From: cedisabl@sprynet.com
Subject: NO Pity  Extract Part 2
This is No Pity extract Part 2.  Enjoy the convention and have some fun on 
the 
side.  It may be long but is worth the effort and time. 
Page 227                                                       No Pity
     Technology can threaten once again to isolate deaf people
and others with disabilities, warns Deborah Kaplan of the World
Institute on Disability. Emerging devices are often incompatible
with existing ones, in effect erecting "electronic sidewalks," she
says, that close off technology as surely as a sidewalk with no
curb cuts limits the access of a wheelchair user. A new design in
telephones suddenly made hearing aids incompatible with the
new phones, so hearing aids could not pick up the sounds on
those new models. It took an act of Congress In 1989 to create
"an electronic curb cut," notes technology consultant Jay Brill,
to force telephone manufacturers to include both the old and
new systems in their phones.
     For I3 million people with blindness and low vision, reli-
ance upon technology has created an epidemic of illiteracy. The
invention of tape recorders and then computers with voice syn-
thesizers that can read a printed page have been great aids in
educating blind students. But the result of reliance on such
devices is that few people with visual handicaps bothered to
learn Braille. Today, only 12 percent of visually handicapped
students read Braille, far below the nearly 50 percent in 1965,
according to the American Printing House for the Blind. And
there is an acute shortage of teachers trained to teach the system
of reading the raised dots that was invented in 1829 by blind
Frenchman Louis Braille.
     Today, many blind people and educators of the blind con-
sider Braille obsolete. But some blind adults, like Kenneth
Silberman, an administrator at the Goddard Space Flight Center
in Maryland, are rethinking their failure to learn it. Silberman
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needed to know how to read to keep up with the increasingly
technical field of aerospace engineering. It was impractical to
play back a tape recorder to find the information he had dictated
to himself.   It became impossible to carry off his old trick of
memorizing what he needed, as "the work was getting steadily
more sophisticated." Learning Braille, he says, allowed him to
stay in a technical job rather than quitting work and living on
Social Security disability benefits.
     Literacy proposals have split the blind community. As usual
with such disputes in the disability community, this is not just
a fight over education but over rights. The National Federation
of the Blind, a strong rights advocacy group whose officials are
all blind, is pushing for state laws to require all legally blind
students to be taught Braille. Marc Mauer of the Federation says
they need to know how to use written words in order to get good
jobs and notes that 70 percent of working-age blind adults are
unemployed.
     Other groups that represent blind people, however, say It is
often inappropriate to teach Braille, since 85 percent of legally
blind persons have some useful residual vision and can read large
type. These groups, like the American Foundation of the Blind,
are run largely by people without visual handicaps or, like the
American Council of the Blind, by a combination of disabled
and nondisabled officials. Susan Spungin of the American Foun-
dation for the Blind speaks of her "amazement" the first time she
saw a legally blind child "reading, by sight and not touch, the
white Braille dots on the white paper." Mauer, however, notes
that some forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa, are
progressive, and the student who can read large type today may
have no vision tomorrow. Those who refuse to learn Braille, he
says, are often ashamed, because of the stigma of being disabled,
to admit the extent of their visual limitation. Dick Edlung, a
state representative who sponsored a successful mandatory
Braille bill in Kansas one of five states to have one-says the
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229
most resistance came from parents. "A lot of parents don't want
to have a blind kid," says Edlung.
     Yet just as technology once threatened to make Braille obso-
lete, it may now turn the tide and launch a Braille revival.
Inexpensive Braille printers and computer programs that trans-
late print into Braille have made it easier than ever to get a wide
variety of texts in Braille, including complex technical or scien-
tific material. In some cities, even the daily newspaper can be
translated into Braille by calling a computer bulletin board and
downloading articles into one's home computer.
Random Access
The hardest part of the technology puzzle has been simply to get
new devices to the people who need them. Making the tech-
nological breakthroughs-what would logically be the hard
part-has proceeded at a brisk pace. Making those devices avail-
able-which should have been the easy step-remains the bar-
rier. "It's cruel," says Dr. Barbara Boardman, who studied
assistive devices for the congressional Office of Technology As-
sessment. "We hold out technology to people as a little shim-
mering dream and then we don't deliver."
     British physicist Stephen Hawking is the shining example of
how technology can dramatically improve the lives of people with
disabilities. Bob Magee, a retired U.S. Air Force photographer
when I first wrote about him was, unfortunately, more the rule.
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