This spring, Patty and Terry Horvath took 46 blind travelers on a Caribbean cruise.

The owners of Best Cruises & Tours in Grand Blanc, Mich., let participants pay $20 a week in installments for months or years to pay for the trip. They subsidized seven volunteers to accompany the group. They arranged special shore excursions on Nassau, St. Thomas and St. Martin. They kept the price as low as they could, pairing up the mostly solo travelers in double rooms.

Their biggest contribution? Serving a completely passed-over market — blind travelers on a budget.

"The blind community," says Patty Horvath, "wants to do the same things on vacation as anyone else."

Terry Horvath knows the challenges of blindness, because he has been visually impaired all his life. One eye doesn't work, and until surgery last month, he was nearly legally blind in the other. He cannot drive, but he can do most other things with assistance. His idea for the trip came when he went to an American Council for the Blind conference and asked if anyone ever thought about going on a cruise.

"Instead of a response, there was this big silence," Horvath says. "Finally some guy says, 'Yeah, in my dreams.'" Later, he found out that because 70 percent of blind and visually impaired people are not in the labor force, a cruise is beyond financial reach for most.

Making arrangements with tour operators, they got the best deal they could on a cruise and put the word out. Patty Horvath's first customer was a woman from Philadelphia.

"She wanted a balcony cabin," she says. "I had to ask, 'Why do you want to pay the extra for the balcony cabin?' And she told me, 'Because I want to sit outside and smell the ocean and feel the wind.' "

The week-long cruise on Carnival Dream left from Port Canaveral in February. In Nassau, their tour bus driver brought live conch aboard so everyone could feel them. In St. Thomas, locals were so excited about the group that the port authority berthed their ship in the prime first spot to make it easier to disembark.

Most blind cruisers never get off the ship because shore excursions are geared to the seeing world. Although one traveler brought her service dog, others left their dogs at home because of the complexities of paperwork for animals on an international voyage. So the Horvaths made special plans for the group.

"At each stop, we did an island tour, shopping and the beach," Patty Horvath says. "We did all-day things."

On the ship, the passengers shopped and went to the shows. With braille bingo cards, "one of the gals in our group won the bingo jackpot," she says. "One day in the casino, they had a slot machine tournament. We had a whole row of blind people there on the slot machines."

The Horvaths also gave each traveler a T-shirt : "Seaing Our Dream."

Now, the Horvaths are planning a second cruise for visually impaired and blind people. It will be in April 2013 — giving customers a two-year lead time so they can pay in installments.

The last cruise cost about $700 to $1,100 plus airfare, but the next one might have to cost a little more to cover lodging for more volunteers.

The itinerary likely is the western Caribbean.

The cruise touched the Horvaths' hearts.

Terry Horvath says a woman thanked him, but told him she'd been terrified to come on the cruise.

"She had never been on an airplane, she'd never seen the ocean, she'd never been on a ship," he says, his voice choking up. "She had never been further than two cities in her state."

For more about the cruise, call 800-533-7915. The Horvaths did not ask, but I'd like to see somebody contribute a few bucks to subsidize the volunteers or help someone who could not otherwise afford the cruise.