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Chicago Sun Times For June 15, 2009
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Blindness can't hold him back U.S. ATTORNEY'S ELITE | From early on, family expected 'excellence' June 15, 2009 BY AND TESS FARDON Staff Reporters/nkorecki@suntimes.com
On his computer in the U.S. attorney's office, Yusef Dale is listening to his e-mail.
He quickly clicks from one message to the next, the voice from his computer sounding like an auctioneer on fast-forward. ? Yusef Dale, accompanied by his
Labradore, Weldone, is a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office. (John H. White/Sun-Times) To the untrained ear, it's almost unintelligible. To Dale,
a federal prosecutor in Chicago who is blind, it's like speed-reading. Special software on his computer, called JAWS -- for Job Access With Speech -- reads
most files electronically. It's a tool that has opened a world to Dale and others who are blind. Not that he couldn't read before. It just took a lot longer.
Dale grew up in the South Shore neighborhood. Blind or not, what his parents expected of him was nothing but "excellence. They never believed my blindness
would hold me back," Dale said. It didn't. Two weeks ago, he joined the elite ranks of the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago -- believed to be the first
blind federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Illinois. Dale, who began working in the office two years ago as a special attorney for the Social
Security Administration, quickly became a fixture, along with his black Labrador, named "Weldone. Dale's younger brother, who's also blind, works with
the Obama administration as special assistant to the president for disability policy. Dale was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic, degenerative
eye disease that meant he was born "worse than legally blind. He gradually went completely blind by adulthood. I went from slim to none," he said. He excelled
in college and law school. He majored in corporate finance, despite a warning from the business school dean: "Perhaps you'd be better suited for liberal
arts and sciences. That only emboldened Dale. He graduated in five years, typical for corporate finance majors. Then, his aunt said he'd never graduate
law school in just three years. He did. I busted it night and day," Dale said. As an undergraduate, Dale recorded lectures, then played them back in his
dorm room so he could take notes using his Braille writer -- a big, clunky, loud mechanism too unwieldy to take to class. Note-taking was laborious, but,
Dale said, "It prepared me for law school. By then, something called the "Braille and Speak" was available. Smaller and more mobile, the mechanism allows
users to type in Braille, and it converts the notes to sound. It can also be fed into a Braille printer. His boss, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, said
of Dale: "Yusef has a lot of presence. He's not intimidated by anything. If you see him when you interact with him, he doesn't get flustered. He's very
independent. U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall said that, in an embezzlement trial she heard, Dale walked easily through the courtroom, appearing to
make eye contact with the witnesses -- Dale calls it "fake eye contact" -- and flawlessly questioned a witness, image by image, about a surveillance video
that he couldn't see. By the second day, you forget you have a blind lawyer in front of you," Kendall said. Dale has a few things he thinks people usually
get wrong about blind people -- like assuming their dog does all the work getting them places. Weldone does act as his eyes at times, but the dog doesn't
know directions. It's Dale who has memorized the city's grid, as well as the interior of his own office and building, and teaches Weldone where to go.
Blind people are the experts on blindness," Dale said. . 

 
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