A Matter of Dignity

by Andrew Potok

  “On the way home from the racetrack, in a rented car, on a narrow, dark, two-lane road, driving slowly but preoccupied, I saw the headlights of a car coming toward me. Not until we were very close did I realize that I was driving on the wrong side of the road. I swerved right and he, of course, swerved left and we hit head-on.” He pauses to clear his throat. “In those days, cars weren't required to have shatterproof glass. I was sprayed by shards of windshield, which left me with minor cuts except for the glass that pierced both of my eyes.”

  “Did you lose all your eyesight at once?”

  “I lost one eye outright, then had two operations on the other. The first surgery was a success but the retina didn't heal properly. When I woke up after the second operation, I was totally blind. I knew right away that it was essential not to be held back by the emotional part of losing my eyesight and approached it on two levels. One was the conceptual part. I got over that real quick, in about ten minutes. I was able to do that because of my faith in God. I realized that this was planned for me and it would end well. I just had to find out what the rest of the plan was.”

  The practical part turned out to be a little more difficult. He had to learn all the tricks, adjust to the mobility problems in getting around, to the very different way even well-meaning people treat the newly blinded person, and to the emotional impact when they treated him like a helpless idiot. “Unless you're pretty damn tough,” he says, “their pity can have a detrimental effect. It bothered me but it didn't depress me. I know that it holds back a lot of people, those who get stuck in the ‘why me?’ phase. I didn't want to be that way.”

  “Did people fall all over themselves trying to rescue you?” I ask.

  “My parents wanted to do everything for me. I had to push them away. I had to educate them. My wife Mel, like me, knew we would make it, blind or not. She was capable, she had a job, she took care of the family, drove me around. Not everyone has someone like that to help them build up their self-esteem. When a lot of people are treating you like an idiot, it's nice to have somebody who doesn't. But before the accident, we were probably heading for divorce.”

  “Blindness saved your marriage?”

  “Hmm. I guess it did. It changed me a lot,” he admits.

  “You were a guy who loved speed, and, as we both know, a blind person is not particularly speedy.”

  He laughs. “Right,” he says. “I guess that's why I still do all this racing. But from the beginning, I stopped living in the sighted world.”

  The difference between losing eyesight in one catastrophic event and the endless adaptations required by gradual loss lends itself to interminable insider comparisons about which is easier to handle.

  “How did you make the mental switch from a passion for big macho machines to the intricacies of computers?”

  “I'm a pretty good engineer,” he says. His grandfather was a machinist, his father, a hydrologist, both great mechanics. When Ted was in fourth grade he took apart the coaster brake of his bicycle and put it back together again. “My dad thought it was a miracle,” he says, chuckling. He was able to translate his mechanical talents into computer skills. “Not only did I realize that I had a mind to understand computers but I recognized computers as an extremely promising field for blind people. I'm very fortunate,” Ted says, “to be able to combine my disability with my career.”

  I ask him how the whole computer enterprise got started. “After my surgeries,” he tells me, “a rehabilitation counselor went with me to check out the computer program at the University of South Florida. We talked to a professor and, to my amazement, he told me that he didn't want a blind person in his class.”

  “My God, Ted, I haven't heard a story like this since the bad old days.”

  “The professor said that he allowed a blind person into his class once before and the guy needed so much special attention that he held up the rest of the class.”

  “These days we could sue the bastard,” I say.

  “I had too many things going on emotionally at the time to make much of a fuss. Still, that professor's rebuff was almost inconceivable to me, too. After all, being an athlete, I'd been revered. When I was in the hospital in England after the accident, people would come to my room to ask for my autograph. So this hurt but I didn't want to fight it. I wasn't all that sure I wanted to go into computers anyway, and besides, I had too many other struggles in my life, mobility and braille foremost among them.”

  Unwilling to give up so easily, he decided to try a branch campus of the university. He managed to take a few computer courses and was hired by a friend who wanted to design a fancy computer program for his beach hotels. It was a foot in the door that allowed him to learn how to use a very primitive talking terminal. Maryland Computer Services, the company that produced it, noticed that Ted was becoming one of the few skilled users of its technology and the owners came down to Florida to check him out. “It was the middle of winter, so it wasn't a bad time to come south,” he says, laughing. They asked him to come up to Maryland to manage a trade show and, seeing him in action, they hired him to make talking computers that were better than the ones he was asked to promote. Meeting a lot of great engineers, he got himself an on-the-job education, and ended up writing a new code for their computers as well as doing tech support, sales and marketing. Eventually he was involved with higher decision-making. “I was incredibly lucky,” he says. “It was a fantastic way to learn.”

  But Ted and his wife were homesick for Florida, so they left Maryland and he continued to work for the company from home. Shortly afterward, Maryland Computers went out of business and both he and the screen reader he was working on were bought by another company. At the end of the first year, he met one of its clients, a blind millionaire from Chicago named Bill Joyce, who put up the money to start the Henter-Joyce partnership. Soon it was apparent that Bill Joyce had little time to give the new business, so, taking a huge risk, Ted Henter bought him out. “This whole progression of things reflects the wonderful breaks in my life,” Ted says. “It was meant to be.”

  Ted and I reflect on how some of us fall into our lifework, how some lives seem preordained, on a mission. Some people stumble through the most unlikely, least expected doors. And then, who among us can stay on course? There must be folks who remain untouched by circumstances and end their days having lived in perpetual sunshine, but we agree that most of us face unexpected detours.

  “Do you ever think of what life would have been like if you hadn't been blinded?” I ask Ted.

  “I would have been a world-famous, world-champion motorcycle racer,” he says, not skipping a beat. “Or I would have been dead.”

  In the late afternoon we sit on the terrace of his spacious suburban home overlooking a scenic canal off Tampa Bay, with blue herons that neither of us can see screeching overhead. Ted provides two mugs of beer as his wife Mel brings us a plateful of shrimp. “Taking risks in racing isn't that far from taking risks in business,” he muses. “Certainly the competitiveness is similar. Everyone I know in both worlds is very competitive. We don't like to lose.”

  “When you suddenly found yourself blind, did you feel that your fate was entirely in your own hands or were there a lot of other folks who helped?”

  “The emotional stress of learning to be independent while working hard to carve out a new career was difficult. Only when I got my first guide dog did a lot of the stress subside. I loved the freedom that dog gave me.” Ted's dog Lori, an eight-year-old Lab, had once been attacked and nearly mangled by a friend's shepherd. Lori is now being very careful with Tobias. As a matter of fact, she and Tobias take positions far from each other, my dog's face resting on my shoe, Lori in a corner staring at the wall. “It took me years to begin to feel really comfortable with blindness,” Ted says. “Still, though some people felt sorry for me and some talked down to me, almost everyone perceived me as a normal person, allowing me to do some powerful healing emotionally. And it was very important to have help. I c
ould focus on what I was good at while Mel took care of the girls and the house, as well as helping in the business. My parents provided transportation and money when we needed it. Our whole family lives within minutes of here. There are quite a few people in my life, even competitors, whom I can trust. That's key. At the beginning, a lot of people talked down to me. They no longer do.”

  “What about you? Having been helped by others, do you now consider yourself a helper?”

  “No,” he says without a moment's hesitation. “Helping other people was never my motivation. This isn't to say that I didn't want people to get whatever benefits they could from my work, but I got into this to make money, not to help.”

  “Didn't you get help from rehabilitation people, folks from the Division of Blind Services?”

  Ted sits up in his chair. This is obviously a hot topic for him. “From them, I primarily got mobility instruction. They also bought and paid for a talking computer and a braille printer. But when they tried to counsel me and give me advice, it was horrible. They wanted me to go to a class to learn to cook and sew. I'd never done cooking and sewing before and I wasn't about to start. I was twenty-seven years old, I had a wife, a college degree, and they wanted me to spend six weeks of my life in a rehab center doing nothing but learning skills I didn't want or need. Even though I didn't have a job yet, I didn't have six weeks to throw away. For a lot of people I guess that's perfectly normal.

  “The rehab industry is built on the premise that the more people in the system, the more funding they get. It's the natural progression of any bureaucracy. It's a great concept but it deteriorates as it goes. These counselors don't set high standards for the people they try to help. They themselves aren't successful, so they keep people down at their own level.”

  We both are veterans of the system, albeit very different people with very different politics. I tell him that, in my case, they gave me computer equipment, sent me to a rehab center, then to graduate school, all of it most useful at the time.

  “What I object to,” he says, “is the way these counselors go into our lives claiming to be saving any semblance of our self-esteem. What they do is commiserate with how horrible blindness is, what bad luck. I hate that. And it isn't true. So they tell you to sit back and relax, and they'll send you eight hundred dollars a month instead of really motivating you by saying: ‘Look, you're worth it, you can do it, you've got to get out there and try’ If it were me, I'd offer people two thousand a month for a limited time, say four years, and tell them to get it together, to find a trade school or college or employment.”

  “And if they don't?”

  “They can live the life of soup kitchens and barracks. My impression is that the motivational part doesn't happen as much as it should. The monthly money should be to get you over the tough spots and get you back into the game. When I was first blinded, I was looking for some vision of a future. What could a blind person do? What are the possibilities? They didn't have a clue. They couldn't find me role models of successful blind people. That's what I needed.”

  “But you were educated and motivated. Privileged. It's a whole lot easier to help you than someone without your inherent advantages.”

  “That's true, but a lot of very successful people come from that other side of the tracks—a lot more from there than from those who are born with a silver spoon. When tragedy strikes, it often ignites people and they become successful. What holds blind people and people with other disabilities back is the social system around them. If you pay people to sit on their ass, that's what they're going to do. You must give people a vision and a direction.”

  He tells me about being on the board of an organization called Abilities, which helps give disabled people a start. Recently, Abilities considered a case of a walking and biking path that cuts right through the city. Even though no one was allowed to put any business venture on the path, the board wanted to ask for an exception so that a disabled person could run a snack bar on it. “Just one other guy on the board besides me voted against this horrible idea,” Ted says. “It's an example of pitying the disabled. I can take hatred but I can't bear pity. It's time to get rid of all the special privileges given to blind people. In America, if you're motivated, you can make it. I'm against handouts. Disabled people should not be special. If we are given special privileges or head starts in a business venture, nondisabled business people will have a right to despise us.”

  Even though there are many people in the disability rights movement who think somewhat similarly, wanting no special privileges aside from what they consider their absolute rights in the form of a level playing field, my views are softer, a lot more liberal. Ted himself is an avid follower of Rush Lim-baugh as well as some of the religious right's radio evangelists, but in spite of his conservative political attitudes, he himself is a role model for a lot of blind people. A highly successful businessman, he helped create a very useful product that helps keep many blind people in the workforce. I suggest that making it happen must have been both exciting and challenging.

  “We started in the late eighties,” he says, “busy mostly with our DOS screen reader. By 1993, we realized that Windows had to be attacked. It looked formidable, but we knew it simply needed to be done.”

  Henter-Joyce had nearly gone bankrupt after unsuccessfully attempting to create an off-screen model, the essential data base, a memory list of every bit of text that exists on the screen, its location and pixel coordinates. Ted then hired Glen Gordon, a blind programmer whom he'd met earlier, a man who, like him, knew that without the move to Windows, he and many other blind programmers would lose their marketability.

  The development process was arduous and at times somewhat comical. Because Windows was not accessible to blind people, it took all of Glen Gordon's ingenuity to juggle the possible options. “Imagine,” Glen says, “I was flitting from the Windows help file to a primitive version of an existing screen reader, then back again. From there, I'd go into DOS, where I was writing the new program. Talk of pulling one's self up by one's own bootstraps,” he says, laughing. “We gave that metaphor a new definition.”

  The wonder of the whole enterprise is that Glen had no visual access to Windows and thus couldn't truly know the screen configuration in order to determine how it should be represented verbally. “I could have had someone look over my shoulder and explain it but that would have been arduous,” he says. For people like Glen and Ted, the challenge of beating the odds, no matter how daunting, was so seductive that they couldn't allow themselves what might have been an easier route.

  The purpose then of running another existing program was to get a spatial concept of Windows. Glen used it and the Windows help files to understand what was going on, to understand that pressing a certain key would result in particular on-screen displays. The fluidity of text becoming graphics was a completely new concept and required learning how to store and quantify information in a new way.

  In DOS, it is possible for a screen reader to read anything that is typed on the screen, to say aloud what any character is at any location. A lot of people had mastered this straightforward technology of intercepting the text and transforming it into words. But when Windows came along, the entire paradigm changed. It was no longer possible to say what the character in, say, row one, column six, was, because in Windows there is no such grid. Though most things start in Windows as text, by the time they're actually on the screen, they've been converted to graphics. “What we had to do,” Glen says, “was intercept the text before it was turned into a picture and store it away so that it could be located later. Eventually, we would give it a number and a label, then a key on the keyboard that would make audible what to a sighted user was an easily recognizable symbol representing functions, letters, words, sentences and paragraphs.”

  But that wasn't the only problem. There are some things on the screen that don't start as text, like the picture of the recycle bin, which designates the place you're to put your deleted files, or the ic
on that says: Click on this and your text becomes bold. “We were able to determine that this was some sort of picture,” he says, “and from that picture we computed a number and from that number a label, simply the name assigned to a picture.

  “Intercepting keys can be complicated, because whatever we want to use for our JAWS program can't interfere with any underlying applications, but once we jump that hurdle, assigning keystroke equivalents to visual signs that appear on the screen is fairly straightforward.

  “As a blind user, you don't care about the entire landscape of the screen. You care about the landscape of one application at a time. It's like a sighted person maximizing a program and not seeing anything else. A sighted person can rely on looking at a trash can on the screen, then delete his file by dragging it to the trash can. As a blind person you need more of a concept about how to perform this task. You won't get visual feedback which would give you a clue. You'll get audible feedback from the JAWS program that tells you where you are, asks you what you want to do and then tells you how to do it. So we have a whole bunch of keystrokes you might use that a sighted person can accomplish by simply dragging and dropping, doing something quickly with a mouse. None of this means that a blind person has to be less efficient, though a blind person who wants to keep up must learn all that is provided as an equivalent language in JAWS.”

  As the sun begins to set over Tampa Bay, Ted's youngest daughter's dog, an eight-inch-long miniature Doberman named Daytona, begins to run Tobias ragged. We hear a wicked splash. Tobias has been steered into the swimming pool chasing Daytona. Unsatisfied still, the little hotdog manipulates Tobias into flying headfirst into a glass sliding door. He seems unhurt but I bristle, mortified on behalf of my noble animal. Tobias, a little dazed and very wet, loves the playtime and, tail wagging, wants more.