Category: Uncategorized

 

(Punch)

December 13, 2012

LAGOS, NIGERIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] On Monday, December 3, 2012, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities was observed across the world. The annual ritual was celebrated in Nigeria, not unexpectedly, with speeches and glib promises by government to improve the lot of the physically challenged persons in our society.

It is estimated that over 15 per cent of Nigerians are PWD. However, this should be persons with bodily disabilities. In truth, however, all human beings are disabled one way or the other as no human has infinite ability.

In Nigeria, the community of persons with bodily disabilities is growing at a geometric rate. Every act of terrorism, road and domestic accidents, medical misdiagnosis, parents refusal to immunise their children against polio and other killer diseases, collapsed buildings and many others leave victims as potential temporary or permanent members of the PWD.

But it must be noted that Nigeria’s persons with disabilities are vulnerable and marginalised lot. The enabling environment is lacking for these persons to realise their full potential.

We always view them from the prism of invalids and dependants. Our mindset is that they are beggars and never-do-wells. How wrong we are!

Entire article:

Plight of persons with disabilities in Nigeria

http://tinyurl.com/ide1213125a

Related

PDP: Partnering with the Disabled (Vanguard)

OPAN hails court ruling against Police for detention of journalists

(Cincinnati Enquirer)
December 12, 2012

CINCINNATI, OHIO– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Therese Wantuch can’t help but boast about her son.

A gifted cellist, he composes his own music.

He’s played to a packed Carnegie Hall as a student in the orchestra at Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts.

And now, Jack Wantuch, an autistic 21-year-old, is driving. All on his own.

The Mount Washington mother is on a mission to help children and families across the globe break through some of the daily challenges faced by those with autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.

This year she launched Training Faces, an application for iPads, iPhones and Android phones designed to help people like Jack Wantuch with emotion recognition.

Entire article:
A mom, and her app: Technology affecting autism
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20121209/BIZ/312090105

(U.S. News & World Report)
December 12, 2012

WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Nationalize Twinkies. Construct a Death Star. Name a worldwide appreciation day for Michael Jackson. The petitions flooding the White House’s “We The People” website have become increasingly gag-oriented or unlikely to be taken seriously by the administration.

But a recent petition that has crossed the threshold needed for an official White House response may be different.

A petition to officially recognize American Sign Language as a “community language” and a “language of instruction in schools” has collected more than 27,000 signatures in less than a month. Petitions need to reach 25,000 signatures before the White House will officially issue a response.

ASL, the language used by the deaf community, has recently gained recognition as a foreign language in some states, meaning students can take it as credit for a foreign language. Adrean Clark, a Minnesota-based deaf cartoonist who created the petition, says foreign language recognition is a step forward but that it also perpetuates sign language’s marginalization.

Entire article:
Petition To Officially Recognize American Sign Language Reaches Threshold For White House Response
http://tinyurl.com/ide1212121a
Related:
White House Petition: Officially recognize American Sign Language as a community language and a language of instruction in schools
http://tinyurl.com/ide1212121b
Sign Language Users Read Words and See Signs Simultaneously
http://tinyurl.com/ide1212121c
Sign Language Becomes Official National Language In New Zealand — April 10, 2006 (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/archives/06/04/10/041006nzsignlang.htm

And so I’m born aloft not by what I see, but all I cannot see. A fish inside a teardrop and the small girl who sheds that tear.

 

Mind you, I cannot see her. She’s half a world from the room where I type these words with two dogs for company.

 

She’s crying in Gaza, where, among a hundred cruelties, she’s denied water as a factor of Israeli policy.

 

And I, a blind poet, here in America, see the long, bony pike swimming like a sober needle.

It is time now to admit my folly, admit my easy seasonal delusion, for as the “Holidays” are upon us, and as ever, I become bluesy in a reliable way. I think things like: “Nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too.” Or: “I see my coffin comin’ Lordy Lord in my back door…” 

And the terrible Christmas music plays in all public spaces–an auditory toothache; worse really, for you can pull a tooth and once its gone the mind forgives memory the experience–not so with Bing Crosby singing of figgy pudding for God’s sake, that figgy pudding works its way around the dendrites of memory like a snail crawling on broken glass. You will never get rid of Bing. He’s a barnacle on the Superior Colliculi. 

I trudge about, thinking of my dead parents, who were hard to live with in life but I miss them all the same; think of my dear dead friends gone too soon; and feel bleached of spirit by the aggressive, bloody monolith of capitalism and its sugar tit music. 

For poets, philosophical ideas are all potential lovers as Charles Simic said while writing of Emily Dickinson. 

For me, well, the music of this infernal season is like a repo man. Bing Crosby can’t have my soul. It’s not here right now, you can look throughout the house with your pestilential Christmas music leaking out of your pockets. Go on and look. My soul is in some villa outside of Florence, pretending to be Enrico Caruso. 

By Andrea Scarpino

 

I like to think we all come to the cemetery for our own reason, the older man who lingers by a grave not far from his car, the power walking women, their arms swinging with purpose and strength, the teenage boy cutting through to the woods—even the white doe, who I imagine enjoys the sanctuary, the quiet space in the middle of town where hunters aren’t allowed, where the dead are mostly quiet.

 

I learned to ride a bicycle in the cemetery near our house in Massachusetts, its wide, near-empty streets the perfect place for my step-dad to remove my bicycle’s training wheels. One memorable early trip, giddy with my own independence, I pedaled farther and farther away from my mom and step-dad as they pushed my brother in his carriage. I remember the wind in my face. I remember laughing. And then I turned around to see how much distance I had covered, and rode straight into a tree. I remember lying in the grass gasping for air, and my step-dad arriving finally to pick me up, set my bike upright.

 

Almost every time I’ve gone to Paris, I’ve made a special trip to visit Montparnasse Cemetery and the graves of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. Cigarettes, metro stubs, pieces of gravel, handwritten notes, a copy of one of their books, are always placed carefully on their graves. In Pere Lachaise, Oscar Wilde’s tombstone is covered with lipstick kisses and flower bouquets. In New Mexico, my friend Kate brought me to a cemetery near Georgia O’Keefe’s home: dry desert landscape, overly saturated blue and purple silk flowers, gravestones cracked as if by the heat, cactus growing around untended plots. We took photograph after photograph, sun bearing down around us. In Morocco, I was about to step through a cemetery gate when a woman pulled up in her car, waved me over, told me I shouldn’t go inside because women had been raped in there. I heeded her advice, peered over the stone gate, and walked away.

 

Almost every place I’ve visited or lived, I’ve found a cemetery to spend an hour, an afternoon. I’ve done grave rubbings, moving charcoal across white sheets of paper to see the gravestone’s image magically emerge. I’ve listened to Halloween stories of famous murders and suicides told by animated storytellers, my back pressed against a gravestone. I’ve listened to orchestral music, picnicked, brought flowers for my father, pushed the strollers of kids I was babysitting. And when I need some perspective, some exercise, I walk through Marquette’s cemetery, watch for red-headed woodpeckers, the white doe, watch the Mallard ducks and Canadian geese. Watch the other cemetery walkers, imagine what we each want from our visit, what we each hope to see.

 

The Madwoman and the Blindman

Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability

 

Edited by

David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson.

Ohio State University Press, 2012.

 

Drawing on the work of disability theorists, as well as scholarship in women’s studies, deconstruction, autism studies, masculinity studies, caregiving, theology, psychoanalysis, and film studies, the contributors to this new Anglo-American book suggest that disability may have a more pervasive, subtle, and textured place in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre than has previously been acknowledged, guiding us to an enriched understanding of the novel and of the meanings and functions of disability. With previously unpublished contributions from Lennard J. Davis, Margaret Rose Torrell, D. Christopher Gabbard, Essaka Joshua, Susannah Mintz, and Martha Stoddard Holmes, this is the first book to apply disability studies to a single literary work.

 

The book is now available and shall be the subject of a panel at the forthcoming MLA conference in Boston.

 

For further information, please contact:

 

Dr. David Bolt

 

Director, Centre for Culture & Disability Studies

www.ccds.hope.ac.uk

 

 

National Federation of the Blind Condemns Amazon’s 
Push to Put Kindle E-books in Schools

 

Blind Americans Will Protest at Amazon Headquarters

 

Seattle, Washington (December 4, 2012): In protest of a recent push by Amazon.com to put Kindle e-books, which are inaccessible to blind students, into K-12 classrooms across the country, members and supporters of the National Federation of the Blind will conduct an informational picket at the company’s headquarters on Wednesday, December 12. The action comes on the heels of Amazon’s launch of Whispercast, a system designed to allow teachers and school administrators to push Kindle e-books to different devices, theoretically allowing the sharing of content among devices brought to school by the students.  Kindle content, unlike some other e-book products, is not accessible to blind students, even on devices that are themselves accessible to the blind, such as personal computers and iPads.  This is because Amazon makes Kindle content available only to its own proprietary text-to-speech engine, if at all, rather than to accessibility applications of the reader’s choice.  Furthermore, the limited accessibility features that Amazon has implemented do not allow for the kind of detailed reading that students need to do in an educational setting. Although the books can be read aloud with text-to-speech, the student cannot use the accessibility features of his or her device to learn proper spelling and punctuation, look up words in the dictionary, annotate or highlight significant passages, or take advantage of the many other features that Kindle devices and applications make available to sighted students.  Kindle e-books also cannot be displayed on Braille devices, making them inaccessible to blind and deaf-blind students who read Braille.

 

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “Amazon has repeatedly demonstrated utter indifference to the recommendations of blind Americans for full accessibility of its Kindle e-books and failed to follow the best practices of other e-book providers.  Blind Americans will not tolerate this behavior any longer.  While we urge Amazon to correct the many obvious deficiencies in its implementation of accessibility and remain willing to work with the company to help it do so, we will oppose the integration of these products into America’s classrooms until Amazon addresses these deficiencies.  Putting inaccessible technology in the classroom not only discriminates against blind students and segregates them from their peers, but also violates the law.”

 

For more information on this important issue, please visit www.nfb.org/kindle-books.

 

Encounter At The Market: Veteran’s Service Dog
(The Chattanoogan)
December 4, 2012

CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] After a trip to the Chattanooga Market today, I would like to thank a member of the Chattanooga police department, Sgt. Mike Smith for his assistance. His knowledge of the ADA laws in regards to service dogs came in handy.

My husband is a wounded veteran; wounded twice in Afghanistan and medically retired from the Army over a year ago. He recently acquired a service dog and takes him just about everywhere he goes.

Today we decided to go the market downtown and, of course, the dog came with us. My husband and I entered the market and were approached by one of the vendors who informed us that pets were not allowed inside. My husband provided the documentation specifying his dog as a service animal. Although the gentleman insisted the dog needed to be wearing a placard or vest, he took the paperwork provided as proof and allowed us to enter the market.

Not all disabilities are readily apparent. My husband doesn’t use a wheelchair or any other device and appears, to the casual observer, to be perfectly normal but things are not always as they appear. People would do well to remember that. You never know what is under the surface.

Due to his disabilities he doesn’t often go where there are crowds. After this incident he felt harassed and discriminated against and attempted to communicate without getting upset, which is hard for him due to his disabilities.

Entire article:
Encounter At The Market – And Response
http://tinyurl.com/ide1204126

Yesterday’s Senate defeat of the United Nations charter on the rights of people with disabilities is easy to dismiss as an instance of the Tea Party’s influence on 38 rightward leaning Senators–politicians so frightened by re-election they’re willing to pander to contemporary know-nothing-ism. A variant of this small “d” democratic impulse at rationalization is to say that the Senate has occasionally been worse–one has only to recall the influence of the KKK in our nation’s affairs for example. (In fact the Tea Party bears a considerable resemblance to the Klan with its rabid and narrow view of American exceptionalism.) I can’t say if things are worse now than when Harry Truman was young and was advised to join the Klan if he wanted a political future; I’ve no idea how hateful and deep the present strain of America’s reactionary provincialism is. What I do know is that I have a bad case of Huddie Ledbetter’s “Bourgeois Blues” with a decidedly crippled strain. I think of Leadbelly singing: “Hey all you colored people, listen to me, don’t you ever try to build no home in Washington, DC…”   

 

One can say, “Well, we have the ADA here at home–the failure of the Senate to ratify an international treaty that would bring those rights to other parts of the world doesn’t mean anything, really.” Dear Senator Grassley: I recall being denied entry to an Italian church because of my guide dog. Recall being denied access to a hotel restaurant in Milan. Senator Grassley, you apparently don’t give two straws about my rights to travel abroad with dignity as an American citizen. In fact, given your long standing opposition to disability rights, it’s clear you think that disabled people should shut up and live in a back room on the family farm and stop bothering you. Senator, you are a party hack. The idea that voting for a United Nations charter would in any way interfere with American law is false but you used it–you used it to suborn the rights of people all over the world who are striving to follow America’s lead. To you and your 37 colleagues who voted down one of the noblest exercises in human rights in global history I say simply, you are pandering to the same forces that historically animated the political arm of the KKK–shallow, paranoiac, isolationist vitriol. And that’s the best thing I can say. How can you look Bob Dole in the eye? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have to! You can walk right around him since he’s using that wheelchair. Senator Grassley, you’re a just a saucebox: an impertinent and petulant fellow. That you’ve cultivated this in lieu of statesmanship means of course that you are a wantwit–a fool. In this age of international relations and globalization you and your 37 buggy cohorts represent a dangerous tendency in our politics, for you want us to simply leave the world, not as leaders but as dark and toadying neo-Fascist romantics. I’ve lived in Iowa, sir–I’ve always thought you a dullard, but never a dolt. And who am I? I’m just one of the 56 million people with disabilities in these United States. That’s all.