Celebrating Helen Keller's Birthday

On this episode, celebrate the birthday of Helen Keller by highlighting her lasting impact and legacy. Justin Gardner sits down with Tony Stephens to share fascinating stories and insights about Keller’s life, achievements, and influence as a trailblazer for people who are blind or have low vision.

The episode also features the monthly Tech Takeaway, where Michael Dennis provides a closer look at Wordstock, an app designed to support literacy and accessibility.

On this episode

• Narrator
• Sara Brown, APH Public Relations Manager
• Justin Gardner, AFB Helen Keller Archivist at APH
• Tony Stephens, AFB Assistant Vice President for Communications
• Michael Dennis, APH Technology Products Specialist

Additional Links

• The Dot Experience
• AFB Helen Keller Archive
• American Foundation for the Blind
• AFB Possibilities Podcast

Transcript

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Narrator 0:00

Welcome to Change Makers, a podcast from APH. We're talking to people from around the world who are creating positive change in the lives of people who are blind or have low vision. Here's your host.

Sara Brown 0:15

Hello and welcome to Change Makers. I'm APH's public relations manager, Sarah Brown. And on today's episode, we're celebrating Helen Keller's birthday with two experts in the field. I'm going to toss the episode over to Justin Gardner, who has Tony Stevens on hand to share facts and information about the trailblazer. After that, we'll have our monthly tech takeaway where we'll learn about the app Woodstock. But first, I'm passing the mic over to Justin and Tony. Take it away.

Justin Gardner 0:43

Well, thank you, Sarah. Hi, I'm Justin Gardner. I'm the Helen Keller archivist here at APH. And today we're celebrating Helen Keller's birthday by talking to the organization who knew her best, the American Foundation for the Blind. We have AFB's Tony Stevens here to share what we can expect to discover from the Helen Keller archives when The Dot Experience opens this October. So hello, Tony, and welcome to Change Makers. Hi, Justin.

Tony Stephens 1:06

Thanks so much for the invitation. It's great to be here with you all.

Justin Gardner 1:09

Well, Tony, could you please introduce yourself and kind of let the listeners know who you are and what you do at AFB? Sure, yeah.

Tony Stephens 1:16

So my name's Tony Stevens. I'm the Assistant Vice President for Communications at AFB. And that oversees a bunch of things, all the way from our, you know, regular communications for a large nonprofit like uh what we do nationally in terms of our research and you know, sort of dissemination of information and all the things tied to communications traditionally. But at the same time, too, uh, we also do events and things, like we're excited to be uh the same week with you all, and we'll talk about this probably a little bit later around The Dot Experience opening. But you know, we have our annual leadership conference, and this year is going to be a one-day summit that's gonna be tied uh the same week as the annual meeting in Louisville. Uh so I also oversee the events and things like that, and then uh have the opportunity to have under uh sort of the umbrella of my team the Helen Keller Archives. So we uh both myself and Haley Lindville here at AFB work a lot with uh you, particularly Justin, and the folks at APH uh with all things around Helen Keller. So all right.

Justin Gardner 2:15

Well, thank you. Could you please share a little bit more about what uh AFB does and some of the services and benefits it provides?

Tony Stephens 2:21

Yeah, sure. So AFB is a national nonprofit. We've been around since 1921, not as old as APH, but we're getting up there. And, you know, our main focus is to provide sort of equal opportunity and focus on inclusion. You know, we say creating a world of endless possibilities for people that are blind or have low vision. What does that really mean? So we do a lot of research and we do a lot of sort of stakeholder engagement. We're a convening organization. We bring together folks from all aspects of the field, uh, you know, on our research side. We've got the scholars, we also publish the Journal for Visual Impairment and Blindness, JVIB, which is our sort of flagship journal at AFB. Um, but you know, we essentially really work in this advocacy space and we use sort of thought leadership and research to really sort of just drive a world of greater opportunity for people that are blind or have low vision around the country.

Justin Gardner 3:17

All right. Well, thank you. Now though there will be many things from the AFP Helen Keller archive that will be on exhibit at The Dot Experience. And Helen Keller is still a well-known figure to this day. Um, why is her story still so relevant?

Tony Stephens 3:31

It it it is incredible to think. So, you know, today she's 146 years old. Uh, we're excited as as folks are listening to this podcast now. We're actually premiering a documentary film at Carnegie Hall in New York City in the uh Zenkel Hall, which is part of Carnegie, called Possibilities. And the film really focuses on Helen's impact and her legacy. You know, a lot of people learn about Helen in like second grade and fourth grade. It's in school curriculums where you read The Miracle Worker and you learn about Ann Sullivan and the work that happened at the well when Helen was a young girl, and how you know Anne was able to break through and communicate with her, and then she went on to do amazing things, right? And that's kind of the kind of where the history books, a lot of them stop. What folks don't know is, you know, in 1924, shortly after we were founded, she came on board at AFB as a chief ambassador and really, I mean, she did this before too, but you know, for 44 years until her death, she worked for AFB and just traveled the world as not just an icon for disability rights, but for peace. She was an ambassador for pre peace under President Truman. Um, you know, she just all around the world was sort of embraced as this icon for independence, right? And I mean, I I think it's particularly special this year as we're celebrating 250 years of independence for a nation. That, you know, we think about what what Helen's sort of vision and mission was in the world was just creating a world of greater independence, you know, for someone who was deaf, blind, but for all people with disabilities, but even I mean, she was a a a suffragist, she was a labor rights advocate. Uh, there were really a lot of areas that she, and you know this as well as anybody, Justin, by the way, you know, your work with the archives, but you know, she created a legacy that it really to this day, and this is what our film Possibilities does, is it it talks to people that are blind and low vision and deafblind today and really trying to tries to capture like, you know, who was she, right? I think the more we realized she was a real person, she wasn't superhuman, right? She did incredible things, but people do incredible things every day. I think at the time, and what she was very powerful at was using things like the early days of the media to really capture what she was doing as a platform. Um, you know, I try to think like what Helen would be like today with TikTok, right? And Instagram and social media, like how powerful would she be with an iPhone in her pocket. But yeah, she really did a uh a such a huge job of reaching a global audience at a time with, you know, when she was born, there were horses on her on Ivy Green, her farm that they grew up on in northern Alabama. And when she died, we were a year away from putting someone on the moon, right? Right. She she she witnessed the globalization of the world, and I think was really one of the first people to really leverage that to travel the world at first by ship, but then by plane, and to use things like film, newsreels, uh, you know, journalists that would follow her along, her own writing, you know, her memoirs and other books that she wrote that were super powerful. Um, her story of like Ann Sullivan, the teacher, her book about that was a biography on her best friend. Um, you know, she she really sort of leveraged the birth of mass media and electronic communications and really kind of kind of rode that wave as an early advocate for disability rights.

Justin Gardner 6:51

Well, that's one of the things that I've always thought interesting about um the archive was that no matter what's going on in the news or where it's happening, I can almost always look through the archive and draw a link to current times from something that's in the archive from the past. And it's you know, it's it's so broad and she said did so much in so many different places that I can always find something that's relevant. You know, there's always a letter or a photograph or something in here that can connect her experiences.

Tony Stephens 7:18

When she wrote to the to the German students, right, the Hitler youth, what was that, 32 or 33? She wrote that letter. Yes, yeah, yeah. I think it was 33. Folks go to the archive and search for it. It's powerful because it's like nine years before America entered the war, and she says straight up, at a time when they were burning her books in Germany, we know what you're doing, and we're we're on you. And she gives this powerful letter. I mean, that was the other thing too. She was so gifted with words. Um, even though her communication was limited, uh, which she she could speak, but you know, uh the the challenges that she overcame in terms of you know communicating, she was such a wonderful wordsmith and could write such powerful. I I would have been hated to be on the on the other end of a scathing letter from Helen. Oh through history. At Nagasaki after World War II, in the years that followed after that, and her trips to Japan. Um, yeah, she she seemed to be like someone that was was there throughout history uh at the important places at important times.

Justin Gardner 8:20

Well, speaking of that, speaking of artifacts and history, um, what do you have a favorite artifact or document in the collection and you know something that maybe can now be accessed accessible at The Dot Experience? Um, because I know we just talked about the Hitler letter. Um, and that's always been interesting to me because you know, the first line of it, I think she addressed it to Hitler and then crossed it out and then addressed it to the student body of Germany. And I've always wondered, you know, maybe first she went straight to the top and thought, ah, there's no hope there. Maybe I'll go to the young people. Um, but so that's always been another, that's been one of my favorite artifacts in the collection. Is there anything else like that for you in the collection?

Tony Stephens 8:55

I think a lot of the things and some of the stuff that we've been excited to hear that's gonna be in the in the in the collection for The Dot Experience that we can get to in a little while. But like, you know, it you you hear about Helen's life and and there is this idea of like she's superhuman, you know. I mean, there's even an episode DC Comics did uh we're gonna do for I think National Comic Book Day, um, where she was a in a Wonder Woman comic issue, had Helen Keller, right? So I mean she literally was there with superhumans in the fictional side, right?

Justin Gardner 9:26

Yeah, yeah.

Tony Stephens 9:27

But but the idea that that she was above human, but then like the desk that's gonna be on display at the museum, that was the desk in her office. Yeah, that was the same desk that then after after she passed away, our president, uh the Carl Augusto, uh used it for years. And and you know, it's been it's been stored in the archive. We now that we've started to be much more conscious of preserving, but it was like these these things were just around the office. And and and I think you know, setting up this sort of space of of what it was like maybe in her office, um, they just these little artifacts like that. It's like you realize that she was a real person who had great idiosyncrasies, you know. Um, she could be she could be a f a fireball from what I've heard, uh, you know, and also be a complete joy uh to be with. And and it's just like someone that you work with. Uh, you know, I mean, she was prestigious and there was, I'm sure people would be in awe when they would meet her and stuff like that, and you know, sort of taken aback with sort of her fame. But when you find out that she was just someone like all of us, and it kind of gives you a sense of what we all can do when you realize too that she she she had a you know just a regular kind of life for so much of it that that we all do, right? Yeah, yeah.

Justin Gardner 10:43

Yeah, and that's you know, I've always really enjoyed being around that desk too, because like you said, I just I think about all of the work that went on, you know, at that desk. Was it work that she was doing, whether it was for AFB, whether it was for the good of the world, or whether it was just communicating with friends and loved ones and thinking of all the important thinking and messages and love that may have, you know, kind of passed from her from her mind through her fingertips on top of that desk. And now everybody's gonna be able to share with that, you know. And it's especially important, I think, here because um, you know, she might not have been in Louisville as much as she was in other places, like say Tescumbia or in Radcliffe or New York at AFB. So it's just so wonderful to be able to bring that world here and share it with people. So I think that's really probably my my favorite thing that's going to be exhibited as well as the desk, just thinking about how much how important that was in her her work. Um so how does it feel for the archive and for these artifacts and Helen to be connected again with an entire new generation? Because, you know, I I think that this was all shared at AFB at one point as well, and then a lot of it was stored and now it's open again. It was.

Tony Stephens 12:02

I mean, you know, like I said, for years it was literally just at our offices, right? When we were on 16th Street in Manhattan, um, you know, a lot of that stuff was just still around. We we did have the archives, and then we we built it up to when we moved to Penn Plaza in Manhattan in midtown Manhattan, uh, you know, uh it it it it sort of carried itself up there and you know, all the things that she left us and you know began to get much more organized and would be available for people to come check out, you know. I mean, that we you know, you your predecessor, you know, there were like tours uh when we had the archive in Manhattan that we would give, and that was always a big, you know, big prestigious thing. You could be excited. I remember when I first went to AFP, um, you know, getting a chance to sort of check out this this part of the floor, and I can't remember what floor we were on then, but I wasn't, you know, working for AFP yet. But it was just part of the legacy, right? Part of the law that AFP had. And I think it's what's great is you know, we are now mostly virtual staff, just with the the whole new world, right? Especially since the pandemic. We have a a footprint in a small footprint in New York City still, but mainly in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. But you know, when the archive we we realized how important it was in the preservation, and when we worked out the arrangement with you all with APH to become stewards of that archive and to take it and create this safe space for it. Um, you know, it's it's it's wonderful to know that we are preserving her legacy, but it's even better to know that as that was undertaken and then The Dot Experience became to sort of bring life uh to all things blindness, but particularly to the archive, it was very exciting, right? Because these things are meant to be seen. I don't think Helen would like to think that all of her stuff is locked away in some like Raiders of the Lost Ark secured bunker. But the fact that we can begin to share this again with the world is just really exciting. We're we're so proud of what APH has been doing with The Dot Experience, not just for Helen, but all all encompassing Louis Braille or Stevie Wonder, all the stories that can be told. But in Helen's case, uh what you all have done all the way from the interactive experience with the well that that we had a chance to check out that your engineers were working on, up to the artifacts and and replicas of artifacts that people could literally put their hands on things for people like myself that are blind to be able to feel and and get really sort of grasp. Um, you know, that that's wonderful. And that's that's what that's what uh museums are meant to do, right? They're meant to take history and to bring it to the present and and people can put into it what they want with their own personal experiences or other contexts. But you know, this stuff's meant to be shared with the world, and we're so excited that APH, which has its own long history for the blind in the United States of America, that it it can be something that is part of the uh part of the collection now. Yeah.

Justin Gardner 14:53

Well, there was one thing that I really wanted to talk about a bit because it's it's been something that's involved me in my own history here at uh APH for about 15 years, and it's really the collaborations between APH and AFB, because I started in the Miguel Library here at APH, which was also originally formed at AFB. So this really, you know, this isn't the first time. The DOT experience and the Helen Keller archive, those aren't the first times that we've collaborated together. And I think our collaboration probably dates back at least to the Talking Books program, which I know is something that you have a lot of interest in as well as I. And uh it's going to be celebrating an anniversary. So I wanted to see if you could talk about that a little bit.

Tony Stephens 15:31

Yeah. I mean, it you know, the the history there was, I mean, we we were born in 1921. You all had been around for was it 50 something years, 60 years, sometime around then? You know, 1870s, 1880s, whenever it was. So we we were still pretty new and we were the new kids on the block, right? Um MC Miguel, you mentioned the Miguel Library. So Moses Charles Miguel was our founder. He was a uh a philanthropist, silk, silk trade uh person that was really sort of, you know, an industrialist in that sense, I guess, coming out of World War I was really moved by what was going on when he would go over to France and Europe and realized in his work with the blind that there needed to be some sort of group that could bring people together and really tackle a lot of the major issues going on, particularly with a lot of the soldiers coming back from World War I. And so AFB was founded. You know, in less than a decade, we really moved in uh focusing on Braille and our relationships early on with APH uh in the in the early days of really unifying the Braille standard to what we have today, but also in the talking book, uh, you know, we were very lucky that we started working with RCA early on. Robert Irwin, who was our sort of first executive director, uh came on staff, who was you know blind himself. And, you know, he sort of had this vision at what Thomas Edison had invented with the with the phonograph and the idea that this could be a media that could be very powerful for the blind. And so, you know, we created these labs and working with RCA at the time and really pioneered the the long plane record, what we know today is the 33 and a third record, um, so you would have voice on it. And it was really the first use and sort of mass production of that. And it took off so much in 1932 in the years that followed when we got the talking book libraries and was able to get that in the National Library of Congress's, you know, Library for the Blind, uh, NLS, National Library Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Um, that, you know, the talking book really exploded. And there was such demand. I mean, you know, the APH was a critical part in the production and and and really helping to get the audio and talking book players and the and the the media themselves to people that were blind all around the country. I mean, think about it. We not everybody knew Braille. Braille was hard to come by. Uh, but suddenly you could have these enormous collections of books uh and media and just for education and for recreation and things like that. It was really revolutionary and pretty much carried you know that idea of what a record was up until the 1940s, late 40s, when finally, you know, the jazz cat started to get under this. Oh, look at these really long songs instead of the 78 or 45 RPM little smaller 7-inch records, and how much more they could do with stuff. So, you know, for us in in a couple of years, we'll be celebrating 100 years of the talking book and and you know, also helping at APH with the stewards of the Talking Book archives and all that stuff. Um, you know, I think it's a great relationship that we both share that in a couple of years, you know, uh we we we we were the first uh first, you know, podcast, everybody has a podcast now, but we kind of were the first to get a human voice behind a microphone and and and kick it out to the masses. So I'm like, I think there's some craig we got going on there. Oh yeah.

Justin Gardner 18:52

And that, you know, all during the depression too, you know, times were tough. And I think there was even some correspondence where Helen Keller said, you know, I don't know that we can really do this, you know, asking people to to try to start this whole program when there's so many people out of work and and times are so hard, but they they got it done.

Tony Stephens 19:08

So they did and actually helped with the WPA. I mean, I want to say I want to say like that was part of the we were part of that Roosevelt's vision of coming back after the Great Depression. So yeah. It's it's exciting to think. I mean, our offices on Manhattan exploded, and then we had to get another office whole production plant on 10th Avenue in New York, and I mean New York real estate's always been tough to come by. Um, but yeah, there were booming days when it was, you know, it was exciting. Um, you know, and then as things progress to audio tape and stuff like that. So it's it's it's a neat part of the history that I love to dive into. Yeah, yeah.

Justin Gardner 19:46

All right. Well, is there anything else that you would like to share about AFB or the Helen Keller archive that we haven't discussed yet?

Tony Stephens 19:52

You know, I mean, folks can check it out at you know, the Helen Keller Archive.afb.org. Everything that is is is, you know, 20, 30 meters from your fingertips has been digitized painstakingly. We are doing updates to that to because some of the transcriptions don't always get human script writing done. So we're cleaning that archive up. But, you know, I encourage folks to check that out and also to check out our possibilities film because it really a lot of the images were pulled from the archive, and the archive played a huge part in piecing together that film. And it was, you know, we had some wonderful awards we recognize on the festival circuit. Now on Helen's birthday, it's being released over like Apple TV and Amazon. And so if you search for possibilities, uh you'll find that film. And I believe it's going to be on canopy for libraries, so people can watch it for free. And we want schools to share it because it really it really captures Helen's voice. And again, there's there's great images from the archives that are scattered throughout that as we sort of interspace the uh stories of people that are blind today with Helen's own life to make connections that way.

Justin Gardner 20:51

So thanks. That's exciting. Yeah, you you helped a lot on that, Justin. Good, good. I'm looking forward to seeing that. So can't wait.

Tony Stephens 20:59

Yep.

Justin Gardner 21:00

All right. Well, well, thank you so much for coming and talking to me today on the podcast.

Tony Stephens 21:04

My pleasure. Thanks. And and then we'll have to reciprocate enough to get you on our podcast sometime. Sounds great.

Justin Gardner 21:09

I'd love to. All right, all right. Well, back to you, Sarah.

Sara Brown 21:14

Thanks so much, Justin and Tony. Now it's time for our monthly tech takeaway. Here's a table, Michael Dennis.

Michael Dennis 21:21

Hello everyone, and welcome to our new episode of the Tech Takeaways. My name is Michael Dennis, and incidentally today I'm alone with our my colleague Jennifer Wendzel, just because of the fact that we couldn't match our schedules with me being out of office for about two weeks going to China and Jennifer actually being very deeply involved with our monarchy student pilot project and the writing program right now. So today the episode is just with me. And I hope that we will have Jennifer obviously back for our next episode then in July. And uh what I want to go with you guys over today is one of our newest apps relaunched within the last months earlier on in the year, especially with the 1.5 update, and that is the app WordStock. Wordstock is a word game you can play, and it is basically to be found under all applications, and then you can just navigate with first letter navigation to W and find Wordstock in all applications. And Wordstock, as I said, is already a word game. The goal of the game is actually to guess a four or five character word. When you are opening word stock the first time or at any given point in time, you will get a start screen and you just hit enter on that one. And we'll get to the menu where you can play the word of the day, where you also have an actual whole library with the previous words of the day. And you can also choose if you want to play four or five character words. If you are not making any changes by default, you will always play a five-character word. And the actual important piece is when you go into the WordStalk app and play, you just type in your first word, what your guess is. For example, you play a five-character word and you guess house. And afterwards, the monarch will give you an audio feedback which characters are actually part of the word which is searched or looked for that particular day. But you also, and that is actually the point I want to highlight, is you get haptic feedback on the monarch. So if a character is not part of the word, there's basically no actual like underscoring or however you want to say it. But if a letter is part of a word, it is underscored. But that just means that the letter is part of the word but in the wrong position. So let's say like on house, the O is part of the word, so it's underscored, but it just means it's not in position number two. If you have a whole square, like a box around one of the letters, that means that the character is part of the word and is in the right position as well. So that is the really cool feedback the modern gives you when you actually play Wordstock on the device. And uh I want to highly encourage you to try to break Jennifer's streak. I'm a horrible word stock player, but Jennifer has told me at one of the conferences, I think, that her actual record is sitting at about 130 days in a row, finding the word of the day. So if you guys want, take on the challenge and get back to us within the next three to four months and let us know if you could beat Jennifer with that 130-day streak. The other thing is what I want to already already point out is that APH is working very hard on a new monarch update, which we hope is be launched throughout the summer, especially towards the beginning of the new school year. So make sure that you follow all of our social media channels, and obviously also that you're gonna check at the beginning of the school year when you return the key updater on the monarch to see if there are new apps out there, since we have now the ability to just download individual apps or if there is an update for the monarch overall available. With that said, that was a quick episode of the tech takeaways. As always, if you have any questions or ideas or topics you would like us to talk about or touch base on, feel free to email chemakers at aph.org. And we are looking forward to having you at our next episode. And then again, myself, Michael Dennis, and Jennifer Wenzel together. And we both hope that you guys are enjoying your summer.

Sara Brown 25:54

Thank you so much, Michael, and thank you so much for listening to this episode of Change Makers. Please check the show notes for additional information and links about the AFB Helen Keller Archive, The Dot Experience, and the monarch. Do you have a podcast idea or topic suggestion? Send it to me at changemakers at aph.org. And as always, be sure to look for ways you can be a change maker this week.