In 1812, a small French boy named Louis Braille injured an eye on a sharp tool in his father's harness shop. Both eyes became infected, and soon he was completely blind.
When he entered school he was an eager student, but he became frustrated with how he was instructed. He learned of a technique that enabled soldiers to compose and read messages at night without illumination: using raised dots for tactile writing and reading. By the age of 15, Louis had developed and perfected the system, employing six-dot cells based upon normal spelling (not phonetics). Today that system is used around the world.
"Braille is our hero," says Queen Anne resident Nancy Lopez-Swaney, her yellow Lab Brady lying peacefully at her feet. A beneficiary of Braille's invention, she also has been creative overcoming the obstacle of blindness.
Nancy was born in 1965 ("a good year," she says) and raised in Elk Grove Village, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. She is the sixth of seven children born to Eugene and Josephine Lopez. Eugene, a Cuban immigrant, is a retired doctor. Josephine (of Czech heritage) worked as a nurse when she wasn't raising her brood. In recent years she has been called "J Lo."
Nancy has Leber's optic atrophy (LOA), a condition first described by Theodore Leber in the 19th century, in which certain genes lower the amount of energy available to cells of the optic nerve and retina, causing them severe damage. LOA usually appears in young adulthood, but Nancy was born with it.
Although the condition is hereditary, neither of her parents has LOA, nor any of her siblings. But two of her sisters are visually impaired, for entirely different reasons.
As a child Nancy experienced further inflammation of the eyes as well as detached retinas. LOA is supposed to stabilize at some point, but it hasn't yet in her case, and her eyesight continues to worsen. Large print has become harder and harder for her to read. But she still has some usable vision. "I think the color of Brady's coat is beautiful," she says.
In school Nancy was mainstreamed and kept up with her classmates. She was sometimes pulled out of the classroom for special instruction, but not often. She learned to type in the second grade, and to read Braille in the sixth.
She attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, and graduated cum laude in 1987 with a degree in family social services. A year later, through a Catholic volunteer program called Channel, Nancy came to Seattle and found part-time work as a receptionist with Community Services for the Blind. She shared the job with a woman named Judith Swaney and became acquainted with Judith's husband, Don.
From a case worker at Washington State Services for the Blind, Nancy learned of the Lighthouse, a private, nonprofit agency founded 85 years ago that provides employment, support and job training for people who are blind, deaf-blind and blind with other disabilities. Opportunities include vocational computer training, job coaching for the developmentally disabled, manufacturing products for the federal government (like hydration packets for troops in Iraq and rubber stamps for the postal service) and manufacturing airplane parts for Boeing.
In 1990, Nancy began working at the Lighthouse as a machinist, running power equipment, riveting and doing other assembly work. She worked in that position for 18 months. Don Swa-ney was now working at the Lighthouse as well, so they crossed paths again. During this period, sadly, Judith Swaney died.
Over the next decade, Nancy worked as a cer-tified massage therapist, a reservation specialist at Seattle Tours, an elementary school tutor and a customer service representative at Sears. She preferred the customer service positions.
"I like people," she says.
Don Swaney and Nancy maintained their friendship, and eventually it took a romantic turn. They were married in 2000.
They each lived in Uptown before their marriage, and liked it so much they bought a condominium there together. "Queen Anne has its own micro-climate," says Nancy. "It's often sunny when it's gray in other parts of town. I love the smell of the marine air, and I love Seattle Center, especially the festivals." Folklife is her favorite.
Another advantage is that it's easy to get to work. The No. 8 bus takes Nancy and Don practically door to door, from Uptown to the Rainier Valley.
Don, who is also blind (and has his own dog, Camber), has worked at the Lighthouse for years in the Information Technology Department. "He's a technological guru," says Nancy. In 2003, she resumed working at the Lighthouse herself.
She worked in customer service, then as Braille and tape services coordinator, preparing materials in a variety of alternate formats to accommodate different vision types. She translated documents (such as training manuals) into Braille. When appropriate, she also put text into audio format.
Now she is back in customer service where she is happiest. How does she pass on phone messages and read and send e-mail?
First off, she is a fluent typist regular keyboard. But her computer is not regular; it is one of about 100 "adaptive technology stations" at the Lighthouse, with software called JAWS - job access with speech - as well as a Braille display, a black strip of six-dot cells in front of the keyboard.
To check e-mail, she clicks and a voice tells her the name of the sender, the subject and the date and time sent. If she wants to hear the message text, she clicks again and the voice reads it to her. Concurrently, dots raise and lower on the Braille display if she wants to read along. She can send messages to other adaptive technology stations to be read in the same way.
She is also able to greatly magnify standard text on her computer screen if she needs brief information, like that on a business card.
"I love working at the Lighthouse," says Nancy. "I particularly enjoy my present job because I use the skills I learned in college.
"I also enjoy the working environment," she continues. "Because many of us have a visible limitation, we have a sense of camaraderie." More than half the 280 employees at the Lighthouse are blind.
"It's great to be part of the Lighthouse mission," she concludes. That mission is to create and enhance opportunities for independence and self-sufficiency of blind and otherwise disabled people.
Unfortunately, about 70 percent of visually impaired people are under- or unemployed. That figure has not changed much over the years, despite the efforts of places like the Lighthouse and their outreach programs. "But we'll persevere," says Nancy, "and hope that begins to change more significantly."
Growing up, Nancy was often told that she could do whatever she wanted. "But I wasn't told what it would take," she says. "You have to prove yourself twice as much."
And she has. It helps that other senses compensate for her loss of sight; she has acute hearing, sensitive touch and an intuitive sixth sense. But mainly she has worked very hard.
For more information about the Lighthouse, go to information@seattlelighthouse.org or read Seattle's Best-Kept Secret: A History of the Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc.[[In-content Ad]]
