And yet again I read another reminder of that frightful day almost four years ago. Tears, fear, shame, blame, anger, danger, pain, and all so impossible to
explain. Thankfully the result for my being hit by a car as the result of a driver’s inattention and failure to yield” was much
less serious than death–the outcome for 103 pedestrians during the period this article describes.
“Inattention and failure to yield is what you are pleading guilty to,” said the judge to the person who hit me. And the ultimate
in irony, due to Washington traffic laws, promise to be good for a few years–seven I think– and you get no fine and a clean
record.
It was two years ago that I sat in a King County court room listening to a judge speak those words–the same words I’m guessing
are spoken dozens of times a year here in King County alone? I really wonder if the drivers realize the pain, damage and lifelong consequences they cause in the people they so “inattentively happen to hit with their cars? I know the driver in my case didn’t since a witness told me that the person was more interested in borrowing a cell phone to tell another that they’d be late for dinner, repeatedly interrupting medical personnel who were attending to me.
Inattention and failure to yield” We couch such wanton disregard for the safety of another in such mild terms that it sounds
almost like the person did little more than spill a glass of milk. Make no mistake, it is the blood of another human being
spilled and trust me there’s more than enough crying to go around afterward.
Where’s the inattention and failure to yield” of the pain I feel after doing nothing more than walking for a few miles? I guess
I’m the lucky one who gets the gift that keeps on giving because the docs say “that’s just the way it is.”
Oh rest assured I’m more than thankful to have the pain. After flying 12 feet in the air, doing a flip I’m told would do a
gymnast proud and banging my head on the pavement, I’ll gladly take the pain. The alternative, given to 26 folks a year here in
King County for the period covered by this article, is something that I’m all to aware of could have happened to me.
I’m also all to aware that pedestrian safety is not taken seriously nearly as often as it should be. Ironic that my own home town newspaper publishes an article on the topic of pedestrian safety where the police chief of a neighboring city says cars don’t stop for folks in crosswalks often enough.
The Idea Place Posts
Bob Regan of Macromedia has a great post talking about Flash accessibility and a newly relaunched J.K. Rowlin site that is a model for Flash accessibility. How nice to see accessibility of such a high profile web site being taken seriously.
Harry Potter books are not on the top of my reading list but having played with the site a bit I’m really impressed to see how well the Flash works with several screen readers. How cool!
SF Gate has an excellent article on, well I’m not exactly sure what you’d call it. The functional name is Bookshare. I could call it a web site, a volunteer service, a non-profit or something else and none of those would do it justice. Bookshare is in short to me a revolutionary way for people who are blind to read. Short of publishers making electronic versions of all books not only available but also accessible, Bookshare is to me the greatest way for people who are blind to access books today.
The article goes into greater detail but the basic concept behind Bookshare is that if one person who’s blind scans a book then that book can be shared with others who are blind so they don’t have to go to the trouble of scanning the same book. Optical character recognition technology has come a long way in the more than 20 years I’ve been using it. Today I can read pretty much any book I want with about four hours of work to scan the book. Still there’s no reason that effort needs to be duplicated and I’m thrilled that Bookshare was created.
I read probably three books a week on average and lately the power of a community working to make books accessible is really showing itself in Bookshare. Roughly 50% of what I want to read has already been scanned and it is nice to be able to just grab a book for reading without having to turn the pages on a scanner. It is equally nice to know that the time I still do spend scanning printed books, which is a rather tedious experience, will benefit others.
We are back in the midwest for the holiday weekend. This time it is Minneapolis to visit a long time friend.
Even though it has been 11 years since I’ve called the midwest home, a summer thunderstorm reminds me just how much a part of me this weather and climate are.
In 11 years of living in California, Oregon and Washington, I don’t think I’ve experienced a true thunderstorm once. My definition isn’t the few claps of thunder that seems to qualify in Seattle. It is the hour-plus sort of storm where the thunder rattles the windows and rolls from one side of the sky to the other. It is the sort of storm where a clap of thunder can set off a car alarm. It is the sort of storm where the rain falls at a rate to justify the expression “raining buckets” and where you sense the awesome power of nature with every gust of the wind.
As a very small child I remember how much these sorts of storms used to frighten me. The “beep beep beep” of the television weather alert to be followed by the forecaster of the day reading a national weather service alert used to send me to the center of the house Mickey Mouse radio in hand to listen for every detail, just hoping the storm would go away.
Today a summer trip back to the midwest is a disappointment for me if I don’t get at least one good thunderstorm. This morning’s was at least two hours long. Windows rattled, rain pounded the windows and the wind was a constant. Strange how much all that just feels like home to me.
Richard Nixon’s presidency is one I know largely through history. I was seven when Nixon resigned and the only memory I have of his presidency is watching his announcement that he would resign on television at summer camp.
The story related in The Assassination of Richard Nixon is one I hadn’t heard until renting the DVD. The movie features Sean Penn as Samuel Bicke, a man that finds life slipping away. A failed marriage, job problems and his general problems with the world lead Bicke to hatch a plot to fly a plane into the White House.
Much of the story and Bicke’s perception on the world is related through tapes Bicke narrates to Leonard Bernstein. The mix of Penn sounding perfectly calm and rational in these narrations while Bicke slips further and further away from reality in the film’s action is powerful. Audio production on this movie is excellent and clips of Nixon are mixed throughout plus news from the period to help convey things with which Bicke expresses greater and greater outrage.
This is a film I recommend.
I moderate two e-mail lists related to different aspects of disability. WebWatch, which has been around in one form or another for 10 years, deals with web use for people with disabilities. Disability-news is a place to share news coverage about disability. Both lists can now be found on the AccessPlace home page.
Comments closedGrowing up I had the occasional newspaper written about this or that school function I was in. Back then the parents would buy a few extra copies of the paper to clip and send the article to relatives.
Funny to see how times have changed when today it is an e-mail with a link telling me that my niece made the newspaper.
The Washington Post ran an article on Madison, Wisconsin in a recent travel section. I wasn’t born in Madison but in many ways consider it my home town, or at least my home town from adulthood.
The article, brief as it is, captures much of the essence of Madison. Afternoons on the Memorial Union Terrace are some of the fondest memories I have of my nine years of living in Madison.
Then too there’s the Babcock ice cream which is a must have for any trip to Wisconsin.
On Friday Apple released their latest operating system Tiger with a screen reader named VoiceOver included as part of the operating system. I dropped by a local Apple store today to take Tiger and VoiceOver for a spin.
First off I think it is great to see a screen reader for the Macintosh again. Since development of outSPOKEN was stopped a couple years ago, the newer Mac operating systems haven’t been accessible to people that are blind.
My initial impression, based on about 60 minutes of exploration, is that VoiceOver has potential. I wasn’t thrilled by the speech synthesis (there are much smoother options out there) but I was able to interact with the machine and get around.
The real test of course is how productive one can be. Zipping around an OS is one thing but the end goal is to accomplish the tasks you bought the computer for. My explorations today didn’t get far enough to launch any applications beyond the VoiceOver help and OS navigation so now I’ll need to decide if I want to invest the time and money to relearning the Mac environment.
In playing with VoiceOver today the thing I was reminded of again is how much longer it takes to learn technology if you are blind. Back when I was actively teaching technology this was a point I emphasized to my students. There’s a strong temptation for instant gratification when it comes to technology but I believe spending a bit of time in learning how to fully use something pays off.
On one hand this is a bit frustrating. I know that folks that are sighted can often grab a mouse and point and click their way to productivity with a new application in a few minutes. By contrast it can take hours to learn a new application with a screen reader.
Since working at Microsoft though I’ve also gained an inside knowledge into just how much research goes into making that point-and-click environment seem obvious. I don’t think the mainstream technology industry is at the point where it is really understood what it takes to move beyond basic accessibility to an application. In general the focus is still on ensuring that basic access is available.
If you think of accessibility as a journey, then Apple’s release of VoiceOver means that a few more destinations are again available to people who are blind. Hopefully over time we can move to more discussions of how to enhance the journey and not just ensuring that people who are blind can take the trip.
I’m looking to move the Webwatch and Disability-News e-mail lists I moderate to my own hosting service. Finding a good domain name to attach to the lists has proven frustrating.
I’d like to avoid using a hyphenated name but most of the two word combinations that interest me do not sound good when read with a speech synthesizer. The words are frequently run together and the result sounds like mush.
I have to laugh a bit at myself. At work I can get bored when discussions drag on about whether some image is a pixel or two off but in my own way I guess I’m just as picky.