- A good writer starts every decent story with a hook.
- So close.
- Meet Baylee Alger.
This Green Bay 16-year-old loves playing video games.
A teenager playing video games isn't unusual though.
The main character needs to be tested, an obstacle to overcome.
In Baylee's case...
- X-Box, turn on narrator.
- X-Box voice: Starting narrator.
- It's that he can't see the TV screen.
- I was diagnosed with cancer and a brain tumor,
which destroyed my optic nerves
so I was totally blind by the time I was four.
[mechanical clunk, clunk, clunk]
- Around that time,
Baylee's family began teaching him to read.
- I started early childhood, when I was three and a half,
I believe.
And they started teaching me braille right away.
- He fell in love with literature.
- They started giving me small books
and I would just read them over and over and over again.
- By 2nd grade, Baylee could speed-read braille.
He decided to try his hand at the Braille Challenge,
an annual competition in Janesville,
where his comprehension, spelling and proofreading skills
were put to the test.
[mechanical clunk, clunk]
- You read each sentence.
You see if there's an error and you just keep it
in the back of your mind.
Then you get down to the question and it'll ask you,
"Where's the error?"
- Baylee's entered this regional event
nine years in a row.
The top 60 scorers nationwide travel to Los Angeles
to compete for a national championship.
How has Baylee fared?
A true storyteller never gives away the ending.
- Stop.
- It's better to develop the main character
by drumming up another storyline.
[ba-dum ching]
- I started practicing on the one at school.
And then my uncle Jason bought me one that I play on at home.
- Baylee plays the drum kit in the school band.
- And then I just sat there and kept working at it.
And within a couple months I was really, really good at it.
- That's not all he's good at.
- Someone showed me fighting games.
My friend Dustin, actually, he got me really into them.
And he started teaching me how to play.
- How does a visually-impaired person vanquish a video game?
- Electronic voice: Selected games, one of three.
Game item Mortal Kombat.
- I just navigate everything mostly by sound.
- Stereo sound.
- But see, I'll go next to subzero, and it'll
[electronic crash]
and that's all the way on the left
so now I know I'm player one.
- Combined with a vibrating controller,
Baylee manages to hear and feel his way through a game.
- All right. Let's try this again.
[clicking of controller buttons]
- Technology continues to make Baylee's hobbies
more accessible, but his first love will always be books.
- I'm getting really into this book
all of a sudden.
- What is the book?
- It's "Starless Night."
I can read aloud if you want.
[fast clicking sounds]
The mercenary hadn't heard of any missing high priestesses
except, of course, Jerlys Horlbar,
and she wasn't really missing.
I mean there's a lot movies that don't have audio description
and there's a lot of games that I can't play,
but there's no book that I can't read.
- As for the Braille Challenge, Baylee's qualified for
the national championship in California
six times and counting.
A good writer might call that a Hollywood ending.
[soft music]
- I'm actually trying to build a career in writing.
- And a good writer is what Baylee aspires to be.
- It was on and off.
Back in 7th grade, I kind of really started getting into it.
And then I'd start a story, get nothing done with it,
try to move on to the next one.
And that was putting me off from it.
But then I started reading more fantasy books,
which caught my interest,
and then I started wanting to write again.
- And like most writers,
he'll be tested by every scribe's greatest enemy,
writer's block.
- I'm actually starting a story that I keep hitting dead ends on
but I'm working on it.
- And in Baylee's eyes,
that's the only obstacle he needs to overcome.
- I feel like people have this stereotypical thought
that blind people are kind of secluded.
That they don't really talk to sighted people.
You know, I'm not like that.
I'm just like everyone else.
I'm a normal teenager.
[electronic sounds]
I gotta wait 'til he texts back.
I wish more people would just look past the fact
that I can't see and just realize that
I'm just trying to be a normal teenager
like other people are.
[music]