Computers for the Blind

It’s a quiet afternoon in the King of Glory Lutheran Church basement, where shelves reach to the ceiling, holding hard drives, monitors, CPUs and motherboards.

A few older gentlemen diligently tinker with desktop computers, taking them apart and putting them back together again. “Most of them had no experience doing this until they got here,” Gil Brand says.

Brand is the president of Computers for the Blind, a neighborhood nonprofit of about 15 people who volunteer twice a week at the church at Hillcrest and LBJ, working to repurpose donated computers for the visually impaired. The group recently celebrated its 4,000th computer, shipping an average of 350-400 per year.

“We learned through trial and error,” Brand says. “There’s always someone sitting next to you who has done it 50 times.”

Volunteers spend hours replacing parts, creating tutorials and loading special software such as Zoom Text, which enlarges type for those partially blind, and an audio program that reads words aloud from the page.

PHOTO BY Can Türkyilmaz

The organization officially began in February 2001, founded by Lake Highlands resident Bob Langford. He went blind at age 15 after a Halloween prank gone wrong. He set out to make a difference for the visually impaired, not just locally but across the globe. In fact, most of the computers are shipped out of state.

John Austin, one of the earliest volunteers, has refurbished 1,463 computers. “To talk to the people who receive the computers is very gratifying,” he says. “It opens new doors for them. They can do things now that they had to hire someone to do.”

HOW TO HELP To donate a computer to Computers for the Blind or to become a volunteer, contact Gil Brand at 214.282.2581 or visit computersfortheblind.net.