[nagdu] Jury finds IA Dept. for Blind's guide dog policy does not discriminate

[JULIE PHILLIPSON]

Angie I'll take a shot at this although I might be being too brave to do so!
Anything that helps by visual means is being referred to as a visual aid, so 
that could be a machine like a CCTV a magnifying device or a human sighted 
guide and in this case it is a guide dog because your dog is helping you by 
using his her ability to see.
What the NFB centers are doing is eliminating help from any other visual 
means and making you learn to tune into your own abilities to gather the 
same kinds of information and learn to trust and depend on yourself and only 
yourself without the confusion of in adequate vision.  .
When someone is first learning or relearning travel skills they are learning 
much more than just traveling with a cane. they are also building and 
strengthening confidence and self respect.  They discover that they have 
regained independent mobility, and eventually are still able to do all the 
things they could do before losing vision.  Once someone has established 
that sense of confidence and can travel competently, on an emotional level 
you have proved to yourself that you can accomplish what ever you want to 
do.  It didn't just happen in a week or a month it took lots of time to 
carefully build that confidence and trust in yourself.  For example think of 
something that you feel you are really good at, and think about what you had 
to do to achieve that competence.  How did you feel about yourself once you 
reached your goal?  Pride, ability to move on to accomplishing other things? 
You could even compare it to graduating from school.  You don't just become 
a psychologist, or a lawyer in a short period of time.  You had to work at 
it and practice it, and do it often like learning to ride a bike or play an 
instrument.  The more you did it the better you got at it right?
It is the same with learning to do anything even to use a cane or a guide 
dog.  When you are learning to use a cane you might stubble on an uneven 
surface or miss a step but I'll bet you just learned how not to do it again! 
You notice the differences in the sound that your cane makes and you start 
being more careful paying attention to traffic sounds as you approach the 
corner.  When you use a dog and skip the cane altogether you figure oh my 
dog will take care of it and stop when I get to the corner so I don't need 
to think about it right?  You don't give yourself the chance to develop your 
own awareness to the environment.  You learned to be overly dependent on 
your dog, not working as a team, and putting way too much pressure and 
stress on the dog.  When you miss that step you don't take responsibility 
for it being your own mistake, no you correct the dog and blame it on him or 
her!  By skipping the learning to use a cane step you are cheating yourself 
and being unfare to the dog.
When you get a dog for the first time you didn't all of a sudden know how to 
do it perfectly, in fact it takes several weeks of training and then 
sometimes months after that to feel comfortable and trust in your dog, but 
it still took a lot of hard work to accomplish that goal.

Now the use of sleep shades is a whole other issue.  Like I said before you 
are eliminating the confusion of poor vision and tuning into your other 
senses.  If someone has residual vision I can't tell you how many times I 
have thought I knew what I was seeing only to find out it wasn't at all what 
I thought it was.  Is that a pot hole or just a dark patch of blacktop 
coming up?  Is that door open or is it a glass door that is closed.  How 
long am I going to feel around looking for the door handle or visually find 
the door bell.  Once you start learning to do these kinds of things without 
the help of poor vision it becomes much simpler.  I think this is probably 
hard for a congenitally blind person to understand because it has simply 
never been in their experience.  I have never been trained or used sleep 
shades and I don't think I would ever like to.  What I have done many times 
is closed my eyes and trusted my other senses to figure something out.  That 
is a hard thing to do, and most of us would not want to or perhaps even be 
able to do it voluntarily.  Most of us blind and visually impaired folks 
have simply never gotten adequate mobility training.  There is a shortage of 
mobility instructors and there is neither the time or money to give mobility 
the time it deserves.  Somehow some of us get good at it on our own or 
perhaps got lucky and did have a good mobility instructor who was able to 
teach something and managed to somehow give you the confidence to transfer 
those skills to other situations, but many times that just doesn't happen 
for lots of reasons.  OK let me know how well I have explained it or how 
much I've screwed up! (grin)
Julie Phillipson
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Angie Matney" <leadinglabbie at mpmail.net>
To: "NAGDU Mailing List, the National Association of Guide Dog Users" 
<nagdu at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 6:56 PM
Subject: Re: [nagdu] Jury finds IA Dept. for Blind's guide dog policy does 
not discriminate


> Would someone please explain this nonstandard use of the term "visual aid" 
> to me? My dog is not a powerpoint presentation.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Angie
>
>
>
>
>
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