Christina: [00:00:00] Welcome to the taking the lead podcast, where we empower people to be unstoppable. I'm Christina Hapner with my cohost, Leslie Hoskins in Timothy Cuneo. And today we're going to do a little bit of a shorter episode. And Leslie and I actually were going to a coffee shop earlier today and we were Timothy.

We were [00:00:20] like a crossing the streets in, um, Birmingham is where we're at Birmingham, Michigan, and we were talking about the crosswalks. It's funny because in Rochester where it leader dog is based when you press the button, it talks to you. And I was joking around with Leslie and I was like, oh, press the button.

I want to hear it countdown. [00:00:40] And it didn't. I was like, oh, it's not coming down. Why not? So, you know, you get used to like certain

Leslie: crosswalks, which they all counted down right

Timothy: on mine. Don't count down. I myself, my little town didn't have the audible crosswalks. So I, for [00:01:00] myself, I become my own advocate. So I called my local Georgia, D O T.

And I requested for at least five intersections of my town to get those crosswalks. And today they're installed and they are working. So when I go downtown, I could press, I've trained glacier to go to those places. And she'll go to him and I hit the button and we go out to [00:01:20] the curb and we wait for that.

You may know, cross thing. And then I cross and she hears it and see if she's ready to go. Cause now she was here is that she knows the go to, so she's waiting for me to give the command, but she knows she's getting ready to go when she. You can cross now. So it, and with a cane you go out and you hit that button.

You go out and find that, [00:01:40] that, that the tactile, where the, I guess, the down ramp goes and you just wait for that signal and you gotta set yourself up correctly to cross that street. Perfect.

Leslie: Yeah. So those are called accessible pedestrian signals APS, if you will. Um, and they're not everywhere, so. Not every intersection is going to have a push [00:02:00] button and every push button isn't necessarily going to be audible.

It's not necessarily going to talk to you a lot of times they have what we call the pet head, which is basically the little white walking guy or the red hand. Um, but it doesn't make any sound so you can imagine if it's not making sense. Probably it's not going to be helpful to somebody who's blind or visually impaired, but I think that's awesome, [00:02:20] Timothy, that you went and advocated for yourself and said, Hey, this is what I need.

This would make it a much safer environment for me to travel in. I'd be a lot more confident. And that it happens. So, yeah. Congratulations. I love

Christina: it.

Timothy: Well, I know there's two or three other people in my little town that are blind and [00:02:40] nobody has done anything for them. So I said, Hey, um, cause one, two of them go to my doctor.

We were talking about it. My doctor was amazed what I was able to do in our little town here. And he was amazed. He sees me in glacier out there walking, and then he goes, you're the one that got the audible wall. So I said, yes, I did. And so he. Fascinated by that. So he's telling his clients about [00:03:00] them and he's telling my clients about leader dog.

So hopefully they're going to be clients for you guys one day. So see what

Leslie: happens,

Christina: Timothy. I think that's so amazing. And I think that's amazing for other people to hear that you can advocate for yourself. You can try and make change in your own town. You did it. And [00:03:20] I think it's great for other clients or other people who are blind or visually impaired to know that.

Yeah, you can make

Leslie: a difference. Absolutely. I, you know, we've heard from some other clients who've been working for years to get that technology at intersections. And I do want to be clear. It doesn't mean that you can't still cross an

intersection without APS, but it's just [00:03:40] kind of that extra confirmation or confidence boost that you're crossing at the appropriate time.

Yeah, cause

Timothy: I mean, you still have to use your hearing because you can have a little town like I do, and it's really loud. And you may not hear that. Cross-walk say it's time for you to go. So you still have to go by your cards. You still have to listen. Cause you don't want to become in my mind [00:04:00] lazy, depending on that thing to tell you to go because not every crosswalk is going to have it.

So you still need to tune in and go when you know you're supposed to go. And uh, cause you may not hear it for, to give you that a little.

Leslie: Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about intersections and let's pretend that they don't have an APS system because again, many [00:04:20] of them don't, but it's up to the client, right.

To be able to walk up to an intersection and determine how it's controlled and what I mean by how it's controlled is, is it a stop sign, controlled intersection? Is it a light controlled intersection? Is it a two way? Is it a four way? Um, what shape of intersection is. All of this [00:04:40] information is really, really important in order to know when the appropriate time to cross is.

Um, and so that's one of the skills that we work on during a week of orientation and mobility is being able to answer all those questions, walk up to an intersection and based on the sound again, cause we're not relying on our vision based on [00:05:00] the sound determined. Is this a stop sign controlled intersection or a stops or a stop sign or a light controlled intersection, because that's going to determine how we cross.

Wow. That is a lot to

Christina: learn. I can only imagine. And nowadays I feel like people are getting really, um, [00:05:20] unique types of sidewalks and across walks. I mean, how, how did. if I can talk,

Leslie: how can you

Christina: help tell them the difference between those types of sidewalks? You know, whether it's a stone road, if they didn't want to do some cool stone or if it's just a normal [00:05:40] crosswalk, how do you tell the difference?

Leslie: Yeah. So tactually with a cane. You're going to be able to feel a lot of times that's actually a nice feature. So a lot of like cute downtown areas, their crosswalks will actually be like that stone or brick. And that could be really helpful when traveling with a cane because you know that if you're on the stone or if you're on the brick, [00:06:00] then you're still in the crosswalk lines versus if you kind of get off and it feels a little bit smoother.

You might be veering either away from traffic or towards traffic. Um, so sometimes those little textual or texture, uh, information can be really, really helpful for crossings. But one thing I want to talk about, so being able to identify the difference [00:06:20] between a light controlled and a stop sign controlled intersection using your hearing, um, Basically, you're listening to the flow of traffic.

You know, if we think about a four way stop intersection, every car that comes to the intersection has to stop before proceeding. We're hearing one car go at a time. Now, if we compare that to a light controlled [00:06:40] intersection where we're going to hear one street, you know, kind of surging through going through.

All of a sudden, they're going to stop now the next direction of streets, those maybe east, west streets are going to surge. Go, go, go, go, go, go. Then they're going to stop. And then vice versa again, the other side. So we're hearing multiple cars going at a time and depending on whether it's a [00:07:00] stop sign. Or like controlled, it's going to base, you know, what technique we use to cross.

So Timothy, you, you learned all those skills in a week of orientation and mobility. Are you still using those skills today with a guide dog?

Timothy: Uh, like I've said in previous podcast, uh, your, what what'd you take from your, uh, learning from your [00:07:20] cane skills? You take that to the guy dog, because they are the, at the.

Uh, you're just using a different device to travel. And, uh, you learn where your blocker car is. You go when your blocker car goes and you still listen to, uh, uh, to traffic flow and, uh, you have to know, wait, you're crossing. So nothing

[00:07:40] changes really with the kid, with the cane or a guide dog, uh, just a different form of.

So

Christina: Timothy, when you're traveling in different places that, you know, your hometown, I'm sure you know, very well, but if you take glacier somewhere else, how do you tell what type of sidewalks there are in how to know [00:08:00] if it's, you know, stoplight, cross walk sort of.

Timothy: Well, when I'm not in my town, I take when my, uh, Victor reader Trek, that is the greatest tool.

I use that all the time. And I, if you got it, please use it because it gives you an idea of what's ahead and. [00:08:20] Then you still got to listen. It's basically the skills that you learn and what you take in your little town. You go out and in the United States and use it there too. It's a little nerve wracking to being an unfamiliar territory.

Trust me. It is. That's why you gotta have the best tools. And I take my Victor reader Trek with me everywhere I go. And [00:08:40] it just gives me an idea of what's ahead of me. And I just give the command for glacier to find the curb. And then when I'm standing there, I listen, God.

Leslie: And I think, you know, another good thing to point out is the patients that you have to have.

Um, especially if you're in, in an, in an unfamiliar environment, you really do have to stand there and take the time [00:09:00] to listen to what's going on. Um, traffic can change depending on the time of day, it can be busier, you know, and traffic intersections, the flow of traffic changes. You know, a lot of intersections these days are what we call actuator, meaning that it's dependent on the flow of traffic of what's going to happen.

So if you've ever been at an intersection before [00:09:20] and you get that, uh, the left-hand green arrow, for example, but then maybe the next. You don't get it. It's a blinking arrow. That's really dependent on the traffic and how much traffic is there. The light is trying to always kind of move traffic through at a fast pace.

So it's really important to know all of the potential options of where [00:09:40] traffic can go and when at an intersection. Um, and then also determining again,

the appropriate time to cross or the appropriate method. So patients, patients, patients, uh, when in doubt, Wait it out is the saying that I say all the time to clients, because we'd rather be sure, [00:10:00] uh, that we're making the right choice.

Timothy: Don't ever let an, a person in a car tell you to go. You go when you're supposed to go on your time. Not somebody honking their horn saying, come on, let's go. No, because you you're in control now. And the, let them go on, let that, let that intersection clear out and then you go be [00:10:20] patient there. You're not that I'd rather be safe and get there than not get there and be in the hospital somewhere.

You go when you feel

Christina: safe. And that is such a great point too, because sometimes when you're in their section, there are. You know, you don't, they don't honk. They'll just kind of try and wave you by. And obviously if you're blind or visually impaired, you [00:10:40] can't see that car waving you by. So I think that's also important to remember to be patient because you don't know if there's another car on the other side that could be zooming, right?

Leslie: Yeah. And one thing we talk a lot about and ONM is communicating with, with cars and traffic while at an intersection. So we do that a couple of different ways, um, by our [00:11:00] cane positioning, we communicate to drivers. So first of all, at an intersection, we want to be as visible as possible. We want people to know that we're there and we want them to know that we're visually impaired.

So we're always positioning our cane towards the intersection or towards our parallel street for most visibility. And then when we decide to cross, uh, a [00:11:20] lot of times we encourage movement and that can be called flagging in the profession, if you will, or there's a step in pause, there's a couple of different techniques, but basically what it is is, is moving because movement draws the eye in.

So if for whatever reason that driver didn't see you standing there. Hopefully now when you start to move, whether you physically move your body forward or [00:11:40] you swing your cane, hopefully that movement is going to draw their eye in and that's our way of communicating to them. Hey, I'm going now on the opposite side of that, a way we can communicate with drivers to tell them we're not going is to do the.

And actually pull the cane up close to our body. Maybe even, you know, turn our body away from the intersection. I've told [00:12:00] clients to check their fake watch. If they have to, um, anything they need to do to basically communicate to those drivers. No, I'm not going because like you mentioned, people are honking and waving and trying to get you to go and they think they're helping.

And, and we know that right. It's it always comes from a genuine place. We want our clients and travelers to make the [00:12:20] decision on their own of what they feel comfortable and when the best time to cross is so communicating through body language on the corners that maybe, you know, sounds a little silly, but it's a really important part of orientation of mobile.

Timothy: If I'm correct. Leslie, did you say if I'm correct, you take a step and you hesitate for just a second and then you decided to go, you show [00:12:40] them that you're moving and you just take that step and just stop for just a sec. I mean, split second and then you go. Yeah. So that's why, that's what she means. Show them that you are moving, you do that.

And that's how you do it with the.

Christina: Makes sense now, Timothy, how do you do that with glacier? Because obviously you can't just hold glacier up to you. Like you can't. [00:13:00]

Timothy: Oh no. When I tell glacier go, she digs in and we go, she gets me across that street fast and, and she really moves quickly during a intersection.

So she wants to get on the other side and she finds me that curb and she shot stops and she shows me that curb. So she's

Leslie: right. [00:13:20] A different thing to think about too is once you're traveling. So we've decided to cross now, right now we have two. Straight, which when you're traveling without vision, what is straight, right?

Cause it's really wherever your nose takes you in the appointment direction you're walking. So a guide dog usually is really helpful and takes you curb to curb, as you mentioned, and kind [00:13:40] of helps with that straight line travel when traveling with a cane, that can be really difficult, especially if there's no APS counting down on the other side, um, to travel a straight line.

So we really focus on as we're approaching a curb, maintaining our line of travel. Uh, I'm getting aligned, you know, using the traffic on our perpendicular street, coming in her left ear, [00:14:00] around her nose and out our right ear and, or the parallel traffic coming directly on one side of us, all these different techniques that we're using before we even cross.

Right. So we're setting ourselves up or maintaining our line of travel. And then as we're crossing, we're actually using those parallel street cars, the cars on the side of our body. And we're trying to maintain the [00:14:20] same distance away from them. If we start traveling towards them, they're going to get a little bit louder as we start traveling away from them.

They're going to get a little bit quieter. So. Just I'm saying all this, not for you to understand, of course, because I know there's a lot that goes into it, but just to understand the work that our clients put in in order to make these safe and independent. Yeah.

Christina: [00:14:40] I know. I always say this, but it always blows my mind.

It really does because even though I work at leader dog, I am learning something new every day because I don't work with the clients day in and day out. I'm not a trainer, I'm not an instructor. I work in the marketing department. Um, Learning. This for me is so [00:15:00] important as well. In, like I said, my mind is always blown during this podcast and I love it.

I love learning all of this new

Timothy: stuff. It just shows you how much of impact that leader dog has on everybody. Uh, without the donors and the volunteers. I wouldn't have that an independent travel skill. And [00:15:20] imagine you not, and to be able to go down your streets, go to your little town, go to your coffee shop, always bound into your home and without leader, dog, that's what most people, that's what I'd be doing right now.

So thank God that people give their money and their time to leader dogs so they can give those skills to.

Leslie: Thank you, [00:15:40] Timothy that's, that's very kind of you to say. And, and I totally agree, right? I am so thankful that we work for an organization where we're able to help people and teach these skills, right?

These are life-changing skills. Um, and so it definitely makes an impact, but I hope today's podcast helped everybody understand a little bit more as to what goes into crossing streets. [00:16:00] Again, we don't expect you to understand all the ins and outs of it, but just to give you an idea, there are. So many skills that our clients are working towards using their, their hearing and their other remaining senses.

And whether it be a mobility tool of a cane or a guide dog, um, there's different strategies for everything. But again, I am your host, Leslie [00:16:20] Haskins with host Timothy Cuneo and Christina Hapner. We hope you enjoy today's short episode. Please join us next time as we continue to share stories and educate about the world of why this

Christina: yes.

And always as a reminder, if you liked today's podcast, make sure. Subscribe and check us out wherever podcasts.[00:16:40]