‘It was great!’: Blind banjo player invents electronic device to make white canes more visible

Adam meets a senior who plays banjo and invents devices to help blind after losing sight.

VICTORIA, B.C. — If this story had a soundtrack, Barny Hiney says it would be bluegrass.

“Bluegrass music has its own way of telling stories,” Barny says before pulling out his banjo.

The story begins when Barny was a boy and started taking apart everything he could get his hands on.

“Lots of clocks,” Barny laughs. “And destroyed a couple radios from grandparents.”

After he taught himself how to rebuild most things, no one was surprised when he pursued electronics in college and started learning about a brand-new technology called transistors.

“The instructor said, ‘These (transistors) will never go anywhere. You’ll have to stick with glass tubes,’” Barny laughs. “How wrong they were!”

After he graduated, Barny says he worked for IBM, NASA, and Boeing. In his spare time, he says he played music with a pre-fame Joni Mitchell.

“She obviously was much better (than me),” Barny laughs.

But this is when the soundtrack to this story takes a turn for the worse.

“(My vision) was getting darker,” Barny says of going blind. “It’s like looking through a straw.”

While he was comforted to learn how to use a cane to help himself get around, Barny was panicked to discovered it could hinder others who didn’t notice it

“I almost tripped a couple people,” Barny says, adding the fear of getting hurt created a lot of extra anxiety. “I thought this (cane) needs some kind of attachment to it.”

So, despite losing 98 per cent of his vision, Barny spent countless hours over several months in his basement creating a series of prototypes to attach to the end of his cane to capture people’s attention.

“It achieved what it set out to do! It was great!” Barney says with a smile, showing how the device clips to the end of the cane and flashes bright lights. “People moved aside like Moses parting the sea!”

It worked so well, Barny’s now striving to find a way to manufacture his device—so he can “turn the bitter lemon of blindness into lemonade.”

Cue that soundtrack.

“The music is uplifting,” Barny smiles as his fingers fly across the banjo strings, singing, “Cuz I’m sitting on top of the world!”

Because although he lost his sight — Barny has gained the vision to help others.