Tag Archives: gaming

Recommended Reading for 30 August 2010

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.

Venus Speaks: Despair

Now, I don’t have a good history with the social security office. The two times I visited one, I was brushed off. I don’t know if they took one look at a mostly able-bodied young girl and said, hey, she must be trying to trick us, but it sure as hell felt like it – they told me that I needed to apply online, entirely online, and that they were so far booked into the future that there was just no point in scheduling. As in they refused to schedule me.

And lo, as I am filling out the disability report tonight, not only do I lose the internet and all my progress, but I just happen to notice before it goes down that you can’t apply for SSI online, you can only fill out the adult disability report, print off a few forms, and schedule an interview. You know, that interview that my local office couldn’t afford to give me.

Those Emergency Blues: The Title is About the Power

Titles, in short, are about establishing status and power. Why else worry about them? They are utterly irrelevant to actual patient care and one’s ability to do the job. Insisting on their use can create an atmosphere of professional intimidation that suppresses the free exchange of information. Health care professionals expressing power over patients is definitely not a good way to create therapeutic relationships. Implicitly saying (or believing) the title makes you a better person or supplies you with definitive or superior knowledge about patient care is dangerous as well as destructive to collaborative relationships with other health care professionals. In the end, it results in bad care of our patients, and of each other.

Pipecleaner Dreams: A Modicum of Sense

Well, at least the Academy of Arts and Sciences haven’t completely lost their minds. I was appalled when I first heard that the TV show, Family Guy, got an Emmy nod for their song, ‘Down Syndrome Girl.’

Haven’t heard it? Well, here is a sampling of the lyrics:

And though her pretty face may seem a special person’s wettest dream. […]

You must impress that ultra-boomin’, all consumin’, poorly-groomin’, Down Syndrome girl. […]

ABC News: Too Special for the Special Olympics (via Patricia E. Bauer, thanks to Nightengale for the link!)

The problem arose when Jenny’s school district entered an agreement with the Special Olympics, promising to abide by the organization’s rules. That meant no court time for Jenny, though the organization won’t say whether it’s because of the oxyen, or Simba, or both. [sic]

Ablegamers: Bungie Punishes You For Quitting Early

The fear is that disabled gamers who need to quit in the middle will be labeled as rage quitters. Certain people’s disabilities can hit at a moments notice, forcing them to quit out of a game. While according to the statement Bungie is only punishing those who habitually quit, it doesn’t discuss how they gauge that. Is that a certain percentage of total games? Frequency? What?

What has gone so wrong that it has come to this? Has Bungie exhausted all other options before walking down this path? Not really.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading at disabledfeminists dot com. Please note if you would like to be credited, and under what name/site.

Recommended Reading for December 3

Disableism Impacts Families

This choice that is being forced upon me is impossible. I must either tolerate physical pain at the hockey arena or emotional abuse at the dojo, if I want to be a part of my child’s life. It’s ironic that disabled mothers are often viewed as incompetent but where is the discourse surrounding the ways in which our parenting often occurs under extremely difficult situations? I suppose, of all the people on the planet that Destruction and his brother Mayhem provide the best reason for me to want to rise above, but the constant pain requires more of a super human effort than I believe that I am capable of.

Murphy’s Law And Disability: The Week From Hell

Normally, we get by. We get by pretty well. Provided we stick with the diet restrictions, usually we just switch off when one is a bit more able to get things done than the other. Chores basically go to whomever is in less pain at the time, or in less of a bad mental state or who can actually do them reliably without issue (like me defocusing and being unable to even read a recipe because I can’t keep on it). Usually even when the chronic shit we deal with is flaring the other one is just dealing with the baseline of the chronic shit for them, and the other disabilities coming up are all spread out over time.

Not this week though.

This week was the perfect storm of flare ups, semi chronic appearances and stress induced aggravations of all of the various things we deal with on a regular basis. While my partner fought off a pain flare, struggling just to walk, I was nailed with a “Richter 7? migraine.

Accessibility and Gaming: Randomizers

Most traditional six-sided dice may be tactile enough that someone who can’t see could feel the result. There are also special “Braille dice” available for not that much more than premium gaming dice; they’re more properly called tactile dice since the faces are traditional die pips and not true Braille numbers.

So, blind players can probably get their hands on accessible d6s, but to the best of my knowledge there are no tactile dice made for any other types of dice. Champions, anyone?

The wrong message – still

I don’t know who dreamed up the concept of “disability simulations” but they have been around for a mighty long time. My lifelong friend, Michael A. Winter, now the Director of Civil Rights for the U.S. Department of Transportation, first exposed me to the shameful practice. Michael and I were classmates at a segregated school for crips and met in 6th grade. We attended the same university. As undergrads, Michael formed a group called Wheelchair Action. When the Rehabilitation Institute at Southern Illinois University sponsored a disability simulation, Michael and members of his group stormed into the classroom and tried in vain to halt the fiasco.

Professionals who are nondisabled rarely stop to listen to the people who live with disabilities. I was proud of Michael for trying to get people to understand how destructive these simulations can be.

What Makes A Good Doctor?

Dean Tom Marrie is interested in hearing what kinds of qualities people value most in their family physician or specialist. What do you appreciate about your doctor? What do you think physicians of the future will need that might not be taught at med school today?

Recommended Reading for November 30

How to Survive Thanksgiving When You’re In Eating Disorder Recovery [I should have posted this earlier, but there are major food-related holidays coming up in December.]

During the holiday season, support from family and friends can significantly impact an individual’s ability to effectively handle these stressful situations. For those supporting someone with an eating disorder through the holidays, the Eating Recovery Center offers these suggestions:

Language, Stigmatisation, and Mental Distress

I recall from some years ago when a mental health survivor of the system told me about a meeting he had with script writers working on a soap opera. They were trying to create a storyline regarding a character and his psychotic breakdown culminating in him running amok brandishing a knife. The script writers were happy with the storyline and were engaging in a discussion with mental health users to see whether they had anything to add. The guy telling me the story said the other people he was sitting with just sat there totally gob smacked. One of them explained to the script writers that the current storyline as it stood only reinforced stereotypes and stigma (mental distress=psycho=knife wielding maniac).

After much patient explaining the penny eventually dropped, wasn’t so much an eureka moment when that happened. They changed the storyline, taking out the needless psychodrama for psychodrama sake. Wasn’t perfect, it still referred to stereotypes and your average psych textbook but at least they took out the knife wielding moment. My own view and I said it to the guy who told me the story is that this exposes lazy script writing as opposed to researching the realities of mental distress.

Disability & Virtual Worlds: Universal Life

The island was designed visually and experientially to offer the best benefit to users with disabilities, fully available to adaptive services and developed in accordance with Universal Design principles. The island contains the following features: wide ramps scalable for avatars in wheelchairs; bright high-contrast signage more easily trackable by users with visual impairments; smoothly landscaped walkways to accommodate many types of users; and training offered in small sets to decrease fatigue.

Testing was performed in stages, with the first challenge being how to best present signage. Signs needed to be readable by the default camera view, which is angled downward at roughly 15 degrees from eye level, so all signs in the island’s Orientation Centre were compensated for the height of avatars using wheelchairs. The standard view in Second life includes the avatar in the frame, so signs were placed high off the ground. Paths and walkways were designed with as few stairways as possible, with no bumps that would make an avatar trip while walking. The surrounding land was modelled to meet the paths as closely as possible.

In the news:
Man builds stair climbing wheelchair

“It used to take us a good half an hour to walk downstairs from our fifth floor apartment to the ground floor after her injury,” he said.

“I realised that what she needed was an electric wheelchair that could go up and downstairs but such a thing didn’t exist.”

So, despite a complete lack of mechanical knowledge, Li sold his apartment for £44,000 to fund the project.

The wheelchair as a weapon

And though the 38-year-old father of two quickly learned sporting activities such as hand cycling and sit skiing, it wasn’t until he took a new self-defence class for wheelchair-users that he began to feel at ease with his new paralyzed status.

“When you become a paraplegic and are in a chair, physically your world changes. You’re looking up all of a sudden,” he says. “(The class) was a great way for me to get to know my body again, to get comfortable in the chair and to build up a sense of confidence.”

Recommended Reading for November 26

They hate you. Yes, you.

Because the first thing people use on us is always, “It’s not about you.” When I was a kid, when I first started reading about autism rights, it was so instinctive: of course it’s wrong to say “cure autism now.” Of course it’s wrong to say autism is a tragedy, a disease, it’s wrong to give kids electric shocks, it’s wrong to say you thought about killing your kid in a video about eliminating autistic people from the gene pool. Like Sinclair says it’s wrong to mourn for a living person. All this stuff was plain and clear and bright, and I was autistic, and I was being attacked.

Right?

Well, not to anyone else.

YouTube now adding close captioning automatically

We received word from our new star writer Tara that YouTube will begin using a machine to produce close captioning for its videos. At first, the “auto-caps” will only be seen on a select number of videos of the nearly 20 hours of footage uploaded to YouTube every minute.

This is an excellent step in the right direction to add more accessibility to the second most popular search engine on the planet. Deaf and hearing-impaired gamers will now be able to begin looking up cheat codes for their favorite video games just like everyone else!

Accessibility and Table Top Gaming: Rulebooks

To fully understand what accessibility means in a gaming context, game players and game designers need to think beyond simply what our own abilities are, and consider a larger audience that may not share the same physical abilities. If a game requires pointing a nerf gun at other players, how can you adapt the game (or can you?) for people who can’t point a nerf gun?

Also, proper accessibility for games requires not just that people with disabilities are able to participate, but that they can participate fully. In other words, in games with a Dungeon Master or Gamemaster, people with disabilities need to be able to take those roles as much as any other player of the game might. Game accessibility includes the ability to be the GM.

Captchas: The Bain of everyone’s Existence

So the question is how do you make a captcha accessible, without making it solvable by spam bots? There are actually many options. The current audio captchas include, typing in a set of numbers that you hear, and typing words that you hear. The draw back to both of these is that they can be difficult to hear, or too challenging. I often have to listen at least 2 to 3 times and then I still worry that I’ll get it wrong, but at least this option gives me the potential of being able to submit the form. Another option, and one of my favorites is to make the captcha a question that you have to solve, such as, “what is 2 plus four?” This is a simple math problem that most people should be able to solve, but it isn’t something a computer can solve. Finally, there soon will be a new option thanks to the work of the NFB and Townson University. They’re new system will use pictures of familiar objects and sounds that correspond to the pictures. If you are listening, the answer to the captcha is whatever the sound corresponds to. So for example the image may be of a lion, and the sound would be a lion roaring. The answer to the captcha is lion.

In the news:
New Grants Aim To Get More Disabled People Volunteering [UK]

Organisations can apply for grants between £250 and £5,000, which can be used to help overcome barriers that stop disabled people volunteering, such as specific equipment, a lack of suitable access and understanding of disability issues.

These grants are part of the £2 million ‘Access to Volunteering Fund’, which was developed by the Office of the Third Sector as a pilot scheme in Greater London, the West Midlands and the North West.

Please note: I’m in thesis crunch time now, so don’t hesitate to send me links to your own stuff, to other people’s stuff, or to the news, because my reading time on the internet is getting more and more limited. anna@disabledfeminists.com