EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) — Martin Aveces has been legally blind his whole life. He’s an El Paso native and University of Texas at El Paso graduate trying to find a way to involve the blind community in public more.<\/p>\n
For the last three years, he worked to make a game of billiards for the blind. A guide maker, whose son is blind, helped Aveces make wooden guides for the game.<\/p>\n
The game is similar to normal billiards; the goal is to get the balls into the pockets, but you can’t see. Players can’t fully see what’s going on, but they can feel it.<\/p>\n
“When they could see, they actually played the game.\u00a0And that comes back, the full feelings get into effect and getting involved with the game,” said Aveces. <\/p>\n
The first Tuesday of every month, the players get together at the Marty Robbins Rec Center in East El Paso. The group calls themselves the “Sharp Shooters.”<\/p>\n
“Living on your own is hard, but it’s possible,” said Carlos Mosqueda, a member of the group. <\/p>\n
Another member, Frank Rodriguez, said he never thought he would be able to play pool again. <\/p>\n
“We want the people to get involved and come and do something, you know, to get them out of the house,” said Rodriguez. <\/p>\n
According to Aveces, about 5,000 people are visually impaired throughout El Paso. He wants to get as many involved in his game as he can.<\/p>\n
“Blindness is a major tragic issue, more so than other disabilities. It completely cancels a person’s life until they get retrained into society,” said Aveces. <\/p>\n
His next steps are getting all of Texas invovled, and creating a tournament around the state. <\/p>\n
“I’m 70. Between now and 80, I want to see a state championship of this,” he said. “Let’s say I see a thousand individuals playing pool and that I started this? Give me a break. That’s very enjoyable.”<\/p>\n
Watch the full story on ABC-7 at 6 Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) — Martin Aveces has been legally blind his whole life. He’s an El Paso…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139],"class_list":["post-311043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}