by | August 20, 2007 · 12:29 pm

Employ disabled people – We’re running out of everyone else!

I’m such an optimist. I listened with interest in the hope of some new revelation to yesterday’s Insight Doco and Friday’s exhortations form Business New Zealand on Radio NZ’s Morning Report. None came. Just the same tired old messages. Something new and radical will need to happen before there will be real change in what is quite a complex situation.

If I was a cynical Marxist I might consider the reserve labour market theory, to be discarded when the next and more important labour market development comes along, as they always will. I might be reminded that the women who worked during the war were shoved back into the kitchen the minute the boys came home. It took a long time for that ground to be regained.

But because I have experienced discrimination as a disabled person and a woman, and now could on the grounds of age, I have to put my money where my mouth is. So AccEase will take a disabled person on work experience, hoping we may be able to offer them some work eventually.

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Filed under Disability Issues

by | August 16, 2007 · 12:28 pm

Good intentions

Oh dear – a blog a week has begun to elude me already. Pressure of work probably doesn’t cut it but I will use that as an excuse anyway. I guess blogging has to be habit forming like anything else. I will try and do better in the future.

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Filed under Miscellaneous

by | July 30, 2007 · 2:29 pm

Ugly is beautiful!

Some of the ugliest sites are the easiest to use. Yet there is a persistent view among the web community that web sites must be elegant and beautiful examples of the designer’s art to be worth anything. This often means thumbing the nose at web accessibility and usability conventions such as blue underlined links, and the use of colours for maximum visibility.

Trade Me, Amazon, Google , My Space, and YouTube are ugly websites. They are also hugely successful websites. They don’t win a lot of design awards, but who cares – they are easy to use for most people and they make a lot of money.

Which leads me to the question, who are design awards for and what is their purpose? Suffice it to say that a site that AccEase user testers rated as their worst site ever for usability and accessibility has continued to win a whole raft of awards. I say let the users be the judge.

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Filed under Web Accessibility

by | July 28, 2007 · 9:03 am

Happy Birthday old friend

This year is the hundredth birthday of the NZ School journal. Around mumble mumble years ago I learned to read using the school journal. No big deal. Probably most of the kids in my generation of Kiwis did the same. But for me there was one big difference. Most early readers were off limits for me – I simply could not see enough to read the print. The large print editions of the school journal, and my wonderful new entrant teacher, were my introduction to literacy, and the whole wonderful world it brings to a young child.

Several years ago I mentioned to a friend in Special Education my few tatty copies, lovingly retained. (In those days you got to keep them.) She said there were no large print editions today. So a while later, when we moved house I couldn’t bear to throw them out and offered them back to SES for the records. Apparently they were the focus of some discussion.

Many disabled people, who are perfectly capable of learning to read, are, sadly, still leaving school barely literate. It seems to me to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment to deny someone, who may already face limited life choices the pleasure a good book, beautiful poem, or simply the daily reading of the news in the paper or on the web can bring, never mind being able to read the bus timetable, instructions for household appliances, study the Road Code, or understand everyday signage. Poor literacy is one way society further disables people.

Happy Birthday School Journal!

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Filed under Information Accessibility