Forcing everyone to use Microsoft Office because they have good disability readers allows that monopoly to charge large sums of money for word processors and spreadsheets. With programs like Open Office and Oracle’s Star Office there is no reason to pay these large sums of money or to force everyone to buy a product merely because they make it easier to manipulate data. This is a good reason for the disabled to join a open source project and help them to be more disability friendly. Open source, or free programs only work when everyone donates some time and effort to make the program better. In this case the developers of the open source programs do not know what needs to be done to help those with poor eyesight or those that have problems manipulating things in their hands. Many of us have plenty of time on our hands and have access to a computer. That is everything you need to join an open source application and make it more disability friendly.

SourceForge is an excellent website to start looking. Programs that are the most popular are posted that you can look at. These programs have people that you can send emails to or there are chat rooms that you can post your willingness to help. Almost everyone is looking for help and you will be integrated into the development of a program that is used worldwide. This is a win-win situation where you get a chance to go back to work on your schedule without bosses beating you on the head because you are disabled. Rather than sitting in front of the television all day and night you can do things that are fun and worthwhile and meet up to make new friends. This has been a very powerful way of generating programs that everyone needs and there is no reason why the disabled cannot make their mark on how all these programs work.

It is not surprising that we are ill prepared to handle a serious attack from the Internet. In the scenario Wall Street was closed down for a week while the power was turned back on. It would be impossible to calculate the tremendous damage to our economy that would happen if no one could trade on the stock exchange for a week. There would be runs on companies, mutual funds, and probably banks. How many companies would be wiped out when things first started up again? How many workers would find themselves unemployed and their bank accounts emptied because of bank failures. People would have to figure out how to stay alive for months while the feds figured how to pay for all the accounts in banks that were insured. If you do get a check, where do you cash it? What other bank do you truest to open up a new account? Does the postal system even work? There are substantial documents that are super secret that outline COG, or continance of government. These papers outline what to do in the case of a nuclear attack where the federal government is substantially damaged. There are outlines for who is responsible for what and how to ring the economy back on line. Many aspects of that document would have to be implemented if we were to get our country back off the ground again.

How would the disabled fare in this environment? If you are in a hospital situation then you are probably the safest of anyone. Major hospitals would be the first to get power and supplies. But if you are either at home or at a shelter then things are going to get ugly quickly. Everyone saw what happened in Hurricane Katrina at the Superdome where basic supplies were gone and people were living without clean water or sanitary conditions. The government has shown that it is not prepared to deal with a large emergency and that it takes time for groups like the military to get involved and get assets to the area. During that time everyone, especially the disabled must be able to fend for themselves for the better part of a week. Hoping that someone from state or federal government is going to come knocking on your door with food, water and medical supplies is a pipe dream. Those folks that need a nurse to get going in the morning need to make arrangements to have someone stay with them during the storm so that when roads are blocked, power is out and there is no gasoline your nurse is already in the house and can help you immediately. If you require drugs that have to be refrigerated then get a small refrigerator and a few uninterruptible power supplies or a generator to keep the fridge running. Make a spot in your home that can hold food, water and other supplies for a week for each person in your household, including your helpers. That will give you enough time for emergency crews to get power back up and police and fire crews to get things back under control.

How well you fare in an emergency is directly tied to how well you prepared. Those that have generators or UPS systems will find that life without power is more of an inconvenience. Food and water are the most important things you can have and things can get ugly if you run out of either. It is easy to stock up before an emergency and to keep track of dates so things do not go bad. Make sure that you also include manual can openers to open cans of soup. Since electricity may be an issue you should also include a couple of battery powered flashlights and a radio. If you have the budget for it get a battery powered digital television so that you can pick up local stations. This is a good place to start to set up an emergency kit to help you in times of bad weather or national emergency. Either way you should be able to stay at home for 7 to 10 days without food or water to make sure you don’t run out of supplies before emergency crews get a handle on the situation.

It is quite sad that the disabled have the hardest time in getting a job and when they do it is usually a low paying job tied to a boss that thinks they are stupid. Even in the best of financial times it is difficult for the disabled to find a good job. In this complete meltdown of many sectors of our economy makes it all but impossible for the disabled to get good employment. We are competing with people that are over qualified for a position but is in need of money to keep their house and car that they will do almost any job. So the low end jobs are going to engineers with master’s degrees that would never take that job except that there is nothing available in their market and they have been out of work for the last 18 months. The only answers I can think of is schooling and working for yourself. Because many of us are on SSDI or worse, it is very easy to get money to go to school – all the way to PhD. That would give anyone a huge boost in their ability to get a job and to increase their income. Of course it is a lot of work over many years, but then again nothing that is worthwhile is simple or easy. So we get to decide what we will do with our lives, sit at home staring at the boob tube, or get off our collective wheelchairs and get back to school and work.

There are many positions for teching available for secondary as well as college and research. I have found that schools are much more willing to take a chance on someone that is disabled than a company and they are easier to work for. Some universities are willing to put you through school to fill a job that they cannot find qualified people for. At a public university in Florida I saw a position open for a mathematical researcher and the school was willing to put you through to a PhD for free if you were willing to work at the university for five years. Not a bad deal – you get awesome paperwork and schooling for free along with a good job with benefits for the next five years or more. Stuff is out there for us, but we need to look for it and let the able bodied know that we are no different than they are, we are just stuck in a movable chair.

This is a monumental problem that the disabled community needs to address. The different communities do not talk to each other, and in some cases work against each other to get the same things accomplished. We can no longer think that only one disability exists and as such we can ignore everyone else and not even try to help them. To help ourselves it is easy to hook up with a open source program and help them. All of these programs are looking for help and guidance and would love to have disabled people on their team to make things better and easier to use. But we have to do the work, it doesn’t happen by itself. Sitting in front of the television is not a good way to run your life and getting back to work and helping others at the same time is an excellent thing to do.

I have watched many wheelchair bound people just sit and do nothing in front of a television 18 hours a day. There is no reason that they cannot write a blog, letters, or make phone calls to their elected officials or others to make things better for the whole community. I guess that it depends on your own personal drive but there has to be something else in life than what toi watch on the travel channel. By volunteering for something as simple as a free and open source software package you are using your brain again and interacting with people all over the world. They appreciate the work you are doing and you get to help other disabled people that need access to these programs but they cannot until functionality and documentation exists to use them. Don’t let yourself drop down to nothing as you just watch television. You have skills that are in need and you should figure out the best way to use them. Open Source products are just one place that you can help a lot of people by doing what you know best.

While it is great that a group has taken up the job of trying to help the disabled community to make good decisions on which games play well and which ones that are missing basic help for them, all game companies should think of the ADA during design phase. Typically it is not difficult to add difficulty levels or to add closed captioning since the characters are speaking the words anyways. Changes to keep colorblind players happy is also a relatively simple process because there are well known color combinations that cause grief and those could be easily changed in the graphics engine without any other modifications to how the game plays or how it looks.

One would think that game companies would want to add to the number of customers that can purchase and play their games if the work to do that is easy and cheap. But instead the game companies completely ignore the disabled community because there is no one to club them over the head to let them know that we exist. The lawsuit against Sony will wake that company up, but what about the others? The idea is to get them to make minor changes without pricing the company into bankruptcy because of legal costs or dramatically increased development costs. This could be fixed by adding a few disabled people to the testing teams so that fixes can be worked on right away and the company can get write-ups in disability magazines and websites saying they are working with the community to make their products available. This would open up a brand new market for arcade games to people that would love to play and pay for them but can’t because they are unplayable. But with a few changes we all can have fun on our computers and game consoles.

This political football has created a group of people that cannot pay for their drugs because of a crazy program that is based on Social Security that was never supposed to give people enough money to pay for their medical bills. So instead we have a drug industry that makes billions of dollars in profits on the backs of those that pay for research on the pills that we are charged $1000+ a month for. These companies due to keep generic drug makers from creating drugs that can be afforded by all. It is interesting that the costs of the same drug in the US is a fraction of that amount in Canada or even India. Each country pays a different amount but we are too stupid to make these same deals with the drug makers. To add insult to injury Medicare is not allowed by law to purchase drugs from other countries for less than what we are charged for them now. The US pays for all of the research but does not gain any of the benefits of that research. Instead the poor of the country are forced to pay outrageous amounts of money for drugs that they need to stay alive. We need to make some decisions as a country on how we deal with those that are disabled and elderly. Either we are going to pay for their medical care or not – not the bits and pieces we are now. By only allowing these people to take their drugs every 6 months, their health is deteriorating to the point that they are dying before they should because of the damage caused by not taking their medications. Lets close the doughnut hole and give people the medical care that they need to live useful lives.

Unfortunately the disabled are usually the ones that are the first to be laid off and that employers take advantage 9of those workers because they know how important the salary is. There are laws in place to protect the disabled so they will not be discriminated against but there are few agencies that are able to enforce the law. Even if the disabled person can prove that they have been discriminated against they need the money to hire a lawyer to go after the employer. If they do go after the company then they can be fired for other reasons. So most times the disabled just deal with the discrimination and hope that they can hang on to the job until the economy gets better and they can get another job.The government is working on a new law to protect the disabled workers called the "Equality Bill" and Parliament is discussing it. People that have been discriminated against are asked to contact their MP and let them know what happened and what could be done to fix the situation. Until this bill is passed into law the disabled will not have the same protections as the able bodied and will have to put up with unsavory managers that take advantage of their situation.

The medical care bill changes are the least of our problems with an ever increasing disabled population. All these programs are running out of money or are rationing what little money is left. Vocational Rehab which has been helping the disabled get back to work are finding that they can only help those that are presently in the program. Any new people are being put into a queue that may or may not be funded this year or next. So we will have large groups of people that want to get back to work but cannot even talk to a counselor because there is  no money to convert cars or put ramps in a home. Decisions have to be made on what will be done to help the disabled and how will funding be increased over time as workers who have been paying taxes over the last 40 years move over to Social Security and disability payments. Somehow we need to get more workers paying into these programs or we will be in deficit. The government has been in deficit for many years and managed to start to pay things off in the 1990s but economic problems have put all these programs in serious trouble.

Many analysts have said that Social Security and Medicare will run out of money by 2030, forcing people into nursing homes or halfway houses to pay the bills. Many of those people will be disabled by that time and will need specialized care if they are remove from their homes. No one knows where the money for those doctors and nurses that can work with the disabled but they must come from somewhere. It is doubtful that the population of the United States will put up with pushing the elderly and disabled on the streets panhandling for money because the governmental programs that were put in place to help them are now of money for good. No one wants to increase taxes but something has to be done or there will be substantial changes that will make the middle class disappear with a divide of services between the super rich and the ever increasing poor population.

There have been several attempts to change the way medical care is doled out in the United States but is has been shot down every time. This is the closest that anyone has come to creating a omnibus bill for medical care. While it is not perfect everyone can see that we cannot continue to zoom down the way we are going because Medicare and Social Security are both in big trouble financially speaking. Something has to be done in the next 10 to 15 years or many programs that Americans use to live on after working their entire lives will crash and burn. That does not include all those (and we are talking millions) that depend on those programs because of a catastrophic injury that forced them to be disabled. The disabled usually cannot work anymore and without Social Security would be tossed out on the street (along with their family) and without Medicare would also lose their home because of skyrocketing medical bills. It is not unreasonable for many on Medicare to lose their prescription drug program after 5 or 6 months because of the way the law works and then stop taking their drugs until the next year. Many die of heart attacks or worse because they cannot afford to take the drugs they need to stay alive. It is a scary thing to think about but we all will eventually get to that point as we get old and our bodies give out. So if you think that this does not effect you, give it a few decades and we’ll see how you feel about no programs in place to help with paying the bills. Read up and stay tuned, it is going to be a bumpy ride.

It is sad that these companies are fighting to keep books out of the hands of disabled people across the globe. We all know that knowledge is power and that the better educated a person is t he easier time it will be to find a good job or continue in college. By tightly controlling what books are available to the blind, they are deciding what books the blind should read. The individual no longer has control over what materials they have access t, instead large corporations decide that and put whatever price tags for entry on these products so they can control the disabled. The Library of Congress, Google and the Gutenberg Project all pay  the publishers to convert the books into electronic format so that they will be available to many people including those using electronic book readers and the blind. Those works are then placed in public libraries so that they are available to everyone. Evidently the book publishers believe that libraries are really large groups involved in stealing all of their works by making them available to everyone without charging them a fee.

The disabled are usually at the bottom of the economic ladder, trying to live off of Social Security Disability payments and eking out a life for themselves and their families. Most do not have money to purchase books at $15-$50 a pop, especially for technical or college texts. By making these available in formats like Daisy the blind can keep up with the latest trends and make themselves useful to the market for jobs. By locking them out of millions of titles available around the world you lock them out of works that everyone who is not disabled can access. This creates a group of underserved that can only access what companies deem they need to read rather than letting the consumers make that decision. What books and literature should we not allow the blind to read? How about the Jewish population or African Americans? Are we hiding books that show how the have been systematically discriminated against? Is this how we keep the disabled from ever moving up the economic food chain? 

The fight against allowing people to read what they want is a scary idea that needs to be stopped. The free press needs to publish stories on what is happening to the blind so that advocacy groups can step in to protect the rights of the disabled in the United States and Europe. Wile you finish this article, think about what books you should not be allowed to read by corporate america.