Clicking for freedom

I’ve never asked myself, ‘Can I?’,” says Juan Ruiz. “My question has always been: ‘How can I?’ And the first step is how to get started. Once you get started, you’ve got the ball rolling and things are in your favour.”

Ruiz has been blind since birth, but he has never let his lack of sight get in the way of his ambitions. Now living in Vienna, he has a well-earned reputation as a world-leading teacher of click-based echolocation, which is helping transform the lives of blind people.

Ruiz was born in Tala, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, in 1982. But with his educational options limited, he moved with his parents to California when he was five years old. There, he eventually went to a school of around 600 pupils with what he describes as “great teachers”. The school had two classes for blind children, and it was while playing with friends there that he started to develop his own version of what is — unbeknown to Ruiz at the time — called “echolocation”.

“As a blind kid, you don’t run around as much as most children do,” Ruiz explains. “You have to watch out for other kids running around and that you don’t get hit by balls or swings and so on.” After getting hit several times, he says he became determined not to keep repeating these negative experiences. The brain naturally tries to develop strategies on how not to allow this to happen,” he says. “My strategy was echolocation.”

“Out of my comfort zone”

Echolocation, which involves locating objects using reflected sounds, is common among various species in the natural world. Bats, whales and dolphins, plus a small number of bird species and other creatures, all use a form of echolocation.

Bats, for example, have evolved to use echolocation to hunt better at night and in dark caves. Whales and dolphins make high-pitched clicking sounds, which they bounce off objects under the water so that they can listen for the echoes.

The sound-wave information that these animals receive gives them details on specific objects, from distances and speeds to densities and sizes. Although it is a less sophisticated form of echolocation, the human variant is similar.

From around the age of 12 — and without being taught — Ruiz started to develop his own version of echolocation, derived from sounds he heard around him. “I was able to work out the position of buildings and how far from the building things are. I could hear the swings and the poles of the swings,” he says.

His knowledge and use of echolocation techniques rapidly advanced when he met Daniel Kish, an expert in what Ruiz calls “active echolocation” and the president of World Access for the Blind. Active echolocation functions when a person actively produces tongue-based “clicking” sounds with which to gather sound information from other objects.

Click-based echolocation, combined with Ruiz’s natural desire to push himself “out of my comfort zone”, began to massively improve his orientation and mobility. He began to gain a high level of independence. Barriers began to lower, and he was soon enjoying all sorts of activities, from mountain biking and skateboarding to skiing and wrestling.

From California to Vienna

Some ten years ago, Ruiz started to teach echolocation to students. He says he “began to realize that what came easy to me did not come easy to other people”. He started to understand that a lot of blind people have “terrible orientation and mobility”, but that skills in these areas were potentially “huge assets” for blind people. They provide blind people with more “confidence and self-reliance, and a lot of freedom,” he explains.

There is, however, a major problem. “Blind people are kept from doing a lot by sighted people,” Ruiz says. “They can’t imagine what it’s like to be blind. They think that blindness is what they imagine blindness is. They cannot imagine themselves to be able to function as a blind person because of their limited experience.”

The result, says Ruiz, has been that blind people have lacked not just orientation and mobility freedom, but also the freedom of decision-making. The metaphor of “the blind leading the blind” suggests that blind people know nothing and have little or nothing to offer. This negative perception goes to the heart of what Ruiz is trying to change.

Throughout the early 2010s, Ruiz’s reputation as an outstanding echolocation practitioner and teacher grew and, with it, the demand for his services. From 2011, he was invited to Vienna every six months or so to teach and explain his techniques. This led to further invitations, from Germany, Italy and other European countries. It got to the point that he was spending two or three months in Europe at a time.

In 2015, he got a major commission from the Austrian Ministry of Education to travel around the country teaching professionals who worked with blind people. He decided to relocate with his family from California to Vienna and set up his own business. Today, his business is thriving, and he is a regular expert guest on international TV programmes, including Discovery, History and Galileo. He continues to tour schools across the country, speaking to teachers and students about echolocation.

Transforming lives

His long-term goal is to use click-based echolocation to help to transform the lives of as many blind people as he can. At the same time, he aims to push echolocation into the wider consciousness of sighted people. This means he works not only with schools exclusively for blind people but also with university researchers and teachers in schools that are not for blind people.

Ruiz works with early interventionists, mobility instructors and physiotherapists to share his knowledge of echolocation. Experts in these fields don’t always want to use echolocation directly. But they are keen to learn what echolocation is and how it is used, and also to consider its wider potential.
Ruiz holds what he calls “self-experience workshops”. He blindfolds students and gets them to do various activities to highlight how sound can help in orientation. “There is a lot of auditory information that is completely ignored,” he says. “The brain typically learns that what one sees is important — and that sound is only important when you want to hear somebody speaking or listen to music. People don’t use sound for much more. There is usually a lot that echolocation can teach somebody who is sighted. Most people are just not used to using this sense well.”

Echolocation, then click-based echolocation, have helped transform the life of Juan Ruiz. Just as important, however, has been his desire to live life to the full, his willingness to learn and his positive, can-do attitude. “Acknowledge the problems and focus on the solutions” is one of his favourite mantras.

Today, he has a simple aim, and that is that blind people take more control of their lives. “A lot of blind people’s lives are dictated by their environment and people around them,” he says. “I would like blind people to do more of what they want to do and not be limited by other people.”

And that’s why, instead of starting with the question, “Can I?”, Juan Ruiz always starts with the question, “How can I?”