National Federation of The Blind (United States) - Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation

The NFB’s contention is that an average blind people can do the average job in the average place of business and do it as well as their sighted neighbors. To achieve this end the NFB strives to provide effective blindness training at several sites in the United States which require a residency of about 12 to 14 months. Spouses and children of the blind are not permitted to live with the blind student during this time of intense training. Family involvement in rehabilitation is limited and discouraged. The NFB has developed and requires the students in its rehabilitation programs to use only their own line of lightweight long white non-folding canes. The purported purpose is to enhance effective travel coupled with the use of dark sleep shades for total occlusion during the intense year long training schedule. The object of simulating total blindness according to various articles and opinions published in the Braille Monitor (an NFB Publication) is to prepare the student for such a time when they might become totally blind. Some medical professionals hold the opinion that such total occlusion practice actually exacerbates the deterioration of sight in those who might still have a remainder of limited or partial sight. The NFB has always stressed that the blind citizen is to be taught to travel, not simply by memorizing specific routes, but by practicing going unfamiliar places using the long cane and even wearing blindfolds, called sleep shades, if they have any residual vision. The NFB contends that students who have been trained using this method become confident, independent travelers who don’t need to return for more training if they lose more sight. Though the NFB officially supports the use of guide dogs (and some of its members use them) the NFB believes that all blind people should know how to use canes and in practice strongly discourages the use of guide dogs as a sign of weakness and a lack of independence in the user of this tool.

The NFB advocates teaching Braille to both children and adults who cannot read print efficiently and comfortably. This position has provoked opposition from some agencies and school districts who believe that only children who are totally or almost totally blind should need to learn Braille. According to the National Center for Health Statistics National Health Interview Survey, the United States currently has 93,600 legally blind school-age children. Of these only about 5,500 are being taught Braille. Some of these students can read print effectively; some are multiply impaired and cannot learn to read at all; but the NFB believes that many more than the six percent of the blind children currently learning to read Braille could be taught to read if parents and educators were committed to doing so. An even smaller percentage of adults losing vision are encouraged to learn Braille. The NFB maintains that these adults are functionally illiterate when they are no longer able to read print effectively and Braille instruction has not been made available to them. Some graduates of NFB rehabilitation programs report that after losing their sight in mid-life they were discouraged by those who never experienced sight not to continue visualizing their surroundings or loved ones despite medical opinions to the contrary.

The foundation of this instruction and the component that its founders feels makes training at an NFB center uniquely successful is the steady effort to help students develop a healthy attitude about blindness and about themselves as blind people. The NFB encourages an ongoing attitude of independence and strongly encourages and steers intimate, intense and ongoing involvement with local and national chapters long after rehabilitation has been achieved. Participants are encouraged to see the National Federation as their new family oftentimes to the exclusion and frustration of the original biological family and/or marriage partner. NFB centers offer no training to the family and spouses of children of the blind adult when family members are sighted.

The NFB has said that the goal is that students come to recognize and combat both the bigotry of lowered expectations and the blatant discrimination based on presumed incompetence that they face everywhere they turn in their home communities. Some state rehabilitation agencies are beginning to pattern their rehabilitation programs on the NFB-center model. The NFB publishes stories both nationally and locally on a regular basis which report new members relishing the NFB model as an opportunity to turn the tables on the sighted world to make them feel like the outsiders, aiming to exclude sighted citizens from involvement. Both the rehabilitation centers and ongoing monthly and annual meetings and conferences continue to ask blind members for their loyalty to the goals of the group including some political lobbying as needed.