Full Transcript
Baba Voss:
The moment has come.
Joe Strechay:
You know, they brought me on early in the show and told me about their commitment to bring on actors who are blind or low vision, and that was exciting to me.
Speaker 3:
Centuries from now, almost all humans have lost the ability to see.
Joe Strechay:
But I also got to work with actors and making sure that they have the accommodations they need to be successful.
Speaker 3:
Some say sight was taken from them by God to heal the earth.
Joe Strechay:
There’s some ignorance out there, even in some of the questions from press and such, because people don’t understand blindness and they don’t understand people who are blind, they don’t know about our capabilities and abilities.
Speaker 3:
For the few who remain, vision is only a myth.
Joe Strechay:
We want to make sure that we have the most talented people. Those actors who are blind or low vision, they beat out people with sight for those roles. They were the best person for that role. We’re not just hiring people because they’re blind or low vision, we’re looking for people with talent.
Speaker 3:
But after so many years, the power of sight has returned.
Joe Strechay:
Put yourself out there and take measured risks. Lots of people are going to tell you no. Not everything is possible, but a lot of things are. And people like to decide what you can and can’t do. I like to decide for myself.
Speaker 4:
What is it?
Jason Momoa:
Something’s different. The children, they have the ability to see.
Jeff Thompson:
Welcome to The Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson.
Jason Momoa:
I have to keep you safe.
Baba Voss:
The moment has come.
Speaker 7:
It’s astonishing how the smallest moment can change an entire world.
Jeff Thompson:
Hey Joe, congratulations on all that’s coming your way.
Joe Strechay:
Thank you. We had a great team and worked hard and we’re just excited to get it out there in the world.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh yeah. Joe, I have to admit, the first thing I wanted to do was check out how you guys were going to convince people that this is possible to have a society of blind people and their culture and believable.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah. We really worked hard on the little details and really re-imagining it. The whole story’s a “what if” story. It’s a viral apocalypse happening at this point in time or maybe a 100 years or 200 years from now and then in killing off the majority of population of earth, and then those who live, which is a few million people, emerge blind, and then our show takes place centuries later, maybe four or five centuries, six, whatever, centuries later, after civilizations have built out in different areas and just in small population and infrastructure’s been destroyed because you lose that many people and the earth being destroyed prior, and who’s to say it wasn’t because the people with vision?
Jeff Thompson:
Huh (affirmative).
Joe Strechay:
The idea is that we lost a lot of skillsets that help manage that infrastructure and people moved away and isolated themselves, so they live off whatever type of land they’re living in, whether it’s an urban environment or it’s rural or mountainous, and you see the differences in each civilization, and the blindness is embedded in all of it. And what would a society who is blind build out, like universal design? It’s not even universal, it’s just designed for that world.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, especially when they’re using an ax for a cane.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, that’s a whole different level. That’s creativity I would say.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, like splashing a little bit near the edge of the water so people can follow, little cues like that.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, and that’s stuff we use out there. Like when I go hiking and a majority of the stuff you see that people who are blind are doing, I did out there in the world, in the same environment, and we played with it and we worked with a tremendous team on that.
Speaker 9:
We’re talking to Joe Strechay, he’s the associate producer and blindness consultant on the new release on Apple TV+ called See. That’s S-E-E. Welcome Joe.
Joe Strechay:
It’s a great pleasure to be here talking about our product and we’re so excited that it launched on Apple TV+. See is something you all should check out, especially for mature audiences, for adults, of course.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh yeah. I dug in and now the next one’s ready for me and it’s just exciting, it’s riveting. The audio description I have to tell you, it’s not like a movie, it’s not like a book, it’s a whole new thing now. It’s really good.
Joe Strechay:
Thank you. Yeah. And we’re working and we hope to even take the audio description to the next level truthfully, in the future. We’ve been playing with some ideas around it as we’ve been watching it and kind of redoing how audio descriptions’ done. Work with the people that do it all the time, but maybe add a little more detail that is real to the world and we’re hoping to play with that.
Jeff Thompson:
I noticed it’s more bridging like what’s coming up, what’s just happened, even though audio description does do that, but usually they’re trying to fit it right into a space, [crosstalk] and this seems like a narrative going through as well.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, it definitely, it tries to, because there’s not a lot of dialogue in that first episode, and throughout the show there’s a lot of space of traveling through these unique environments or unique movements and it tries to give you that description and what’s going on. You’re right, you’re definitely right about that.
Jeff Thompson:
Now, tell me about this wardrobe. Someone was wearing a hood and you suggested, “Mm, probably not.”
Joe Strechay:
Well, so Baba Voss is the character, and that’s Jason Momoa, the lead on the show. He has this unique outfit and it has a hood on it and he tends to like wearing the hood. But there are times that you wouldn’t wear that hood because it impacts your hearing and the way you’re able to use it for locating sound, and also if you were using echolocation, but just even the location of sound, it changes it. So we played with that in certain settings where he could be more comfortable or certain settings when he is really honing in on his hearing. So Jason was very accepting of those comments and suggestions.
Jeff Thompson:
And another thing that I noticed is the actors and the people behind the scenes. You have a lot of visually impaired and blind people working on this.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, it was kind of like building a plane while you’re flying it. They brought me on early in the show and told me about their commitment to bring on actors who are blind or low vision, and that was exciting to me. So different aspects. I worked on scripts, props, set, working with actors, working with the background and movement teams and help design the postures and the culture and everything. But I also got to work with actors and making sure that they have the accommodations they need to be successful, and their main goal could be acting and bringing everything they have to the acting and not having to worry about whether they’re going to get things in an accessible format or if they’re going to be able to access first mark and last mark onset or whatever it is. So building out what that looked like and we continued to improve as the season went on, and the more experience we got, the better at it. And really I’m proud of what we did and we’ll just take that to a different level if we’re offered our season two.
Jeff Thompson:
I’m one episode in and that would be great. So Joe, I heard that there was even sleep shades used to give the actors the experience of being blind?
Joe Strechay:
Well, I use sleep shades in general for training and I’ve used that on… I’ve trained thousands of people who are blind or low vision in travel orientation mobility and daily living skills all over the United States, and I brought that to working with actors as well. Not so they know what it’s like to be blind, but it’s so that they focus on their senses and they use the skills that I’m teaching them.
Joe Strechay:
So we start off always with education and awareness before we even get to sleep shade or a sleep mask, whatever you want to call it. We don’t call it blindfolds because you can’t take off blindness, [crosstalk] something I bring up to them. And we talk about disability and the portrayal of blindness and how it’s been comical in a lot of shows, but Apple and our production See, is committed to respecting blindness and disability and we show that and our actors live it every day. I’ll tell you no one cares more.
Joe Strechay:
It’s surprising how much the actors who are not blind or low vision, how much they care about it and care about the perceptions and that everyone is receiving it well, but specific to respecting blindness and addressing the misconceptions even when they’re asked in interviews about what people who are blind can do. Because I talk about all my friends, like my buddy Eric Weihenmayer who’s a mentor, a role model, and a friend who summited Mount Everest and the highest peak on each continent. Right now he’s up in Nepal acclimatizing and getting used to the altitude for another climb up there and another face there.
Joe Strechay:
So talking about my friends who are mechanics, carpenters, lawyers, computer programmers, and I shared videos with our production and our cast, five minute or less videos from friends from all over the U.S. and Canada who are blind or low vision talking about themselves and their lives from various backgrounds and experiences, so they got to understand how different. And then as the cast came on that were blind or low vision or background who are blind or low vision, or our two stunt performers, they got to meet them too, and hear their story and talk to them and see that every person is so different and how they do things is so different and the amount of vision they have is so different. So it was really a process, but I do start off with education and awareness, move to the training and definitely use sleep shades because I believe that you have to focus on those senses to understand why you’re doing that skill so that you’re not relying on that vision to do those skills.
Jeff Thompson:
It has to be believable. I think that was the biggest perception, that perception that people had when you thought that there was a society of blind people and with their culture, as I mentioned.
Joe Strechay:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jeff Thompson:
The believability that they could exist really puts the notion into the sighted viewers that “Okay, they can do this.” The can do attitude.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah. And a lot of questions are like… There’s some ignorance out there, even in some of the questions from press and such. Because people don’t understand blindness. They don’t understand people who are blind, they don’t know about our capabilities and our abilities and they’re wondering if people can be in outdoors and survive. And I talk about a wilderness survival. I’ve done wilderness survival and outdoors and camping and all that stuff, and we spent some time with a wilderness survivalist who came in and we did some stuff during the day, but in the evenings him and I would spend time talking and just thinking about things, and there’s a lot of similarities between wilderness survival and blindness. So in wilderness survival, one of the things is when you’re entering a new environment, you stop and you start taking some deep breaths and calm yourself and you try to bring yourself to the pulse of the environment you’re entering because you don’t want to set off the alarms, because they’re literally alarms when you go out into the wilderness.
Joe Strechay:
Birds, a bird call, bird song and such, they set off alarms. They actually will point you out, and I can actually tell from this experience and spending time with this guy, but he didn’t realize, but I can hear where the heads of the birds are facing as they’re making their call and see where they’re directing it. So it could be us that’s setting off alarm or it could be someone further off and they’re pointing them out, and there’s a pattern to how the other birds come around too as well and might set off alarms, and then the type of a predator too. If it’s a large cat or something that can get up high into a tree or something, they’ll change the sound, they might even then go into ventrilocal sound if they get real close. All kinds of stuff like that.
Joe Strechay:
But in blindness, in orientation and mobility, we teach people who are blind or low vision to stop and plant their feet, become a tree, stop and listen. If you’re unsure of something you stop and you get the understanding of the environment, listen to it, whether it’s an intersection or just you’re unfamiliar with an area. Because sound provides a lot of information. The wind, the sun all provides information. Where the sun is hitting you in your face, where the wind is coming from. All of that tells you a story and it’s not indifferent from wilderness survival.
Jeff Thompson:
You could really tell that when they’re marching through the trees, the forest on their ridge, that using whips to locate trees and using their ax and sticks, but they seem confident, well, it’s their community, so they’re used to it just like you and me in our own houses or something.
Speaker 9:
Yeah (affirmative).
Jeff Thompson:
It’s really cool. That’s the way they live.
Joe Strechay:
And the whip stuff, it was written into the scripts from Steven Knight who created the show originally, and he had this idea of these whips and stuff. So we worked with a movie director who had a little bit of expertise around whip, so we started playing with whips and the movement of the whips and kind of modeling it after the cane tap, like tapping. Using a whip, you can do a very gentle touch with it. It’s like just a light flick. And this is not cracking the whip. So when you crack the whip that creates an echo, it actually breaks the sound barrier. So it wouldn’t work well indoors for sure. I can tell you that for a fact, I’ve done it.
Joe Strechay:
But outside he brought in this whip master, Todd Rex, who’s one of the top whip masters in the world. He came in and him and I spent some time together separate from everyone in between things. We went outside and I started using the crack of the whip to do echolocation and I can make out space and navigate just from the crack of the whip, because that loud sound, if you allow it to do its thing creates that echo and I can use it to navigate besides the whole whipping the ground thing. It was interesting. Stuff I would never have guessed. And we played a lot with passive and active echolocation.
Joe Strechay:
Passive meaning sound around you, like the sound that you are not creating, and then the active. We were out on the waterfall scene in episode kind of end one, beginning of two, or throughout two. There’s this waterfall and I was standing down, after we had navigated past this waterfall, and I was standing down below talking to one of the actors, and a few days before she had asked if I could use echolocation and make out big objects in space like mountains. Can I hear the difference or they’re far off?
Joe Strechay:
And I’m like, “Huh, I don’t know.” So I started paying attention to it for a few days and then we were down at the bottom of this waterfall a little further away. On one side a stream that came off it or a small little river and on the other side was this treeline. I could use the sound of the river to make out the tree line across the way. Like I could hear the difference where the sound was hitting the tree line and where it wasn’t. Something I never would have thought of without this show, truthfully. Using something sound like that to make out an object.
Jeff Thompson:
Well that makes sense because if you’re going to live it and then generations and generations of developing these techniques and passing them down and carrying them on, it’s like you said, it’s just everyday stuff. It’s not universal design, it’s just design because that’s whole the society.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, you’re right. You’re exactly right.
Jeff Thompson:
So that must have been quite the experience to actually be onsite in the locations. Then when they have a question that you get to experience it. So you have to move ahead 400 years of developing your techniques to where could be, but I’m glad you caught onto it, like heard it.
Joe Strechay:
It was, it was cool. As I said, you know, we were, we’re kind of building the plane while we flew it and my whole roles, we were kind of figuring it out as we went. I was involved heavily early on for sure. And then, and I was on set for, all through the show and episodes one through two I would say I was in the, I would be onset nearby, in a video village or I’d be right next to the set and I got closer and closer to the director. By episode three I was pretty close to Francis Lawrence. And then episode four we had a different director episodes four and five named Anders Edstrom and Anders, I kept bringing these suggestions up about what, what the actors could do or what they wouldn’t do.
Joe Strechay:
And, he said, “Joe,” and he stopped the whole, everyone around, he goes, “From now on, every day I want you standing right next to me while I’m directing because I want to know what we could be doing, what possibilities and, and I want an experience it with you.” And so from episodes four through eight, I was right next to the director, and I walked through the blocking with them every day, got to, listen to them read through the scene or the shot. And then as they start to walk through it, I’d provide suggestions. I see what they would do.
Joe Strechay:
And I had a person who would audio describe what people were doing, whether it was a specific person or whether it was one of our choreographers that I worked with from the beginning. We spent months prepping before almost two months prepping in-person before we started filming and building out this world and the culture and Paradox Pollock is our movement director. He’s really an expert on like Island nations and, and these groups. So bringing the culture part to it and then adapting it for our world and making it fit and trying to differentiate these groups. So we spent a lot of time with that and we had such a great movement team on the, [inaudible] Sharky, Kara, Melia, Kevin, Shay, it was just a great team we had.
Jeff Thompson:
You know, when they’re marching along in some sound or something, they hear in the distance and he stops and just gives a command out, everyone just the silence comes.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, because silence is power, right? Like we want to hear things right? And, we play with that a lot. There’s probably a lot more silence in this show than people are used to. And maybe then it might make people uncomfortable. I’m curious, we’ll see. People with something we play with, and I brought up and you may see it at some point, people with vision tend to rush into things and just they see and they think they’ve figured out. You know when you’re blind you and just as I was talking about wilderness survival, you stop, and you listen, and you try to figure it out before you go rushing in.
Jeff Thompson:
You know, something that I really noticed going off on this, paying attention to the sounds itself, the audio quality is second to none.
Joe Strechay:
I agree. And that’s the Atmos, Dolby Amos sound and actually this accessibility wise, you know our show and Apple in general at the all the shows, it’s the first time that audio description is being provided in the same quality sound that everyone else experiences. Usually it cuts out and then with that sound, and you’re not getting the same experience, but it is all Dolby Atmos sound if your sound system allows for that. Most of us don’t have Atmos at home, but we may have Dolby, I have Dolby sound system at home but you get that opportunity to experience it.
Joe Strechay:
Also, Apple’s Apple TV+ was launched with eight or nine audio described languages, which is unreal and you have access it to no matter where you are. So if I went to Japan, typically Netflix or any other streaming platform, you’d go to access the audio description and you would only have access to Japanese audio description. But now with Apple TV+ you get access to all eight or nine languages in audio description. So if you’re traveling or you work abroad or live abroad and your English or whatever, language is not your first language. You have access to the audio description in that other language. And in closed captioning, it’s some ridiculous amount of languages and closed captioning too. I don’t remember if it was 38 or 33 something.
Jeff Thompson:
40 years. Yeah. [crosstalk]
Joe Strechay:
No, maybe 90
Jeff Thompson:
But that’s on day one.
Joe Strechay:
On day one. Yep.
Jeff Thompson:
Amazing.
Joe Strechay:
From the start. Yeah. That’s really cool.
Jeff Thompson:
Joe, I met you as the director of Pennsylvania Bureau of Blindness and Visual Services and you worked a lot with transition aid students as well. Plus you worked what, seven years at American Foundation for the Blind managing the career connect program.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, I ran career connect and I’ve done a lot of different things and really all building to this truthfully. You know I, my graduate work’s around blindness but my undergraduate’s around public relations and I studied media there and media effects and how the immigration of minority groups into media part of it, I had a course where we studied that and we looked at populations and how they migrate through the media to create legitimacy around either a character or a portrayal or even the actors portraying it as well. We studied that and then also how gender roles play a role in, in media and whether it’s positive or negative, how they portray it. And a lot of that became a passion for me. And I brought that to the blindness world and disability world. And I wrote about it when I was at the American Foundation for the Blind in AccessWorld before I even got connected to media.
Joe Strechay:
I started giving advice to some documentary people and then helping them connect to people. And then also I started helping casting agents who are looking for people or actors who are blind or low vision. And then later on, a show Royal Pains on the USA Network reached out and I worked with their writer’s room in my off time to help them build out the dialogue or the language that they used for this character they added for three episodes who was blind and maybe some of the storyline around it. And from there got an opportunity. I’ve got a vague message around person navigating blind on a set and I didn’t know if it was a person who is blind on a reality show or if it was going to be an actor portraying it and they didn’t know how to describe it.
Joe Strechay:
I ended up helping them define it and create the job description and it ended up being for Netflix, Marvel’s Daredevil and then they interviewed a bunch of people and they asked me to interview and they hired me and I got to work on the season one of Marvel’s Daredevil where I worked on reviewed scripts and helped with props and set around Matt Murdock’s apartment, which is the alter ego of Daredevil and help with the blindness related stuff in the child version and background and it was just a unique experience.
Joe Strechay:
And later when I left AFB after seven years I was moving to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and I was moving on, I flew up there on a Thursday, I was going to be living up there two months prior to my wife moving up and I moved up on a Thursday and I was starting on Monday and Friday morning I get a phone call from a producer from a new show and she says, “You know, one of our producers worked with you on Marvel’s Daredevil and our lead actor and creator of our show is going to have to portray blindness” and kind of described it a little “and you’re the only person we want her to work with.”
Joe Strechay:
And I was like uh (negative) she’s like, can you come for a few weeks or a month or something and work with her? And I was like, well I’m starting a new job on Monday. I can come to New York, like hop on a train and be there in a few hours and meet with her this afternoon, and then spend the weekend with her, and then come back the next weekend and the weekend after. And I can send you and work with your different departments during the week in the evening after work, off work hours. And so I could do that. And they’re like, yes. So I hopped on a train within an hour, I had packed a bag and went to New York and worked on the Netflix’s The OA, working with Brit Marling as well. She’s brilliant and Charlie Cox and Marvel’s Daredevil is the nicest person I’ve ever met in my life Brit is probably one of the smartest.
Joe Strechay:
She was valedictorian from Georgetown University in economics and I worked with child version of these characters too. It opened up opportunities for me and I went into work for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and did that for almost, I guess three years and, and I would get people reaching out about movies and stuff like that. I’ve had a passion about movies since I was a kid and television and I worked at a video store for four years through high school and studied a little bit. I took a film class in my undergraduate. Just getting to mix everything I’ve done in my life into one job is pretty much where I’m at because whether it’s the accessibility stuff and accommodations or it’s the orientation mobility, the VRT like I was a VRT towards the end of my graduate work at Florida State University. Go Knowles. Bringing all the different experiences in my life into one place.
Jeff Thompson:
Well it’s really neat to see your progression into this even though you’re going up the blindness chain all the way to director. But you kept that passion about movies going along and there the opportunity was for someone to leave a directorship to go to that. I was talking to Carol Pankow, she was the former director of Minnesota State Services for the Blind and I said, “Where’s Joe?” We were at the National Conference for the State Board Agencies out there and she said, “Oh, he left, he went off to do this movie thing or something.” So I was like, what movie things? So it stuck in my mind what movie thing is he doing? And all of a sudden when See came out and I found out you’re on there. We got to get him on here it’s
Speaker 9:
I’m excited.
Jeff Thompson:
What a major thing. That’s like you said, you work with transition students.
Joe Strechay:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) And I still do. I still do. September, I was down, I do consultant work for the American Printing House for the Blind around, they have a product coming Code Jumper, which is a partnership with Microsoft. And I helped with that and I believe in what the American Printing House for the Blind does. I have the opportunity to do what I want now, truthfully. I have lots of opportunities and I’m consulting with them because I believe in what they do and how they bring products to people in U.S. and abroad and what they do.
Joe Strechay:
So I also do speaking and it was down in Florida in September. They brought me into a work with parents and families. But I also, because I was there, I spent an evening with the teenagers talking about my story and my life and the good and the bad, and they ask questions about being embarrassed or if I had ever been bullied or the ups and downs and the realities of it was I ever depressed and all those things that they feel alone.
Joe Strechay:
And so I still do that and I just came back from Missouri. I was there this weekend speaking to parents and families of Dr. Ian Shadrick. Really nice guy, a great guy brought me in and, and some others, Tyler Marian and Chris Boone and to come and talk to the parents and families about our lives and what we do and our stories and some of that stuff in transition. Cause I’m still passionate about that. I believe I have a duty to give back to people. I spent 10 months in British Columbia and be part of the blindness community there. And I got involved and got involved there and making sure that I’m making a difference.
Joe Strechay:
Their Blind Sports Association with Blind Beginnings, it’s an early intervention type program and a school age program. And then with seeing [inaudible] and all the above and I was mentoring an older gentleman, not old but a middle aged gentleman who lost his vision and he had other disabilities. He lost his vision due to three aneurysms. He had a leg amputated and whole bunch of things the organs removed and, and he woke up blind after a coma. So I worked with him, I would go to his house every other week and spend time with them. I taught them how to use voiceover on the iPhone, anything I can do to give back and people hear that so they, they connect me to other people.
Joe Strechay:
I helped, there was an actor from another TV show up there. Her son was deaf or hard of hearing and they were still evaluating maybe two years old and she wanted to start learning sign language and wanted the child to start having early intervention around that. So I found an ESL teacher and someone who are early intervention specialists who could come into the home and work with her and her child. So whatever I can do to help out the world and the community around disability, I try. And there are also people who, want to take advantage too, but everyone has their own mission, my mission is to help people.
Jeff Thompson:
What advice would you give to someone’s transition age student?
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, the standard thing I like to say is put yourself out there and take measured risks. Lots of people are going to tell you, no. Not everything is possible, but a lot of things are and people like to decide what you can and can’t do.
Joe Strechay:
I like to decide for myself and try it. I have been skydiving, I’ve been bungee jumping, I’ve done all kinds of different things and on our show there were definitely, people aren’t used to people who are blind and we were out in very kind of dangerous areas like cliffs and navigating through these big rocky areas. Almost like bouldering. And I was like, I’m going to do this and one of our characters had to climb down this cliff. So I kept showing them how they do it. When it came to like real climbing, Jason Momoa has some scenes of him climbing. I was like, I’ll reach out to my buddies. And I reached out to Eric Weihenmayer and he sent us some videos that Jason looked at and worked with so and he worked with a climbing specialist otherwise, but Jason’s an amazing climber in general, truthfully, but these other techniques where else to get those and someone like Eric.
Speaker 9:
Well Jason, in this first episode that I watched, he sounds like a big guy.
Joe Strechay:
He is six, five, maybe 240/245 and muscle in some interview he called me mini Momoa. Yeah, he’s like seven inches taller and muscly. I’m a little softer than he is.
Jeff Thompson:
Well, it’s a great job. Joe. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?
Joe Strechay:
Yeah, I’ll throw it out there. When we’re building this world and we’re all, we’re including actors who are blind or low vision, but right now our lead cast are not blind or low vision, but number 10 in the entertainment world. You have numbers like your number one is Jason Momoa, Alfre Woodard is number two and so on. And but number 10 is a person who’s legally blind. And then we have a bunch, a number of people in the 20s and the 30s and so on. But you’re going to see people moving up in those rankings. If we future seasons and our shows committed, we set a bar right now and we’re going to look to beat that for future seasons and continue to, and we’re going to help identify those future Jason Momoas’ or Alfre Woodards’ who are blind or low vision. We want to make sure that we have the most talented people, those actors who are blind or low vision, they beat out people with sight for those roles.
Joe Strechay:
They were the best person for that role. We’re not just hiring people because they’re blind or low vision. We’re looking for people with talent. No matter what type of actor you are, the amount of experience doesn’t always equate to being a great actor and or even the training. Like some people may have done theater back in the day or acting classes or we have a guy, Donovan Tildesley, who’s a Canadian Paralympian and world record holder in swimming. We have all kinds of different people that we’ve found and this little girl Margo, her name’s Maggie out of Vancouver Island. She is astounding. She is going to be something famous. She’s totally blind. I saw her also at the National Braille Challenge. I was speaking there for the American Printing House for the Blind and she was there and placed of course because she’s brilliant and amazing and I can’t say enough about her.
Joe Strechay:
She is going to be something famous. She’s 11 years old, but she talks like she’s 25 and she’s talking about portrayals of blindness and people. What she doesn’t like in television when they do portrayals of blindness. And we had a lot of conversations about that. We were lucky. We included other persons with disabilities and our background and in some of our cast actually had other disabilities. We had people who are deaf or hard of hearing. We had people, shorter stature, people who utilize a prosthetic leg. A gentleman with Cerebral Palsy, we had a number of different disabilities covered and if you’re making a show about disability, I thought we had an opportunity and these people were talented and give them what they needed. We ask them if they need any accommodations or access anything we would help them with. So just making sure that people had the opportunity to be out there and in the part of our world as well.
Jeff Thompson:
Joe, I can just hear your passion in this, whether it’s in the movies part or the transition or the training of people, the blindness. I’m just so glad that you followed your passion and you’re creating opportunities between you and Apple. You’re helping influence, probably. Great. Great job, Joe. Great job. And thanks a lot for coming on the Blind Abilities. And I’m so excited. I’m ready to jump into episode two of See, on Apple TV+. Check it out people. Good stuff.
Joe Strechay:
Yeah. AppleTV+ $4.99 a month. You can get a free week Apple TV+ $4.99 per month. Find it on your iOS devices, also through other devices, your Firestick whatever else. So check it out today.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah. Thank you, Joe.
Speaker 9:
You have an amazing day and thank you for your time.
Jeff Thompson:
Thanks Joe. Have a good one.
Speaker 4:
The moment has come.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff Thompson:
For more podcasts with the blindness perspective:
Check us out on the web at www.BlindAbilities.com On Twitter @BlindAbilities
Download our app from the App store:
‘Blind Abilities’; that’s two words.
Or send us an e-mail at:
info@blindabilities.com Thanks for listening.
send us an email at info@blindabilities.com.
Thanks for listening.
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
To find your State Services in your State you can go to www.AFB.org and search the directory for your agency.
Contact:
Thank you for listening!
You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities
On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com
Send us an email
Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Storeand Google Play Store.
Check out the Blind Abilities Communityon Facebook, the Blind Abilities Page, the Career Resources for the Blind and Visually Impairedand the Assistive Technology Community for the Blind and Visually Impaired.