From dsmithnfb at gmail.com Mon Jan 4 22:59:27 2010 From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith) Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 14:59:27 -0800 Subject: [Ccb-alumni] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in town? Message-ID: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com> This Listening to Braille By RACHEL AVIV Published: December 30, 2009 AT 4 O?CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, and she listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The Financial Times to her while she uses her computer?s text-to-speech system to play The Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the magazine. The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, poring over the news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she does not use Braille. ?Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not from my finger to my brain,? she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She doesn?t think of a comma in terms of its written form but rather as ?a stop on the way before continuing.? This, she says, is the future of reading for the blind. ?Literacy evolves,? she told me. ?When Braille was invented, in the 19th century, we had nothing else. We didn?t even have radio. At that time, blindness was a disability. Now it?s just a minor, minor impairment.? A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed the written word. Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the ?tribal and oral pattern.? But the decline of written language has become a reality for only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time learning to spell in her youth ? she writes by dictation ? she says she thinks that using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers. ?It?s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should be abolished,? she told me. ?It?s just not needed today.? Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house in Boston, printed the Harry Potter series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes, each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than $1,000 and there?s a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and computer-screen-reading software. A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report. The figures are controversial because there is debate about when a child with residual vision has ?too much sight? for Braille and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades ? in recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because of premature births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. ?What we?re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able ? and illiterate,? Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. ?We stopped teaching our nation?s blind children how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.? For much of the past century, blind children attended residential institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today, visually impaired children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read; computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and read the individual letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for educators. ?If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is limited,? Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal, told me. ?You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can?t feel or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.? Like many Braille readers, Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are still extremely costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: ?This is like going back to the 1400s, before Gutenberg?s printing press came on the scene,? he said. ?Only the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were the illiterate masses, the peasants.? UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture. Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or outlined in felt with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a cipher language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified the code so that it could be read more efficiently ? each letter or punctuation symbol is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three rows and two columns ? and added abbreviations for commonly used words like ?knowledge,? ?people? and ?Lord.? Endowed with a reliable method of written communication for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator and spiritual savior. With his ?godlike courage,? Helen Keller wrote, Braille built a ?firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb from hopeless darkness to the Mind Eternal.? At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more innocent and malleable, not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In his 1933 book, ?The Blind in School and Society,? the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly assimilated into the sighted world would become lost in ?verbal unreality.? At some residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or light because, they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that blind children as young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like ?look,? ?touch? and ?see.? And yet Cutsforth was not entirely misguided in his argument that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual input. These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that Braille is essential for blind children?s cognitive development, as the visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain?s plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading ? whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina ? is inherently better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal memory , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their brains. Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print literacy. But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The activity of reading itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies illiterate former guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares 20 adults who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had not yet begun it. In M.R.I. scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing, and more white matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in dyslexics, and the study suggests that those brain patterns weren?t the cause of their illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result. There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of debate. In moving from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind people may not be cognitive but cultural ? a loss much harder to avoid. In one of the few studies of blind people?s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, a teacher of visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn?t use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by listening to their words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a character named Mark who had ?sleep bombs?: He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep. In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said ? the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them ? transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, ?as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.? The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, ?It just doesn?t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.? OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind people makes the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when Louis Braille invented his writing system ? so that blind people would no longer be ?despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,? as he put it ? there has always been, among blind people, a political and even moral dimension to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral culture seen as primitive and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and Britain, are now thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia, told me that he has heard this described as ?one of the advantages of being poor.? Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still try to read print ? very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two from their faces ? are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement for the blind. Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to Abraham Lincoln . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit Marriott last July, I heard the mantra ?listening is not literacy? repeated everywhere, from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured children who don?t know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that ?happily ever after? is made up of three separate words. Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of reading skills. ?I am now over 50 years old, and it wasn?t until two months ago that I realized that ?dissent,? to disagree, is different than ?descent,? to lower something,? he told me. ?I?m functionally illiterate. People say, ?Oh, no, you?re not.? Yes, I am. I?m sorry about it, but I?m not embarrassed to admit it.? While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York, David A. Paterson , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot afford. Like Sloate, Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every morning. (He calls himself ?overassimilated? and told me that as a child he was ?mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I?m not really supposed to be blind.?) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor. A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be employed as those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited with pride, so much so that those who didn?t know Braille were sometimes made to feel like outsiders. ?There is definitely a sense of peer pressure from the older guard,? James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using text-to-speech software, told me. ?If we could live in our own little Braille world, then that?d be perfect,? he added. ?But we live in a visual world.? When deaf people began getting cochlear implants in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way ? as an identity and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities, lifting the burdens but also complicating people?s sense of what is physically natural, because bodies can so often be tweaked until ?fixed.? Arielle Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind since birth, told me that if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes photographs of text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of vision like that, as ?just another piece of technology.? The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of reading, with the scope of the disability ? the extent to which you are viewed as ignorant or civilized, helpless or independent ? determined largely by your ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were designed to function as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has essentially done away with the limits of form, because information, once it has been digitized, can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but for many blind people the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation members recited to me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air. Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The Times. -- The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your help! To Get Involved go to: www.TeachBlindStudents.org "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching before us; if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe past and future generations, then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be done, and usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama From KKuhnke at nfb.org Tue Jan 5 01:46:47 2010 From: KKuhnke at nfb.org (Kuhnke, Kristian) Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:46:47 -0600 Subject: [Ccb-alumni] Visit eBay and Support the National Federation of the Blind! Message-ID: Dear Fellow Federationists: This week the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is one of three featured charities at eBay?s check-out counter. On January 4?10, customers will have the option of adding a $1?$25 donation to one of these featured charities at the time of their purchase. It?s an easy way to make a difference when you spend. You can also go to the National Federation of the Blind?s eBay Giving Works page to donate to the NFB or to buy or sell items that support the NFB. There is no better time to visit eBay if you support the National Federation of the Blind! Thank you for your generous support, and please forward this communication to any family, friends, or coworkers who use eBay. From MRiccobono at nfb.org Thu Jan 7 11:15:30 2010 From: MRiccobono at nfb.org (Riccobono, Mark) Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 05:15:30 -0600 Subject: [Ccb-alumni] Goddard Space Center Looking for Disabled Interns Message-ID: From: "Silberman, Kenneth A. (GSFC-1300)" <kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov> To: "Silberman, Kenneth A. (GSFC-1300)" <kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov> Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 13:17:32 -0600 Subject: Looking for Disabled Interns for Summer 2010 Goddard Projects Greetings from Goddard as we prepare for the Martin Luther King Holiday: We are looking for disabled interns for Summer 2010. The list of 2010 GSFC projects has been entered by our mentors. There is an abundance of projects to review at http://education.gsfc.nasa.gov/opportunities/ . Just click on the "Browse Available Opportunities" link to see what is available and apply to the internship of interest. (There is a link for every project and an "Apply Now" button with every internship description.) The deadline for students to apply is 7 February 2010. In addition, I encourage you to send me resumes of students you feel fit into the category of "highly qualified" based on academic merit and experience. See the Goddard organization lists in the attached PowerPoint file; and if you know of a student well suited and interested in one of these Branches, by all means send me their resume, their Branch of interest, and I will personally check with that group and get back with you. Again, we would like to see many more students with disabilities placed at Goddard next Summer. Your help in achieving this goal is greatly appreciated. I look forward to receiving your recommendations and hopefully together we can brighten a deserving students space-career! Very Truly Yours, Ken Col. Kenneth A. Silberman, Esq. U.S. Supreme Court, Maryland, & Patent Bars B.A., M.Eng., J.D. NASA Engineer & Registered Patent Attorney Education Office Code 130.3 NASA/GSFC Mailstop 130.3 Bldg. 28 Rm. N165 Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA Voice: (301) 286-9281 Fax: (301) 286-1655 E-mail: kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov Office Location: Building 28 Room W151 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2010 GSFC Labs.ppt Type: application/octet-stream Size: 577536 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mhartle at nfb.org Wed Jan 13 02:00:36 2010 From: mhartle at nfb.org (Hartle, Mary Jo) Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:00:36 -0600 Subject: [Ccb-alumni] NFB LAW Program: Deadline coming up soon--February 1, 2010 Message-ID: The National Federation of the Blind Announces The 2010 NFB Leadership and Advocacy in Washington, D.C., (LAW) Program Engaging the Voice of America's Blind Youth For Youth Grades 6-9 or Ages 12-16 April 16-20, 2010 Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, MD This four-day experience will provide blind and low vision students with a unique opportunity to explore the inner workings of our country's government, its history, and its culture while staying at the national headquarters for the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, MD. In addition to learning about grassroots legislation efforts, how resolutions are passed, and how various blindness legislation is brought about, participants will learn more about advocacy work for blind individuals and available resources for blind students and adults. Highlights of the Program include: * Visits to historical sites in Washington, D.C. * Meetings with, and presentations from, influential government leaders * Presentations by influential leaders from the largest blindness advocacy group in the country * Tours of the National Federation of the Blind national headquarters * A visit to the International Braille and Technology Center, the largest lab of accessible technology for the blind Program Details: * Cost: There will be a $250 fee for accepted students. All other expenses including transportation, room, and board will be provided * All accepted students must be accompanied by a parent/guardian, teacher, or blind/low vision mentor from their home state * No more than twenty-five participants from across the country will be accepted * Applications are due by February 1, 2010, to be considered To learn more about this exciting new program, or to apply online, please visit www.nfb.org/LAWProgram or contact Mary Jo T. Hartle, director of education at (410) 659-9314, ext. 2407, or by e-mail at mhartle at nfb.org. Mary Jo T. Hartle Mary Jo Thorpe-Hartle, MEd, NOMC Director of Education Jernigan Institute NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND 200 East Wells Street Baltimore, MD 21230 Phone: (410)659-9314 ext. 2407 Email: mhartle at nfb.org Fax: (410) 659-5129 Visit www.nfb.org From braille at nbpcb.org Mon Jan 18 19:52:30 2010 From: braille at nbpcb.org (Louise Walch) Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:52:30 -0600 Subject: [Ccb-alumni] NCLB Braille Exam at NFB National Convention Message-ID: Attention all interested in receiving National Certification in Literary Braille (NCLB): The National Blindness Professional Certification Board (NBPCB) would like to again offer NCLB braille certification at the NFB National Convention in Dallas this July. The NCLB is the only nationally recognized certification in literary braille geared specifically toward teachers. The NCLB is a five-year renewable certification awarded to those who successfully pass all four sections of the National Literary Braille Competency Test. The cost is $250. If you are interested in testing at the NFB national convention, we request that you fill out our brief online interest form with a note that you are interested in testing in Dallas. Please do so before February 10th. This is an interest form only and is NOT an application. A sufficient number of candidates are needed before the test room can be scheduled; Thus, by filling out the interest form you are increasing the chances that the exam will be offered. You will be notified of the decision by mid February. We urge that you fill out the brief online NCLB interest form at: http://www.nbpcb.org/forms/NCLBInterest/NCLBInterest_1.htm?id=694562449 For more information, updates, deadlines, sample exams, and to apply online, go to: www.nbpcb.org If you have further questions or would like to host an exam in your area, contact Louise Walch, NCLB Test Coordinator at braille at nbpcb.org or call (318) 257-4554. Louise G. Walch NBPCB Coordinator braille at nbpcb.org www.nbpcb.org From JFreeh at nfb.org Wed Jan 20 02:00:56 2010 From: JFreeh at nfb.org (Freeh, Jessica) Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:00:56 -0600 Subject: [Ccb-alumni] National Federation of the Blind Announces 2010 Race for Independence Message-ID: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Chris Danielsen Director of Public Relations National Federation of the Blind (410) 659-9314, extension 2330 (410) 262-1281 (Cell) cdanielsen at nfb.org National Federation of the Blind Announces 2010 Race for Independence Fundraising Effort to Focus on Access to Technology for Blind Americans Baltimore, Maryland (January 19, 2010): The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the oldest and largest organization of blind people in the United States, today announced the 2010 Race for Independence, a fundraising effort focused on improving access to technology by blind Americans and supporting other NFB initiatives. The Race for Independence is designed to raise funds for the National Federation of the Blind Imagination Fund, which supports the education, technology, and research projects of the NFB Jernigan Institute, as well as programs conducted by the fifty-two affiliates and over seven hundred local chapters of the Federation. The Race for Independence will also bring public attention to the need for full and equal access for blind Americans to modern technology, in everything from home appliances to automobiles. The initiative begins with a six-month campaign to raise funds from NFB members and friends that will close on July 31, 2010. Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: "The Imagination Fund represents the hopes and aspirations of blind Americans. Through this effort we are able to create innovative research, training, education, and technology programs that improve the lives of the blind and move us closer to our ultimate goal of full integration into society on a basis of equality. The crisis in Braille literacy for blind children and advances in technology that, if not properly designed, will threaten the independence of the blind mean that time is of the essence. But I am confident that with the help of our members and friends, we will ensure that blind children are literate and can pursue the career of their choice; that blind people have access to cutting-edge technology; and that opportunities for all blind Americans are limited only by our capacity to dream." Parnell Diggs, Chairman of the NFB Imagination Fund, said: "The Race for Independence is quite simply the expression of our desire to speed toward our goal of achieving first-class citizenship status in society at an ever-increasing pace. It is the anchor of the National Federation of the Blind's Imagination Fund, the annual campaign to raise proceeds for NFB programs at the national, state, and local levels." To sign up to be an Imaginator and help build the Imagination Fund, please visit www.raceforindependence.org or call (410) 659-9314, extension 2371. ### About the National Federation of the Blind With more than 50,000 members, the National Federation of the Blind is the largest and most influential membership organization of blind people in the United States. The NFB improves blind people's lives through advocacy, education, research, technology, and programs encouraging independence and self-confidence. It is the leading force in the blindness field today and the voice of the nation's blind. In January 2004 the NFB opened the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute, the first research and training center in the United States for the blind led by the blind. From CDanielsen at nfb.org Sat Jan 30 06:46:33 2010 From: CDanielsen at nfb.org (Danielsen, Chris) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:46:33 -0600 Subject: [Ccb-alumni] Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida to receive Distinguished Legislative Service Award at Washington Seminar Message-ID: Dear Fellow Federationists: As you know, our Washington Seminar is fast approaching. On Wednesday, February 3, it is extremely important that you attend the 5:00 p.m. meeting because we will have a special guest. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida will receive a Distinguished Legislative Service Award for her leadership in securing funding for the Digital Talking Book program of the Library of Congress. Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz is a subcommittee chairperson and Chief Deputy Whip in the United States House of Representatives. Please make a point to attend this meeting and express your sincere appreciation for all that she has done to create opportunity for blind Americans. Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz is also a cosponsor of the Blind Persons Return to Work Act and the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, and we believe that she will soon sign on as a cosponsor of the Technology Bill of Rights for the Blind. Please join us in honoring this great supporter and friend of America's blind. If you're not already in Washington on Wednesday but live in the District or in Virginia or Maryland, please make an effort to be at the Holiday Inn Capitol, 550 C Street SW, to attend this special presentation. If you live in Maryland or can get to the National Center for the Blind in Baltimore, there will be transportation on Wednesday afternoon to the Holiday Inn Capitol for this important gathering. If you would like to utilize this transportation option, please contact Scott White by calling (410) 659-9314, extension 2231, or e-mailing swhite at nfb.org. Please let Scott know by the close of business on Monday, February 1, if you plan to use this transportation option. Transportation will leave the National Center for the Blind promptly at 2:45 p.m. and return to the Center at approximately 8 p.m. Please be sure to arrive at the Center no later than 2:30 p.m. so that the van(s) can depart on time. If you will already be at Washington Seminar, please make a point of being in the Columbia Room at 5 p.m. The gathering will last until approximately 6:30 p.m. I hope to see you in Washington. Sincerely: Chris Danielsen