Outlook on Radio Western

It’s been several years since both of us had our one-and-only guide dogs, in our teens and twenties, but that doesn’t mean it’s been so long that we can’t identify with another guide dog user around the impact of the end of a guide team partnership. Our guest this week made it on with us, even as he’d just recently experienced the loss of his German shepherd guide dog companion, a difficult loss f...

Blind people, well all people to a certain extent, but specifically blind people are either constantly told we cant do things. Or else we’re told we can be/do anything we want. This week on Outlook we relate over this position, and over the barriers that feel hard to surmount without support. It’s that time of year again when snow’s making an appearance, but we’re glad to be speaking with our gues...

We’re back this week for another episode of Outlook, another Mixed Bag Monday, Home Edition this time as colds, flu, and Covid pile up. We’ve been off and on air these last weeks, since Covid finally caught up with us both last month, and as we’re transplant patients we’ve had to give ourselves the time to recover slowly. Happy to be back on air though, since our last live in studio show in early...

From old episodes of Perry Mason on AMI to the 2011 Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate on CBC to Love On the Spectrum on Netflix. Our latest guest has described it all. This week on Outlook we speak with Ruth Barrett, who attended the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, who started out as a performer, in the theatre, as a voiceover artist, but she eventually found her way into the world...

Shawn Marsolais learned about her Retinitis Pigmentosa at age twelve and started attending a summer camp for blind children shortly after that. It was there, for the first time, Shawn finally felt like blindness didn’t have to be a big deal and meeting her blind peers made coming back every summer a thing to look forward to all year. At Camp Bowen, blindness was irrelevant because all the kids liv...

The blind leading the blind. One of our guests this week on Outlook says: “That is like the best idea ever!” On our first episode of October’s Blindness Awareness Month (or what we like to call BAM) we’re speaking with Alex Jurgensen and Jessica Gladysz from the Canadian Organization of the Blind and Deafblind (COBD) - Alex is director of operations and community engagement with the Camp Bowen Div...

She noticed something was going on with her son’s eyes one year while he was making his list for Santa and was only writing on the page’s right side margin, but there was a lot more going on, underneath the surface, in the Owens family. He loved skateboarding and skimboarding and was an excellent student, but this mother was about to have no choice but to teach her son how to advocate for himself...

Last winter, Kerry took a virtual program called Speaking With Confidence, since it had been years since she practiced her public speaking skills. Plus, anything she learned she figured she could apply to sounding more confident on the air for the radio show/podcast as well. This week, on Outlook, our guest was Nasreen Bhutta, (Consultant and Trainer- Helping folks to launch or relaunch their Care...

Katie Morgan says she feels like she knows us, even though we only met each other in person when she appeared on this week’s anniversary episode of Outlook. Even her family now know about the program she tunes in for, every Monday morning at eleven. This program is Outlook On Radio Western because it first started as a radio show, airing on 94.9 CHRW Radio Western, before the pandemic happened and...

During the pandemic and lockdowns, Kerry started attending a weekly Wednesday evening virtual space, on Zoom (where else) where art and accessibility came together with the help of a friendly, welcoming host. VocalEye is a non-profit society, registered charity and the first live descriptive arts service for the blind in Canada describing theatre, arts, and culture for the low vision and blindness...

Toy Story was Rebecca Odum’s first introduction into the world of audio description, movie night at a camp for the blind. Born premature and becoming blind from Retinopathy of Prematurity ROP, even when reading large print and screens was still possible and before becoming a screen reader user, movies and television have been a part of Rebecca’s life. What is audio description, AD QC, or quality c...

It’s been a few months since our last purely Mixed Bag Monday episode of Outlook, but we’re back, in the middle of August, as summer begins to wind down with a mixture of topics we’re discussing. Kerry’s been writing and taking classes in writing and the natural world and then reading her words, in community with others. Brian’s been having a rather creatively productive month, practicing with oth...

From one president to another. Doug Lawlor has become President of the Canadian Federation of the Blind. This week on Outlook On Radio Western, we speak with Lawlor about this new position and the responsibility that goes along with it, including his recent first-time experiencing a National Federation of the Blind national convention where he had an introductory meeting with the NFB’s president M...

We’ve known of this particular guest for years, through a friend, but now we welcome Victoria Francis as a friend of ours on the show after meeting her in an airport flying home from Orlando, Florida. This week on Outlook we speak with Francis about her experience coming here as a little girl, her parent’s determination to give her and her twin brother every possible chance as blind people, and th...

Jewelry isn’t only about what visually glitters and sparkles: both jewelry and braille are tactile experiences. Our latest guest tells us about her more than a decade in the accessible jewelry and accessories world, after studying music and theatre and working in assistive technology roles, leading to the role of accessibility advocate alongside. Laura Legendary is the founder of Elegant Insights...

On Outlook this week, we’re talking disability pride during July’s Disability Pride Month. Whether it’s us starting out the show talking about Brian’s recent musical practice with an old friend and society’s devaluing of music as an art and a skill, a skill many people with disabilities have. Or our recent guest, H May, whose short film Awaiting Tiresias highlights discussions of the continuum of...

“Even a blind pig finds a truffle now and then” —Medical technician from Awaiting Tiresias Awaiting Tiresias is the short film, loosely based on our guest’s story of disability and gender, this week on Outlook On Radio Western. Dr. Heather(H) May is a director and professor of theatre at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. May shares from their recognized platform of privilege a...

It’s graduation season and our guest this week is a recent Masters of Counselling Psychology graduate at University of Victoria in British Columbia on Vancouver Island. We met Kyla Berry when she attended the 2022 National All-Virtual Canadian Federation of the Blind Convention in May and invited her on Outlook. On the show this week, we talk to Berry about how she became interested in counselling...

We’re back for a Mixed Bag Part II with all variations of Father’s Day, already halfway through 2022. This week on Outlook, we talk bat caves and finding braille at the ROM, yet not on university bathrooms, and the complicated business of the travel urge, Kerry tells of a new author friend named Nicole who visited her and Brian and Kerry together read a statement by Penny Leclair (a guest from las...

It’s been a while since our last Mixed Bag Monday episode with only us two, but we’re back again with our mixture of topics. On Outlook this week, we talk unforeseen poles leading to ambulance rides and stitches, reflecting on our experience of kidney failure with a recent study on childhood medical trauma done out of the B.C. Children’s Hospital, and continual election day inaccessibility during...

June is Father’s Day month in North America, but this year is a special one - featuring a father/daughter connection like no other. This week, on Outlook, we speak with our father, for his debut on the show, as June 5, 2022 marks 25 years since he gave a kidney to Kerry when she was a teenager. We discuss themes of ancestry and family with our father, Bob, whose parents were immigrants/settlers in...

Singer/song writer and author Heather Hutchison now, will think of herself during the toughest moments of these last few years, as if it were another girl entirely: “She’s been so mean to herself for so long. And if we talked to our friends the way we talk to ourselves, we wouldn’t have any.” It’s been six months since we spoke with Hutchison about her memoir, released a year ago: Holding On by Le...

Hanna Leavitt is an author and blindness historian whose life passion is in creating a world with words and she is our guest this week on Outlook. We met Hanna through the podcast she co-hosts called Triple Vision, all about the past, present, and future of blindness in Canada. We have a lively chat about the brain tumour that was the cause of the damage to her eyes, the importance of finding out...

Last fall, Kerry participated (as community consultant of lived experience) in a virtual Inclusive Design Multisensory Museum course through Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD U). The instructor of that course was Melissa Smith, who works at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) as Assistant Curator, Access and Learning. This week on Outlook we speak with Melissa and two students who took the cour...

Banter: the playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks. (quips, ribbing, witticisms) A banter based conversation is happening this week (with more than just the two of us) and we like that - the wittier the better. This week on Outlook, we speak with Rob Mineault, Ryan Fleury, Steve Barclay and Lis Malone who host the podcast AT Banter, some of whom are blind and visually impaired and others...