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

Fri Feb 20 21:59:09 UTC 2009

But, one must take each person as an individual.  if a person already  is 
willing to use a cane and it's noted that he or she uses the cane and he or 
she can also use a guide dog, then he or she should use the guide dog if 
that is her or his preferred method of travel.

I think our centers would do well to be more flexible and not try to mold 
everyone into one mold.

margo and Elmo
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "JULIE PHILLIPSON" <jbrew48 at verizon.net>
To: "NAGDU Mailing List, the National Association of Guide Dog Users" 
<nagdu at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 11:18 PM
Subject: Re: [nagdu] Jury finds IA Dept. for Blind's guide dog policy does 
not discriminate

> 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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