Category Archives: Uncategorized

For Your Tool-Box: How to get YouTube Captions to make a Transcript

My friend Capriuni passed along to me this awesome YouTube video of “Your Brains” (original song by Jonathon Coulton). In and of itself, that’s not really note worthy – Capriuni is my source for many cool things in YouTube’s Deaf communities. The video itself is subtitled for the ASL-impaired.

That’s where things got interesting, because my friend particle_person passed along to me how to get the captions off a YouTube video so one can make a transcript without duplicating work!

This is awesome to me because, of course, transcripts are necessary even for subtitled or captioned work, for a variety of reasons.

I wanted to pass along particle_person’s instructions, and the video itself because it made me laugh.

Continue reading For Your Tool-Box: How to get YouTube Captions to make a Transcript

QuickPress: The Carnival of Mental Health is Up!

I’ve been so behind in my reading this month that I missed entirely The Blog Carnival of Mental Health Issue 1: Diagnosis

Welcome to the first Blog Carnival of Mental Health. I’m a day late, but I’m going to share with you an interesting if small collection of posts. I must say that it’s rather ironic that I’m hosting a carnival on the theme of diagnosis barely a week after receiving a new diagnosis myself. Anyway, enjoy!

Astrid says that the next Carnival will be hosted at CBTish. You can read the Call for Contributions there. Deadline is December 30!

Happy Post! Things That Make My Life … Er … Easier?

I have a love of cooking that often times taps me all the way to the bottom of my silverware drawer. I will often borrow tomorrow’s spoons to finish what I want to do today… I am sure that some of this is drawn of my stubborn and bullheaded nature.

To assist me in my passions, The Guy outfitted our tiny Korean-style kitchen with a thick, squishy mat from the local E-Mart (like a Korean department store that has groceries and household goods). It takes a ton of the strain off of my back and upper legs while I am standing for extended periods while chopping or kneading. I love it. It makes my life easier!

Apparently, I am not the only one in our home who loves it.

A light coloured wood floor with a wood-floor-looking squishy mat lying on it. There is a mound in the mat with a wee little white paw sticking out from under it.

[A wee little white paw sticks out from a wood-looking squishy mat on my wood floor. Who could it be?]

A wee bitty white-tipped black paw reaches out from under a wood-looking squishy mat, and attempts to snatch the tan toes of The Guy, clad in Navy Issued navy blue sweat pants.

Whoever it is seems to think that these tan toes look enticing! Or maybe she is defending the honor of my stolen Navy Issued sweat pants. I was looking for those!

A black cat with white whiskers and paws peeks out from under a wood-look squishy floor mat, with a serious-hunter look on her face.

Someone was playing “submarine kitteh” under the floor mat and was stalking our feet as we walked past. Of course, it rendered the mat useless, because who can walk on a mat that is being used by a kitty?

I guess it isn’t really making my life easier, but I guess that is why she came in a cute package, so that I don’t mind so much!

Hope this brightened your day just a little bit!

WIN!: Federal Court Orders Canadian Government To Make Websites Accessible To Screen Readers!

I haven’t even had time to process this yet – I just found out when my friend called me to ask if I had heard the news. Donna Jodham has won her case against the Canadian Government – Government websites will now have 15 months to follow their own accessibility guidelines.

Canada must make Web accessible to blind

A federal court ruled Monday the government had denied Jodhan’s equality rights by not providing equal access to government programs online.

“She has been denied equal access to, and benefit from, government information and services provided online to the public on the Internet, and that this constitutes discrimination against her on the basis of her physical disability, namely that she is blind,” Justice Michael Kelen wrote in his ruling.

The government was not living up to its own 2001 accessibility standards, Kelen ruled, and he gave Ottawa 15 months to make its Web sites more accessible.

In a rare move, Kelen said the court would monitor the government’s implementation of online services for the visually impaired to ensure it complies by the deadline.

I am so excited to learn of this! Congratulations, Donna – your hard work is greatly appreciated!

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: The Awkward Lines of -ist Language

[The scene sets with OYD, a slightly pale yet never-the-less still quite indigenous woman, sitting down to her trusty Macbook Pro, a laptop named “Lappy”, who has seen better days. She sets down and opens up her “drafts” tab under FWD/Forward, where she notices that egads! she has been working on this book review for over a month, and Oh my! how it must have been a long time since she has completed one. She cracks her “double jointed” knuckles like she does it too often, tucks a strand of brown hair behind her ear. She drags the review out of “drafts”, dusts it off, reaches for anything caffeinated, and begins to type.]

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 1st edition cover. A black background with plastic toy figures of a cowboy and an indian, with the title and author's name in chunky green and white letters.I like media where I can consume it, enjoy it, and get a sense that I am experiencing something that touches on experiences that are my own, that seems real to me with out over-exaggerating them (mostly). I also enjoy it when certain traits about characters are touched upon as a description, as part of who that character is, but then they are not brought up as Huge Deals throughout the entirety of the book.

These are a few things that really endeared Alexie Sherman’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to me. Sherman created a protagonist “Junior”, who was born into the world with several oppressions, living on the axis of poverty, race, and disability. Within the first few pages of the book Junior gives a pretty good run down of how each of these things affects his life, and has always affected his life from the moment he was born. From never having quite enough to eat, to the way his “grease on the brain” has given him a stutter and seizures.

But that is where Alexie leaves the discussion about Junior’s disability. It is just a part of him, a description of his character. It isn’t some great obstacle he has to overcome. His disability isn’t some plot point, and it doesn’t help the other people around him become inspired about trying harder or appreciating their lives more. In fact, he goes into great detail early on, in those first few pages, to explain that the reservation kids often bully him. From an excerpt on NPR:

You wouldn’t think there is anything life threatening about speech impediments, but let me tell you, there is nothing more dangerous than being a kid with a stutter and a lisp.

A five-year-old is cute when he lisps and stutters. Heck, most of the big-time kid actors stuttered and lisped their way to stardom.

And, jeez, you’re still fairly cute when you’re a stuttering and lisping six-, seven-, and eight-year-old, but it’s all over when you turn nine and ten.

After that, your stutter and lisp turn you into a retard.

And if you’re fourteen years old, like me, and you’re still stuttering and lisping, then you become the biggest retard in the world.

Everybody on the rez calls me a retard about twice a day. They call me retard when they are pantsing me or stuffing my head in the toilet or just smacking me upside the head.

I’m not even writing down this story the way I actually talk, because I’d have to fill it with stutters and lisps, and then you’d be wondering why you’re reading a story written by such a retard.

Do you know what happens to retards on the rez?

We get beat up.

At least once a month.

Yep, I belong to the Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club.

Sure I want to go outside. Every kid wants to go outside. But it is safer to stay at home. So I mostly hang out alone in my bedroom and read books and draw cartoons.

Then, he moves leaves it there. We know he deals with these things as part of his life, but they do not define his life. Even the most horrible and hurtful parts of his life with disability are not defining his life.

Some other things that are not defined by Junior’s particular disability:

  • His grades in school — He does well in school, and this point becomes part of the main plot, so I won’t give too much away for anyone who plans to read this book.
  • His ability to participate in sports — Junior plays many sports, including contact sports. He is a good basketball player, playing on the school’s team.
  • His ability to have romantic relationships — Despite his believing how shallow it is, Junior has a girlfriend, and as it turns out, she actually likes him! Imagine that!

The other aspect of this book that I enjoyed, though I don’t expect every reader to view the same way, is that the Indian Reservation depicted has a lot of truth to it from my own experiences of having grown up on and around my own as a girl. Twenty, and even ten years ago, our reservation life was not so far off from the one described here, with the exception of perhaps the climate being slightly different, and perhaps I was too young to understand and remember anything about crime rates. But there was poverty, and then there was crushing poverty where I am from. There was alcoholism, though I would venture that perhaps it wasn’t the hot-button stereotype that I feel is portrayed at times in Alexie’s book. I don’t know. Every Native community is different, for sure, with their own unique set of problems. While I feel that there is a lot of truth to what Sherman Alexie has created, I also feel that there is a sweeping generalization. So, it hits and it misses, and I would encourage you to read it for yourself and decide what you think.

There are a lot of instances of language that I would not recommend in a progressive or social change setting going on here in this book. I see it being useful and very much achieving its purpose, for example, there is a very racist joke told by a white boy that Junior meets on his first day of school, using the “n”, which I will not repeat, but which is disparaging to Natives and Black people alike. Junior demonstrates an intolerance for it, without missing a beat, and in Junior’s point of view, the kid respects him for it. But, I have to wonder, is it because of how Junior addresses it, or because this particular student realizes that what he said was hurtful and wrong? The demonstration of how wrong racism is in YA literature is something I want to see more, but I question, sometimes, the ways in which we see it handled. There is almost no discussion or consideration of why this is wrong, just the very visceral use of very hateful words (like above, with the use of the “r” word in so casual a context). Just like using rape as a metaphor to show that a “bad” guy is bad, I don’t need to see or read -ist language for shock value to confront -isms. However, a well placed word could have the proper effect if viewed through the proper lens, but I don’t know if that is quite so obvious here. Junior simply reacts, saying he has to defend Black people, and Indians, but he doesn’t go into much else.

I will also note on the Wise White Person, or WWP, as I will. It takes a WWP living on the rez to point out all of Junior’s problems early on, and essentially Save Him! from the Rotten Destitution! Without a WWP, why poor Junior might be dead, the victim of a trailer fire started by grease from frybread, helplessly drunk and passed out.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is an excellent book, worth reading, for many reasons, but I caution you, gentle readers, there are many themes addressed, in very direct and raw ways that I am still not sure that I wholly approve of, and yet, as a non-white, Native American, woman, with a disability, I am not fully sure that fully disapprove of all of them either.

Oh, except for the sexist language. I found no use for that at all. I found no point where that taught any lesson, except where young boys were using it to show that “Hey!  Women and girls’ bodies are weak, so calling you a woman or a girl body part means you are weak! Har har!” You get no points there, Alexie. Misogyny wins again! Whee!

Reminder! Deadline for Submissions to the September Disability Blog Carnival is Tuesday night!

I am totally cheating and just reposting what Ouyang Dan said earlier!

Astrid, of Astrid’s Journal, has agreed after much consideration to host the September edition of the Disability Blog Carnival, and we at FWD/Forward are enthusiastic to support that decision!

Astrid has chosen the theme “Identity”:

Think of it as broadly as you want. Posts relating to transforming identities, are of course especially welcome, as they honor both themes. Just a reminder that, even though this is a disability blog carnival, we honor intersectionality, so racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and any other type of identities also count, as long as the post is somewhat relevant to disability.

Comments can be submitted preferably here or else at the Disability Studies, Temple U. blog. The deadline for submissions will be Tuesday night, September 21 – Tuesday night your time, so don’t worry about my living in Europe. I hope to post the carnival on Friday, September 24 – whenever it suits me, my time.

We hope you will consider submitting something for the Carnival. Remember, the theme is a way to get you started, and we hope that you will interpret it to how it applies to your own situation, keeping the general spirit of intersectionality in mind.

Again, thanks to Astrid for taking this on, because without volunteers, there would be no Carnival!

Be sure, if you haven’t already, to check out the August edition of The Disability Carnival at Brilliant Mind, Broken Body, hosted by Kali.

Things That Make My Life Easier, An Invitation (Part 3 of 3)

Cross-posted: three rivers fog, FWD/Forward, Feministe.

Part 1Part 2Part 3

This is a series I always hoped would catch on. Because hey, I can write about stuff that helps me live my life, but that’s only one experience. I would love to see a community full of people writing resource posts for other folks who are living our different sorts of lives. I know we all negotiate shortcuts in the process of getting through our days. I know we all have well-trusted tips and tricks for dealing with society’s demands of us — fair or not. And I think we can all share them — writing about our own experience, and letting it apply where it might, and not where it doesn’t — and not creating expectations of individuals to respond to individually-shared recommendations, with all the problems that can cause.

Anyway, there is a great range of experience within the world of disability, much more than is let on by mainstream narratives, and another reason I appreciate the chance for us to talk about it is that it exposes the nondisabled world to all the things that go into living with a disability, the way that disability can make life very different, and appreciating that in a more-than-superficial way. While knowledge of certain experiences doesn’t eradicate prejudice against them, ignorance certainly makes it more likely, and is one of the easier issues to address — we talk about our experience (among ourselves and for all listeners); they catch parts of it and get curious and start listening.

No one is required to educate those who hold privilege over them, but most of us do practice the art of education every single day, as our lives play out in front of those around us. We are used to explaining things. It is tiring, and it is wrong when people demand or expect it of us. But when we give it freely — that can do a whole world of good. What makes it bad is not the act of an unprivileged person explaining pieces of their life to a privileged person — what makes it bad is the privileged party’s expectation that we will explain. That is what sours the entire experience.

But sharing what helps us with our lives — hopefully helping other people in similar positions who might be able to use the knowledge we gain from our day-to-day struggles — there is room for great good in that.

There is no shame in doing things differently. There is no shame in taking a different route to reach the same end point. There is no shame in reaching a different end point, even! If it works for you, if it makes your life easier, that is what matters. Not your conformity to expected methods of doing things, but the fact that it accomplishes your starting goal or gets you closer to accomplishing it.

And, hey, part of disability is to learn to compromise, and change goals altogether. To realize that all the milestones you are “supposed” to reach aren’t necessary to a successful, enjoyable life. You don’t have to have a career, or even a job; you don’t have to complete or even begin higher education; you don’t have to find a heteronormative partner, get married and have kids. You don’t have to fulfill all the responsibilities heaped on you by a society built around the particular qualities of nondisabled people. You don’t have to shower every day. You don’t have to appear “normal.” You don’t have to have a huge local social circle. What you have to do is whatever makes the struggles of your life easier on you. That is all.

There is no shame in that. There is no moral value attached to a method of doing something. It’s a method, that’s all. Just a method. One method. Not the only option.

In that spirit, I’m going to try to pick this series back up, and I’m hoping that maybe other folks will pick it up too. Because I really do believe it has great potential for the disabled community. We already come together and share resources; maybe we can do that while communicating our fundamental humanity to the outside world as well. And they need to listen.

They’ve gotta learn at some point – they never know when we’re going to spring a pop quiz!

So please, listen and read, and write or speak your own experience. Let me know if this is something you’d like to do, and if you end up writing anything! I don’t want this to be my series. I want it to be everyone’s.

Here’s what I’ve written on so far:

intro post / shower chair, shower chair redux / Tempurpedic Symphony pillow / cute pill case / TENS unit

Readers — what can you add to that?

Things That Make My Life Easier, A Reintroduction (Part 2 of 3)

Part 1 Part 2 — Part 3

In the realm of disability, there is a lot of terminology like: assistive device, accommodation, care services, mobility aid, various sorts of therapy/treatment (physical/behavioral/occupational/speech/etc.); and so forth, about things/people/services which fill various common needs that people with disabilities share. The unfortunate thing about these terms is that they imply particularity to disability. But in truth, these things are not special to disabled people.

What are the needs being met? Things like: mobility and transportation, mental function, physical wellness, self-care. But we do not name the things abled people use to fill those needs as being special to abled people. This is because ability is an unmarked identity. That is, ability is seen as normal. The needs and behaviors surrounding ability fade into invisibility; they are not about ability, they just are. But disability is marked — it is special, notable. It can never just be; it is always about something, always representing and signifying something particular.

Along those lines, consider these examples:

  • When an abled person wears shoes, they are not called “mobility aids.” Shoes are just things that normal people wear to do normal things. But canes, wheelchairs, and braces are special “mobility aids,” rather than just being things that normal people use to do normal things.
  • When an abled person rides in a car, bicycle, or public transportation, they are not using “mobility aids.” They are just using transportation.
  • When an abled person gets their hair cut, the stylist is not called their “personal care assistant.” Only disabled people need assistance with personal care tasks.
  • When an abled person eats a meal cooked for them by someone else — a spouse or parent, a cafeteria or food court, a restaurant — the person preparing the food is not their “personal care assistant,” despite doing for the abled person the same thing PAs do for PWD every day.
  • When an abled person uses a remote control on their television, this is not called an “assistive device.”
  • When an abled person types out words on a plastic board with small key blocks indicating letters of the alphabet while staring at a screen, or speaks words into the bottom area of a plastic-and-metal hand-held electronic device while holding the top to their ear, this is not called “facilitated communication.”
  • When an abled person is put through training at their place of work so that they can learn the tasks  they will be performing for pay, this is not called “occupational therapy” or “vocational therapy.”
  • When an abled person wears a bra, or a jock strap, or any clothing at all, this is not considered in the same category as slings or braces.
  • When an abled person climbs the stairs, they are not considered to be a special device thought up just for abled mobility.
  • When an abled person takes the escalator, they are not considered in the same category as the elevator or wheelchair ramp.

The trend evident here is that there are all sorts of things that help people live their lives. Having help to accomplish things — basic or beyond — is not special to disability. It is a fundamental part of humanity. Our society would not exist without all the little things we do, from products and tools to techniques and tricks to other people and relationships, to help us get through this world a little bit easier.

I want to emphasize this for a reason. A common trope in mainstream discussion on disability is that disabled people are helpless, and abled folk must take on the noble burden of keeping them alive, afloat. Disabled people need help with doing things, and it’s such a pitiable condition to be in, dependent on other people and things to get through life. Abled people pat each other on the back for the strength and courage and sacrifice they make in helping disabled people in their family or community. They often lament that would kill themselves before living as a person who needs help with things! And some of them take their considerable platforms to argue that because disabled people need help with doing things, their lives must not be good-enough-as-they-are, therefore their lives are not worth living at all, and we (the abled world) should withdraw all help and let them all die like they should have done as infants. (No, seriously, if your name is Peter Singer and/or you are the New York Times, this is what you say in all seriousness.)

In short, this idea of help-as-special-to-disability can be dangerous.

This is why I’ve come to like Things That Make My Life Easier: because that’s what they are. They aren’t super-special things that only people with disabilities can use. They aren’t super-special things that only people with disabilities need. They also aren’t things to be ashamed of. It shouldn’t be a hit to anybody’s pride to take shortcuts or to do things in an unconventional way. It shouldn’t be a possible insult to disabled people to associate themselves with icky, pitiable disability, and it also shouldn’t be a point of anxiety for disabled people who have concerns about admitting any sort of dependence or need for help. We can admit that we need things — or even just that those things are nice to have around — without it having to be a referendum on our identity, on our worth as a human being.

Or at least, I’d like it if we were able to!

So some of the things I post about are silly little things. Because they help me. Some of them are things that are particular to my disability — things that an abled person will likely not have to ever deal with, and may not be able to relate to — but that’s part of the human experience. I am a human being; there are other people like me who share these concerns, and they are human too. Part of the human experience is our experience. Because we are human. It shouldn’t have to be repeated like that, but it does. Disabled people have claim on the human experience. We can talk about our experience as disabled people, and it is not only about disability-in-particular, but about humanity itself. No matter how much it flames the insecurities of abled people, this is truth.

Next: An Invitation

Cross-posted: three rivers fog, FWD/Forward, Feministe.