Episode Notes Welcome to the May edition of The Art Parlor! This month, oru guest is Johnny Cassidy. He is a BBC journalist and a fellow for the Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism. Johnny Cassidy has been a TV and radio producer at the BBC for more than 17 years. He has recently moved into a new role into digital news, working on longer-term projects, specifically on how to best reach opportunity and under-served audiences. He is a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion and believes strongly in universal accessibility for everyone. We are proud to now offer you a transcript of this episode and those in the future. Thank you and enjoy! AI-generated Transcript Opinions expressed on ACB Media are those of the respective program contributors and cannot be assumed to serve as endorsements of products or views by Friends in Art, the American Council of the Blind, their elected officials, or staff. Friends in Art welcomes you to the Art Parlor, where visually impaired artists of all types will discuss their work. Pull up a chair, bring along your beverage of choice, and listen to thoughtful, stimulating conversations with visually impaired artists in all media and from all parts of the world. And now, here's your host, Ann Chiappetta. Welcome to the Art Parlor. I'm your president, Ann Chiappetta, and the Art Parlor is brought to you by Friends in Art, the place where blind and low vision artists and audiences thrive. You can find us on www.friendsinart.org. Today's guest is Johnny Cassidy. He's a BBC journalist and a fellow for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Johnny Cassidy has been a TV and radio producer at the BBC for more than 17 years. He's recently moved into a new role into digital news, working on longer-term projects, specifically focused on how best to reach opportunity and underserved audiences. He is a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion and believes strongly in universal accessibility for everyone. Welcome Johnny. Hello, Ann. How are you doing? Thank you so much for having me here. Yeah, wonderful. I'm glad you could make it and we managed to figure out the time change. At last, eventually, yeah. Right. Yeah. So before we get started into my questions, I just want our listeners to know how we met and we met through the Descriptathon of all things. And I just wanted to know what you thought of the overall experience for anyone that's listening that might be considering to do a Descriptathon. Well, the first thing to say is, if you are considering to do it next year, go for it. It was a fabulous, fantastic experience. Not least because I got to meet you, Ann, and we're talking here today. So if nothing else, that was a huge bonus. But the Descriptathon, it was a really good experience. It wasn't anything that I had experienced before. I didn't know what to expect really from it. So it was totally different. I think, you know, trying to work like that in such a big, massive collaborative way with so many people, hats off and huge kudos to the whole team at Descriptathon who managed to corral and manage that big group of people. And I think for so many people to show a passion and an interest in making images accessible to blind and low vision people, I think, you know, it's a it was just there's so many positives from it. It was just really, really good. So if anybody is considering it for next year, definitely go for it. I thought it was fantastic. Yeah, I totally agree. That's why I keep coming back. I think once you do it, you can't stop. It's just it's such an affirming experience for everybody. And you know, and it's not an easy thing either. There's, you know, times where you're like, oh, boy, I got to keep going. There's a lot of frenetic parts that just kind of come together. You don't think it's going to come together. And you say, oh, oh, wow. You know, I don't know if we'll make it to the end. But then you do. It's like, I don't know how it happens, but it happens. I think the management team must be doing so much really, as you say, frenetic stuff in the background, behind the scenes, under the waterline. Because it does. You know, I was exactly the same as you. I was thinking this is chaotic. And then it slowly but surely comes together and you find your feet. You know what it is that you're doing before you know it. Those three days are up and three big full days and they're open. There's really good, solid product to show for it. So yeah, brilliant experience. Yeah, I agree. Wow. OK, so there's a plug for the descriptor that's done. So more serious things, I guess. Could you share with us your vision loss journey and maybe incorporate that into who you are and maybe how you got to be a writer and that kind of. Yeah, from a young age, I was always short sighted. I wore glasses, first of all. But when I was I think I was maybe as young as seven, I started wearing contact lenses because there are these big, heavy glasses that I wore. They were big, thick glasses. And my mom used to say that, you know, I don't do a national health. The UK is the National Health Service and they were the ones the most comfortable glasses. I don't know if anybody remembers the wire framed ones with curly wire that went around your ear and really hurt my ears because there were heavy lenses. And, you know, my mom used to say I used to hide them down the fields and, you know, I would always have to be getting new ones and everything. I ended up wearing contact lenses and lenses for a good while. But then when I was 11, I you know, people can hear from my accent. I grew up just outside Belfast in the north of Ireland. When I was 11, I. Part of the situation that was there, I was beat up. I lost the eyesight of my right eye straight away. That was a detached retina. But then for years, my left eye was fine. And it didn't really bother me at all. You know, I went to mainstream school. Luckily, I did. I learned to touch type of school. Maybe there was a prediction of what might happen later on. But when I was maybe early 20s, I left. I started going. I had a series of detached retina operations, maybe five or six operations. And it slowly, gradually during my 20s and deteriorated more and more. And such times that I had to start using the white stick when it did start going, my left eye, I was actually studying at art college in Belfast. I was studying fine art as an artist, as a painter. But my eyesight started getting to the point where I just couldn't do it anymore. So I left. I got a bit lost for a while. Didn't know what I was going to do. And I come up with this really, sort of, I thought, very sensible idea of transferring my understanding and experience as an artist into sound art. Something that was tangible to me. I no longer could see visually enough to paint or to draw or to do clay work. I suppose I could have done clay work. But I had this idea of going into sound art. So I went to study sound engineering and that never really took off. But, you know, again, went out into the wilderness, lost for a while and went to university, studied literature, history. And my mum passed away. She left a few pounds and it wasn't that much at all. But I used it to do something really concrete. And that's when I decided that when I was at university, I studied or discovered a penchant, a liking for writing and research. And I thought, hmm, and I thought maybe I could move into journalism. So I went and did a postgraduate qualification in journalism. And rather naively, the first job that I applied for after completing that postgraduate qualification was at the BBC. And weirdly, I got that job. And I do, I do. I still say, I think to this day, it was my mum. My mother was there. You're sort of guiding. She was at my back. She, as soon as she seen that it got settled with the first job, then that was it. It was almost, I always knew you from the point that I decided that's what I was going to do. I committed myself so much to it. I've done lots of things in the past that if I look back on it now and look and ask myself honestly, I don't think I'd committed wholeheartedly to it. But I think because of the. The intrinsic value of being able to do it as a memory for my mother, I knew in my heart that it wasn't that I was 100% committed to that I was going to be successful at. Your journey is very similar to my own. When my mum passed away, it's so odd that you mentioned all this. She made me promise that I would finally publish my my book, my poetry book. And then, yeah, like I always and I was like, OK, I'll do that. Right. And then when we were going through her, her stuff, we're going through all of her items in her apartment. We found her poetry that she never showed us. And she wrote I there's two poems that since they were handwritten, my my sister in law, she transposed them for me and put them in word and sent them to me. And that was just like, OK, I know where this writing thing came from. I know where this compulsion or this connection to the written word and literature and art and all that stuff came from. I didn't really fully understand it until then. So that's a beautiful thing, you know, I think in the same vein, it's almost. You know, it gives you an answer, but it also gives you something to aim towards. No, you're not doing it for yourself. You're somehow putting that goal. And it is a goal, you're doing it for someone else. So it makes it you almost. You are non-selfish thing. So you're doing it for what might be considered a right reason. Yeah. Yeah. It just seems natural, right? It's where you should be at, you know, and and then you can apply it to whatever you want in your life. Right. It gives you the freedom to do that. I think that's that's I think what now that I think about what happened and how th
