Speaker 2 00:01:00 And hello in greetings. And this is Disability and Progress. This is also K F E I 90.3 fm, Minneapolis, and K ffe i.org g. It is pledge night. So we hope you will show us the love and go to kfa org and lay down some pledges. Any amount is good as usual, and this is disability and progress. We bring you insights into ideas about in discussions on disability topics. My name is Sam, I'm the host of this show, and Charlene Doll is my research woman. Hello Charlene. Hello
Speaker 3 00:01:36 Everybody. Sorry about the clock
Speaker 2 00:01:38 And we know that you are listening. And if you wanna be a part of our listener program, of our listener club, please feel free to email me at Disability and
[email protected]. And we'll say your name on the air when we get it, um, for next week. And we'd love to hear from you. We'd like to hear how far away our listeners are. So you can email us at Disability and progress sam jasmine.com. You can also email me and get on our email list and find out what we have coming up. We do like to, to tell people tonight, we have some great guests with us. We have Peter and Nancy Tope, and they are with us, and they're going to be talking about their podcast called Eyes on Success. Good evening, guys.
Speaker 4 00:02:29 Well this is Pete here, and if your listeners don't know, I've been blind since birth
Speaker 5 00:02:37 And this is Nancy and I'm fully cited, but I've been, I like to think I've been living with blindness for 40 years. It's just his, not mine. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:02:47 Yes. I was just gonna ask you how you kind of came, um, to the disability community. I'm wonder if you guys wouldn't mind sharing the story about how you met.
Speaker 4 00:02:57 Well, I was working at Xerox, my job out of graduate school as a research scientist. And Wow. After I was working there for a few years, Nancy got hired at Xerox also as a research scientist. And turned out in graduate school, each of us had picked up American Contra dancing. It's sort of like square dancing, but done in lines. And so when we moved to Rochester, New York where Xerox was, we had both joined the local dance crowd and we more or less met that way.
Speaker 5 00:03:27 We exactly met that way. Ah,
Speaker 2 00:03:29 But it
Speaker 5 00:03:30 Turned out we independently joined the same carpool, so we would've met that way and our bosses reported to the same person, so we would've met at work too.
Speaker 2 00:03:42 Wow. So it was fate, <laugh>,
Speaker 4 00:03:45 It sort of was fate. We met in August when Nancy came to Xerox and we were married by the next July. And here we are nearly 40 years later, still together.
Speaker 2 00:03:56 Well, congratulations. That is not always an easy feat.
Speaker 4 00:04:00 We would not recommend that for our kids.
Speaker 2 00:04:04 Oh, <laugh>. Oh my. Um, so well good on you guys. And, um, that was, that's a fun story to hear and you would've met one way or another. So it looks like you could run from each other but you couldn't hide. So. Excellent. Um, I wanna talk about the, what we're here to talk about, which is your podcast Eyes on Success. Um, you started out though it was not Eyes on Success. It was, I believe viewpoints.
Speaker 5 00:04:35 It was viewpoints. And so
Speaker 2 00:04:37 Can you please tell me like how that idea got started and why did you decide to change the name?
Speaker 5 00:04:43 Well, those are two separate stories.
Speaker 2 00:04:45 Well go ahead, line 'em up.
Speaker 5 00:04:47 <laugh>, we were volunteering at the local public radio station and I said, geez, I can read, I'd like to volunteer for the local radio reading service, which was a side band of the public radio station. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so I had been doing that for a while. And then the woman who ran both the radio reading service and the FM side of the public radio affiliate said, Hey, you know, between you and Pete, you talk, well, you know, a lot of access technology, I think you should do a show. And it took her a few months to talk us into it. But, um, the first week of January, 2001, we aired our first show. And at the time it was Viewpoints.
Speaker 4 00:05:33 But just to rewind a little bit, since it is your fund drive, how we first got in, how we first got connected with the radio station was through the fund drive. We had volunteered to answer the phones during the fund drive, and of course Nancy could do it just answering the phones and interacting with a computer and entering the people's names and page numbers, et cetera. But I needed some assistant devices, like a talking computer. So we took her laptop down there with Jaws running on it mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And everybody was amazed how this blind person was interacting with a computer and doing the whole fun drive stuff. And in particular, the manager of the FM station was also the manager of the radio reading service. And it turned out that she had a blind employee who was running the boards for the radio reading service and the station wanted to upgrade the whole complex to some new software. And his screen reader wasn't compatible with the software. Oh,
Speaker 2 00:06:33 I've heard that story before. Right.
Speaker 4 00:06:36 So she talked to me and she said, you know, she knew I was a physicist and knew a lot about technology. And I said, well, maybe I can help him. So I actually wrote him some Jaws scripts that enabled him to work with the new software. And the day I delivered the scripts the next day they upgraded the whole station to the new software <laugh>.
Speaker 5 00:06:53 Oh. And that was AM fm radio, reading service and television. And they were all holding back because of the One Blind Sound engineer.
Speaker 2 00:07:03 Wow. Cool story. Um, I'm was, what was your show when you, when you did the show Viewpoints? What was that one about and how long did that last?
Speaker 5 00:07:18 Oh, it's the same show, but what happened was about a year and a half in, we found out that there was some other weekly half hour radio show that was opinions about news. It was nothing to do with blindness. And they had trademarked the
Speaker 2 00:07:36 Name Uhoh
Speaker 5 00:07:38 <laugh>. And so we contacted them, whoops. And we said, you know, our show has nothing to do with your show. Can, would you GI Grant uss permission to continue using this name? And they said no. Oh. So we needed a new name and that's all it changed was the name. Wow.
Speaker 4 00:07:55 It wasn't easy finding a name because when you think of it these days, you want the URL for the website, you want the Twitter handle, you want the Facebook connection. And to get all that in a sensible name, there are billions of websites out there and all the good names are taken.
Speaker 2 00:08:10 Tell me about it. Yes. And so how did you come up with it?
Speaker 4 00:08:17 We made a giant spreadsheet with lots and lots of names. We started looking for URLs that were available and now it's eyes on success.net.
Speaker 2 00:08:28 That's pretty cool. I I like it. And
Speaker 4 00:08:31 We thought that was sort of emblematic of our mission of the show. I mean, really the mission of the show is to show people around the world, visually impaired people around the world, <laugh>, that you can do anything you want. Even if you have a vision impairment. Right. There should be nothing that holds you back. You don't have to be selling pencils on the corner. I mean, I had a successful career as a PhD research physicist being totally blind so it can be done.
Speaker 5 00:09:01 And so every episode discusses either some visually impaired person's success, whether it's their career, their education, a hobby, sports, anything, or a way that a visual impaired person can succeed. And so we talk about the latest features of the latest updates of whatever access technology is out there, and services provided by organizations to help make life easier for people with vision loss.
Speaker 2 00:09:33 How did you decide on the length of the show?
Speaker 5 00:09:38 Oh, radio reading services are radio programs and they work in increments of half an hour. Ah. So it's a half an hour. It's actually a little bit less than a half an hour. So they can give their station identification, they can give the weather the time, whatever else they have to say. And that little sliver between programs.
Speaker 2 00:10:00 Wait, so I'm familiar with the radio reading, um, programs, but I don't listen a lot. All of them are just half hour lengths. Not all of them. Are they?
Speaker 5 00:10:11 Well, most of them are full hours, but we weren't that enthusiastic. So ours is
Speaker 2 00:10:16 Tapping. Oh, I gotcha. Oh listen, I don't know that it's enthusiasm. I think you can be really enthusiasm, but it's, it's a lot of work. So <laugh>, I get it. It's
Speaker 5 00:10:28 A lot of work. Yes. And we didn't wanna make it twice as much work.
Speaker 2 00:10:33 Gotcha.
Speaker 4 00:10:34 But interestingly, I think the time constraint has actually made the program be the quality that it is. You know, I listen to so many podcasts online and people will ramble on forever cuz they have kind of an infinite time limit. There's no end and they can make mistakes and back up and yeah. You just feel like you're not getting a lot of information per time. And so the fact that we have to edit everything down to half an hour, well actually less because we have breaker parts and sometimes a promotional item, it really has to be pretty tight and very information dense.
Speaker 2 00:11:12 That's true. And I have found now we used to be a half hour and then we went to an hour, um, kind of nudged to do so. And I have a, a combination of feelings, you know, sometimes, oh my gosh, I feel like an hour is not enough. And then other times it's kind of like, okay, that took 40 minutes. Now what <laugh>? So now we just, you know, I kind of arranged to have the time that I can have and then, you know, if it runs short, we use fillers so that, I think rather than drag it on all the time, cuz you're right.
Speaker 4 00:11:52 And what we've done is sometimes we'll interview some people and it will be more than a half an hour episode and you really want to tell the story. Right. And so sometimes we'll split it into two episodes and kind of have a pair of episodes. We recently did that. We interviewed people from the early days of Jaws and Freedom Scientific, ah, Glen Gordon, Eric Damie, and Ted Hunter, you know, who were the early people in the company. Right. And it was such a good conversation that just had to be two shows and tell the story.
Speaker 2 00:12:24 Yes. So how did you go about deciding where your podcasts were going to be housed and, and and whatnot?
Speaker 4 00:12:34 Well, that also is an interesting story. We first started doing it at the, uh, suggestion of the lady who was running the radio reading service in Rochester at the time. She says, you know, you guys know a lot, maybe you can, uh, talk and do a radio reading service kind of show for us every week. So we started doing that and we would generally take little clips and chat back and forth and quickly we figured out that, you know, we could do some more interesting stuff. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and the radio reading service at the time was hosting some of the podcasts on their site, but they weren't doing it regularly. They were only keeping two or three at a time. And I said we could do better. So I found some hosting provider at the time, it was one-on-one. I said, I know how to make a podcast. You know, you started up in WordPress, I know how to edit websites and create websites. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So we started hosting our own podcast and eventually we started doing the whole thing ourselves. You know, it's so easy to do a podcast from home these days. The equipment is relatively inexpensive with a hundred dollars microphone and some relatively inexpensive mixing equipment and a computer. It's quite possible. And then you, with Zoom, you can interview people around the world.
Speaker 2 00:13:46 Yes, this is true. That's, we were doing the around the world before Zoom. But um, yes, it's especially true with Zoom now, uh, for a lot less expensive too <laugh> than you just have to worry about time management as far as what time zone they're on. Um, and so do you host them on your own, uh, website or where are they kept? Are they in the SoundCloud?
Speaker 4 00:14:15 We have a provider called, uh, it was called One and One now, it's called iOS io n o s.com. And they provide, um, WordPress and the ability to write some code on the site. So I've written actually some P H P code that manages counting the downloads and telling us where they come from, what countries, what IP addresses, and doing some of that stuff. So I've actually written a lot of that code. I mean, you know, with our scientific backgrounds we're kind of nerds. We did all the H T M L for our site and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 00:14:50 Gotcha. Yeah. But if
Speaker 5 00:14:51 You wanna know where you can find the back episodes. And Pete also wrote a very handy search tool, which is great. Um, if we wanna know when the last time we covered a topic was I just enter the name of the topic and it all the shows that are related to that topic pop up. Um, so we have the entire archive, which is now well over 600 episodes available on our website. You can find most of the way back on the actual podcast on the WordPress site. You can go back, I don't know how far on Facebook, on Twitter. Uh, we started posting them on YouTube a couple of years ago. So going back a couple of years on YouTube,
Speaker 2 00:15:43 You're all over, I think, over the place. I saw, I saw one that had like 300 of them or something like that. So, but I'm sure as you said, how does, do you know how, um, like Apple or Stitcher or, or them decide how many they're gonna, will they host as many as you put out?
Speaker 4 00:16:03 So I believe, I haven't looked into this in a while, but I believe the WordPress plugin that I'm using only allows me to push 300 at a time.
Speaker 2 00:16:13 Oh, that would explain why I saw 300.
Speaker 4 00:16:15 Yeah. Otherwise it gets kind of unwieldy for podcast applications to download the updated show list for all the podcasts you might subscribe to every week. But we do have all of the shows available on our site, as Nancy said, right at the top of our website is a search field. You can put in a show number or a topic if you're looking for Beat Baseball or running or reading or n L s and it'll come up with any of those shows and you can download them directly. And then we also make sure that our podcasts are fed through Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can listen on your Amazon or Google devices these days by saying Play the Eyes on Success podcast. Right.
Speaker 2 00:16:58 We need to take a short break to let everyone know you're tune two K f e i 90.3 fm, Minneapolis and kfa I org. This is Disability and Progress. We're talking with Nancy and Peter Tope and they are speaking about their podcast Eyes on Success. And as you guys were told before, this is our pledge drive week. Um, we are pledging and hoping to get pledges. Uh, you may go to kfa i.org g and pledge, hit that nice little button and you can use your iPhone as well if you've downloaded the Kfa I app. And um, you can not only hear us with that, but you can pledge as well. You guys are old hands at pledging and doing pledge stuff at. I understand.
Speaker 5 00:17:52 Oh, we've been donating to our local public radio affiliate, uh, for several decades. I don't even know how long, but a long time. And when we moved, we started pledging to the new local affiliate.
Speaker 2 00:18:07 So you know how important it is, you know, to have those types of things and um, be supporting the public radio or the community radio as this is. Um, but we do, we are as in fact national you can hear is everywhere since we do stream online as well. Can you talk, you know, you kind of talked a little bit about the different topics that you have had on your shows. What are like the most recent things that you've, you've had? Well,
Speaker 4 00:18:48 I mentioned talking with some of the founders of Hunter Joyce and mm-hmm. <affirmative>, freedom Scientific. That was kind of fun. We also talked with, um, some of those people, Jim Erman, who, who founded Open Book and Dean Blaze and Ted Henter. Um,
Speaker 2 00:19:05 Oh I remember Dean Blaze. Right.
Speaker 4 00:19:08 And we had
Speaker 2 00:19:08 Royal and Speak
Speaker 4 00:19:10 <laugh>. Yeah. We had them all on a show a couple of years ago and it was so much fun cuz you know, they kind of keep in contact every, every couple of years or so. And we got 'em all together on one show and it was so much fun to hear them interact and reminisce a lot times.
Speaker 2 00:19:25 Yeah. So they they're probably old friends. They're or
Speaker 5 00:19:28 At least Oh yeah,
Speaker 2 00:19:29 They know of each other. <laugh>.
Speaker 5 00:19:31 Yeah, they're buddies. Um,
Speaker 2 00:19:33 Yeah. And sometimes
Speaker 5 00:19:34 We do lighter shows. We found out some Fluke cabin and we learned that all of the equipment for Beep baseball worldwide is made a 15 minute drive from our home. Really? So we went over and interviewed them and it was really cool to be able to do that.
Speaker 2 00:19:55 Yes. We had some of those people on our show as well and it was very informational. We always love doing that. Um, talking about sports that people with different disabilities can play.
Speaker 4 00:20:09 Another
Speaker 5 00:20:10 Us another really fun show we did recently, it was actually an encore presentation. We figure if it's good enough for Terry Gross, we can do it a couple times a year. But this was talking about a show we did of a, describing a trip we took around our new home state of Colorado and some of the experiences we ran into. And that was just so much fun to revisit the trip. And our listeners love it when we talk about some of our experiences.
Speaker 2 00:20:44 And so it's interesting, you know, you your name for the show. I'm gonna go back to that Eyes on Success because there's so many, to me, meanings to that. What does it mean to you personally?
Speaker 4 00:20:59 Well, as I mentioned to me, part of the mission of the show is to demonstrate to people with stories of other successful blind professionals, blind athletes, et cetera, that you can do virtually everything. I mean, you know, probably the only thing a blind person can't do these days is drive a car. But with the,
Speaker 5 00:21:20 Well, we have talked to people who've driven cars. Well, true.
Speaker 4 00:21:23 Well
Speaker 2 00:21:24 That's true. But how about legally? <laugh>
Speaker 5 00:21:28 <laugh>, well off road on a race track. Yeah. And we talked to people who set land speed records blind on a motorcycle at the Bonneville Salt Flats. People can do anything. We've talked to wood workers, we've talked to shop teachers. This is a guy who uses power tools and in a room full of teenagers and teaches them how to do it.
Speaker 2 00:21:51 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 4 00:21:53 And, you know, many people would think that, you know, how can you be a physicist and program computers and work with mathematics and stuff? But you know, I did it. So we talked to blind scientists and you know, we advocate a lot for the fact that blind people can get into these fields that people might discourage them from being in when they're young. So we've done a lot of shows based on science. It's kind of our passion.
Speaker 5 00:22:20 And one of the really gratifying parts of this show is having spoken with experts in various fields all around the world, every once in a while we'll get a query from a listener. You know, I'm thinking of going to medical school, is that possible? And we'll find some blind person who did it mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And as a practicing psychiatrist, you know, same thing with being a pharmacist. We put them in touch. We did a whole episode because, you know, presumably the person who wrote us the question isn't the only one on the planet who's interested. But we put the two of them in touch with each other. And that's so gratifying.
Speaker 4 00:23:01 And that's partially what makes the show so rewarding for us because even though we are retired, it is a lot of work, as you know,
Speaker 2 00:23:07 It is.
Speaker 4 00:23:08 Set up the interviews, do the interviews, edit it, put the website up and distribute it. It's, it's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding meeting people around the world with these stories of success and how they did something and being able to share it with other people and make those connections.
Speaker 2 00:23:26 I can tell you the
Speaker 5 00:23:27 Furthest person, the furthest away person we've spoken to is in Tasmania.
Speaker 2 00:23:33 Oh wow.
Speaker 5 00:23:33 And I believe you can't get any further away than that.
Speaker 2 00:23:38 Probably true. I I am not retired and I can tell you you're right, it is a lot of work <laugh>. Um, how do you go about choosing your topics and your guests?
Speaker 5 00:23:52 Well, you know, at the beginning we had to come up with all the ideas ourselves and we would sit down and brainstorm and, you know, what's new in access technology? What new services are there maybe for making reading accessible. Um, and then we would contact somebody who was more knowledgeable than us. And at the beginning, nobody knew who we were from Adam. We would get blown off pretty frequently these days we contact somebody, it's like, you know, we'd like to interview you about such and such. Oh, I'd be honored. Which is great. And then sometimes people contact us, they say, Hey, I have a great idea for your show. And assuming it's good idea, that's just one less idea that we have to come up with.
Speaker 2 00:24:38 That's right. Yeah. We kind of have that combination too, that we, you know, sometimes we get people writing in about what they'd like to talk about other times, you know, we find things that we feel like this is important, we need to cover it. And as you, I think mentioned too, sometimes you have to revisit things cuz things change. And hence why we kind of changed our name to Disability and Progress. I feel like things do always progress. You may not like how they progress, but they always do. Yes. And um, they, they're always changing. So we have found that we have sometimes gone back to topics that we've done a handful of years ago because especially in the medical field, things are, are always changing. Um, so what, to you, what has been the most difficult part for you doing a podcast like this?
Speaker 5 00:25:39 Oh, that's an interesting question. Wow. Well, <laugh>, you know, we keep hyping how important lifelong learning is. But let me tell you, we had to learn a whole lot. We had careers at Xerox Corporation in corporate research developing next generation printers. And so we both, including the blind guy, learned a lot about image processing, image manipulation, color science. We knew nothing about audio production recording, you know, we've had to learn a lot web hosting. We knew a little bit of H T M L to write the website, but we both had to learn more. You know, somebody said, Hey, you ought to include a picture with every show. I'm like, okay. Then I had to learn how to do that. And it's just, there's always something new to learn, which keeps it interesting. But I think that's the hardest part.
Speaker 2 00:26:38 Yes. Yes. I need to take a little bit of a break and make sure people remember that this is Pledge Drive. You can go to kfa.org and pledge for us, whatever you can afford, uh, for disability and progress. Or you can click that little button on your smartphone on the app that says Pledge Now. And this is Kfa I 90.3 fm, Minneapolis and kfa I org g. This is Disability and Progress. We're speeding with, we're speaking with Peter and Nancy Tope, <laugh> <laugh>. You never do that, do you? <laugh>
Speaker 5 00:27:13 M we edit. Nobody knows that's Oh
Speaker 2 00:27:17 Yeah, you cheat <laugh>,
Speaker 4 00:27:18 You can make mistakes.
Speaker 2 00:27:20 It's called, uh, eyes On Success is their podcast. And um, that's, I I'm really glad you guys decided to come on and it's now you now you know what's, while you've known what it's like to do live anyway, but I think sometimes people get so used to doing their podcasts and not live and they think what live? I'm like, yeah, actually it's easier in some ways cuz you, you take away from a lot of the editing. It is what it is. <laugh>. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:27:51 There are different ways of doing it. Yes. But you know, you talk about, you've been talking about, uh, public radio a lot since it is your fun drive season there. And I must say we have, as Nancy's mentioned, we've donated to public radio for decades and we get a lot of our news and information from those services. But not only that, they've been sort of a model for learning to do this podcast and how to do a podcast, what questions to ask. I mean, you know, you listen to people like Diane Ream and Terry Gross and what makes them good interviewers. Why do those shows work? And you know, we'd listen to what people did to make their shows interesting and work correctly and try to emulate that.
Speaker 2 00:28:36 Right. They're
Speaker 4 00:28:37 Kind of a high standard.
Speaker 2 00:28:39 Yes. Yes they are. And how does your podcast get its support? Do you actually have, um, support that comes to your podcast or do you, is it just out of your own pocket and that's what you do?
Speaker 4 00:28:53 This is primarily a volunteer effort for us. We occasionally run promotional items. I mean, we have several running this year. The American Printing House, um, took a a long support spot last year and there are several people doing that this year. But you know, mostly it's to promote agencies and organizations for the blind. We don't do like toothpaste ads or anything.
Speaker 2 00:29:20 Right.
Speaker 4 00:29:21 <laugh> so and so
Speaker 2 00:29:23 Underwriting that helps
Speaker 5 00:29:24 We get enough money to cover our web hosting expenses if I need to buy another, um, microphone or, you know, something like that. We, we get enough money to cover that, but we're certainly not making any money at this.
Speaker 2 00:29:44 Right. That and that, uh, I think is the way of a lot of podcasts. You know, we're community radio, so we, we are not paid either and we are all volunteers. So we understand that, you know, what that takes for that.
Speaker 5 00:30:00 Um, but we do declare it <laugh>. We're we're honest about that. We put it on our taxes.
Speaker 2 00:30:07 Good. That is excellent. And
Speaker 4 00:30:09 What makes us really feel good is, as Nancy said, making connections with some of our listeners around the world, but also occasionally getting these notes from people saying, you know, we've listened Eyes on Success for years. Or, or I particularly liked that last show. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, occasionally someone will send in a small donation. And you know, it's just the thought that counts. The fact that people are appreciating it, the people that, yes. The fact that we have so many listeners and the show has grown so much over the years, that's what makes us feel good and keeps us going.
Speaker 2 00:30:39 And I, I think for us too, we, we love the idea of educating people. There's so much. Even we don't, you know, there are so many disabilities I didn't even know about till I started doing this show. And uh, even living in the land of disabilities, you know, you don't even know all the ones that are out there. And I think that that's a big thing to be able to learn and imagine now what the general person who just stumbles on your show, what they don't know and, and learn. And I always tell people, you better like the education cuz you're probably not gonna get famous through this. But I, I mean that for me, that's, um, what I have enjoyed is the education. And I wonder about you guys, like what is it that really makes you keep coming back to doing something like this week after week? Well,
Speaker 5 00:31:32 You know, all of these shows that we get compliments on from listeners saying, Hey, that was really interesting. We got to have the conversation and we've gotten to talk to, you know, not only people doing a, a wide assortment of things, but we've gotten to talk to some of these people who are household names in the field. And that's just really pretty cool. You know, we've talked to people from all over the place. What's it like being a blind teacher of blind students learning English in Iran? Like, you don't get to have those conversations in a normal life.
Speaker 2 00:32:16 Right.
Speaker 5 00:32:17 It's cool.
Speaker 2 00:32:18 Yes. What has been the most challenging topic that you feel like you have done?
Speaker 4 00:32:28 Challenging topic.
Speaker 5 00:32:30 I would say it was, um, the guy we talked to about the intersection of blindness and race. He grew up as an African American in Atlanta, Georgia, and lost his vision at some point along the way. I think he was in his twenties mm-hmm. <affirmative> and talking about his social navigation skills that he developed being in a minority that frankly wasn't treated all that well, um, helped him be a member of another minority that also had problems getting around.
Speaker 4 00:33:11 Mm-hmm.
Speaker 5 00:33:12 It, it was really interesting and it, and it was a challenging, delicate conversation.
Speaker 2 00:33:20 You would agree.
Speaker 4 00:33:21 The other interesting ones are, I think sometimes talking to professors, you know, their job is to profess and we like to keep our show conversational and interactive so it makes it more interesting for the listeners. And sometimes you can ask these people a question and all of a sudden you get the 40 minute lecture from your class
Speaker 2 00:33:42 <laugh> like, wait a minute, we've all all been there <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:33:47 And I think professors are worse at that because as I said, that's their job to profess.
Speaker 2 00:33:51 Right, right. It is funny because sometimes you don't know who you're, you really don't know what you're going to, I should say you don't know what you're gonna get. Not who, obviously you know who you're gonna get, but you don't always know what you're gonna get. Sometimes you can get somebody who just keeps going and you have to get, take a breath, take a breath, <laugh>, and then other times it's just pulling, you know, the information out of them. And I'm like, Ooh, this is gonna be a long night. <laugh>. Yeah.
Speaker 5 00:34:24 We've been at both, both of those extremes and there have been times because we edit mm-hmm. <affirmative>, we've been known to cut somebody's comment in half and put another question in the middle because, you know, people just don't have attention spans that are all that long. It's easier to grab pieces of information that are smaller and more manageable. Right.
Speaker 4 00:34:47 We don't change the content, but we will break it up into digestible chunks for our listeners.
Speaker 2 00:34:53 I'm not sure about what you guys think now about all of the podcasts that are out there, but it kind of feels to me like everyone is kind of jumping on the whole podcast bandwagon and it feels like there's a lot of podcasts on disability stuff. And I'm wondering what you feel makes your podcast unique.
Speaker 4 00:35:17 I think part of it is the fact that we do edit it down to half an hour and it really is information dense compared to many particularly accessibility podcasts that I've listened to. You know, I may see a topic that I'm interested in on some of these podcasts, but I don't have 50 minutes to listen to the whole thing <laugh> and to sift through to find the part that Right. We're interested in.
Speaker 2 00:35:43 Right.
Speaker 4 00:35:44 And really that, you know, that sometimes having a constraint is a good thing, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it forces you to make decisions.
Speaker 5 00:35:51 In fact, we've gotten comments from some listeners, they say, I mean, I'm sure you do this, you're blind, you listen to everything sped up and we don't mind if people listen to us sped up. But we've gotten comments from many blind people who say, I listen to everything sped up except your show, <laugh> and I, and I think the reason is because we take out the redundancy. We don't change the meaning, but we take out the redundancy, we take out the gaps, we take out the garbage, and there's always garbage
Speaker 2 00:36:26 Of course.
Speaker 5 00:36:27 Um, and so the, the information is much denser like pizza, and so you can't absorb it sped up as much as normal.
Speaker 2 00:36:38 Right. Well, we need to take another short station break, but before we go on, I want to remind everyone that it's Cafe I 90.3 FM Minneapolis and it's pledge drive. So please go to kfa i.org and give what you can afford. Um, I wonder if, besides, I know that we talked about all the learning that went into doing something like this with knowing how to put up a podcast, how to edit it and everything like that. Has it surprised you? Is there anything that you've kind of learned personally that it has brought to you that you didn't expect?
Speaker 4 00:37:20 Um,
Speaker 2 00:37:22 I,
Speaker 5 00:37:22 I think I've developed more of an empathy for people with different abilities. You know, when I met Pete, he could see a little teeny bit. He was using magnification that was three or four inches tall mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, but basically he was blind and he was just so competent. I'm like, well, okay, so he can't see. Let's get on with life. But you know, we've talked to all of these other people who've been through all sorts of other challenges. Pete had a great job, but we've talked to people who graduated near the top of their law school class who couldn't get a job and had to work in the disability field. Not like there's anything wrong with that. Right. But when you send out 50 job applications and no one gives you a job and you know you're qualified, that's a problem.
Speaker 2 00:38:10 Yeah. Yeah. That's a topic for a whole nother show. <laugh> <laugh> that
Speaker 5 00:38:18 Oh, we've done shows on that. It, it
Speaker 2 00:38:20 Really is a problem. Um, and, um, uh, both that and, and the other, the other way, right. People with disabilities don't always want to, um, get out there for whatever reason. And, and they, and that's a problem too. So, yeah. Um, yeah,
Speaker 4 00:38:41 As Nancy mentions a lot of these stories, it's really, I had a very easy time sailing through. I mean, I graduated from graduate school, I was used to being blind, so it wasn't a big thing for me. It was like sound blind, big deal. I just found ways of doing stuff. I was plugged into all these systems. You go blind later in life, that's a lot harder to deal with. But I really sailed through. But we talked to people that, you know, didn't sail through and they ran into these issues and people saying, you can't do that. You can't do this. They didn't have the training opportunities Right. That I had. And, you know, it's, it's really given me a big appreciation for that on how fortunate I was along the way. I mean, I never had people telling me, you can't do this or can't do that.
Speaker 5 00:39:25 Oh, that's not quite true. Well, <laugh>
Speaker 4 00:39:28 Semi true.
Speaker 5 00:39:29 He just ignored them. So, ah,
Speaker 2 00:39:31 Well there is that
Speaker 5 00:39:33 Or American adults have been socialized not to even admit that they noticed that the other guy has some issue. And so when Xerox changed from using DOS to using Windows, which is a graphical user interface Ah,
Speaker 2 00:39:49 Yes, yes.
Speaker 5 00:39:50 Pete's coworkers, they didn't say a peep to him. And some of these people were good personal friends. They cornered me in the hall. They're like, now what's he gonna do? He's, you know, son, Aw <laugh>. And, and that was everybody's attitude and my attitude cuz I'd seen him up close and personal. I'm like, I have no idea what he's gonna do, but trust me, he's gonna find a way to work this out and he'll be just fine. And within a month or two they were all asking him, how do I do this? How do I do that? How does that work in Windows?
Speaker 4 00:40:20 Well that's an example of how, you know, you think you're blind and you're always behind the eight ball and often you are, but you have to figure out ways of getting out from behind the eight ball. And sometimes being blind has worked to my advantage. For example, the reason I knew Windows so well is because it was a pain to learn with the early screen readers. It was a very different paradigm. Those screen readers didn't work so well. I had a note inside out. So then when other people started using it, they had no idea about what could be done with a keyboard, what Windows was all about. Well, I had been through that already. Right. And a similar thing with my job later in life, I actually became the manager of the person in research who was responsible for the image processing algorithms and color algorithms and print quality specifications of some of our novel printers. And you would think, how could a blind person do that? But you know, it made everybody in my group be very objective and very verbal about what they saw in prints when we were grading prints and saying, what do you like about this? What do you not like? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, everybody sees something different in a print. And just to have people verbalize that I think made the group stronger.
Speaker 5 00:41:34 And one more instance, and this has happened many times, but this particular one sticks in mind when somebody said, you can't do that. You're blind. Somebody shipped us a gift for the family for some event and it was ants in the pants, which is sort of like tiddly wings. And you flip up these little plastic ants and they land in a little plastic container. And our son, who had been living with a blind father his entire life and knew that daddy could do pretty much anything, he said, oh daddy, you'll never be able to play that. And guess who won the first game? <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:42:12 <laugh>. Excellent.
Speaker 4 00:42:17 But, you know, I think through life, you know, fortunately I was pretty intelligent. I was a pretty hard worker and I was also pretty proactive as a blind person in particular. I think you have to be an advocate for yourself. Don't take no for an answer. And you gotta offer people solutions If you just say, oh, I have this problem, I don't know how to deal with it. You, you know, n no one else is as familiar with blindness as, you know, the blind person is. So it's really up to the person themselves to come up with solutions. And that's what I would do when I worked at Xerox. You know, if I had a problem with something, you know, no one was gonna say, geez, maybe you can do this cuz what do they know about blindness? Right? They see one blind person in the organization. But if I offered a solution, Xerox was always, okay, you know, let's implement that or let's buy the equipment you need and, you know, you really have to stick up for yourself and be proactive.
Speaker 2 00:43:12 Well, I, I think the whole proactive thing, it goes across the board, right? For all disabilities, I think. Absolutely. You really need to do that. What would you like to see for the future of Eyes on Success?
Speaker 5 00:43:27 Oh, we just wanna keep going and going and going <laugh> and exploring new topics and, um, meeting new people and helping to put more people in touch with either information they need or people who can provide it. Um, it's been a blast.
Speaker 4 00:43:46 I would, I sometimes think of, you know, when we're not able or willing to do it anymore, if there is someone or an organization that might take it over, you know, with over 600 episodes in our archive and growing, there's a lot of useful information there. Now, a lot of it, as you say, needs to be refreshed, you know, when you're talking about technologies and all. Mm-hmm. Yes. But there's some stuff, there's a lot of stuff that's kind of evergreen and can be useful just for people in general. So I sometimes think of, you know, kind of a legacy thing, right?
Speaker 2 00:44:19 Yeah. Where to go
Speaker 4 00:44:20 When we're
Speaker 2 00:44:20 Gone, right? Absolutely. Yes.
Speaker 4 00:44:22 Can it, can it be like a library to help other people? Will someone else take it over?
Speaker 2 00:44:27 I know, right? Yeah, I know. I think about that too. <laugh>. Yeah. Uh, um, how can people hear your podcast?
Speaker 4 00:44:35 Well, the easiest way to do is to go to our
[email protected] and there's information on there, how to subscribe to the podcast. Um, you can put the URL in your podcast or, or just search for Eyes on Success in your pod catching program. You can listen on as I, as I said, on your Echo or Amazon devices by saying, play the Eyes on Success podcast. Of course you'd find it in iTunes, apple Podcast, et cetera.
Speaker 5 00:45:06 And if you'd like to get a reminder every week we have a mailing list that we send an announcement every Tuesday evening for what the next morning's released episode is gonna be. So you can get that in your inbox. If you prefer Facebook, we post it on Facebook and that's Eyes on Success. We post it on Twitter every week. Um, in spite of everything we said about checking all of the web a availability, uh, somebody else had Eyes on Success. So it's underscore Eyes on Success on Twitter. Ah, there's a, a YouTube channel that's Eyes on Success with hosts Peter and Nancy tope.
Speaker 4 00:45:53 And if people have questions for us, if they have suggestions, comments, or ideas about the show or they just want to connect with us, they can send an email to
[email protected]. And on the website is information on how to subscribe to our weekly announcements list. We'll get a link to every week's show along with the show notes if you miss it in the audio and a summary of that show.
Speaker 5 00:46:17 And we have a discussion group because sometimes topics pop up and listeners wanna explore concepts about that topic and they can interact with each other. And of course we are on that list as well. So we see everything that goes through there.
Speaker 2 00:46:38 Well, that's way more time than I have. <laugh>,
Speaker 5 00:46:42 We said it's a lot of work. The show is half an hour and we figure we each spend about 12 or 14 hours a week.
Speaker 2 00:46:51 I believe that. I believe that I,
Speaker 5 00:46:54 And we never miss a week. You know, we can leave town for three weeks. We'll have those shows already and um, you know, ready to put in all of those web places before we leave town and then we hustle like crazy when we get back cuz we need to fill the, the pipeline again,
Speaker 2 00:47:12 This is Kathy I 90.3 fm,
[email protected] g. It's also disability and Progress. We are in our pledge drive. You may, uh, pledge and go to kfa.org and pledge to Disability and Progress. Any amount is appreciated. Uh, I think that's about all I have for you. I don't know Charlene has any questions. Charlene sometimes sneaks one in,
Speaker 3 00:47:42 Well I was just wondering if there's a topic that you've always wanted to do but just haven't gotten to it?
Speaker 4 00:47:51 I don't think so. The, you know, it was interesting before the show became more popular, it was hard to get interviews from big companies like Inside Apple or Google or Microsoft. And I think to get inside Apple, we were sending 'em notes for like, I don't know, three years or so. But you know, now, now that we have connections into these places and the show is better known, it's a lot easier to get those interviews. So that, that has been frustrating for a while, but we're kind of over that hump. But I can't think of any topics. Generally, if we're interested in something, we go and search out someone or some organization that can talk about it and contact them and say, here's why we want to talk to you and share what you have to say.
Speaker 5 00:48:34 And I would like to thank all of the people we've had on the show as guests in over 600 episodes. We've probably had 500 guests cuz some people come back and whatever. They have all been so generous with their time and their knowledge and you know, if somebody has a question for them on the side, they've always make themselves available. And we're very grateful to our guests.
Speaker 2 00:49:00 And that is what it's all about, isn't it? People donating their time.
Speaker 4 00:49:05 So yes, it's a worldwide community. We're all kind of interconnected that way.
Speaker 2 00:49:11 Well, I would like to, is that it, Charlene?
Speaker 3 00:49:15 Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:49:16 I would like to thank you guys for coming on. I appreciate your time and if there is nothing more, then we will call it good. Um, and good luck with, with the ongoing of the podcast and, um, I I wish you many more years of it.
Speaker 5 00:49:36 Well thank you. Well thank you. You too.
Speaker 4 00:49:37 And it was a pleasure talking to you.
Speaker 2 00:49:39 Thank you. This is upon disability and progress. The views expressed on the show are not necessarily those of K F A I or its board of directors. This is K F E I 90.3 fm, Minneapolis and k ffe.org g. We are in our pledge drive. Please support us. This is how this show runs. Kfa, I do org. This week we spoke with Peter and Nancy Torpy talking about their podcast called Eyes on Success. Charlene Doll is my research team. Thank you Charlene. And Miguel Vargas was my engineer this week. Thank you Miguel. And Erin is my podcast person who helps turn this into a podcast. Thank you Aaron. And thank you all your listeners for listening. Fresh Fruit is up next. Thanks for listening.
