‘WIOU’s’ Eye-Opener: Blindness in the Workplace : Television: A test audience of the disabled gives mostly positive reactions for the inclusion of a character’s blindness. Dick Van Patten plays the ailing weatherman.

This was audience testing of a different kind.

Monday night at TODD/AO Studios in Hollywood, the producers of “WIOU” screened two episodes of the CBS drama for an audience to its reaction--standard procedure in the TV business. But this time, the series’ creators were seeking the opinions of a usually ignored demographic group: people with disabilities.

“WIOU” is about employees at Chicago’s WNDY, a struggling TV station. Among those characters is grandfatherly weatherman Floyd Graham (played by Dick Van Patten), who entertains his viewers by creating new words ( snow plus rain equals snain ). Graham is adored by his public.

The character is also going blind. And a highly vocal audience with a wide range of disabilities offered an equally wide range of reactions to the way this turn of events is handled on the screen.

In recent episodes, Graham learned he would lose his already failing sight due to a degenerative, age-related disease. After unsuccessfully trying to hide his problem, Graham at first gave up--then, with the support of colleagues and a skills instructor, Teresa Zana (portrayed by Patty Neumeyer, who is partially sighted), learned to live and work with his disability.

The episodes were shown with closed captions--already accessible to deaf viewers at home who purchase a decoder--and, for the blind, a technology called Descriptive Video Service, which provides description of key visual elements between the blocks of dialogue. It could be heard by tuning in through a headset.

Audience members voiced mostly positive reactions to the inclusion of Graham’s blindness in the story, and praised the producers for using a visually impaired actress in the role of Graham’s instructor.

A few, however, disliked a scene in which instructor Zana gave a speech about how one should use the terms sight impaired and visually impaired instead of blind.

“I don’t want to get stuck with that,” said audience member Lee Manning. “I’m blind . I’m not sight-impaired.”

Actress Neumeyer, however, defended the term because, like herself, all people with some loss of vision are not completely blind. “I always thought of myself as partially sighted,” she said.

Audience members were uniformly displeased over another point: Neumeyer’s character worked with Graham for quite a while before revealing her own blindness, explaining that blindness is “not who she is.”

“For her (Neumeyer’s character) to say that’s not who she is is a lie,” said Barbara Waxman, who uses a wheelchair and works with the disabled in the areas of sexual and family issues. “It encourages us to hide our disability and ‘pass.’ I found it very disturbing.”

Stan Greenberg, director of the Westside Center for Independent Living, who is blind, agreed that Neumeyer’s character should have been honest, but found Graham’s initial denial realistic. “I think there’s not a single one of us in this room who hasn’t denied their disabilities,” he said.

Kathryn Pratt, an executive producer of “WIOU,” said that the producers decided during the show’s inception that they wanted a blind weatherman. Pratt, who once worked in TV news, said that the character was inspired by two weathermen she met during her career: one who learned to compensate for failing hearing, and another who was taken off the air because he was getting old--but was reinstated by a massive write-in campaign.

“When Dick (Van Patten) came in to read for the role . . . at first, he didn’t know what to make of it,” Pratt said before the screening. “We told him we had a very comedic character that we were going to put through a very serious story line.

“I remember him saying to us, ‘Once I go blind, can I still be funny?’ And we asked ourselves the same question. Graham will remain blind, and it will become part of his character.”

Van Patten said he “sort of likes” being thrust into the role of crusader for the blind, even though he is not blind himself. “I’ve been meeting a lot of (blind) people and I find them very interesting. And I’m learning a lot. I was saying sightless --but after this discussion, I guess now I can say blind .”