Tag: Disabled

Health officials in Tennessee turned away elderly people waiting for hours to get a vaccine and gave it to friends instead: report

The Delta variant has robbed us of our choice to vaccinate or not vaccinate*. Now, our choice is: will humanity eradicate COVID, or will COVID eradicate humanity? Let us NOT be known as the generation that ignored history only to repeat it. 

Accessibility seems to be the “cause de jour” in the tech world these days with tech giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft pledging their commitment to Accessibility (making the internet more user-friendly for people with disabilities). As a visually impaired user and founder of a website created for the sole purpose of supporting those with visual impairments (LowVisionSupportGroup.com), I am hopeful and grateful that this issue has received so much attention. I do not want to rain on Facebook, Google nor Microsoft accessibility parade, but I urge anyone who wants to make the web more accessible to those with visual impairments take a step back and do some very simple fixes to their sites first. The first thing that could be done is to do away with grey or silver text on a white background. For people like me with visual impairments that impact our ability to see color, grey or silver text on a white background can make a site virtually useless. This seems like a very simple fix so I do not understand why grey or silver text on white seems to be the default color scheme of so many sites.

“Accessibility Teams” issuing glossy press releases touting their commitment to making the web more accessible. However, I feel like we are putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.

Features like voice over and designing sites to be more screen-reader friendly are all admirable and badly needed features for people like me who are losing their vision.

I had a disturbing encounter today. My caregiver dropped me at the hospital curb for Physical therapy and as I was walking through an automatic door I’ve walked through a million times, I felt someone gently grabbing my arms from behind at the same time I heard a male voice saying “you’re okay….just go a little to the left”. It really startled me and I tried to see where the voice was coming from, but the man was totally out of my field of vision. I guess to him, it looked like I was going to walk into the wall, but I wasn’t. I was mostly just trying to get through the large automated sliding door without hitting anyone with my cane. The man continued to hold onto my arms and “helped” me until I got to the elevator. It was very odd as I know he meant well, but grabbing me from slightly behind me scared the beggeezes out of me as it made me realize how vulnerable I am. It also strikes me how little people understand about the degrees of visual impairment and how much work we must do in order to educate the general public on how to interact with people with visual impairments. But how do we communicate this?

The workers compensation system was started as a safety net to protect workers who were injured at work. However, in its current state, the system is a joke at best. The workers compensation insurance industry used to be a big money loser until nationwide reforms in the early 1990s. Since then, workers compensation insurance companies profits have exploded, employer premiums have decreased, and the financial and emotional exploitation of the injured worker has become standard operating procedure. The saddest part is that it isn’t expected to change any time soon!