#BlindTok Podcasts

n Episode 14 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson welcome Mark Slavin, the relentlessly upbeat creator behind BlindTok's Mr. Blue Skies. Mark's eyesight started slipping at twelve, but a tidy nearsightedness label sent everyone home happy and kept the real story buried for years. He caught footballs by sound, played every sport his school had, and trusted his body to quietly cover for him, right up until it couldn't. Whe...

In Episode 13 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourn and Tammy Jackson welcome their first-ever international guest, Joe, joining from across the pond after a friendly squabble over whether a well-traveled American could fairly claim the title first. Joe takes the gang back to an inherited eye condition that showed up early and moved fast, a year-long misdiagnosis that landed harder on her family than on her, and the odd limbo of being a tee...

In Episode 12 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourn and Tammy Jackson sit down with Anna for one of the most candid journeys the show has hosted, beginning with a diagnosis nobody saw coming. Picture a fourteen-year-old soccer player who wears glasses only for the projector, until a routine eye appointment refuses to add up, no matter how many lenses get flipped in front of her. What followed was a Stargardt's diagnosis, a dad doing late-ni...

In Episode 11 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson sit down with special guest [Janelle's last name], a former collegiate softball pitcher and occupational therapist living with Stargardt's disease, for a conversation that moves between heartbreak and hard-won clarity in a way that only this community seems to pull off. Janelle takes the hosts back to the moment everything changed: a routine eye appointment, six yellow s...

In Episode 10 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson welcome Joey [LAST NAME — unconfirmed], the show's first male guest, who happily jokes about finally evening out a panel that had left him pleasantly outnumbered. Joey takes us back to the early signs he couldn't yet explain, a high school stretch when the textbooks quietly slipped out of focus, and a driving test that asked far more of him than anyone in the room ...

In Episode 9 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson are joined by Delaney Walsh, an Iowa-raised athlete and occupational therapy student whose entry into the low vision world started long before her own diagnosis. What begins as a family story shifts into something far more personal: a car accident, a quiet realization, and a teenager who suddenly had to make sense of what she had been watching from the sidelines for years...

In Episode 8 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson sit down with Alison DeFranco, an international human rights lawyer whose journey from small-town New York to Jakarta, Mexico City, and a tiny Irish island most people have never heard of started with a question her mom asked over spring break: why are you holding that book so close? What followed was a Stargardt's diagnosis, a wildly unhelpful eye doctor with a knack for...

In Episode 7 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson are joined by Jessie Evans to walk through what happens when a kid knows something is wrong and the adults around her keep insisting it isn't. Jessie's story stretches across a decade of being told she was dramatic, of glasses that did absolutely nothing, and of a mom who flat-out refused to back down. The episode gets honest about the quiet damage that comes from being l...

In Episode 6 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson are joined by Madeline Stafford for an honest conversation about what happens when answers take years to arrive and you spend most of your life filling in the blanks yourself. Madeline walks through her road from a Utah classroom where the books were bigger than she was, through a college experience that nearly didn't happen, and into her current role as a Teacher of the ...

In Episode 5 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson are joined by Mandy to dig into what it really takes to build and keep a career when vision loss keeps rewriting the rules. From adapting a current role with assistive technology to walking away from a profession you fought hard to earn, this episode lays out three very different paths through the workforce and gets real about the unemployment crisis facing the blind and ...

In Episode 4 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson unpack what really goes into your toolkit, and spoiler: it's way bigger than assistive technology. From AI-powered apps like Seeing AI and Microsoft Copilot to motion-sensor hallway lights, LED strips under kitchen cabinets, and the ever-reliable smart speaker that keeps chiming in uninvited, they share the creative, practical, and constantly evolving ways they navigate d...

In Episode 3 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson take on the anger that comes with vision loss, the kind that shows up after the shock wears off and the reality sets in. They get honest about the "why me" phase, the frustration of watching your body change faster than you can process it, and how easily that anger can slide into isolation and depression if you let it sit unchecked. Tammy shares how she eventually turned ...

In Episode 2 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson tackle the unspoken reality almost everyone in the vision loss community knows intimately: faking it till you make it. That exhausting daily performance of nodding along when someone points at something you can't see, agreeing with details you can't make out, and pouring every ounce of energy into appearing fine when things are anything but. They get real about the two si...

Welcome to the very first episode of #BlindTok! Murray Elbourne and co-host Tammy Jackson are launching this podcast the only way that feels right, by diving straight into one of the biggest unspoken challenges in the vision loss community: social isolation. Tammy gets real about the depression that followed her retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis, the moment she knew her healthcare career was over after mistaking a mailbox for a deer o...