Saturday, September 18, 2004



Watching Disability Affairs Correspondent Peter White at work is an amazing experience.

Where most journalists scribble into a spiral bound notebook, Peter punches away like a court stenographer on his braille note-taker, the speed and agility of his fingers betraying the fact that he's also an accomplished pianist.

When he's finished writing, he reads his scripts out loud to me so that I can time them and offer suggestions for changes, his fingers gliding effortlessly across the braille display.

He explained to me that he has to speak two or three words ahead of what his fingers are reading, so he doesn't have to pause every time he hits the return key on the machine to bring up the next line of braille text.

Once we get into the studio Peter tucks the brailler under the table as he reads so that the microphone doesn't pick up the clicking sound as he hits "return."

Radio is such an evocative medium, and Peter is such a consummate professional, that if you just heard his voice on the wireless you wouldn't have any inkling that he's been completely blind since birth.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Correspondent Peter White gives us good eyesight people no room to complain that paperworks can not get done.


Mr. Blogger, I never heard a blind person dictates his written work. Would it be possible for me to hear some of Peter's oral reports?

5:27 AM  

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