BAM) we’re speaking with Alex Jurgensen and Jessica Gladysz from the Canadian Organization of the Blind and Deafblind (COBD) - Alex is director of operations and community engagement with the Camp Bowen Division and Jessica is Director of Programs and Student Affairs for the Pacific Training Centre Division and has been of the Camp Bowen Division in various roles.

Out on the west coast, a short 20 minute boat trip off west Vancouver there is an island, the home of a community of blind Canadians for over 100 years since the CNIB was there. They created a camp for blind children and Camp Bowen on Bowen Island is where many blind children, including our guests, met and discovered friendship and common ground. There, they weren’t isolated or blocked by barriers. Instead, they were welcomed and found out, many for the first time, that it was okay to be blind.

And on the show today, we learn about the history of Bowen Island and Camp Bowen and the impression it left on so many, about how the Pacific Training Centre for the Blind in Victoria and Camp Bowen (Camp Bowen Working Group) came together with their programs for teaching blind Canadians the skills they needed, in many cases for the first time, for success, and the kinds of programs offered as the Canadian Organization of the Blind and Deafblind was formed and is rapidly and over time expanding.

Now Camp Bowen and COBD offer summer camps, braille literacy camps for kids, and music camps for children and adults and provide a glamping situation, alongside activities such as horseback riding, swimming, boating, self-defense, boardgames, camp fires, and movie nights.

They have received federal funding for a 4-year plan, access to a beach front with 11 thousand square feet on 2 and a half acres, and will offer 8 camps in summer and are now running a 10-month intensive independent skills program (eventually for up to 38 people) where students are taught cane travel, braille instruction, assistive tech training, cooking and home skills, and employment preparedness.

We’re no longer being taken care of (by CNIB or others) - the program is Blind People In Charge and they really are, including (for the first time in Canada) the Deafblind community right there in COBD’s name. Blind and Deafblind Canadians have been a major part of Bowen Island for a century, a solid part of the culture, and have big plans for the future.

So check out everything they offer on their website, including 21 programs, (some virtual), a tech loan bank, and blind hub with lots of resources. Also consider making a donation if you have the means as these programs are all so important here in Canada and require funding to continue.

https://cobd.ca

She noticed something was going on with her son’s eyes one year while he was making his list for Santa and was only writing on the page’s right side margin, but there was a lot more going on, underneath the surface, in the Owens family.

He loved skateboarding and skimboarding and was an excellent student, but this mother was about to have no choice but to teach her son how to advocate for himself and work toward a radical acceptance of her own.

Kim Owens is a blogger, wife, mother, author, and advocate. First she taught her son how to advocate for himself and now her blog shows people how to do the same, offering a place where mentoring happens for many other families.

This week on Outlook we spoke with Kim about chronic illness and disability, hers and her son’s, and about the ways they’ve found to navigate blindness with Owen’s blog Navigating Blindness.

While still newly navigating her own autoimmune disease, after years as a busy career woman in the marketing field and her own massage therapy business, Kim Owens started noticing personality changes in her always adventurous younger son. Known as No Fear Kai since he was little, and always trailing after his older brother on adventures, Kim started noticing his anxiety, requiring visits with several specialists to pinpoint just what was going on. As a mother, she had no doubt that something was happening.

On the show this week we discussed the long road to proper diagnosis, the freedom to adapt and thrive her son experienced once he received the tools for owning his blindness diagnosis and adaptive technology and braille, and the battle for access and accommodation they fought for against the school district.

Kim Owens has received a national braille certification, runs Navigating Blindness which is a resource for others newly experiencing blindness, and is working on a book about her family’s story while Kai is off, at university with his first guide dog, a young man out doing the things he loves most.

Check out the blog here:

https://navigatingblindness.com

Last winter, Kerry took a virtual program called Speaking With Confidence, since it had been years since she practiced her public speaking skills. Plus, anything she learned she figured she could apply to sounding more confident on the air for the radio show/podcast as well.

This week, on Outlook, our guest was Nasreen Bhutta, (Consultant and Trainer- Helping folks to launch or relaunch their Careers), and one of the facilitators of Speaking With Confidence. It’s a 10 to 12-week program for (as the name suggests) speaking With more confidence and developing a stronger presence, as blind people, when speaking for any occasion. We wanted to hear a bit more about how this program got started and about the approach Nasreen and the other 2 co-facilitators take in structuring things, as session 6 begins next week.

In session 5, Kerry worked to further develop her public speaking muscle, in getting more comfortable speaking on the spot, and had fun and picked up some advice along the way, as well as learning with and from the other participants.

On this week’s episode, Bhutta shares about how she adjusted to the ever evolving spectrum of blindness after her RP diagnosis, the kinds of speeches each SWC participant is required to give, and on the work she’s also doing for the fashion, style, and confidence-building website and brand Bold Blind Beauty, including its new Up In the AIR (Access, Inclusion, and Representation) podcast.

If you think you might be interested in signing up for session 6 (Starting the final week of September), email Nasreen Bhutta: [email protected]

Join the Speak With Confidence Training Facebook group:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/312584286892626/

Check out the Bold Blind Beauty On A.I.R. podcast which features Nasreen as a co-host:

https://boldblindbeautyonair.buzzsprout.com

And if interested, you can sign up to the virtual LinkedIn webinar happening on October 6 here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAof-CgqDstGNajYzf-zGXOSAeGUMAX3yZi?fbclid=IwAR0O9m3hhoymR1fT0lTe_IMQrOqfbkOD4B-AkKXdLHCg1mFS2w5SsbkXdy4

Katie Morgan says she feels like she knows us, even though we only met each other in person when she appeared on this week’s anniversary episode of Outlook. Even her family now know about the program she tunes in for, every Monday morning at eleven.

This program is Outlook On Radio Western because it first started as a radio show, airing on 94.9 CHRW Radio Western, before the pandemic happened and it evolved into both a radio show and podcast. We first aired on September 10, 2018. Now having recorded 173 episodes and with Katie, our 92nd guest, we’re thrilled to have her join us live in studio, taking the hour to look back.

We try to keep this episode light and fun for the most part, while discussing some of the themes we like to cover, along with Morgan sharing some of what she’s learned from listening to our lived experience of blindness here.

Kerry shares an interaction she had with her white cane and someone on her way into the studio before this recording. And Katie shares some of the techniques she uses to manage anxiety, tells a story of ADHD and misplacing her glasses, and how utilizing all our senses can only be a benefit. Accessibility, advocacy, and equality - Outlook is all about the diversity in perspectives, thus where the name of this show comes from.

Morgan has lived in London, in one way or another, since she was young. Since then, she is active in her local community, including sharing details with us of her previous experience with the station, first helping out a friend who has the show, Music Is The Medicine, airing in the morning shortly before we come on. Brian and Kerry really appreciate the freedom of community radio and are grateful to Radio Western for giving them a platform to be themselves and sharing that with listeners.

Whether it’s the lessons Katie learned from travel and the open mind that helps broaden or her advice about being curious, not assuming what others might need, how it comes down to asking others what it is how they feel about things. We discuss lessons in making a new friend by reaching out, how it’s okay to ask for help, or shaking things off and accepting what is.

As we celebrate four years of this show, we thought it would be fun to invite on with us a long-time listener, to sit in, to thank them for supporting us all this time.

Long-time listener turned life-long friend - we dedicate this week’s episode to Katie Morgan and to all the support we’ve received from so many.

Check out Music Is The Medicine, a favourite show of Katie's that lead her to discovering us:

https://radiowestern.ca/program/music-medicine

During the pandemic and lockdowns, Kerry started attending a weekly Wednesday evening virtual space, on Zoom (where else) where art and accessibility came together with the help of a friendly, welcoming host.

VocalEye is a non-profit society, registered charity and the first live descriptive arts service for the blind in Canada describing theatre, arts, and culture for the low vision and blindness community. They’re now making the arts more accessible for people who are blind and partially sighted, online and in-person and this week on Outlook we speak with its community outreach coordinator, Amy Amantea.

We start by hearing about Amantea’s early years including the family’s traveling life with Amy’s father working in the shopping centre industry and about her early childhood diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. Outlook may be hosted by two siblings who were born with blindness, a show where they regularly speak with other blind people about their lives, but (as both hosts live with other chronic illnesses), the aim is to discuss more conditions and disabilities than blindness alone in future and this week’s guest experienced blindness as a result of her underlying chronic disease, rather than being born with it.

From a doctor’s prediction of blindness at twenty-four to the reality of that, our guest shares the path she was on, involving precious gems, into an artist’s life (acting/photography) Amy Amantea likely never would have had otherwise. This guest looks at life with chronic illness (neurodivergence) and disability as things that make one wonderfully rare (like a gemstone) and unique and we tend to agree.

Check out the extremely valuable work of VocalEye, including the custom jewelry designed by Amantea herself as The Blind Beader, with proceeds going to this nonprofit’s cultural offerings:

http://www.vocaleye.ca

Hear some of the arts and cultural activities they describe on the VocalEye YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/vocaleyeful

And take a listen to Amy’s AMI podcast, Accessing Art with Amy here:

https://www.ami.ca/Accessing-Art/recent_episodes

For custom jewelry orders by Amy you can email: [email protected]

Toy Story was Rebecca Odum’s first introduction into the world of audio description, movie night at a camp for the blind. Born premature and becoming blind from Retinopathy of Prematurity ROP, even when reading large print and screens was still possible and before becoming a screen reader user, movies and television have been a part of Rebecca’s life.

What is audio description, AD QC, or quality control? This is the field our guest is training in. What constitutes good audio description anyway?

This week on Outlook we speak with Odum about how audio description AD can benefit not only blind people and why it matters and about Odum’s writing background and early vivid imagination. Rebecca also shares about studying ASL or American sign language and being a member of an all sign language choir.

And we discuss the documentary one of our co-hosts and this week’s guest recently trained on, for the art and specialty of audio describing and quality control, a beautiful doc about musician and composer Grace Fisher who acquired a childhood virus in her teens. Fisher is now quadriplegic and has started The Grace Fisher Foundation.

Check out more information on Amazing Grace and what Grace herself is up to with the foundation:

https://www.gracefisherfoundation.org

Follow Rebecca on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/rwritesfantasy

Find her book here:

https://www.amazon.ca/Lightning-Proof-Rebecca-Ann-ebook/dp/B07K65BKN6/

And take a listen to her podcast, Spirit of Avalor, about her favourite Disney series:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spirit-of-avalor-podcast/id1463065687

It’s been a few months since our last purely Mixed Bag Monday episode of Outlook, but we’re back, in the middle of August, as summer begins to wind down with a mixture of topics we’re discussing.

Kerry’s been writing and taking classes in writing and the natural world and then reading her words, in community with others. Brian’s been having a rather creatively productive month, practicing with other likeminded musical friends he’s known and performed with for years. Sometimes, it’s nice to work on our creative interests, outlets in a tough world where there’s always something serious happening in the news and around the world, and art helps us be able to let loose a little.

Whether it’s the stress on the healthcare system in this province and across the nation, abortion rights for women and other pregnant people being at risk and how this issue in the States finally gets us to study up about the issue in our own country, or August 15th being exactly one year since western countries pulled out of Afghanistan which leaves Afghan people and especially women behind to face oppression and other dangers, human rights of all kinds are threatened and this impacts everyone around the world. It’s important we talk about all this on our show, hosted by two disabled siblings in Ontario, Canada.

From saying farewell to a friend or opening beans when you meant to open lentils, it’s truly a mixed bag of topics. We are spending the week with family, celebrating our nephews and their birthdays in August, and talking Blue Jays baseball, a super summery subject.

And last but certainly not least, to round off the show this week, we’re sharing promotional material sent to us by Cheryl Green, on behalf of Green and project partner Thomas Reid on the survey they’re launching. With support from the Disability Visibility Project, they’re putting out a survey collecting information from Deaf and disabled podcasters and consumers of podcasts on building a network or community of Deaf and disabled content creators and consumers of said content. We’ll let them explain all this further, but we then go on to discuss an article Reid wrote for DVP on the discussion around whether giving an image description of oneself is necessary, in meetings and in workshops for example, and if there’s equity or discrimination in the practice or in the resistance to it since the pandemic and Zoom made us all faces, in little boxes, on a screen.

Fill out the survey for Project Project or Podaccess as it’s being known as here:

https://bit.ly/PODAccess

Find Thomas Reid’s article (Making a Case for Self-Description: It’s Not About Eye Candy) on the Disability Visibility Project’s website:

https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2022/04/12/making-a-case-for-self-description-its-not-about-eye-candy/

And for more background on Green and Reid, give a listen to this captivating discussion on the podcast Down to the Struts on the episode Disabled Podcasters Unite!:

https://www.downtothestruts.com/episodes/season-4-episode-6-cheryl-green-thomas-reid