Daily Archives: 11 January, 2010

Tell Us About Your Visit…

military, oyd rants,

I receive these great surveys after every doctor’s appointment any of us have with Medical here on Post. It is a survey from TRICARE asking us to please rate our visit with Dr. X on such and such date.

I received one for every visit I have with my regular doctor. We’ll call her Dr. Awesome. Except, the survey doesn’t ask me to rate Dr. Awesome, the survey asked me to rate my recent visit with, well we’ll call him Major Scriptwriter, because that is the function that he serves in my care. He is the supervising officer over my doctor, who approves all of my controlled medications. Every time one of them has to be refilled he has to sign off on the forms for them. I don’t actually see him unless there is a problem. In all fairness, he is pretty nice. But he doesn’t actually conduct my appointments. If I were to see him at an appointment, I would be more than happy to take a few minutes and fill out the surveys and return them.

I received several for The Kid’s immunizations asking me to review our appointments with Major Happygunns at Medical on several appointments. I matched the dates up in my datebook, not recognizing the name, and came to the conclusion that this must be the officer who supervises Immunizations. I do not know who this person is. Never seen hir. If the survey asked me to rate our visit w/ Sargent Needlejab, who has administered all of the vaccines and boosters and PPDs that we have needed since arriving in Country, and doing so while keeping The Kid from dealing everyone in the room a behind hook kick in the process (who decided to enroll her in Tae Kwon Do?), then great. He is actually a wonderful Army Medic, and is great with kids to boot, which isn’t easy to come by. He once let us sneak in to get a flu shot on a day that I had a particular foggy mix up and confused my appointment times.

But that is not what is going on here. I am being asked to rate supervisors based on what their subordinates are doing, and I am not OK with that. If I don’t return them I get little happy grams a few weeks or so later (because, funnily enough, they have to go all the way back to the states before arriving in my APO box, it seems) politely reminding me to please fill out my surveys.

The Guy thinks I should fill it out with really crappy marks, 0s across the board, and leave in the comments that the doctors couldn’t even be arsed to show up.

I am beginning to consider his suggestion.

Crossing My Fingers For The Future

Uncategorized

I’m a letter writer. (Not in the wonderful personal-letter sense, much to my personal sadness, but in the “trying to accomplish something through quietly angry letter-writing” sense.) I write a lot of letters about disability & accessibility issues, to people like doctors who think every appointment is Show & Tell Disability Hour, to allegedly accessible transportation providers, to people who insist that they can’t be accessible because they’ll lose their historic plaque (a lie)… You know, letters. Sometimes these letters are effective, but I don’t feel much shock to tell you that I rarely get responses to them.

One of the reasons I write letters, though, is to hold people accountable.

Earlier this school year for me, I was personally assured by the president of my university that they took issues of disability & accessibility very seriously on my campus. This is, of course, utter shite. The meet & greet for my discipline was down a flight of stairs and then up another set of stairs, and they told me that anyone in a wheelchair could be carried in. I’ve been told by the Accessibility Center that they can only deal with students with disabilities directly – I can’t go to them as a student and get help making an event accessible if I’m not registered with them as a student with a disability. And, of course, I get the same responses when I talk to people: incomprehension and stares.

Today, I got an email from the Graduate Studies Office at my university, directing me towards a website for a– Actually, I don’t know. Here’s part of the email:

This conference is a chance to join some of Atlantic Canada’s leaders and youth activists to shape the future of [our university] and your faculties. For more information or to register, visit brainsforchange.ca. Registration deadline is Friday, January 15th.

This initiative is being spearheaded by the [University] Student Union, with support from [the University]’s Deans, and senior administration – a truly unprecedented level of interdisciplinary collaboration.

(I don’t know if my university self-googles, hence the redactions there. You can tell where I attend if you click on the link.]

I can’t read the link. Don can’t read the link. I set my screen reader on it, and it can’t even find the content, let alone read the link.

Every one of the groups of people named in the above paragraphs have assured me at some point that my university takes accessibility issues seriously.

So, I am writing another email, because maybe this time it will make a difference. It has a few times in the past. Not often, sadly. But maybe this time it will make a difference?

I would love to learn more about this conference, in order to decide if it appropriate for me to attend. Unfortunately, the website linked is an accessibility nightmare. I can’t even read it. My screen reader can’t read it outloud for me.

University administration and the executive officers of our Student Union keep telling me that disability & accessibility are a priority on campus. I want to believe them, but it becomes difficult when a conference that’s allegedly about engaging students doesn’t even attempt to be accessible to all of them.

I know that whoever gets this email isn’t responsible for the website, and I do believe the university wants to do more and be better about these sorts of issues. Is there any way I can get the information on the website emailed to me so I can look at it? And could you tell me who created the website? I think they should consider consulting with the Accessibility Center about web design in the future.

I’ll keep people posted about it, but I do wonder: Do you write letters about this sort of stuff? The biggest thing I’m told all the damned time is that somehow no one has ever complained before. This, of course, comes with that winning implication, that I’m just a whiner who should shut up.

I don’t think that my letter writing is going to make everything awesome, but I do think it means people may pay more attention to the next complaint.

Special Ecclectic Recommending Reading Post of Email Backlog

recommended reading, social attitudes

Hi folks! If you’ve been following my Dreamwidth account, you may know that I’ve been cleaning out a huge backlog of email. And that huge backlog of email has included links for recommended reading that I hadn’t seen previously because they got eaten in my inbox.

I apparently am not actually always available by email. But I’ve weeded out close to 5000 email messages and am now slogging away at the final thousand.

Anyway, here’s some of the links that came out of my backlog. Please note that these links are mostly for interest, and not necessarily reflecting the views of myself, the people who sent them in, or the FWD folks.

CD Baby blocks blind artist and fans (via Avalon’s Willow)

“I am so sorry!” begins the letter, “We are aware that our website upgrade was actually a huge downgrade for the blind. Our site used to be VERY user friendly, and I think that it was overlooked by our programmers. It IS a priority though, and we are working on making a dial up site that will be readable. This isn’t going to happen anytime in the next 2-3 months, but we ARE working on this and it is an issue that is not being ignored! … We were really proud of how accessible our site was before for the blind, and we would love to have this fixed so we don’t loose these customers.”

Three Blind Phreaks (via Jha)

The young Badirs closed ranks and vowed that their blindness would never be an impediment. They taught themselves to take apart telephones, to mimic voices and verbal tics, and to get around Tel Aviv without canes or guide dogs. They became obsessed with technology and telephones. After encountering their first computer, in 1989, at Tel Aviv’s Center for the Blind, Ramy and Muzher became enchanted with the IBM clones. They hung around Tel Aviv University while working, with little success, as software and telephone consultants; their early crimes were the phreaker equivalent of shoplifting a Hershey bar.

They’re Disabled – and they’re working

The total number of working-age disabled people without jobs nationally exceeds 70 percent, said Bill Ditto, New Jersey’s director of disability services. The Garden State has 1.9 million disabled residents of all ages.

In Pennsylvania, about 530,000 working-age individuals receive Social Security disability benefits. In 2008, about 5 percent of them also had a job, said John Miller, vice president of AHEDD, a nonprofit placement agency based in Camp Hill.

“The prevailing attitude in society is that if you’re disabled, you’re unable to work,” Ditto said.

Workers and supervisors at the Abilities Center know that’s not true.

Racing on Carbon Fiber Legs – How Abled Should We Be? (via Weaves)

Commence the comical nightmare of being told that we now possess an “unfair advantage” in wearing prosthetic limbs to run. The scores of amputee sprinters who had competed with the limbs for the previous 13 years—and were still comfortably categorized as “disabled”—were virtually ignored. What is fascinating is the immediate shift in society’s regard of a disabled athlete as an “inspiration” (cue the patronizing “awwwww”) to a legitimate threat to other athletes (“Uh, what the hell do we do now?”).

[A fuller set of recommended reading posts will be going up later today – I just wanted to get this out of my ‘to post’ list!]