Technology shapes us and betters us, but sometimes it can also belittle our best intentions. The Talking-Points project is a new idea that hopes to use embedded Bluetooth tags placed strategically throughout a city to communicate with the blind to guide and provide geographic landmarks and local business information.
Continue reading → Embedded Bluetooth Breadcrumbs Leading the Blind
“Black” is one of those movies you yearn to see again and again and you can never ever quite get the story out of your head. The movie is a love story of self-discovery and education for a Deaf and Blind woman who does not speak. She lives in an internal darkness. She wants a way out into the light of the world. The box for the special edition of the DVD is pocked with Braille dots you can feel with your fingertips, thus creating a temptation, and an expectation for the drama of learning to come:
Child abuse takes many ghostly forms and has a multiplicity of fathers. I can still remember, decades later, the one time I was enticed by an older man and how the awful hauntings of that dungeon-like experience still threaten me today.
When I was a wee lad — perhaps 8 or 9-years-old — I acted in a lot of community theatre plays and musicals.
Acting was an opportunity to escape an ordinary life for one of imagination and history and it was a tasting of a freedom that has sustained me ever since.
Theatre made me an escapee from the mandatory expectations of a pedestrian community where staying and longing were demanded over exploration and fulfillment.
One of the most vulnerable
minorities around us in the world are those who are Deaf and Blind.
Being Deaf — or just being Blind — is enough of a challenge to survival but those who are hit with both disabilities in the same body are truly the world’s misbegotten and they deserve our highest protection.
There are approximately 40,000 people in the United States who are deafblind. Hearing and vision are the primary senses through which we learn and collect data. Hearing is the basis of communication and 80 percent of what we learn is through the visual sense.
Continue reading → Stalking Sexual Predators in the Deaf-Blind Community
Today I will provide a warning in an admonition I hope you will accept my correction in the healing spirit in which it is offered. I have a lot of friends and associates that rely on dogs — Service Animals, if you will — in order to live a more average life. These special dogs are raised by families as puppies and only the most dedicated and pure-of-heart dogs make it into a lifetime of service.
Yesterday, in a watershed moment in the history of the disabled, U.S. District Judge James Robertston finally instructed the United States Treasury to find a way for the Blind to discriminate between paper money denominations.
Continue reading → Blind Discrimination: Paper Money Feels the Same
The October 7, 2005 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) reported:
The chancellor of the University of Kansas sent an e-mail message to all faculty and staff members last week stating that evolution is the “unifying principle of modern biology” and that there is no contradiction between that view and a belief in God. In an interview he added that opponents of evolution make Kansas seem like an “anti-science state.”
The Chronicle article continued:
The chancellor, Robert E. Hemenway, said the message had
been prompted by a number of professors who asked him to speak out on
the increasingly controversial issue. It also followed recent remarks
by Steve Abrams, chairman of the Kansas Board of Education, that belief
in the Bible and in evolution were not compatible. The Board of
Education, which oversees public schools, has no control over the
university. Even so, Mr. Hemenway was concerned that Mr. Abrams’s
comment contributed to the perception that Kansans don’t value science.
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