[nfb-talk] blind and wanting to improve things, not get labeled

[qubit]

bravo.
--le

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Amelia Dickerson" <ameliadickerson at gmail.com>
To: <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: "Nijat Worley" <nijat1989 at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:25 PM
Subject: [nfb-talk] blind and wanting to improve things, not get labeled


Hello-
I'm just going to put my two cents in here. I think that when the
government does stuff, it ends up swallowing up a lot of money that is
wasted. I have spent several months applying for jobs in the federal
government and it has been a bit of a comic sketch. At the same time,
we have people in our society for whom we need to care, and the fact
is that any point in time, most people end up in that position.
Ideally, we would privately take care of this on our own- people
within a community would rise up and put together their own education
system for their kids and for all of them, we would help people out
with food when they needed it, doctors and therapists would take on a
few patients and clients pro bono at any one time. But until people
choose to do that over buying that brand new car instead of continuing
to drive it even though it is no longer the latest and greatest, we
need to have the government programs on which to fall back. That
doesn't even address the fact that certain communities have a deficit
of such resources.

At my own church, I am in charge of organizing local community service
activities. We have a solid core of people who give generously of
their time and energy and money, but there are others who are very
much occupied by the things in their own lives and they just don't
really contribute to anything. Fortunately, most will give to others
in some form, but there are a lot of causes and people out there to
give to. I am personally in my mid 20's and my peers are a notoriously
self-centered population. I know some people who meet that discription
and others who do not. Honestly, I don't know what you would need to
do in order to try and meet the needs of others. However, as a person
with my masters in counseling and with a lot of personal experience
working with people who are needy in both an emotional and physical
sense, itt is absolutely not as easy as giving them money for food
each month. Talk to me one on one if you want to know what it looks
like to try and quote unquote "help" someone with schizofrenia or a
personality disorder.

In addition, I am currently taking a class on universal media design
at the local state university. The principles of the class have to do
with  making media and web sites accessible to everyone, whether they
are using an old computer on a dial up connection, using a smart
phone, the latest and greatest computer with whatever internet
browser, they are hard of hearing,  or a use a screen reader. Despite
its principles though, I have had to do a lot of self advocacy. They
have us learning about java script from on-line clips that do not
provide enough information for me to keep track of what is happening
in the visual part of the training. Someone asked me to give feedback
on the web site for the business association of downtown Denver in
preparation for the AHEAD conference here this summer. It is all in
flash, and I was unable to get any content off of it. The business
association doesn't feel particularly obliged to change their web site
at all, even if it also means that people out for the night cannot
pull up their site on a smart phone. The conservative principle is
that economic forces will convince them to change it, but they aare
not yet terribly interested. Along the same lines, the web sites at CU
are often times poorly designed to the extent of decreasing
accessibility, but as a whole group of sites are looking at being
redesigned in the next couple of years, the man in charge of it
doesn't know the first thing about concepts such as the W3 standards.
I met with him and showed him a bit about what makes his current site
that he manages difficult to navigate with a screen reader. Maybe he
will be motivated to learn more, butthus far people outside of
disability services at the university have been pretty apathetic with
regards to making accessibility improvements to sites. All of this is
just to say that I don't tend to find that the best ideas win out; too
many people are caught up in the concept of how things have always
been done and "it works for me, so it's fine."

With all of this having been said, I vote we stick with putting
concepts out there without needing to label them as being part of one
group or another. I am all for innovation, change, and progress. No
political group gets to lay claim to those words and my use of them
does not put me in any one group.

Amelia

-- 
Amelia Dickerson

What counts can't always be counted, and what can be counted doesn't
always count.
Albert Einstein

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