This weeks guest
Sam Seavey
From Lexington, Kentucky Sam's working on a company called the Blind Shell, a company that's making a mobile phone for the visually impaired. His passion lies on his YouTube channel called - The Blind Life.
Sam's story is a recording. You can listen to it here or read our transcription below.
Hello, everybody, my name is Sam Seavey. I live in Lexington, Kentucky in the United States. Originally from North Carolina which is on the East Coast. I am 43 years old, married and have two children. I have a 21-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter.
I'm currently working with an organization named BlindShell we make a mobile phone for the visually impaired. The company is based out of the Czech Republic and I am in charge of the U.S. and Canada but my real passion is my YouTube channel which is called The Blind Life.
I’ve been making videos on YouTube for over 6 years now and I currently have over 500 videos on my channel and right now as of the recording of this I am at 15600 subscribers.
My videos are all about living life with vision impairments, tips and tricks, how to’s and I have a strong emphasis on assistive technology on my channel. I'm a former assistive technology trainer so I've worked with assistive devices for a long time. I've been visually impaired since the age of 11 so I've been using assistive technology since then and so I really love it and I love to share information about it with my viewers.
In about 2010 I started making videos for a YouTube channel named the Mobiletechvideos2 and these videos were just about Android devices Android systems but every now and then I’d make a video about accessibility or an accessible app that I was using. A lot of people really enjoyed those videos I got a lot of positive feedback on those videos. So, one day I decided to see if there were any videos on YouTube any channels about Stargardt’s disease which is my vision impairment. At the time there wasn’t anything out there, this was probably about 2013. There wasn’t anything out there, there were a couple of medical videos but I was really looking for the real-life videos, people living with the disease. There were maybe two videos on all of YouTube about it at the time. So, I thought, you know what, I'm already making videos on here for another channel, I should start my own channel about vision impairment.
At the time I decided to name at The BlindSpot and it was that for about five years, four-five years and then I had to change the name so I decided to go with The Blind Life. And as I said I've made a lot of videos about all types of different topics and dealing with vision impairment. I met a lot of amazing people and just had a great time.
Probably the main reason why I continue to make videos is just the community of the visually impaired community, the “VIPs” is just such an amazing group of people I've met so many amazing people and all over the country all over the world. I get emails and comments all the time, people are talking about how helpful my videos have been and so that really drives me to continue. To continue to help people through my videos.
So, that's basically what I'm doing now, I don't have a lot of time for any other activities. I work, make YouTube videos and spend time with my family. That's pretty much it, but I'm happy to do it, I’m having a great time! Thank you very much for letting me take part in this project.
Sam's channels and more:
The Blind Life: www.youtube.com/c/theblindlife
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheBlindLifesam
FB: https://www.facebook.com/theblindlifesam/
BlindShell: https://www.blindshell.com/