All posts by Anna

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!]

Why “being nice” isn’t enough

accessibility, ,

On December 30, I wrote a post about the myth that people with disabilities are out to sue everyone else into compliance, booga booga fear the scary crippled people. In there I mentioned that Don & I had gone off to the mall and had difficulties getting into the shops, since apparently “wheelchair accessible” doesn’t mean “keep your aisles clear of junk”.

I wrote an email to the mall in question:

Subject: Accessibility and the Mall

Hello,

I recently visited your mall with my husband, a full-time wheelchair user. This was not our first visit to your mall, but it may be our last.

Many of the shops in your mall are not actually wheelchair accessible for a regular wheelchair user. The aisles between shelving units are rarely wide enough for a wheelchair user to not risk knocking something over. Often the aisles and open floor spaces are covered in sales items. Things jut into the aisles that could knock someone in the head. These issues do not even touch on sales staff that ignore people using wheelchairs [1. Oh, hey, we went to Don’s favourite Big & Tall shop in the other mall earlier this week. When he was by himself, and thus struggling with the sweaters, he got completely ignored. When I came into the shop to find him, I was offered assistance immediately. Even though she was standing not a foot from where Don was wheeling around looking for more sweaters, the same sales assistant completely ignored him. So, yeah, I’m going to be writing another email. But I’m especially annoyed because this is the only shop we’ve been to that sells clothing in Don’s size – where else are we going to go?], or stores that are so crowded that a wheelchair user cannot get around – both of which are human-related issues, and not ones I would expect mall administration to be able to deal with, although some sort of policy discussion on that would likely be helpful.

Although your mall has an accessibility policy, I can see nothing on your website that discusses if the stores within the mall are expected to uphold it, or what expectations the mall has that stores will be accessible.

We planned on spending the day yesterday taking advantage of the extended Sunday hours and Boxing Week Sales. Instead, we purchased one item and left. It was impossible for my husband to enter many of the stores that carry items we would want to purchase, or, if he could enter them, he could only get part of the way through the store before the above issues made it impossible for him to go any further back.

I feel many of these issues could be solved if the mall enforced an accessibility policy for the stores within it.

Thank you for your time,

Anna [Last Name]

I did get an email back, which was very polite and understanding and full of fluff. I won’t quote the whole thing, but this one line stood out to me:

Unfortunately we cannot enforce an accessibility policy, but we will be making every effort to encourage our retailers to provide barrier free access through education and an incentive program.

I don’t quite know why the mall can’t enforce an accessibility policy. I do know there is not a Canada-wide accessibility policy, and Nova Scotia is not exactly noted for accessibility-friendly policies.

In a world where people just needed to ask for assistance and voila, it would appear, as though magic, we wouldn’t need an accessibility policy. I could just drop an email to the mall, and that would be the end of it. Heck, I probably wouldn’t need to drop an email to the mall – from the goodness of their hearts, they would already have a thorough accessibility program in place, covering things I never think to ask for, like scent-free policies and braille signs and more seating [1. Well, I used to remember to ask for more seating, and then Don got a wheelchair and now I have to think about it.] and… well, things I never think to ask for.

This is why I’m displeased that my country doesn’t have even a token-effort federally mandated accessibility law. The mall, which can mandate things like “required to follow fire codes” and “required to open during mall hours” cannot (or chooses not to – I suspect the latter, frankly) require the same stores to follow an accessibility policy.

But yeah – if we’re all just really really nice, maybe they’ll do so anyway.

QuickPress: Book List

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I’ve added a new page to the site: Books of Interest.

If you check it out, you’ll notice very quickly that it’s almost all history books at the moment. We’ll fix that over time. I just found that I was procrastinating putting anything up out of fear that it was not the Perfect Ideal Book List Of Awesome.

Now it’s a Work In Progress Book List!

Less Than / More Than – My complicated thoughts on reproductive rights & feminist discussions

101, bodies, class issues, feminism, intersectionality, introspective, justice, reproductive justice, resistance, social attitudes, , , , , , ,

When I’m not being a student, I typically get temp jobs working in a variety of offices. Once things get settled, and folks realise I am married, they often start asking about kids. “Do you have kids? No? When are you having kids? It’s not too late, you know!”

This may seem like an opening for a post about being child-free, but it’s not.

I often put these questions off with flippancy or a shrug or just saying we’re not interested in having kids. In my experience, this will often have people leave the issue be.

Sometimes, though, people will hound and hound and hound.

“Oh, it’s different when they’re yours. But what about Don, what does he think of all of this? What about your parents? What about– what about– what about?” [1. Everything in quotation marks in this post is a paraphrase.]

Do you want to know the secret way of getting people to never again ask why you’re not having children?

At some point, drop into a conversation that your husband’s disability is genetic.

Without fail, that has stopped every single person who has asked and asked and asked about children, even when the “genetic” bomb isn’t dropped in a conversation about having children.

One of the reasons why the focus of abortion! abortion! abortion! whenever talking about reproductive rights really bothers me (and a lot of others) is because of the assumption that people like Don & I shouldn’t have children (because – oh no! – the child likely will have Marfan’s just like Don! And everyone knows people like Don are a burden on the system/have miserable lives/are never happy/can never be married/are all the same/should be stopped/are just an example for the rest of us). When people focus on reproductive rights only involving abortion, they neglect that, for people like us, the pushback is to not have children. Don’t burden the system. Think of the children – and don’t have any.

I’ve seen similar conversations play out around the feminist blogosphere. [1. I have decided not to link to specific examples, because it’s a general attitude I’m talking about here. And also, who wants to start a blog-war? Not I, said the Anna.] When older women have children, there is always a sudden upswing in “BUT THE CHILD MIGHT HAVE A DISABILITY!” (Yes, the child might. And the child might fall out of a tree and land wrong. Or the child might grow up to be the next Stephen Harper and prorogue Canadian government. WHO KNOWS!) “Think of the children!”

The same fears are reflected when discussing women with disabilities having children (with bonus “but how will she care for the child?”), or when parents forcibly sterilize their disabled daughters.

This pains me, perhaps especially as someone who doesn’t want children. It pains many other women who, for a variety of reasons, are discouraged or outright prevented from having children they want. That, in North America, these women are overwhelmingly women of colour, lower class, disabled, queer – that they’re often women who have been institutionalised in some way, be it a “medical” institution or a “criminal” one – is not a coincidence.

In my experience, marginalized voices who speak out about this disparity between on-line feminist discussions of abortion and on-line feminist discussions from a broader reproductive justice framework [1. FREE Halifax: Feminists for Reproductive Justice & Equality. We meet every other Tuesday for teach-ins & movies about Reproductive Justice. Look for us on Facebook.] are often shouted down, or ignored. We’re told our issues are “special circumstances”, or “pet projects” or “in the minority” or “don’t apply to as many people” or … Well, basically everything feminists in general are told when they talk about issues that are “special circumstances” that don’t apply to enough people (read: men) to count.

Frankly, I end up not knowing where to go from here. Do we, who are limited on spoons or forks or energy or time, keep trying to push for more mainstream feminist discussion on these issues? Do we form our own spaces, our own groups, and have our own discussions? Do we write blog posts that seem to dwindle down, rather than lead us all into the future?

I don’t know. I know and respect people who have made each of those choices, and still others that I haven’t mentioned. But I don’t know what the right one is.

Maybe they all are.

Signal Boost: Sexuality & Access Project Survey

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Sexuality and Access Project Survey

The Sexuality and Access Project is looking for people who use attendant services as well as attendants to participate in an anonymous survey.

The survey is part of this two-year project, funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation. The goal of the project is to give Ontarians with disabilities greater control over their lives by providing them and their personal service attendants with the skills and knowledge to protect and develop their sexual health and safety.

There are two surveys. One is for persons with disabilities who use attendant services. The other is for attendants.

If you are in either of these categories, or you know someone who is, please complete the survey or pass the information along.

To take a survey online, please follow one of the links below. Each link will take you directly to the survey named:
Sexuality and Access Survey for persons with disabilities
Sexuality and Access Survey for attendants
DEADLINE: January 31, 2010

If you need assistance in filling out a survey, or prefer to participate in a phone survey, please contact Fran Odette.

To learn more about the project or to receive a version of the online survey in alternate format, contact:

Fran Odette, Project Coordinator
416-968-3422 Ext. 30
f.odette@gmail.com

This project is done in partnership with the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto, Niagara Centre for Independent Living, and Independent Centre and Network.

Happy World Braille Day!

history, ,

Today is World Braille Day!

Were I a more organized person, I would now present you with a scrupulously researched history of Braille, deep insights into the so-called “War of the Dots”, and a wonderful interlude on the use of raised text in the Halifax School for the Blind.

Instead, a few things I’ve gathered from my readings:

There had been a raised-dot writing process before Braille invented his own, but it took up more space. Braille simplified it and quickly taught his friends and fellow classmates at the Paris school for the blind how to use it. Previous to that, blind people had been taught to read using embossed letters. Letters would be embossed by getting paper wet and then putting it down on carved (wooden? metal? I can’t remember) 3-d letters. This strikes me as incredibly cumbersome.

At first, Braille’s new method was embraced by the school. However, when the former headmaster retired, a new headmaster came in and was determined to get rid of everything that had been done by the former one. I wrote some notes about this:

“To dramatize and enforce the new system [of embossed writing for the blind], Dufau made a bonfire in the school’s rear courtyard and burned not only the embossed books created by Huay’s [First principal of the first school for the blind in Europe] original process but also every book printed or hand-transcribed in Louis’ [Braille] new code. This comprised the school’s entire library, the product of nearly 50 years’ work. To make sure no Braille would ever again be used at the school, he also burned and confiscated the slates, styli, and other Braille writing equipment.”

!!!!!

“Dafau’s students rebelled and Braille survived. The older students taught the younger students despite the punishment of slaps across the hands and going to bed without dinner.”

Reading Hands: The Halifax School for the Blind, pp 25-26.

I don’t know yet how braille made its way from France across to England and then across to North America (there was a competition! And the “New York Press” style of raised dots), and know even less about how or whether or went elsewhere. (Lucky for me, there are books! I will learn! It will be exciting!)

One thing I like about braille is that it was invented and refined by blind people. Despite attempts to wipe it out, blind students refused to give it up – much like Sign Language, in fact.

WebAim provides some insight into how Blind people use the web.

Happy World Braille Day! Please feel free to correct my history in comments, and also to leave links and book recommendations. I would like to recommend Woeful Afflictions, by Mary Klages, which is a fascinating look at Victorian attitudes towards disability.

Let’s Bust Some Myths: People with disabilities just want to sue the world into compliance

101

One of my “favourite” disability stereotypes is that people with disabilities are rolling lawsuits waiting to happen. I first hit this stereotype when someone directed me to Penn & Teller’s Bullshit episode about the Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA], which focused mostly on how the ADA is all about putting people with disabilities down and treating them badly. [1. I can’t rant about this enough because this episode really pissed me off. They actually put someone in an iron lung and tried to get around New York, thus demonstrating that you can’t actually make the world accessible for everybody, so obviously the ADA is “Bullshit”.] The episode also included interviews with a town that was hit with many many many lawsuits by a lawyer who is also a wheelchair user, and financially threatened many businesses in a small town.

Another big-name voice that’s come out against the ADA as being “bad” for people with disabilities (and the nice able-bodied folks who are totally oppressed by it) is Clint Eastwood. Strangely, Eastwood didn’t care two wits about the ADA until he was sued for his boutique hotel being inaccessible. Then, suddenly, he was very concerned about the unending stream of lawsuits about accessibility. [1. And this is why I won’t watch any movie he’s in, produced, directed, mentioned as a good thing, whatever.]

There are two big problems with this theory. First, and most obvious to me, is that none of these Nice Able-Bodied Folks seem to be concerned that one needs to sue (or otherwise threaten with legal action) in order to get into buildings, get written material presented in a way you can read it, get captioning, get… well, get all sorts of “little things” that people with a variety of disabilities need in order to fully interact with the world. (Trust me, I have missed many of them myself. Many many times.) Oh, but they’re really really concerned about the poor little crippled person who is just a victim of the big bad lawyer who is totally leading them on, gosh darn it. (They are, of course, not concerned about just going “Oh, hey, let me fix that right now! No need for a law suit!” If you really think accessibility is important, and people note that your space isn’t accessible when it should be, why do you fight this suit in court? Is this some American-thing I don’t understand, being from The Great Frozen Post-Socialist Utopia of Canada? Do you lose American-points if you don’t fight law suits in court? I don’t even know.)

The second problem is that most of the people I know with disabilities don’t have the time/energy/inclination/spoons to sue about an accessibility issue.

Let me give you a personal example. (The plural of anecdote is not data, but strangely, there isn’t a lot of data available on “people not suing for accessibility-related issues”. This isn’t something pollsters ask.) Just the other day, Don and I went to the mall to take advantage of Boxing Day Sales. And, like every other time we go to the mall, it became apparent that the mall’s “accessibility plan” didn’t really include making the actual shops accessible. Lots of junk in aisles, aisles too narrow for a wheelchair, ect. (You’d think we’d stop going to the mall, but we only go about once every six months. The other mall we shop at is better, and I keep forgetting why we don’t trek out to this one very often.)

Don, kindly, pointed out that the shops I was going into didn’t have space for him. At first I thought about making complaints at each individual shop, but I wasn’t sure if the mall actually had a policy, and Canada doesn’t have an equivalent to the ADA. So, then we talked about going to the Mall Information Desk and finding out the details there. That fell through when we saw a very lengthy line, and a very harried pair of employees behind it.

In a world of sue-happy disabled people, we’d probably be contacting the Human Rights Commission, or a lawyer, or our Member of Parliament (that’s Federal government) or MLA (that’s Provincial). Instead, we came home, and agreed to stop shopping there because this is rather ridiculous.

Ultimately, I wrote a letter to the mall to bring this to their attention, but I have no idea if that will actually mean anything in the long run.

This anecdote isn’t unique by any stretch, and many people with disabilities I’ve talked to don’t even go so far as to write a letter (or an angry blog post) because this takes energy and time that could be spent doing countless other things.

People with disabilities are really no more sue-happy than your average person. Some people with disabilities, just like some average citizens, call their lawyer whenever there’s a problem – because they have a lawyer to call. Others stoically press on through life. Others write letters, to editors, to MLAs & MPs, to mall administrators. It’s almost like “disabled people” don’t all react the same way to things, and have a variety of ways of dealing with “adversity” (in the form of non-existent ramps).

So, in short, the myth of the sue-happy cripple who’s just a law suit waiting to happen is perpetuated by Nice Able-Bodied Folks who are actually full of Bullshit. [1. Okay here’s a link to “highlights” of the Bullshit episode on YouTube. It is not captioned, which I guess kinda disproves their ultimate point. I live in a country that doesn’t have an ADA, and I’m still waiting for Halifax to embrace the idea that business owners should be “more compassionate” and put in wheelchair ramps. ANY DAY NOW I’m sure it will be true.]

Quickpress: Upcoming Carnivals!

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11th Carnival of Feminists, focusing on Gender Across Borders, is accepting submissions until January 5!

The 62nd Disability Blog Carnival will be at Uppity Crip/Finding My Way, and the theme is holidays! Deadline for submissions is January 11th.

The 5th Asian Women’s Blog Carnival, with the theme of Who I Am When I’m (not) With You, is accepting submissions until February 12th.

The next Down Under Feminists Carnival is planned for 5th January, 2010, and hosted by PharaohKatt at Something More Than Sides. Optional theme: Feminism and Childcare. (So, breastfeeding, parental leave, adoption, childcare as feminism…) Submissions to pharaohkatt at gmail dot com for those who can’t access blogcarnival.

I’m always happy to signal-boost Carnivals, and am not under the mistaken impression that I know all of them. Poke me to remind me of relevant carnivals you know of!

Anything is possible, except an end to these sorts of stories

anna rants, ,

This wonderful headline came into my email yesterday.

“Calgarian In Line For Berth At Vancouver Games; Triumph shows anything possible”

This is a disability-centric blog, so yes, you can assume it’s about disability, and not class, or age, or immigration status, or ethnicity, or race. Those sorts of “overcoming adversity” stories get written all the time, as well, and are equally offensive, for many of the same reasons I’m about to lay out here.

I hate these stories.

I hate them because of who they’re written for. They’re not written so that blind children in Canada can be all “Hey! We’ve got a great athlete going into the Olympics, and he’s blind, just like me! Maybe I can be a world-class athlete, too!” (Because the Paralympians, who are also world-class athletes, don’t get much attention. [1. From reading the article, it seems like that’s the actual stereotype that Brian McKeever was hoping to overcome – that Paralympians aren’t real athletes. Sadly, that is not the actual focus of the report. It’s primarily about how amazing! it is that he might qualify for the Real Olympics. It even ends with this: “To me, it’s no surprise that he’s going to get a spot on the Olympic team,” Goldsack said. “You forget after a while that he has vision problems. He’s just one of the guys.” Well, yes, of course he’s one of the guys – he’s not one of the elephants, after all. Sheesh.]) They’re not written so that blind adults can feel a bit of smug pride about having one of their own in the Olympic games to cheer for.

No no no, that would be silly. Everyone knows blind people don’t read the newspapers, and blind kids don’t learn about the Olympics! They’re all too busy leading sad lonely lives of darkness and misery! The only people who read newspapers are Nice Non-Disabled Folks who just need a feel good story about adversity.

Basically, framing this story as “overcoming adversity” rather than “Awesome Olympic Athlete (who is also blind!)” feeds into the SuperCrip story. When the only stories that your average non-disabled person reads about “the disabled” is this narrative, well– Annaham talked a bit about this in her post about SuperCrips over at Bitch:

Supercrip’s main function is to serve as inspiring to the majority while reinforcing the things that make this majority feel awesome about itself. In short: Supercrip provides a way for non-disabled folks to be “inspired” by persons with disabilities without actually questioning—or making changes to—how persons with disabilities are treated in society.

It also, of course, reinforces the stereotype that people with disabilities just need to try harder because anything is possible! Which we will now tell you by comparing all disabled people to an Olympic-caliber athlete!

Hey, able-bodied folks. Why the heck are you not overcoming adversity and becoming an Olympic-caliber athlete? It’s so easy, right? If you just “realize most of your limitations in life are self-imposed”, you, too can do anything!

QuickPress: Disability Carnival!

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Oh yay! I missed this earlier in the week, but The 61st Disability Blog Carnival is up at Writing Mental Illness!

As a writer who helps others write about their experiences with mental illness I’ve thought long and hard about what it means to tell about disability. Because there are many facets (many ways to tell, many different things to tell, and the difference between visible and invisible disabilities among others) to telling disability these posts represent a multiplicity of interpretations of the theme.

Carnival 62 will be hosted at Finding My Way.