Introducing Stefanos Tokatlidis!

It's Saturday afternoon. I meet Stefanos Tokatlidis, one of the basic participants of the project, in the Athletic Association for Blind “Pirsos”. Stefanos is a blogger for more than a year now. I want him to show me how he manages his blog, how he publishes his posts and explain to me how he chooses the topics he writes about. Stefanos uses Jaws, as screen reader and he shows me step by step the whole process of publishing a post with the help of Jaws and keyboard shortcuts. And there are lots of these… believe me! He also shows me how he adds images and links in the blog post.

Stefanos usually publishes one or two posts per week. He generally likes technology, science, reptiles, strange and funny news. The truth is that he has a great sense of humour! He is an athlete,  and he has travelled in many places, like Korea, Turkey and China by participating in sports events. We talk about our lives, our dreams, the exams he is going to take in a week, and the prospectives of Blind Dates. During seminars, Stefanos will help participants by showing them how to create a mail account, some of them don't have a mail adress, and how to publish posts in our group blog easily, by using Jaws.

In this video, Stefanos talks about the reasons why he created his blog, about the blind community of Thessaloniki, the problems it faces and his participation in “Blind Dates”. (Sorry about the shaky image, the next video will be better!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m36gxdpuck0

After two hours, we are leaving the Athletic Association. Someone has parked his car in the middle of the pavement outside the Thessaloniki School for the Blind. Stefanos hits accidentally the car with his cane. He tells me:

“See! Can you understand the problems of accessibility I told you about? It's not only State which has to care about blind people but citizens too!”

Thinking of that incident, I realize “I don't know if our blog will manage to persuade State to care more about the blind community, but I hope that it will manage to progressively change the mentality of our society about this community. Maybe it won't be easy but at least we will do our best to succeed it!”


6 thoughts on “Introducing Stefanos Tokatlidis!

  1. This is great, Alexia. Great to learn a little more about Stefanos. Can’t wait to hear more from him and his fellow participants.

  2. Thank you for introducing us to Stefanos, Alexia! I’m eager to get to know him and the rest of the team.

  3. Pingback: Rising Voices » Blind Dates: Meet Blogger Stefanos Tokatlidis

  4. Alexia, many thanks for the excellent video and introduction to Stefanos. It’s great that he seems to be blogging every single day. I’m reading his blog now using Google Translate, and I’m amazed at how diverse his interests are.

  5. I am very happy that you like the introduction of Stefanos. He is really a very nice guy and think that he is not even 18 years old and he has done so many things in his life!

  6. Pingback: Blind Dates: Γνωρίστε τον blogger Στέφανο Τοκατλίδη · Global Voices στα Ελληνικά

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