Stand Up, Change the Attitude!
Ever since deciding to bring the issue of Blog Carnival’s inaccessible visual CAPTCHA to the blogosphere, I wondered how many people would truly be willing to take a stand. The use of Blog Carnival does not have much impact on a person’s “real” life as inaccessibility of a bank or financial institution may.
However, Blog Carnival quickly escalated the issue from inaccessibility to disrespect when the conscience decision was made to ignore the multiple requests of many in the community. (If this is your first time reading about this issue please use the “BC Update” tag to see a history of posts.)
When Lon from the Assistive Technology Blog Carnival pledged to cease from using the service if BC continued to ignore the requests for an accessible CAPTCHA, I wondered if and at what point would he follow through.
Well a big shout out to Lon for continuing to blog and pool together other’s writing on the topic of Assistive Technology, without using Blog Carnival. Yes, that’s right without the BC service.
Thank you Lon for taking a stand and saying No to inaccessibility. I urge all readers of RMM to visit the Assistive Technology Blog Carnival and those of you who are blogger’s, submit a post to the next AT Carnival.
As I write this, I am trying to remain diplomatic, while honestly saying what’s on my mind, that is the name of the blog after all. Recently I read that the latest edition of the Disabilities Blog Carnival was released and I noticed they continue to use the Blog Carnival service.
I’m not sure how many of those who contribute to the Disabilities Blog Carnival are aware of the CAPTCHA issue. I know of a few that are and I really wish they would take a public stand. If for whatever reason you disagree with my position, that’s cool, let me know.
Just remember, the issue is not just about the inaccessibility of Blog Carnival’s site, it’s their attitude regarding our request for access. They choose to ignore us. If this wasn’t a digital request, but rather a request to access a brick and mortar store front and people were denied access solely on the basis of their blindness, I am pretty certain that more people would stand up and be heard. The digital age provides too many possible excuses;
“I didn’t get that email”
“I sent you an email, didn’t you get it?”
There’s no personal interaction, the requests and denials simply boil down to bits of 1’s and 0’s as everything ultimately does in the digital world.
Getting organizations to provide access is not the permanent solution. The highest hurdle facing the blind community on all fronts, is the attitude and beliefs that people manifest about blindness. There are great advancements being made in the areas of Access Technology, legislation and even political influence. However, if we don’t change the beliefs of society then unemployment rates, appropriate funding and even getting a response from a company like Blog Carnival, probably won’t change either.
“’m not sure how many of those who contribute to the Disabilities [sic] Blog Carnival are aware of the CAPTCHA issue. I know of a few that are and I really wish they would take a public stand. If for whatever reason you disagree with my position, that’s cool, let me know. ”
Um, we are already taking a public stand:
http://disstud.blogspot.com/2008/05/disability-blog-carnival-38-is-up-now.html
In every single Disability Blog Carnival edition announcement so far at DS,TU (since October 2006, twice monthly, so we’ve been at this for a while), we’ve indicated that the CAPTCHA at the blogcarnival.com site is inaccessible, and that submissions are accepted through other means as well (which we list). We’ve written to blogcarnival.com about this, more than once (as you know, they don’t necessarily respond). We’ll keep using their site, mostly for the publicity it provides, until we find a better alternative–but it’s definitely only one of the ways we collect submissions (and not the main way, these days).
Thank you for recognizing that the Assistive Technology Blog Carnival has produced our first month without the BC service. I wrote to them once about a question when I first started and they responded almost immediately. The second time, when I asked them to do something about the Captcha issue, they never replied. I saw that many of my submissions through the blog carnival service were of the spam variety and had nothing to do with what we were writing anyway – so I am not too heartbroken over the seperation. I do wonder though why our post submissions were smaller this month – we’ll wee what happens next. We would enjoy submissions from you and your readers.
Lon, AT Blog Carnival organizer.
[…] T.Reid, of the Reid My Mind blog, sent my a kind email today, recognizing that we have steered away from using the blog carnival service to publicize or receive submissions for our blog carnival on assistive technology. You can read his post on this here. […]
I totally agree with you T! If organizations
OOps sorry about that. JAWS just froze on me but now I think it’s back. Anyway…I totally agree with you. It seems to me that certain people who are blind and take stands against these common-sense, common-courtesy issues could at least quiet down just a bit? But I guess that’s just wishful thinking on my part. When I first moved into this apartment building back in the summer of 2004, I was living with a former neighbor who is visually-impaired and is losing more and more vision. This area where we live is very unsafe for independent travel by someone with a visual impairment. There are tree cutouts which are not properly filled in and have increased in quantity, and traffic is at most times so congested that even someone with perfect vision cannot safely traverse the area. My former roommate has since gotten a guide dog, but when we were living together we both tried very hard to advocate for better accessibility here but no luck. A sighted tutor who worked with me for a few years and was quite good, phoned the city manager’s office and had me join her on speaker phone, to try and persuade them to at least install one accessible pedestrian signal here. But what we were constantly told was that noone wanted a blind person around here–and yadda yadda yadda. If the blindness “community” would at least try to become more of a community–where universal accessibility would be unanimously agreed upon–then I think maybe, just maybe, public attitudes would start to change. After all, people of color have more rights than we do, and this has been the case for years. Speaking of that, the tutor to whom I referred earlier is African-American and ya know what? I learned a lot from her and really got along well with her.
Jake,
I think what I hear you saying is that you support the idea of the blind
community working together to produce change