Skating in Darkness

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Learning to navigate through the dark. Much like a radio listener, a blind person has to rely a lot on their sense of hearing. But once you learn to hear with your whole body, you can talk a walk down to the beach or maybe play some baseball.

The last thing you might expect a blind person to do is…play baseball. Producer Ryan Scammell spent an afternoon watching "beep baseball," a version of the game created for the vision impaired. The ball beeps, the bases buzz. It's a game about trust, faith, and overcoming all obstacles. Watching a blind man hit a ball out of the air makes you think anything is possible. Ryan Scammell is an independent producer living in Brooklyn.

Beep Baseball

Also, audio producer Sarah Yahm knows a woman named Gail, in Santa Cruz, California, who lost her eyesight as a teenager.  She's worked out ways of compensating by hearing the world around her in ways that most of us don't.  Gail's kind of "re-wired" her hearing, turning it into a visual tool -- almost like sonar. Sarah remembered Gail when she was looking for a way to help her own mother, a fiercely independent woman who's adjusting to near-blindness, following a biking accident.

The Santa Cruz boardwalk

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