Right now as I write this it is evening on the west coast of the United States. June 21, 2018 isn't quite over which gives me a little time to let you all know what today is. Happy Aniridia Day!

June 21, 2018 is a day for activities worldwide to bring awareness to the rare eye condition known as aniridia. In order to explain aniridia I would quote a little from the Wikipedia entry for it but that has several medical terms. To keep it simple I am going to quote from the "About" section of aniridiaday.org:

"Aniridia is a disease, present from birth, that causes lack of irises (the colour) in the eyes. Without the iris to block out bright lights, people with aniridia have find glare and sunshine debilitating, even painful. Aniridia is rare, affecting only 1 in 47,000 people."

Photo Source: aniridiaday.org

Aniridia is just one of many eye conditions that can result in legal blindness if not totally without sight. According to the National Federation for the Blind fewer than ten percent of the estimated 1.3 million people who are legally blind in the United States are Braille readers (source).

The other day after making one of my regular posts I got one of the best replies to a post I have gotten so far on steemit. @tts converted the text of my post to an audio format which can be played from the reply section of my blog post.

This is wonderful and I hope more people will appreciate what @tts is doing. The @tts audio quality is comparable to commercially available screen reader programs such as ZoomText or JAWS so it can be helpful for people with low vision or those who get fatigued after long periods of reading. It's also helpful for the steemit community in general. When I write a blog listing all the circumstantial evidence that shows both Star Trek and Lost In Space share the same timeline and co-exist in the same universe that post is the same level of pedantic headcanon whether you read it or listen to it. You might as well listen so your hands can be free. You can lay your palms on the table as you bang your head saying, "All this time I thought Star Trek and Lost In Space existed in separate universes but now Holovision has shown me the truth! How could I have been so, so wrong all this time?".

If like myself you can see the intrinsic value of @tts to the steemit community please help support them. I can only see one post that @tts has written and that is an introduction from four months ago. As it states in their introduction post:

 Please consider upvoting us. We need more bandwidth for posting and have ongoing expense to creating and hosting the speech files. 

Let's do that fellow steemians. Please go to their introduction and upvote to show your support. If you see one of their audio replies of a converted post's text then please upvote that as well. Let @tts know we appreciate the great service they are providing.

Like this post? Please remember to upvote and subscribe for more content. Also, feel free to visit my official site holovision.tv.    

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