Lincoln woman making travel easier for the blind

Posted By: Bayley Bischof Channel 8 Eyewitness News 

From bustling cities like Seoul, to sprawling coastlines and even Disney World; The Cervenka family loves to travel.

But both Stacy Cervenka, and her husband Greg are blind, so Cervenka said their explorations haven’t always been easy to navigate.

"When my husband and I were planning our honeymoon cruise, I did a lot of research on websites like cruisecritic.com and tripadvisor.com,” Cervenka said. “While I learned a lot about the various cruise lines and ships and port of calls, I still had a lot of questions about how Greg and I were going to do this as blind people."

She said she wanted a travel website, made for blind people, by blind people.

This month, after years of traveling without a resource like that, Cervenka was awarded The Hollman Prize by San Francisco Lighthouse and given the funding to make it happen.

"The purpose of the prize is to encourage blind people to do things that push boundaries of what people think are possible for blind people,” Cervenka said.

She wants to empower blind people.

"Yes you can travel, yes you can see the world,” she said.

But also let tourist companies know blind people are capable of traveling, she said.

"We have means to travel and we see other people traveling and we want to be a part of that,” she said.

She said her website will help make that happen.

"Whether they’re going to local museum, or local concert or even local restaurant or traveling to hotel in different city or amusement park and can write reviews and ask questions of other blind travelers,” Cervenka said. “Have you been here what tips what should I say away from? What is or isn’t worth it for a blind person?"

Cervenka is just getting started developing the website, she said.

She’s doing focus groups with the blind community now and hopes to have it up and running by the end of the year.