"No Blind People Allowed" Signs

There is a gentleman in the so-called blindness community who is a self-proclaimed accessibility evangelist. I'm not particularly fond of the term, but that's what he calls himself. And I like the guy, not to mention the fact that he has done a lot by way of improving accessibility in many areas.

One area, though, where I have a great deal of difficulty with this person is his analogies. One of this person's huge concerns is accessible captcha, those words, letters and numbers that you have to type on some Web pages to gain access to a particular product or service. This gentleman is a very strong advocate for what I call partially-accessible captcha. I say partially because he feels a battle is won if an audio captcha is provided, a solution which is no solution at all if you are a deafblind person.

But his analogy with the inaccessible captcha has been comparing our situation to that faced by African-Americans during the civil rights fight. It's a horrid comparison: yes, we need sighted assistance to gain access to these sites, but once in, we face neither death, bodily injuries, threats, nor even persecution. I sincerely doubt that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have approved of the analogy. Further, this accessibility evengelist says, inaccessible captcha is the same as putting up a "no blind people allowed" sign. This is simply not true. While I agree that captcha or its equivalent should be accessible TO THE BLIND AND TO THE DEAFBLIND, nobody will kick you out if you get sighted assistance to sign you up.

I bring up this dreary subject again because, in my insomniac state, I got to wondering if this gentleman has ever experienced a real "no blind people allowed" sign. A dear friend of mine was in China recently. She told me that, in front of some public facilities, were signs that proclaimed that any disabled person caught trying to use the facilities would be arrested. It really made me stop and think how good we ahve it here. It's not perfect, to be sure. There are lots of things that could be improved. But as a disabled person, there are many more discriminatory places I could be living in than Canada or the United States.

It just seems very, very wrong to me, and I'm not saying this to pick a fight, to use analogies to represent the problems of something like inaccessible captcha and compare them to true oppression, to true, intentional discrimination. It seems insulting to those who suffered and even died in the causes sited by that analogy to compare them to something as, let's face it, minor in the grand scheme of things as captcha.

Today Will Be Rough

I went to bed at around ten last night, which was fine. But I woke up at a quarter after two this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. I don't know why. I'm not worried about anything, things are going well in my life. Maybe I'm just excited that, as of tomorrow, I get almost three weeks off work, much of which time will be spent visiting kittytech in Milwaukee. Also, back when I was having my sleep troubles, this was generally the time of year when they would manifest themselves.I had really better not have a repeat of tat situation. What cured it at the time was Melatonin, and I have that now.

On another note, one of the things I had time to do while not sleeping was listen to this week's Dr. Demento Show. The Doc played my request, which is cool. I subscribe to the Demento Online Club, which lets me stream the shows in 128-bit stereo, which isn't too bad. I wish I'd lived in Los Angeles back in the days when Dr. Demento was onlive for four hours on KMET. I just think that would have been so cool. I was listening yesterday to an archive show from 1980, where Weird Al first sang Another One Rides the Bus live on the Dr. Demento Show. It was that recording that was used on his self-titled first full-length album, and it was neat hearing it in context. So many things I would like to go into the past and either live or relive. Ah well, all we have for certain is the present, at least in an earthly sense.

I want it to be 4:30, I'm already exhausted.