Comments on: Recommended Reading for November 26

By: AWV

AWV — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:54:31 +0000

hi, I wrote the “They hate you. Yes, you” post and I wasn’t trying to make a point about ABA. ABA is just a method and it’s (in my opinion) a really effective way to teach people with autism. You can use any method to do unethical things. You don’t have to decide that you’re going to try to train a kid not to stim; that’s the decision of the individual teacher or group of teachers.

I was more trying to address the argument that “higher-functioning” ASD people shouldn’t be able to talk about abusive tactics because we supposedly don’t know what “real autism” is like, and people with “real autism” actually need to be treated with those tactics. At that school I saw that a)lots of “high-functioning”-looking people were being treated in a way that I thought was unethical, and b)even when the person being treated unethically seemed very different from me, that wasn’t necessarily related to the way they were being treated.

Obviously it is not appropriate to treat anyone unethically, but I guess I had developed some hesitation about holding/expressing strong convictions because I thought I didn’t have a right to them because I didn’t know enough or have enough experience.

Anyway, I wasn’t trying to write about ABA really. I mean this stuff does happen and I think it’s really wrong, but that isn’t really innately ABA; I think ABA can be, and sometimes is, done in a non-ableist way.

By: PharaohKatt

PharaohKatt — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 05:06:18 +0000

Exactly. It’s horrifying! It’s motivated me to work towards working with disabled children, specifically children with learning disorders/ASD/ developmental delay. Not quite sure how I’ll do it, but the first step is getting my diploma then I can look at specialised studies.

By: Hope to be ADHD PhD

Hope to be ADHD PhD — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:52:01 +0000

The Wizards of the Coast online forums had a really interesting discussion recently about how to make D&D more accessible to the blind. A lot of people shared stories and ideas about adapting D&D.

Here is a link to the post:
http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19701658/Blind_Guy_Wants_to_Play

I have ADHD and I love to GM roleplaying games, but I’ve moved away from rules-heavy games such as D&D because I find all the stats and numbers difficult to keep track of. (It helped that the people I play with mostly liked being their characters, and didn’t care about fighting.)

By: Kaz

Kaz — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:53:56 +0000

…yeah, I was always leery of ABA from what I’d heard of it but I didn’t know it was like. That. My heart, it is breaking over here. D:

By: PharaohKatt

PharaohKatt — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:25:08 +0000

Oh gods, that first link is just… *cries*

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:54:27 +0000

@Anna: Go ahead! I put it out there on Twitpic publicly for a reason.

By: Anna

Anna — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:53:21 +0000

Yeah, that’s what I feared would happen. Do you mind if I link to your picture?

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:46:58 +0000

YouTube’s auto-captioning is one of those things that sounds utterly amazing in theory, but… isn’t quite so good in practice.

Case in point: in one video I tried it on, it transcribed “we’re doing rock climbing as well as table tennis” as “for doing what I mean as well as democrats.” (Here’s a screenshot for proof!) And in another video, “terraforming Mars” became “terror for Myanmar’s,” which differs quite drastically in meaning.