
Surviving public school as a blind girl in 1955 - akharris
http://blog.tutorspree.com/post/53441808738/the-girl-with-bad-eyes
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jareds
I’m a totally blind individual who graduated high school in the United States
in 2004. I was fortunate that I grew up just as assistive technology was
becoming widely available and fairly easy to use. In 1955 a translator would
have to spend a lot of time learning to read and write braille. They would
then have to read a print book and manually retype it in braille. Given this
it’s understandable why Braille was not something that was pushed in the
public school system. By the time I started school anyone with basic computer
literacy could scan in a book, open the file in a translation program and
print a braille copy out using a braille embosser. While this technology isn’t
cheap I was fortunate enough to go to a school that could afford it as well as
having parents who advocated for me.

I think some of the issues this person had were caused by having some vision.
Because I’m totally blind it’s pretty clear that print won’t do me any good
and major accommodations have to be made. When you have some vision it’s
difficult for others to understand what you can and can’t do, especially if
that changes as your vision gets worse.

I have an issue with the only 10% of legally blind people can read braille
statistic because it is not made clear what the population of legally blind
people consists of. Often times being blind is in addition to severe mental
handicaps. If someone can’t use the bathroom on their own then learning to
read books is low on the list of things that are important. In addition
braille may not make sense to elderly people who recently lost their vision.
If their fingers are no longer sensitive enough to read braille then should
they still count in the statistic? Older people who have lost their vision
also have prior experience reading print material. This means that with the
prevalence of text to speech software it may not be worth learning braille if
they already know how words are spelled and how to construct a sentence.

~~~
foobarbazqux
Thanks for sharing your experience. A significant problem with your post that
I'm assuming you don't realize because you are blind is that there is only one
paragraph. It would be easier to read if you put two carriage returns or line
breaks before "I think some of the issues", and another two before "Often
times being blind". Currently it seems like a wall of text.

edit: much better!

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softbuilder
Schools - public schools anyway - seem to stumble the most with accommodating
children with disability. No one wants to deal with it. Sometimes budgets and
staffing get blamed, but most often it seems to just boil down to people being
forced out of their comfort zone and not wanting to deal with the "tards".
Happily the societal trend seems to be toward inclusion. Progress is just very
slow, with parents (and students) fighting for it every day.

~~~
mwcampbell
In the song "Subdivisions", Rush refers to suburbs -- or was it suburban high
schools -- as "the mass production zone". Regardless of what they meant, I
think that phrase is apt for public schools in general. Mass production works
best when the raw materials and the processes are homogeneous across all
units. Needless to say, talking about schools and children this way is
dehumanizing. But when we look at it this way, is it any wonder that public
schools stumble with accommodating children with disabilities? I have no idea
what to do about it; just rambling about a possible reason why the problem
exists.

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peterwwillis
I remember when I was learning web development how "Accessibility" was kind of
a feature to enhance your product. I wonder if anyone even considers it these
days. Seems like the mad rush to push out a barely-working product would leave
people with disabilities on the sidelines.

~~~
Zikes
While there are a number of things that must be done especially for
accessibility purposes, for the large part the web is trying to evolve towards
natural accessibility. The best example I can think of is SEO, as we attempt
to make our sites readable by the various search engine crawlers we also make
them more readable by software for the blind.

~~~
mwcampbell
For content-oriented web sites, you're correct. There are even workarounds for
the often-discussed problem of image tags without ALT attributes, so IMO that
one isn't a big deal.

Rich web applications are more challenging, since they often invent their own
UI widgets (or build on top of toolkits that do this), in addition to or even
instead of using standard links and form controls. For these, the W3C has a
standard called Accessible Rich Internet Applications
([http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria](http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria)). But in
my experience, ARIA is often subject to misinterpretation by the browser, the
assistive technology, the application/toolkit developer, or some combination
of the three.

~~~
Zikes
Agreed, in general rich web applications still have a long way to go in
regards to accessibility.

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fennecfoxen
"Nowadays, we have the digital tools to make information available to people
with vision loss almost instantaneously."

No, we can't let the Kindle read books aloud with text-to-speech; it'll
deprive publishers of audiobook revenue!

~~~
Ma8ee
Works with my Kindle touch. Not sure what you are talking about.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Do you remember this escapade? That's what I mean.
[http://news.cnet.com/amazon-retreats-on-kindles-text-to-
spee...](http://news.cnet.com/amazon-retreats-on-kindles-text-to-speech-
issue/) ... [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/arizona-state-settles-
ki...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/arizona-state-settles-kindle-
lawsuit/3540)

Don't know the latest on it but it was totally a legal battle.

~~~
jareds
Kindle has gotten a lot better. They finally made there iphone app accessible
a couple months ago which makes me happy. Now I'm no longer stuck with ibooks.

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mwcampbell
I don't buy the claim that the Web is 80% inaccessible. Does anyone have a
citation for that study?

~~~
jacalata
It might be from this 2004 study of UK government sites
[[http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-
detail/newsarticl...](http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-
detail/newsarticle/website-access-denied-to-disabled-people)]. A 2007 study
found 'less than half' but doesn't try and give a specific number
[[http://staff.washington.edu/tft/research/international/](http://staff.washington.edu/tft/research/international/)].
That study also refers to a UN snapshot study in 2006 that found <10% of a
small group of sites were accessible, and I also found this 2006 analysis of
British commercial sites saying that 75% of them had accessability problems
[[http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nomensa+claims+75%25+of+UK%27s...](http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nomensa+claims+75%25+of+UK%27s+FTSE+100+companies+fail+to+meet+DDA...-a0145071395)]

~~~
jareds
As a blind developer I'd estimate that 90% of sites are accessible. I consider
something accessible if I can use it even if it isn't intuitive. I could see
how other people with disabilities who aren’t as comfortable with assistive
technologies would have a harder time.

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ars
If you want to know more about what it's like for a blind person read "Do You
Remember the Color Blue?" by Sally Hobart Alexander.

It's aimed at children, but I found it interesting.

