I know the site has been quiet since June without explanation. Our sincerest apologies. But at last I can tell you what has happened.

The webmaster’s SCI accident was 4+ years ago. Almost 3 years ago today, he went in for emergency shunt insertion surgery, due to spinal cord fluid back-up. For six months prior to that point we had both spent a lot of time and energy telling the medical community something was wrong with his back. We were met with ignorance.

Now here we are almost exactly 3 years later; having told the medical community that once again something was wrong with the webmaster’s back. And again, we were met with ignorance and now intolerance. But lo’ and behold (after chasing the medical community)….the webmaster has an elongated syrinx the entire length of his spine; a failed shunt and two lumps on his back. The unintended challenge with this is a wound that developed as the result of a new wheelchair not being put together completely.

He is in good spirits and our child is holding up well under the circumstances. Now that we finally have a path to recovery set up for the webmaster, I’ll try to write more often and hope that you’ll keep checking back.

Your continued prayers and cheerleading are most appreciated and know that we really miss you.

Sincerely,

His wife, the Roaring Mouse

Imagine being at war in the midst of battle without being aware of what was going on around you. Imagine having the desire to serve your country and help your fellow soldiers but you needed an aid to walk. This has been a problem for British soldier Craig  Lundberg for the past three years.  Craig Lundberg lost his vision after he was struck by a rocket propelled grenade in 2007.  

After his incident Corporal Craig Lundberg was the first to get his hands or should I say tongue on a new device called Brainport. You can say that he was a pioneer in using this device. Brainport allows him to see images from his goggles which are then translated with a simulation pattern to his tongue and converted into signals that can be understood by his brain. People who are visually impaired will learn to use this device by recognizing patterns, movement and also high contrast objects. What concerns me is what happens if this particular soldier gets the device damaged while on a mission? Does the device have some sort of backup software and is it durable enough to withstand the different environments and situations a soldier has to deal with in the time of war?

According to Lundberg he says that the device feels like “licking a nine volt battery” or “like popping candy”. This device has a great potential to change the lives of many people if released to the public. This device could help those who are visually impaired see their loved ones which could be an enormous advancement in life of people affected by this disability. Lundberg says “ One of the things it has allowed me to do is pick up objects straight away, I can reach out and pick them up when before I would be fumbling around to feel for them”. The value of this simple action is taken for granted by so many people. You can tell that life is a lot more easier for Lundberg and his family ….even more so than before. There has to be some feeling of relief within him that now he has the ability to do more things for himself as well as others.

Currently this revolutionary device being used is only a prototype according to Disability and Health News. hopefully the British army will find answers to these problems before it is used by other visually impaired soldiers.The neuropsychologist supervising this trial Maurice Pitito says that “ It’s a concept in which you replace a sense that was lost by another one.” Brainport can allow people who are visually impaired walk around without a cane. It gives them the opportunity to navigate obstacles and even the opportunity to read signs. It also allows them to get a feeling of the world from their tongue and that gives them a sense of seeing. Most people do not understand that you do not only see with your eyes but you see with your brain.

Do you have a fire plan? Do you have any idea how you would deal with a fire in your home? This is not the kind of plan that you want to put together as you go along. I would call your local fire department and have then stop by and help you with your plan. They will help you to determine the best way to get out of the home and where additional ramps may be needed. They will also look around your house and let you know  which room would be best to barricade yourself into. Some rooms will be easier and therefore faster to get you out depending on windows and the construction materials of your home.

While you are thinking about fire prevention and safety, now is a good time to get carbon monoxide detectors for your home. Note that this is not something that your smoke detector looks for. If you have a fire somewhere, the carbon dioxide will set off the alarm before your smoke alarm, goes off. Don’t forget about flashlights in case the fire happens during the night you can still find your way around. All these small things can add up to a home that is safer. It also makes you better able to survive a fire instead of trying to create a plan out of your head. That is a way to get yourself in trouble with no way out. This, like many things is made more difficult because of your injury or disability. But planning could easily save your life.

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.

SCRN has written many articles about issues in Europe as the disabled were removed from airplanes because the pilot didn’t want them on board to taxi drivers refusing to take people in wheelchairs because it took to long to get them into the car. It is good that governments realize that the disabled should be treated no differently than the able bodied and should not get substandard service or be charged extra because of their injury or medical condition. It will be interesting to see how the advertisement blitz works and whether workers will actually take it to heart that they need to help those that cannot help themselves. It is not clear who will be doing the enforcement of the law, but they better have plenty of officers around to make sure things are working properly. People are creatures of habit and will not do more work or do things that they do not want to unless they are forced to. Secret officers should try to get on mass transit to make sure it is working properly and if not there needs to be stiff fines to be paid. Once a few workers get hit with big fines it will go through the grape vine that they have to follow the law or else.