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Golden Eagle honors physically disabled for achievements

The Golden Eagle Award was given yesterday to recipients who have overcome their physical disabilities to accomplish outstanding achievements.

Formerly a businessman, writer, photographer and teacher at Shihsin University’s College of Journalism and Communications, Chen Hung (陳宏) became paralyzed in 2000 when he was 67 after getting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

ALS is a nervous disorder that causes patients to gradually lose the ability to control their muscles.

While Chen is still able to move his eyeballs and eyelids, his wife Liu Hsueh-hui (劉學慧) made a board with Chinese phonetic symbols to help him “talk.”

The phonetic board is a piece of transparent plastic with symbols written on it. When Chen wants to “say” something, he rolls his eyeballs toward a certain symbol. Once Liu finds the correct symbol on the board, he blinks to say “yes.” Chen painstakingly spells the word he wants to say by going from symbol to symbol.

“He spends four to five hours a day ‘writing’ articles, then I print them for him to proofread — it takes a week to complete a 1,000 character article,” said Liu, who attended the award ceremony organized by the Ministry of the Interior on behalf of her husband.

So far, Chen has published five books since he was paralyzed.

Su Ching-fu (蘇清富), a man who enjoys reading and is highly skilled with computers, has been visually impaired since he was a child.

“I was fortunate to have an opportunity to find about 30 Braille books, which were quite rare at the time, at school when I was in the fifth grade,” Su said. “I fell in love with reading so I decided that, one day, I would make books for the blind, and I wanted to write books for the general public.”

With these dreams in mind, Su worked hard at school.

“Not all textbooks have a Braille version, so I could only listen attentively in classes and borrow notes from classmates to turn them into Braille,” Su said. “I often had to spend twice the time or more as my classmates studying.”

With his hard work, Su was able to graduate from a regular high school and received a degree in Chinese literature from Tamkang University.

Su was excited when a Windows operation system for the blind was released in 2003 and immediately got to work mastering the computer.

“With an operating system especially designed for the blind, it’s much easier for us to get new information, develop skills or solve problems at work or at school,” Su said.

He then set up a computer lab to teach computer lessons to other visually impaired individuals.

Su also used computers to translate books into Braille and record audiobooks.

Convinced that knowledge is power, especially for the handicapped, Su said: “I have a new goal now to create an online audiobook database that will allow the visually impaired to download audiobooks anywhere at anytime for free.”
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