President’s Blog

The Government is conducting a review of special education. We have submitted our views on the points raised by the review and we have contributed to a submission on behalf of the blindness sector. Last week Martine Abel and I appeared in person in front of the review panel to speak in support of our submission. Amongst the panel members was the Associate Minister for Education, Hon. Heather Roy.

First and foremost, like all other students, blind and low vision students have a right to be educated to their maximum potential. This is the principle that guides our approach to this topic. (more…)

In this second posting in my series on access by blind people to everyday published information, I will look briefly at the situation that developed earlier this year when Amazon released its Kindle 2, and what we learned from that.

Amazon is a well-known publisher of electronic books or e-books. These books are electronic files you read using a portable electronic device often called an e-book reader. In Amazon’s case, their reader is called the Kindle. The second iteration of the Kindle, the Kindle 2, was released in February this year. This caused considerable controversy in the blind and intellectual property communities as I will explain shortly. (more…)

Remember that old folk song “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham”? Yes go ahead and Google it if you’re too young to remember. I wonder if boy scouts sing that song today around the campfire like we used to. The words that come to my mind at the moment are “so high, I can’t get over it, so low I can’t get under it, so wide I can’t get round it…”. That’s what it’s like when you come up against a barrier. Right? Well, yes, but only if it is a physical barrier.

The thing about physical barriers is that they are easy to see and understand. When the disability movement really took off in the late sixties and seventies, it built on the gains won by earlier movements that fought for racial equality. The first focus of the disability movement was to claim our right to live in the mainstream of society, to fight against discrimination in areas such as employment and access to public spaces. In this regard we have been largely successful I think, with many countries now having legislation to ensure that public spaces are basically accessible to people with disabilities and to prevent discrimination on the grounds of disability in various aspects of life. (more…)

Sorry if this post is a bit long, but this is a complex subject. It also explains why it is several weeks since I updated the blog; I have just had to do a bit more research and give a lot of thought to this before I felt ready to publish. So here goes.

It seems to me that as technology keeps “improving”, it is actually becoming more difficult for blind and low vision people to do our business on the net. It should be the other way around because the net, if well managed, offers huge potential for blind people to do business in a way that is more inclusive than ever. So why are we heading in the wrong direction? (more…)