Not so long ago I wrote on this blog about the disgraceful discrimination against a woman with a guide dog who wished to take a computer class offered by the Iowa Department for the Blind. The story is terrible for lots of reasons but perhaps the most critical aspect of the matter is that a group of blind people decided that a guide dog would interfere with the process of teaching blind people how to use computers outfitted with software for the blind. A local court in Iowa bought this specious storybelieving that the Iowa Department for the Blind was within their rights to declare a guide dog a “visual aid” that would somehow screw up their pedagogy. There’s nothing good about this story.
The Iowa Department for the Blind believes that if a person is legally blind but possesses some residual vision they must be blindfolded if they’re going to get training from their agency. This is anarrow matter of interpretation and a view which is not widely shared by progressives in the field of visual impairment and rehabilitation.
In effect the position of the blindfold squad is that if you have a small window of remaining vision you will probably lose it and so by making people wear blindfolds and leave their guide dogs at the door they’re just helping people face the inevitable loss of their fractional sight. Forget the fact that residual vision nowadays is very stable and that today’s ophthalmologists and vision researchers are better able than ever to help people hang on to their remaining vision. The Luddite principle of the Iowa Department for the Blind is that all legally blind people should be forced to undergo blindfold training as if this is a gift. Who can spell Schadenfreude? Who can say “Let’s make more blind people!” “Be like me!” “If you’re not exactly like me then we will take your dog away!” I kid you not. This is shallow and malevolent and illegal and nasty. I remain apalled by the fact that state money in Iowa was spent to keep a woman with a guide dog from taking a computer class.
Now the same organization that has the most influence on the Iowa Department for the Blind is outraged because a blind man in Boston was prevented from touring the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. I agree that the Navy should have had the means to assist a visually impaired person tour the ship. But isn’t it interesting to hear Dr. Mark Mauer, the President of the National Federation of the Blind opine to the press that there’s no room for discrimination against where the blind can go? Mauer said:”If we allow the claim we cannot visit an aircraft carrier . . . we will next be told that we cannot visit a restaurant or a school or a park.”
Apparently its okay to deny access to computer training to a blind woman with a guide dog but this aircraft carrier business is a real outrage.
The point of course is that the NFB is one organization among many that represent the blind and visually impaired and they take contrarian positions when it suits them. They fought the American Council of the Blind when it sought (successfully) to get the U.S. Treasury to issue accessible paper currency. When it suits them the NFB will seek to prevent access. Just take the story of an Iowa woman and her guide dog. They have a legal right to enter any facility that’s open to the public. In short the NFB is not as they claim “the voice of the blind though we can all agree they have a voice. It is too bad they are exceptionalists. I think blind people in the United States need all the help they can get.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
I can only hope none of this happens again! If any agency should be against discrmination it should be agencies for people with disabilities…
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