[Ohio-talk] Fw: Thank You, for the birthday call

[Dr. Smith]

I thought you might find this response interesting to one of my cold calls to one of the recipients of our free cane offer so read on if you are interested.

JW

Dr. J. Webster Smith
President National Federation of the Blind of Ohio
P.O.BOX 458 Athens, Ohio, 45701-0458
Phone Number - 740-592-6326 
"Changing What it Means to be Blind"
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Eric Riddle 
To: jwsmithnfb at verizon.net 
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 2:27 PM
Subject: Thank You, for the birthday call


Dear Dr. J. W. Smith,

Thank you for calling me yesterday May 3, 2009, yes it was my birthday and the first as being recognized as being legally blind. Yes, I received my free white cane, thank you, and I am practicing with it.

After two years I am finally getting some assistance from SS and mostly my problems (I think you asked about this in your call) are of a financial nature. I have racked up a good bit of debt living on my credit cards since April of 2007, and paying past bills plus current bills leaves me with little to no funds to replace wall clocks, alarm clocks, phones, get a larger pc monitor etc. It is pretty overwhelming what I could get to help myself from light bulbs to a large print scrabble game and I am trying to prioritize my items.

In trying to help myself (and others) I put together a list:
NE Ohio assistance programs for the blind (my sight center caseworker had 4 of these I found the rest)
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg789j94_4hftqcvjq 

And spent over a week researching hand held cctv video magnifiers 
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg789j94_3ct6g5zdr&hl=en


Which I tried to format as bobby accessible and ran through WAVE accessibility checker and had no hits on the accessibility, but what google uses for coding oh my

Please feel free to link to them if you think they are useful

Again, thanks for the call out of the blue; without any family and few friends it was nice to hear.

Sincerely,

Eric Riddle