[nabs-l] should the blind adapt to the world, or should the world adapt to us?

T. Joseph Carter carter.tjoseph at gmail.com
Sun Jun 21 21:33:58 UTC 2009


Alena,

Have you ever crossed a street at the wrong time because you heard 
one of those signals from a block away?  I've seen sighted and blind 
people do this on SW Broadway in front of the Portland State campus.  
If it were not a college campus where cars are used to people 
wandering into the street randomly, there would likely have been 
numerous fatalities as a result of poorly implemented signals.

I would fight against such poorly designed and implemented signals.  
In fact, I support the notion of removing the signals installed 
around the Portland State campus because they are dangerous.  At SW 
5th and Broadway, there's a recently installed new signal that is 
pretty nice overall.  If the city wants to replace Portland State's 
dangerous signals with these new ones, I'm all for it.

But the city doesn't want to do that, because as far as they're 
concerned, the intersections are already accessible.  To whom, and 
under what circumstances?  I think you can see the problem.

I'll stay out of the currency issue as it is now a moot point.

Joseph


On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 07:02:13PM -0700, alena roberts wrote:
>I think that attitude ignores that accessibility benefits more than
>the people it is originally intended to. When I cross a street that
>has an audible signal I not only pay attention to the sounds from the
>signal, but I also listen to my traffic. I had the priveledge of
>getting O and M training. Not everyone gets the training they need.
>Audible signals also help people who can see, and those who may have
>low vision. Fighting against accessibility doesn't help anyone,
>especially people with disabilities. I think we need to support
>teaching people skills and having things be accessible to us at the
>same time.
>
>For those of you that don't think that our money doesn't descriminate
>against the blind, I respectfully disagree. Almost all other countries
>in the world have money that is easily distinguishable, and we don't.
>There are simple modifications that can be made to our bills to make
>them distinguishable. The EU even made sure to talk to the blind
>community before designing the Euro so that they made sure it would be
>usable by all citizens. I shouldn't have to use a machine to tell what
>denomination of money I am using because the treasury department
>thinks it's too hard to change the money.
>
>Just some thoughts.




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