Virtual Helping Hands (VHH) is a coalition of four groups, united in their mission “to bring people who have disabilities into Second Life so everyone can enjoy what Second Life offers—entertainment, education, and employment. Everyone can explore and enjoy the same virtual worlds of the Immersive Internet”….with just a teensy weensy li’l bit of code tweaking.
Disabled advocate Gilbert Smith, a former police officer, works to spread awareness and equality for the disabled. The disAbility Resources Center recently presented him with a lifetime achievement Award. (Photo by Tyrone Walker)
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Even sitting in a wheelchair, his hands not fully functional, there’s a physical presence about Gilbert Smith, the former police officer who was shot on duty and left paralyzed from the waist down.
Maybe it’s left over from his rough-and-tumble days as a bouncer in his dad’s bar. Or maybe it’s just the force of his spirit.
“He’s left his stamp on a little bit of everything here,” Gwen Gillenwater, executive director of the disAbility Resource Center, said last week when presenting him with a Lifetime Achievement Award for making Charleston more accessible to the handicapped. “He’s one of the real giants in our community.”
Smith will be 63 in December. He was paralyzed Dec. 12, 1970, nearly 40 years ago.
“I’ve outlived the statistics,” he said.
Before he became a police officer, Smith worked as a bartender and bouncer at his dad’s nightclub. It was called the Coconut Grove on Pittsburgh Avenue in North Charleston. Smith also collected loans for his dad.
“I was big and strong back then,” he said.
His dad died in a tractor accident when Smith was 20. He went to work for the Charleston Naval Shipyard before joining the police department.
He took a test in the morning and was given his badge, gun and handcuffs that evening. He spent the first two weeks riding around with an older officer, who was also shot on duty but survived without any permanent damage, and then was sent out on his own.
Fewer than four months on the job, Smith got a call that a man was passed out in the middle of the road in rural Charleston County. Smith loaded him in the back of the patrol car to take him to the jail. He didn’t handcuff him because the man didn’t have a right hand.
Smith would learn later that the man lost his hand in a shootout. He previously had served time for robbing a bank.
The man woke up in the back of the car, grabbed Smith’s gun, shot him in the back and pushed him out of the car. The man later said he saw the devil.
Smith would never walk again.
As a result of the incident, the department installed cages in all the patrol vehicles and instituted a training program … Continue reading this article
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Quoting guardian.co.uk:
EyesFree, a new interface for Google’s Android mobile phone operating system, provides a perfect illustration of what today’s “assistive technology” researchers are looking for. It provides a way for blind people to use a phone with a touch-sensitive screen, but the corollary is that it also provides sighted people with an easier way to use the phone. In fact, they can make calls without even looking at it. The idea behind EyesFree is that wherever you put your finger on the touchscreen represents the number 5. If you want 1, you move your finger up and to the left, and if you want 8 then you move it straight down, and so on. In alpha mode, your finger is surrounded by letters instead. You get spoken feedback for each selection, and if you pick the wrong number or letter, you can delete it by shaking the phone . . . EyesFree was developed by TV Raman, a blind research scientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and his colleague Charles Chen. Harty says it will be included in the next version (1.6) of the Android development kit, which also includes a text-to-speech engine and accessibility APIs (applications program interfaces). “It’s up to the carriers to ship it,” says Harty, “but users can download it from the Android marketplace, and developers can get the source code from code.google.com.”
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According to Lisa Donovan’s September 26th article for the Chicago Sun-Times, if the city of Chicago had won its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, the stadium that was planned would have been “one of the more handicapped-friendly venues ever built.” In addition to being fully accessible, the city was working on design plans to convert up to 50,000 of the planned 80,000 seats at the temporary stadium into wheelchairs. The chairs, which would have cost an estimated $100 to $200 each, would subsequently have been donated to disabled people in developing countries.
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Kathie Snow is a highly-acclaimed public speaker, trainer, author, filmmaker, and consultant on disability issues. In addition to being Benjamin’s mom, she also runs the excellent website disabilityisnatural.com.
Karen Putz is an insightful, talented and entertaining freelance writer. She provides early intervention services to families with deaf and hard of hearing children. She serves as a board member for Hands & Voices (www.handsandvoices.org) and runs Illinois Hands & Voices in her state. She’s also a deaf mom to three deaf and hard of hearing children, and her husband is deaf, too. Learn more at karenputz.com.
Quoting Chris Foresman, writing on Ars Technica:
We have discussed the advancements Apple has made in accessibility to Mac OS X and even the iPhone in the past, but recent examples show that Apple’s attention to detail in technologies technologies like VoiceOver and Voice Control can make all the difference in the world for users with speech or sight impairments. These technologies are earning Apple awards and the appreciation of users and further separate Apple from the competition. It was just a few weeks ago when we noted comments from industrial designer Mike Calvo, whose company Serotek is involved in accessibility design, on how well accessibility is engineered into the iPhone. “Apple understands that accessibility should be about far more than developing custom solutions which pay lip service to the idea of accessibility but detract from the out-of-box experience enjoyed by everyone else,” he wrote in his assessment of the iPhone. Now, after the release of iPhone OS 3.1, the Mac-cessibility Network noted that Apple has added an additional 16 improvements to the accessibility features of Apple’s mobile devices. These include controls for cutting and pasting text or even editing video using VoiceOver and Voice Control, reading PDF files, and using Voice Control over a Bluetooth headset. The continued attention to detail shows that Apple doesn’t take accessibility lightly. This attention to detail has also earned Apple an award from the National Federation for the Blind. Tomorrow, during its first ever Web Accessibility Day conference, the NFB will give an award to Apple recognizing the company for making the iPhone—a device largely defined by its graphical user interface that works with a touchscreen that has no haptic feedback—accessible and useable for those with visual impairments. In addition to recognition from the NFB, though, Apple’s technology has been recognized by some users recently for enabling them to communicate without the need for costly specialized systems. Users are finding that an iPhone with some specialized software, or even an off-the-shelf Mac with VoiceOver, can replace expensive, clunky text-to-speech devices for far less money. For example, The New York Times detailed the plight of a San Francisco woman who lost her voice due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). She recently supplanted her text-to-speech computer for an iPhone loaded with a $150 text-to-speech app, which lets her “wear her voice around her neck while snuggling with her 5-year-old son.” That story prompted a letter to the editor from none other than famed film critic Roger Ebert, who lost his voice to throat cancer. He told the Times, “After trying an $8,000 custom device with little computing power and a small, dim screen, I tried the built-in speech software on my MacBook and found it much more practical.” He uses the text-to-speech capability to discuss online news with his wife, for instance. While the expensive custom devices have other features, such as e-mail and Web browsing, disabled for complex insurance reasons, Ebert notes that “[a]nyone who uses a computer and has lost the power of speech knows that e-mail becomes invaluable.” It’s easy to point to a list of such features and say, “Great job, Apple,” but unless you have ever had to rely on the features, it’s difficult to understand just how important they are. Expensive, specialized devices may always be necessary for some users, but Apple’s focus on accessibility (even iPods have VoiceOver) could make an iPhone or a Mac all that some people need. The personal testimony of such users really drives home how disabilities can make computing and communicating a serious challenge, and how critical technologies like VoiceOver, Voice Control, and Universal Access are to giving these users the ability to participate in what the rest of us simply take for granted.
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Further reading: maccessibility.net/resources
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