It’s my f**king money….

This post is going to be about what it’s like to manage your money while blind. I’m sure there is plenty of prurient interest in the best way to scam a blindy, but I’m not going to cover that here. I am going to talk about just how useless, ableist and thoughtless government agencies and banks are when it comes to treating us as human beings with rights like everyone else.

My metaphorical eye (actually my ear) was caught by this Irish Times headline on 7th April 2020:

Coronavirus: Lack of electronic transfers for blind allowance causing hardship

The article by Social Affairs correspondant, Kitty Holland, was discussing the piecemeal approach of the HSE when it comes to issuing the Blind Welfare Allowance.  Some regions are offering to issue the payment via Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), while other regions persist in sending out a physical cheque, which needs to be taken to a physical bank branch and physically lodged into an account. In this era of social distancing, self-isolation and cocooning, this presents a real challenge to blind people trying to stay healthy.

But the problems are deeper, further back in time and more bizarrely convoluted than that. Strap yourselves in…

You’re blind, not disabled….

If you are “registered blind” in Ireland, you are special. I mean that in the worst possible way. In terms of social welfare supports, we’re not treated like other disabled people. We receive the Blind Persons’ Pension, not a Disability Benefit. As the “Pension” part of our payment suggests, the payment is managed by the Old Age Pension office – just one of many examples of structural ableism, lumping the disabled and the elderly together. I’ve been a pensioner since I was 18.

Here’s one example of just how ludicrous that system is. While I was at university, I went onto the “Back to Education Allowance” – another misnomer, as I had been in education continuously since the age of 2. The allowance meant I could access an annual book allowance, and could essentially hang on to all my other benefits. When I finally left university, I was setting up as a self-employed sole trader, and wanted to switch onto the “Back to Work (Enterprise) Allowance”. Again, a misnomer, as I hadn’t been technically unemployed. Again, this was a scheme that facilitated me hanging on to benefits while setting myself up as self-employed. Imagine the day when I rang up the Old Age Pension office:

“Hello; I’m currently on the Back to Education Allowance, and I want to switch to the Back to Work Enterprise Allowance.”

“Ummm…. Hang on there while I transfer you to someone else.”

I got transferred about 5 times. Sure why would anyone in the Old Age Pension office know the first thing about either Educational or Work benefits?

So what’s this Welfare Allowance thing?

Good question. On top of the weekly Blind Pension, whereby I qualify essentially for the maximum amount of social welfare, there’s a means-tested Blind Welfare Allowance. I get this monthly, and it’s meant to “offset the additional costs associated with being blind”.  It’s not enough to pay for specialised eyewear, magnification, Braille production, assistive technology or even having a working iPhone, (rapidly becoming the de facto do-everything assistive bit of kit for blindies). My Welfare Allowance tends to cover getting an order of toiletries, some books, new underwear…. anything that isn’t a daily or weekly expense, but requires a bit of capital. Shouldn’t that kind of thing be covered by the weekly basic payment? Yes; yes it should, as many people on emergency benefits during the Covid-19 crisis have discovered. As soon as there was a massive increase in the number of people signing on for unemployment benefits, those who expected their jobs back afterwards kicked up shit about how little money they were expected to live on, and the government increased that payment from €220 per week to €350 per week.

I dream of such riches.

But there’s Braille on ATMs, right?

On to the banks. These are becoming less accessible as time goes on. The Braille markings on ATMs are really just adding insult to injury. Fine, I can tell that this is button number 1 and that is button number 6. But there’s no way in hell of finding out what those buttons actually do. I once tried to use an ATM that had a little headphone socket to hear what  was on the screen. In fact, I deliberately moved my account to that bank (which no longer exists) because they had a lovely ramp up to their door, push-button doors into the branch and this magic ATM. Imagine my surprise when no audio came through my headphones. It might have had audio information when it was first installed, but no-one had checked that it was still working. They might never have checked it at all.

But I’m sure many bankers have seen those Braille-marked buttons and assumed that it made the machines totally accessible. The concept can be quite difficult to explain to Ableds. I once had to explain to a local authority that their info-terminals were no use to a VIP, even with JAWS installed. If you can’t see the touchscreen, how do you know which part of the screen to touch to make it talk?

Then there’s the increased automation of bank transactions; a transparent move by corporations to save money by employing fewer humans. This is the same trend that has seen smaller, rural branches cut to destruction. My local bank branch has a load of machines which they do everything in their power to make you use instead of going to a counter and speaking to a human. By “everything in their power”, I include the practice of charging 600% for a “staff-assisted” transaction in comparison to an automated transaction. I’ll say that again. If you go to a counter and lodge your Blind Welfare Allowance cheque with a member of staff, it will cost you 6 times as much as using one of the machines.

Why not just use the machines?

I sincerely hope, dear reader, that you can guess where this is going. The machines are not accessible to VIPs. Furthermore, in my local branch, they are surrounded by privacy shields which don’t provide enough space to get near them in a wheelchair . So disabled clients have no choice but to make “staff-asisted” transactions, and pay 6 times as much for the privilege.

I’m not even going to approach the tawdry history of my struggles with online banking, especially with the use of card-readers with tiny buttons and invisible screens. Back to the Kitty Holland article…

Cheques and Balances

Aside from the usual thrill of coming across any mention of disability in mainstream media, this article grabbed my attention because I had just been sent a letter about this very issue. And yes, I mean a letter. In tiny print. In the post.

I could tell that it was from the HSE because their logo was on the envelope. So I didn’t even bother opening it until my trusty PA came round. She’s my trusty PA because she’s the one I trust to see me naked, file my private papers and have access to my bank details. When she arrived for work, I handed her the letter, saying “This is probably another normal-print letter from the HSE saying: We’ve just realised how ludicrous it is to keep sending you cheques when you’re not supposed to leave the house at the moment, so here’s a form you can’t read so that we can finally lodge the money straight into your account, which will also save your extravagant bank charges.” To my astonishment, my PA said “Yes, but not in those exact words!”

To recap, this was a letter and a form being sent out exclusively to blind and visually impaired people. Neither the letter nor the form was in an accessible format, and the form required filling in by hand. Their only nod to alternative formatting was the possibility of emailing the completed form back to them. So when I emailed it to them, this was the body text I included with my message:

Please find attached my form requesting a change to receiving my blind welfare allowance.

• The letter should have been sent in an accessible format – I use Braille
• The form should have been available in an accessible digital format.

My rights to financial autonomy and privacy have been violated, as I had no choice but to get a third party to fill in this form. Further, the form was not specific to people in receipt of benefits, and as such, was confusing and made us feel like an after-thought, not a priority.

As you are managing a fund specific to blind and visually impaired people, you should instigate policies of informational accessibility as a matter of urgency. It is your obligation under the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD), to which Ireland is a signatory.

Why do I still have to send these messages to government agencies? Especially those tasked with supporting VIPs and disabled people? It’s getting old, and the novelty is wearing very thin.

Updating “Web Accessibility – Why Bother?”

I have begun work to update my post, “Web Accessibility – Why Bother?“, in the light of the Irish government finally ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD).

(Note: it only took our government 11 years from signing the Convention in 2007 to ratifying it in 2018. They have yet to ratify the “Optional Protocol”, which would enable Irish citizens to hold the government to account in terms of implementing the Convention.)

I wanted to get a list of all the countries who have signed and ratified the Convention, so I followed a link to a page on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). This is the page I was brought to:

http://indicators.ohchr.org/

The only way the information I was looking for was displayed was in an untagged image map.

The upshot of all this is that I’ve just e-mailed the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights as follows:

Hi,

I have been researching the UNCRPD with specific reference to provisions for accessibility to digital information. I visited the following page to obtain a list of signatories to the UNCRPD and its optional protocol:

http://indicators.ohchr.org/

I could not find such a list accessible to a blind person using screen-reading assistive software, only an “interactive map”.

I hope you can appreciate the irony of being unable to access information relating to the right to access information! Can you please ensure that any information presented in a graphic is also presented in simple, accessible text? Otherwise, it could be embarrassing to the UNOHCHR!

Very best wishes

Isolde Carmody

Visually Impaired citizen of Ireland

You couldn’t make it up!

Here is the text of what I said in the above video:

 

Hello!

You may or may not know that, for the first time in the up-coming referendum, blind people – finally – have won the right to a private ballot. Up until now, there was no way to have a private ballot if you couldn’t read the ballot paper and write on it yourself.  As a  work-around, for many years, people like myself have been entitled to the postal vote. But in fact, this was a system that was set up for people who could not physically get to a polling station on the day of the vote. So it was used as a way of ensuring that people with disabilities, particularly in rural areas, could still manage to get a vote.

However, it was not a guarantee if you had a disability. A couple of years ago, in Dublin, my mother was turned down the postal vote because she had a guide dog and access to public transport.  It was deemed that she could get to her polling station without any extra assistance. So then it became an issue of: How are you supposed to vote privately when you can’t see the ballot paper?

Robbie Sinnott succeeded in taking a case to the Supreme Court [*] under the Equality Act [**]. It means that, this time around, in polling stations around Ireland, there will be a Braille and large print template that will sit over the ballot paper, which will facilitate people with visual impairments and blind people being able to vote on their own. However, this does not extend to the postal vote.

I am going to demonstrate to you why it does need to be extended to the postal vote. I have difficulty leaving the house sometimes. My pain condition fluctuates massively from day to day, as do my energy levels. It could well happen that, on the day of a vote, I would not be able to get out of bed or out of my house. I am also visually impaired. So I am going to show you why the postal vote needs to have that template as well, in order to make sure that I also have the right to a private ballot. Which, currently, I don’t.

[In this section, I am going through the papers in the envelope containing my postal ballot paper]

This arrived in the post the other day. [Opens envelope.] Inside, there is… well, there’s a big paper-clip, so I know there’s a load of things clipped together.

So, that is what looks like the ballot paper. Now, in this case, it’s a referendum, so there’s only a yes or no. That’s relatively simple for me to work out. However, I’ve been presented with ballot papers with twenty-plus names on it. In that case, trying to make sure that you’re writing in the correct box beside the correct person is a real lottery.

If there’s one thing an election shouldn’t be, it’s a lottery.

It also includes forms, and these forms and directions and all the rest of it – they’re all just in ordinary print.

I can’t read that!

In fact, I have to get my Personal Assistant to go through all the forms, fill out any bits of information that need to be filled out, and she just puts an X where I need to sign – and I sign it. Also, she has to determine which is the correct envelope to put the correct bit of paper in. I’ve been given two here and… [shrugs] I don’t know what’s on them!

And then… I think this is the instructions, which, again, my Personal Assistant has to read out to me.

Given that it’s a referendum, obviously it’s quite straight-forward. There’s a “Yes” and a “No”, and I’m pretty sure the “Yes” will be on top and the “No” will be underneath. Nonetheless, the principle of me also being able to access a Braille and large print template, which is a frame that would fit over the ballot paper… I think it has all the text, but in much larger print, and it also has Braille. I’d be able to lay it on top of the ballot paper, read the Braille, then there would be a nicely, clearly marked tactile box. I’d be able to stick a pen into the correct box and make my mark.

I can’t do that under the current system, and therefore the government has not yet actually extended the private ballot to all the citizens of Ireland of legal voting age in every other respect – apart from disability.

That needs to change.

Remember to get out and vote, however and wherever you’re doing it.

The referendum on repealing the 8th Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland takes place on 25th May, 2018… unless, like me, you’ve already voted!

[* The case was won in the High Court]

[** I was thinking in terms of the Equality Act 2000, which has had a number of updates since. The link takes you to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the statutory body for protecting and advancing human rights and equality in Ireland]

Three Utterly Empty Gestures Aimed at the Blind

 

You could say that any gesture aimed at the blind is an empty one. These are three of my favourites:

Relief Map of Edinburgh

This is a bronze relief map of Edinburgh, located at The Mound just off Prince’s Street

 

There is a plaque affixed to this bronze sculpture which reads:

PRESENTED TO THE CITY OF EDINBURGH BY THE STAFF OF MARKS & SPENCER, EDINBURGH IN 1984 TO MARK THE COMPANY’S CENTENARY. THIS RELIEF WAS CRAFTED TO ENABLE PEOPLE WITH IMPAIRED VISION TO ENJOY THE GRANDEUR OF THE CITY.

from Canmore.org.uk

This message is first in Braille, then in relief letters. Isn’t that nice? The important information, that this is a selfless gift from a thoughtful corporation to the poor deficient blindies for their edification and enjoyment, can be read by any literarte English-speaker.

Such a pity that the street names and all other text on the map is only in relief letters, not Braille. So you can count the many lumps and bumps that Edinburgh has to offer the curious traveller, but don’t expect any of those lumps and bumps to convey any useful information.

(I love Edinburgh, despite its cobbles and steps and impossible slopes. I first encountered this sculpture in 1995 while attending the Edinburgh Punk’s Picnic.)

 

Garden for the Blind, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin

A visitor reading the Braille signage in the garden for the blind in St Stephen’s Green, Dublin City Centre. From Yelp.com

Original image on Yelp.com

In St Stephen’s Green, in the heart of Dublin, there is a garden for the blind. It’s safely tucked away from public eyes, in an out-of-the-way nook that you would never find if you didn’t know it was there.

In this little nook is a wall, a little taller than waist-height if you’re standing. Along that wall is a series of bronze plaques, each bearing the name of a plant in Braille and in relief letters. In fact, this was my first encounter with Braille in a public setting, before I had learned to read Braille, and I distinctly remember recognising the “S” by comparing the Braille with the Latin characters. The names of the plants include Lamb’s Ears, a furry-leaved plant I rmember from early childhood, and Lavender, a plant I still make any excuse to brush against.

What a lovely idea. In Dublin’s iconic city centre park, a place specially constructed for blind people to access and appreciate plant-life. Shame no-one told the gardeners. Any time I’ve been there, the plants nearest to those signs bear no relationship to the named plants. On at least one occasion, the nearest plants were spiky and unpleasant to touch and smell. Another good idea gone to waste!

TCD Arts Block

Spot the difference… From The Daily Edge

Modelled on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, apparently – but they used the wrong type of stone in the bricks, so they couldn’t grow plants in the cavernous ceiling blocks. But that doesn’t explain the Blade Runner motif running through the building, down to the blue toilet lights.

 Fiona Hyde, writing on TheDailyEdge.com

From September 1995 to November 2005, I studied Arts and Humanities in Trinity College, Dublin. All my lectures and tutorials took place in the infamous Arts Block. How to describe this award-winning architectural gem?

When I started, this was a 5 storey building. They built a 6thloor on top in the early 2000s, which meant I was travelling in an outdoor freight lift for a while. And nearly got carbon monoxide poisoning while taking an exam, since the builders’ generator was positioned directly in front of an air-vent intake. But I digress.

The first confusing thing about this building is that the floors are numbered using the  American system. So rather than having a ground floor with the first floor above it, you have level 1 with level 2 above it.

The second confusing thing is that the main floor, at street level, is level 2.

The third, and perhaps most baffling element of the design, is that each floor gets smaller as you ascend. This means there are fewer rooms on level 4 than on level 3.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

Each room is given a 4-digit number, starting with the level number. So there was a tutorial room in the English Department numbered 4012, and the main Philosophy tutorial room was 5012.

But these rooms were not directly above one another, nor were they the same distance from the lift, nor were they in an analogous position in any way to one another. In fact, every floor in the Arts Block looks just similar enough to give you some sense of familiarity, but is laid out just differently enough to give a young person the experience of having dementia.

During my tenure, the room numbers were in black on a perspex panel screwed to the door near its top. Each door had a fluorescent light shining directly down on the door, with the effect that the closer you stood to the door, the more intense was the shine on this perspex panel, rendering the numbers even more invisible than their eye-level-for-giants positioning already did.

In one of my last terms there, one of my classes was scheduled in a room on level 3 I had never been in before. I think it even started 31**, rather than the cosy central 30**s, given it a truly exotic flavour. I don’t even know what the nearest Departmental office was. For the first time in nearly a decade, I decided to make use of something I had walked past repeatedly but never explored.

Tucked away in a discrete, out-of-the-way, randomly assigned corner of each floor was a big brown tactile floor-plan. I had stumbled across these – usually quite literally – on many occasions, thinking “Oh. That’s cool.”  Suddenly, I had the most genuine reason in the world to check it out.

“Ok, so this is the front of the building overlooking Fellow’s Square. So this must be the lift I’ve just come out of. I’ll see what the numbers are in the nearest corridor….”

“#1… #1… #1… Hmmm….”

“I’ll check these rooms further away from the lift. I’m pretty sure that’s the direction I need to go in….”

“#1… #1… #1…”

“…Oh…”

It turns out that this extravagant, visible, and probably costly, demonstration of how inclusive Trinity College was of its blind students was entirely without function. Or it may have had a function, (perhaps ticking a box on a funding form?), which had nothing to do with a blind person navigating the nightmare industrial-institutional fantasy that was, is, and ever shall be the Arts Block.

So there you have it. Three concrete (and bronze and paper) examples of how accessibility is not simply a question of building something and then forgetting about it. Nor is accessibility about non-disabled people deciding what would make their space more accessible without bothering to check with the people they are supposedly benefitting. My conclusion? That these monuments are a gift to the sighted public, so that they can feel smug and warm. And if we blindies and crips can’t make use out of these graciously bestowed gifts, we’re obviously not trying hard enough.

 

Updates: MY GOVERNMENT IS KEEPING ME UNDER HOUSE ARREST

Since publishing this blog post on Friday, I have done this radio interview with local station, Ocean FM:

Then, sitting in the doctor’s waiting room this evening, I heard this segment on RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime:

DriveTime – RTE Radio 1 – Monday 22nd August: Home Care Services

I have e-mailed the programme to point out the connection between the two stories. However, I don’t use Twitter! So please feel free to tweet @DriveTimeRTE

ORIGINAL POST:

Here is a letter I sent to the Physical and Sensory Disability service in the North-West this week:

 

12^th August, 2016

Re: Emergency increase in Personal Assistance hours for client with multiple disabilities

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to request an urgent increase in Personal Assistance (PA) hours until early 2017. I am visually impaired and have restricted physical mobility, meaning that I need to use a guide dog and a powerchair to leave my own house for medical appointments, shopping, banking and participating in society. I have outlined the nature of my disabilities and their impact on my daily life in the attached Disability Impact Statement, and my specific requirements from a Personal Assistant in the attached form.

My current guide dog has had to retire due to health concerns. Due to my unusual set of needs, a succession dog will not be available to work with me until early 2017. This leaves me with severely restricted mobility in the interim.

As well as providing sighted guidance for mobility outside the home, my specially-trained dog provided additional mobility assistance within the home. The loss of this essential part of my independent living toolkit therefore has a significant and acute impact on my daily life.

I live alone, and currently have 15 PA hours per week, which are almost entirely used for assistance with personal care, housework and, to a minimal degree, accessing print materials within my own home. I already have very limited access to any assistance with transport or tasks outside the home. Having no assistance dog now means I am restricted to a few essential journeys very close to home (within 1-2 km) on familiar routes with good environmental accessibility.

In my current situation, I cannot visit my parents in Dublin, visit any friends’ houses or participate in many recommended theraputic activities e.g. a group singing project organised by the mental health service to which I was referred by the occupational therapist. If I drop, spill or break something on the floor, I may have to wait for 23 hours before a PA is available to clear it up or find essential items for me. When I need to make a medical appointment, I have to wait until a friend with a car is present before I can arrange a time that I can attend.

The interaction of my visual impairment with my mobility impairment means that I am in an unusually challenging position. These impairments combine in unique and often unforeseen ways to create complex barriers to my participation in society and living independently. As such, they should be understood as a form of “third impairment”, with needs distinct from people with only a physical or a sensory disability. The combination of Personal Assistance, powerchair and guide-dog is an essential tool for my independent living. Without that special combination, I am unable to leave my front door by myself. Without a working guide-dog, I urgently need a much higher degree of Personal Assistance to maintain my level of independence.

Thank you for your consideration.

Yours,

Isolde Carmody

 

Within 24 hours of writing that letter, my cat puked somewhere in my bedroom. I couldn’t see where, but boy could I smell it! There would be no PA available to clear it up for me for another 18 hours. Despite keeping my bedroom door closed (the smell was truly awful), my retired guide-dog got in there and helpfully licked up some of the vomit. Since I didn’t know where the vomit was, or whether the dog had eaten all of it, I slept on the sofa that night. The next day, my retired dog was off his food, and had diarrhoea, thankfully in the garden. My PA that morning couldn’t find the vomit, partly because she doesn’t understand animals, so it was 48 hours later that the last of the vomit was cleaned up.

Today, I was told that no new hours had been approved for me. I can’t leave my house. And I won’t be able to go anywhere further than 1 or 2 km until some unspecified time in 2017.

THIS IS ILLEGAL DETENTION

We Forgot to Invite You – The Cruelty of Exclusion Through Thoughtlessness

A few years ago, I had a series of nightmares in which I was forgotten. One involved a group of my best friends getting together and going on my favourite radio show, and I heard the broadcast. They thought it would be a great treat for me, but I was deeply distressed that they never thought to invite me to participate in the show itself.

This is a feeling I encounter on a pretty regular basis. I get left out of the things I most want to be involved in because someone – or a whole series of someones – never thought to include me in the activity. Most usually, this is through genuine ignorance or forgetfulness, but that can feel more personally hurtful than explicit prejudice.

This is most often encountered via technology and new media. The scramble to optimise content for smart-phones has left non-visual learners and visually impaired people out of the picture from first principles. What I mean by that is that newer technological interfaces are deeply based on visual interactions. This is in contrast to traditional operating systems which are based on structured text. Text and code are much more open to non-visual representation.

I don’t have a smart-phone. I used to have an amazing mobile phone on the Symbian operating system which was one of the best accessibility aids I’ve ever used. It is irreperably broken now (it’s the motherboard that’s gone!), and I feel like I’ve been left ten years behind the rest of the world. I can no longer get a smart-phone type device without a touch-screen.

There are applications which purport to make touch-screen phones usable by the blind and visually impaired, but I can’t see the value in them. Sending a text message on a touch-screen phone would be like asking a life-long touch-typist (which I also am) to type documents using a point-and-click on-screen keyboard. Now, I know people who have written books using a foot-controlled pointer to pick out words letter-by-letter, but that was thirty years ago. For me, the sensible way to send a text is using the old numeric keypad. It’s galling to be asked to slow down my technological interactions by such a significant factor for the sake of sighted users getting to their information a wee bit quicker.

As my dear friend Felicity Ford put it, the exclusion of non-visual technology users from the smart-tech revolution is equivalent to a shiny new public building going up with flights of steps everywhere. Maybe they will put a ramp in, or maybe wheelies will have to find the servant’s entrance, ring a bell, wait for the back door to be unlocked and negotiate ten minutes of corridors and tiny lifts just to get into the public foyer. And by the time you get into the foyer, you discover that the people you wanted to meet up with have gone out to the smoking area, which is down a fire-escape. You’re left hanging out the door shouting down to your friends. Not the most inclusive feeling in the world.

I encounter both these forms of thoughtless exclusion at least once a day. The one that made me cry most recently was when I was told about a major public meeting discussing the exclusion of women in Irish theatre. I was told about the Dublin-based meeting the day before, and my first concern was that I can’t really travel across the country with less than 24 hours notice. I wouldn’t be able to arrange P.A. time to pack a bag, the train journey would be exhausting and painful, I probably couldn’t book an accessible hotel-room in Dublin less than a week in advance… it’s just not feasible unless I want to be out of commission for a week.

The promotion for this meeting and the associated campaign was largely done via Twitter. I don’t use Twitter. It’s centred around smart-phone users continuously scanning a huge volume of text to pick out relevant details. Any time I’ve encountered tweets over e-mail or other websites, I can’t make any sense of the constant abbreviations, hash-tags, usernames or links to pictures or articles. So I just don’t bother.

When I looked up the associated blog for this campaign, the first thing I discovered was that the tickets for the meeting were already sold out. However, there was a message saying they would try to set up live-streaming for the event, and that there would be tweets sent out over the course of the meeting.

The morning of the meeting, I checked my e-mail and the website to see if there was a link for streaming. There wasn’t. The website said to visit their Twitter feed for links to streaming. I tried going onto Twitter using a web browser, and was utterly overwhelmed by the volume of text, with no clear way of finding the one piece of information I was looking for. Lucky for me, I was on Skype with the wonderful Felix, and even before I asked her, she found the link to the stream.

That link brought me to yet another social media site, but it said I needed Flash to run the streaming (which I already have installed) and suggested using Chrome instead. I don’t know how to use Chrome with JAWS, so I exited Firefox and opened the link with Internet Explorer. There, the page said to try Firefox or Chrome, so I could guess where this chain was leading. It became clear from the streaming site that it was set up to run via smart-phones. The meeting had already been on for half an hour at that point, so I gave up and started to cry.

That was a morning’s work to get nowhere. Five years ago, I would have had it easier. For one thing, web accessibility was all the rage. We had the W3 accessibility guidelines, and companies like Google and Microsoft were busy building in screen-reader features to websites and applications. Then, tablets and smartphones became the huge money-spinner. The sighted world has leapt ahead in terms of communication, information access and entertainment, while non-visual learners find themselves left even further behind than we were in 2010. Assistive technology has come on in leaps and bounds since then, but all the development has had to focus on compensating for an increasingly visual world.

So I repeatedly encounter the feeling that my friends, or potential friends, are throwing these great parties. Some of these parties are upstairs with no lift access. Most of the time, they just forget to invite me.

The Case for Braille

Thanks to the luscious Felicia Day and her Facebook followers, I have just discovered 64 Oz Games. This is a small company creating Braille add-ons for board- and card-games. As well as bringing attention to the service, I wanted to share this particular post about why Braille is the best tool for VIP access to printed materials. It also suggests that the more Braille is available, the more VIPs will learn to use it. This is something I think really needs to be promoted.

In Ireland, services for the visually impaired are still largely constructed on a medical model. I got totally fed up of being encouraged to use my “residual vision”. The assumption was of acquired sight los, and that it was better to be as “normal” as possible, not giving in to the blindness label. This is very close to the approach of doctors and physiotherapists suggesting anything rather than using a wheelchair. That’s even if not using a wheelchair makes you so exhausted and pain-ridden that your life becomes a round of therapy, exercise and pain management, with nothing else to give your life actual meaning. Sure, I could use the vision I have, and take 2 hours to read one page of print, then have to rest for days before reading the next page. I’d much rather read in a non-visual format, using my “residual vision” to appreciate how the sunset looks this evening.

Anyway, Here’s the blog post!

Why Such A Focus on Braille? – 64 oz games

Web Accessibility – why bother?

So you have a working computer, an internet connection and some assistive technology.  That means you can access any webpage, right?

Wrong

It can be hard to explain what “web accessibility” is all about.  I thought I might furnish you with a couple of examples and a couple of general pointers. First, the examples…

Bouncers of the Internet – No blacks, No dogs, No blindies!

I’m sure you will have come across a “captcha” – that image of warpified text that claims to sort the machines from the humans.  Maybe you’ve even had a whinge about how difficult they can be to see.  If you don’t know what I’m on about, here’s an example from a Google page:

Google Visual Captcha

I tried to understand the audio alternative about 15 times, then started to record my effort.  Bear in mind that I use JAWS, a screen-reading program that gives me audio feedback about what’s happening on my screen.  Every time you hear the word “Enter” and a slight pause, I have tried to submit my effort.  Instead of hearing the same audio again, a new audio file loads. I will give you some kind of prize if you think you can understand the words in any of the 16 captcha samples on this audio recording:

And that’s assuming the Captcha challenge even has an audio alternative, and that the button to request the audio alternative is tagged so that JAWS can detect it. These are by no means givens.

PDF – the universal format

PDF has come to be a standard way to access all kinds of texts. Sometimes, I receive a PDF attachment to an e-mail, which is supposed to carry all the information the sender wishes to communicate with me. Often, PDFs are used online for brochures and publicity – often graphics-heavy publications. They are also the standard format for academic papers and articles.

PDFs have plenty of accessibility features… if the author of the document has bothered to use them. More often, the author is concerned with how the text looks on the page, with neither thought nor care for the underlying code that orders the text. Weird things can happen to words in the most straightforward documents, with headings read as if each letter were on a separate line.

Here’s an example of how JAWS interacted with a price list for spa treatments. See if you can figure out what any of those treatments were or how much they cost…

Universal Access to All Knowledge?

The biggest kick in the teeth has to be my attempt to continue academic work. There are digital and online resources available now that I would have given selected body parts for when I was still officially a student. At the time, which is over 10 years ago now, I even attended conferences about digital humanities specifically to make known how they would be indispensible from an access point of view.

However, the effectiveness of digitisation varies wildly. The wonderful Internet Archive project, of which I’m a huge fan, still has no accessible means (i.e. keyboard-only) of uploading content. A search result has to be navigated using “G” to find graphics, rather than marking search result headers as headings. And then there’s the quality of the digitised texts themselves…

The quality of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software seems to have progressed incredibly slowly down the years. Many OCR Engines seem to imagine that long text documents use an awful lot more random punctuation than I’ve ever come across. Exclamation marks (!) often appear instead of letters I and L, and capitalisation seems a matter of taste rather than of syntax. The word “arc” is apparently more commonly used than the word “are”… I could go on. Really. I could.

The fact is, if OCR is to have ANY value, it needs to be proof-read by a human being. Even then, JAWS will pick up the odd lower-case L that has been mistaken for an upper-case I. But just scanning a book and lobbing it up on the internet does not count as “Universal Access to All Knowledge”.

I have no desire to single out the Internet Archive as an offender. As I said, I love the project. It’s what the Internet was sent from Heaven to achieve. The most recent culprit (and I find at least one a week) for bad access I’ve run into (face-first) is Academia.edu. Never mind invisible buttons and menus that can’t easily be reached. Here’s an article I tried to read this evening. Apparently, it’s about Disability Arts. Here’s what JAWS says:

And here’s a few screen shots. I use visual themes on my PC which hurt my eyes less when I need to read the screen (at least I can still do that). The size of the text at the top of the first image should give you an idea of how big it has to be before I can read it. My mum uses similar settings, although she doesn’t use screen-reading software. So this is pretty much what she’d be faced with:

NOTE: This is NOT the fault of contributers to the site. It’s down to the programmers.

That’s all I have the energy for right now. This is a big topic, and it affects me every single day of my life. No doubt, I’ll need to rant on it again soon…

Local Coverage – A Small Step toward World Domination

Here’s a quick interview I did on local radio station, Ocean FM, for World Sight Day, Thursday 10th October. My less-than-15-minutes starts around 42 minutes into the show.

https://soundcloud.com/oceanfm/north-west-today-thurs-10th#t=42:00

Mobility Allowance Scrapped

This was posted by my dear friend, Kiwi Katie, in her blog on her business site, Adaptable Solutions.  Katie works as an accessibility and inclusion consultant, and is not a woman to mess with!  She rants so well that I thought it simpler to re-post what she has written about the scrapping of the Mobility Allowance and Motorised Transport Grant.

Yesterday, the Department of Health confirmed mobility allowance and motorised transport grants would be scrapped, despite Ombudsman recommendation for them to be widened to include people 66 and over.

Worryingly it has taken 13 years, since the introduction of the Equal Status Acts, to realize that people with disabilities exist both under and over the age of 66. Did they imagine that a disabled driver suddenly would not require modifications to their car, over the age of 66? Or that people over 66 never develop disabilities? Honestly, this notion alone is quite laughable.

Assurances have been made that the €10.6 million fund, formerly earmarked for the mobility allowance and motorised transport grants, will be utilised to meet the transport need of people with disabilities. However if this was sufficient to meet the needs of all people with disabilities then the scope of these supports would have simply been widened, as recommended. No matter which way you look at it, the 5000 people that currently rely on these supports will face cuts.

As a wheelchair user and a business owner, I simply couldn’t live my life or do my job without access to a modified vehicle. As a rural dweller, even if public transport was universally accessible, the nearest inaccessible bus stop is over a mile away and services are limited to twice daily.

Whilst the government is all too willing to consider the financial ramifications of the Ombudsman’s ruling, they seem to be completely ignoring the social implications. People are being made prisoners in their own homes and this will impact on society as a whole.

People with disabilities are: Parents whose children rely on them to drive to schools, clubs etc.; Employees / Employers trying to get to work; Consumers that play a vital role in the local economy; Over 65’s with family and community roles that continue long into retirement; Children whose unlimited potential is being stifled.

What is most abhorrent is that the value of people, with disabilities (and their families), has been completely dismissed. In a time when the government is aggressively pursuing measures to bolster domestic activity, people with disabilities are isolated. Continuous cuts in supports and services render full participation in society and the economic recovery, further and further from possible. Not only is this counterproductive, it is simply cruel!