Dennis Wright from Moberly, Missouri, made a living driving a truck. So, when he noticed a change to his vision, he sought help quickly.
“I must have seen seven ophthalmologists from all over the state of Missouri,” he remembers. Eventually a neuro-ophthalmologist discovered the cause of Dennis’s vision trouble was an optic nerve condition called non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION.
“My daughter researched it and it’s like an eye stroke. And in my case, over the course of two weeks I pretty much lost sight in my right eye. The doctor said there’s no treatment. There’s no way to stop it. There’s no way to prevent it. And there’s no way to correct it.”
“The only good news,” Dennis’s doctor relayed, “was that it wasn’t going to happen to the other eye.”
Dennis’s truck-driving career ended at this point, and he chose instead to work on the warehouse end of the business.
Then a year after he lost sight in his right eye, he noticed a spot on his left eye. As it turned out, Dennis was in the unlucky minority where the disease affected both eyes. While the left eye still has some vision, Dennis describes it as “looking through glasses that have been smeared with Vaseline.”
At that point Dennis retired and began looking for resources to help him live with diminished sight.
“Not one of the doctors I saw gave me any ideas of how to live with this. No one even gave me a pamphlet of what to do next. The doctor just said good luck rather than giving me a list of agencies that could help me learn how to live with this.” Dennis recalls with amazement. “Instead, I learned everything I know from another blind guy on the bus!”
The first agency Dennis’s newfound friend from the bus recommended was Resources for the Blind out of Jefferson City, which was a tremendous help. In addition to helping him directly, they pointed him in the direction of many other resources he could take advantage of, including Hadley. Dennis began to piece together a new way to live his life.
He discovered audiobooks, for instance, and audio-described TV and movies. His love for audio description, in fact, is an episode on our Insights & Sound Bites podcast, “I’m not excluded from life.”
Dennis’s family has been a great source of support. While his ex-wife and best friend of 34 years unfortunately passed away last year, he is very close to his daughter and grandchildren who live close enough to see him just about every Sunday.
“The kids love playing tricks on their Pawpaw. We go to a Chinese restaurant here, and they’ll make concoctions to get me to try. It’s awful and I love them for it. They even fight over who gets to help me at the store.”
One thing that Dennis discovered that made using websites and apps still possible for him was to reverse the contrast. Reversing the background color to black with text in white cuts down on glare and makes it possible for him to read online.
Much to his amazement, not all sites have this option. Even websites designed for people with vision impairment don’t always make that option available. To access the information on these sites, Dennis needs to use his phone’s color invert feature to browse the screen, which means searching for books or songs takes hours. And because websites for Walmart, Amazon and Domino’s don’t offer this option, Dennis’s options for home delivery are a lot smaller than they should be.
On the Hadley site, Dennis appreciated that he could select dark mode right away as part of signing up, but he found the large, white play buttons on our videos to be a problem. He wrote to us and jumped on a call to describe the issue. The Hadley web team evaluated his concern and realized we could do better by members who prefer dark mode. We made some small changes to the design, and Dennis couldn’t be happier.
For taking the time to point out how we could improve Hadley’s member experience, Dennis was given a Hadley Hero award this quarter.
Thank you, Dennis, for making the Hadley community stronger by your contributions.