Milestones

Happy Father's Day, everybody! Especially you, Dad. When I grow up I wanna be just like you. Your patience and wisdom inspire me.

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When I was young my father had a copy of the Rand McNalley World Atlas. I used to spend hours looking through it, memorizing the map details, wondering how to pronounce the names of foreign cities, imagining what life was like for people living in places I'd never seen depicted on tv. I noticed how the map of world languages overlapped the map of world religions. I marveled at the population densities in east Asia and western Europe, the annual precipitation of the Amazon basin and the Congo, and the differences between where the wealth was concentrated and where the people were concentrated.

I loved that book. It made my suburban childhood seem much, much bigger. It helped me realize I was a human being on Earth, not just a daydreamy kid at John C. Fremont Elementary School.

Years later humanity got this fancy new thing called the Internet. It was everything my father's world atlas was times a hundred. I dove into it the same way I dove into that atlas.

The internet has changed, of course. Search engine algorithms have somewhat ruined the experience of discovery. If I type "china" into my browser I'll get economic and foreign policy news about the Chinese nation. If my mom types "china" into her browser she's likely to see porcelain dinnerware sets. It's hard to break out of one's bubble and find anything unexpected online - the algorithm keeps pulling us back to the same songs, the same authors, and the same points of view. Our first search habits shape our algorithm, then our algorithm shapes the rest of our search habits.

There was always another page to turn in the atlas, another fact about the world to discover. I don't know how to turn the page on the internet. I don't know how to find the things I haven't yet realized I'm looking for.

And I've run out of time.

I can barely see the screen anymore. I'm listening to my computer as often as I'm reading it.

I sent Rumster a text yesterday:

Just a heads up - my vision has reached the point I can no longer read Reddit. I'm not looking for sympathy - I'm simply explaining why I haven't been active lately.

Then I set my phone down and walked out of the room. Rumster sent me three quick texts, saying he's here for me and asking me not to leave r/Blind or abandon my duties as a moderator, but I wasn't by my phone and didn't see the texts. When I didn't reply back he called.

But what is there to say? I haven't been able to read a book in years, but I didn't care. Everything I wanted to read could be found online, where I could adjust the magnification and contrast and the screen was its own light source.

But my laptop is zoomed in so much it's become unwieldy. My cursor is so big it sometimes obscures the text of the button I'm trying to click. The text is magnified so much the menu options don't appear on the page anymore. Often I have to use the left and right arrows on the laptop to move the screen view enough to read a line. It's cumbersome and distracting.

And it's no longer working. By the time I'm done writing this blog post my eyes will ache so much I won't be able to read what I've written.

I don't mean to sound whiny, I'm just trying to spell out what it's like for me. I didn't mean to sound whiny when I texted Rumster either, but judging from his response apparently I did. Please understand I'm describing, not complaining.

Last night I told my wife it's probably time to look into getting either Alexa or Siri. I can't really read the numbers on the microwave timer anymore. The oven timer is a little bit bigger and I can still read it, but only for a few more weeks or maybe months. Instead of fumbling with the timer I want to throw a tater tot casserole in the oven and say "Alexa, set a timer for seventy minutes."

Okay, technically I could say that right now, but since we don't have an Alexa nothing would happen and the kids would think I'm an even bigger idiot than they realized.

Still, it's time for change. I need to use software that reads the screen aloud to me. I need a smart speaker that can read the weather forecast to me. I need a car that can drive me wherever I tell it to take me. I'm fortunate enough to live in a time when these technology dreams are coming true.

This train of thought makes me wonder how much time I have left, but it's not easy to frame the question. How much time until what, exactly? Total darkness might never happen. If half of the cells in my retina die off each year, then half of the remaining cells die off the next year, I'll run out of years before I run out of retina cells. I might always have some light perception. But how useful will it be?

How much more blind will I get?

There are two commonly acknowledged milestones, legal blindness and total blindness. I live my life somewhere in between them. Milestones in the in between are scarce and not clearly defined, but I feel I've reached another one. Let's call it the "when you get to the point where the hassle of magnifying and zooming and scrolling your computer screen becomes such a pain in the ass you'd rather put up with the annoying voice and features of a screen reader" milestone.

No, let's definitely not call it that.

Regardless of what we call it, I'm here. It feels significant, probably because so much of my day is spent exploring the online world. Now, instead of INXS and Van Halen and Wang Chung playing in the background there will be the stilted, emotionless, mechanical voice of NVDA reading the latest on Ukraine, interest rates, science, and the other web pages I frequent.

Which brings me back to the beginning - how does one go about finding anything new online with both NVDA and the browser search algorithm thwarting the effort? How can the title of an article catch my eye if I don't have eyes to be caught?

My world feels too small already. My father's world atlas made it feel bigger. The internet made it feel bigger. Then search algorithms made it feel smaller again, and blindness is shrinking it even more.

Each milestone is a point for self reflection, a change in course, and a time to reevaluate. Things can't be the way they were before but that doesn't mean they can't be just as good in a different way. I need to find that new way.