Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

NPR: Commanders Have Ignored Major Mental Health Issues, Army Report Concludes

(Trigger Warning for Statements of the Obvious and a seeming disregard for lives)

In his introduction, Chiarelli says that “now more than ever, our Soldiers need firm, fair and consistent leadership.”

Although he acknowledges that commanders — like troops — have been stretched thin by repeated deployments during two wars, Chiarelli says the Army’s leadership has to do better, taking “a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to address this risk.”

According to NPR’s Rachel Martin, “Defense officials say commanders on the ground don’t have the training to make suicide prevention a priority — or to recognize the signs of a soldier on the brink.”

VA Watchdog: Contract In-Home Nurse Steals from Disabled Veteran

When JoAnn went in for surgery on her hand, she noticed prescription medication missing. Soon after, her son noticed much more missing.

“When he came in the door he said, ‘Mom you have been robbed.'”

Pride admitted to police she had stolen it all: more than $5,000 dollars of garden equipment, electronics and jewelry.

flip flopping joy: disability on the face of gendered bodies

A feeling that stands in stark contrast to how we as viewers understand Emily’s injuries. Usually their narratives are the other way around. An abused woman is blamed, why did you stay with him? And a politically active woman is congratulated as fierce and mighty. Suddenly our consciousness is declaring the abuse victim “beautiful” and “strong” and we want to help–and the politically active woman is understood as a troublemaker. As somebody who maybe shouldn’t have been where she was. It’s sorta her own fault for showing up someplace where she knew there would be trouble. Right?

BBC: Ouch! (disbility) – features- Dragging accessible computer games into the 21st century

With up to 32 sounds playing at any one time, no one could accuse GMA Games Lone Wolf of not being exciting and challenging, even with zero graphics. For this is an ‘audio game’, Made with blind and visually impaired people like me in mind and based exclusively on complex stereo sound.

BBC News: With one good leg, US Veterans climb Mount Kilimanjaro (Apologies for the title, folks!)

(Moderatrix note: I felt the tone of this article was rather ‘splainey and shamey. Kind of “well, if I can do it with my prosthetic leg, than what is wrong with all of you crips at home who aren’t even going out for runs and swims?”. Still, I wanted to highlight the accomplishment, and would hope that we can focus on that, rather than on the negative.)

The trip typically takes five or six days, and the men had to stop frequently to adjust their titanium prosthetic legs, as they slipped constantly on the loose scree-covered paths.

The hikers were Dan Nevins, 37, who lost his legs in Iraq; Neil Duncan, 26, who lost both legs in a roadside bomb attack in Afghanistan in 2005; and Kirk Bauer, 62, who lost a leg in Vietnam in 1969.

If you have an exciting link, news article, or blog post that would be relevant to our interests, please feel free to send it to recreading [at] disabledfeminists [dot] com. We would be more than happy to credit you for any usable find!

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Wheelie cAtholic: Not Bound to my Wheelchair

That’s all well and good. But there’s a problem with the word bound when it’s used with wheelchair, i.e. wheelchair bound. It drags up images of someone duct taped to a wheelchair or melded into its cushions or metal frames. It denies the very real fact that the person using the wheelchair gets in and out of it and is not a part of it, is not a machine, that the wheelchair is a tool.

That kind of language is why, when little kids ask me questions, one of the questions is Bound to Be:

“Do you sleep in your wheelchair?”

Steve at the Art of Accessibility: Fiddling While Rome Burns: Don’t Give Up Advocating Accessibility

Whether armed with lots of money and time or not, you have your voice — never be afraid to speak up when there are opportunities to make an experience more accessible. It can be on the micro level (“that font against that background is going to be really difficult for people with sight limitations to make out”). It can be on the macro level (“all those videos on the site? we really need to add captioning”).

You may lose. You may get a pat on the head and told to go play somewhere else. Keep trying!

Jack at jackandahat: So you’ve found yourself a disabled person!

Congratulations! You now have your very own shiny person in desperate need of YOUR help to run their life!

So what’s your first step?

Well, obviously, your Disabled Person has no clue about their own condition. Living with something twenty four hours a day for anywhere between a month and eight decades is no match for the knowledge you picked up in that magazine you read on the bus last week.

Ian Pouncey at DevOpera: Web Accessibility for cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties

Web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties is one of the most overlooked subtopics of general web accessibility, despite it affecting the largest numbers. A large part of it is that there are so many conditions to understand in this area (far more than say visual or hearing impairments) and a lack of educational information available for learning about it.

In this article we will cover a few of the problems users with cognitive disabilities may have that can affect their ability to use the Web, as well as the things that developers can do to alleviate these problems and things they should avoid. A lot of what is covered will be well known and common sense to many, but is here for completeness.

Problem Chylde: poor people aren’t supposed to want nice things.

However, if you take what little disposable income you have and buy sushi, you are doing wrong. Poor people do not want things like smartphones (you’re poor; who are you calling on a smartphone?), televisions (you’re poor; what do you need entertainment for?), nice cars (why wouldn’t you get a modest car to get around when you’re poor), or delicious food (do you know how much ramen you could have bought for the cost of that scone?). Poor people should not take any windfalls or nest eggs or scraped together pennies and expose themselves to luxuries. After all, isn’t that just a brutal reminder of how poor they are any other time? Why not just face the fact that poor is what you are, poor is what you shall be, and poor means that you cannot have nice things?

Astrid at Astrid’s Journal: “Like A Little Child”

It seems that, for the sake of conceptualizing life with developmental disabilities for people who don’t have these disabilities, they need to assign an age group to that person’s skills or behavior, that is the age at which non-disabled children acquire this particular skill or display this behavior. People then get to generalize into such things as “mental age”. The problem is, an adult isn’t like a little child, even if that adult has a developmental disability. Adults with developmental disabilities, in many respects, display behaviors that are normal for adults. Most adults with mental retardation, at some point, become interested in sexuality, for example. This is exactly why support workers often struggle with how to handle this. If those adults had been like children, they wouldn’t have been interested in sex. The thing is, they’re adults and, like most adults, they develop sexual feelings.

In The News:

Canada: Kids Learn By Example To Meet The Unexpected. “Anyone visibly different knows about the stares — and the occasional comments — they attract when out in the community. For Phil Crowson, it’s when he rides the bus and kids spot his guide dog, Faith. “They’re always asking their parents ‘What’s the dog for?’ ” says the 61-year-old intake and referral officer at Victoria’s CNIB.”

Russia: Russia to adapt higher education facilities for the disabled – Putin. “Putin said a program is being developed in Russia for “inclusive education” so that preschoolers with handicaps may attend kindergartens with their peers on an equal level, and may then progress on to elementary school and finally to a higher educational institute.”

Africa: Disability Rights Must Be Part of Continent’s Future, Ugandan Says. “Any vision for the future of Africa must include people with disabilities, who constitute “a significant percentage of the community anywhere in Africa — almost 10 percent of the population,” Ssengooba said. “People with disabilities have a lot of potential to take part in the development processes of their countries, yet they are in most cases excluded from most of the development programs.””

And, in today’s “We should praise them for doing this even though we hate giving out cookies for providing basic services”:

This Toronto election, voters will be able to use two different accessible voting machines during the

Weekday and Weekend Advance Votes.

Videos are now available to explain each of the machines as well as the voting process. All videos are captioned and are accompanied by voiceovers, and we continue to work on improving them.

To access videos showing how to use each of the machines or hear audio descriptions, please visit Voting Equipment: Touchscreen Terminal and Voting Equipment: Voter Assistance Terminal. Please check our website for events where you will be able to try using the machines.

If you will be voting for the first time and want to find out what happens inside a voting location and how people vote, please visit
How Do I Vote?

We would like to maximize participation in the 2010 Elections, so if you find these resources helpful, please tell your friends.

So: Yay Toronto! Have a cookie!

A collection of links today about Dr Paul Longmore’s life, work, and death. I don’t mind telling you all that I’ve spend most of today sitting here feeling horrible and sad about his death. I know I talked earlier about his impact on my scholarship. I’m reading so many remembrances by other disability historians and scholars today. A major part of both our activist and scholarly community is gone, and I cannot imagine how grief-stricken his close associates must be feeling.

Penny L. Richards writes about Paul Longmore’s contribution to disability history (see comments as well):

*I’ve been co-editing H-Disability since it launched in March 2001. But I had nothing to do with its founding–that’s credited to Paul Longmore and the summer institute where the idea was hatched, long before my involvement.

*I’m president of the Disability History Association right now–but in many ways, the organization exists and thrives because Paul Longmore was very, very persistent when he saw an opportunity to support scholarship on disability.

Book Review by Disability Rights Activist Laura Hershey, on the book Dr Longmore co-edited with Lauri Umansky: The New Disability History–American Perspectives

The essays in The New Disability History: American Perspectives narrate many of the battles disabled people have had to wage for self-respect, autonomy, opportunity, and survival. Some of these battles have been waged in courtrooms, some in state legislatures, some in the pages of magazines. Throughout U.S. history, disabled people have had to organize in order resist the dominant culture’s tendency to dismiss and/or bully them. As editors Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky summarize in their Introduction, “People with disabilities themselves, as individuals and in organized associations, have, in all eras, struggled to control definitions of their social identity, to direct their social careers.”

Dr. Longmore was the the first professor to win the Henry B. Betts Award from the American Association of People with Disabilities.

“I can think of no one that I admire and respect more than Paul. His ideas, work and advocacy have shaped the development of countless young people with disabilities,” Chelberg says. “Paul has given the disability community the intellectual power it needs to push for justice on such wide ranging issues as work disincentives, in-home personal assistance and media images.”

Longmore, who joined SFSU in 1992, has studied disability issues for two decades while also becoming a scholar in American colonial history. He is director of the SFSU Institute on Disability and served as co-director of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Disability Studies, a first-of-its-kind event held at SFSU in 2000. Later that year he helped convene the first major academic symposium on disabilities and sexuality.

I haven’t been able to find any of Dr. Longmore’s academic essays freely available online (which is a shame – if you have access to an academic library, I recommend “Why I Burned My Book” as an outstanding essay, which is discussed at NPR’s post about his death), but you can read an article he wrote for the Huffington Post in 2008 (so, during the US election campaign, which focuses on US-election campaign issues): Palin Talks About Special Needs Children, But Obama Has Substantive Plans For All People With Disabilities.

Palin’s promise to be a “friend and advocate” for the families of children with disabilities has some parents understandably excited. In August, University of North Carolina researchers reported “chilling” rates of “hardship” among both middle class and poor families with disabled children as they struggle “to keep food on the table, a roof over their heads, and to pay for needed health and dental care.” Large numbers of adults with disabilities face the same hardships.

Even though 90% of Americans with disabilities are adults, Palin, John McCain, and the news media have talked almost exclusively about children. And that talk has been mostly about “compassion” not “issues.” The McCain-Palin campaign website has a single page on “Americans with Disabilities for McCain,” but it says nothing about policy positions. Other pages mention autism and disabled veterans but no other issues.

Stephen at Not Dead Yet is pulling together a list of bloggers that have written about Dr Longmore’s death, which I recommend checking out as well. I found this post by Bess at Right to Design especially moving for me to read, which is not to take away from any of the other touching tributes that Stephen has linked to.