Re: a few complaints about the blind comunity
@Assault freak, I've heard as much of the Cnib, and you may well be right about Canida generally, certainly I've noticed the Dutch, the Germans, people from Scandinavian countries have a much better attitude towards disability generally blindness included.
I do have to say though that from the research I've done blindness and deafness are the two disabilities with the worst communication issues, deafness for obvious reasons, although in the case of deafness there is so much "group identity" and language identity (there are many deaf people who even claime to not be disabled at all), that there is at least a much more active cultural element than with blindness.
Part of this is undoubtedly practical, sinse one of the major tools used by sighted people for communication is eye contact, and that's something blind people can't do, however I don't see why if a sighted person can realize someone in a wheel chair can't walk acros
s the room to say hi, they can't realize someone who is blind can't make sodding eye contact.
this is compounded by the issue that conversation is something of a dying art form, and eye contact is largely replacing it, ---- look at how much of social life revolves around environments like crowded pubs and night clubs where ambient noise makes any form of communication but eye contact near impossible.
I will say in the right group and environment, things can work extremely well. During my degree and time at university things were amazing, I was not only accepted by most people as a default but I even got to engage in some fairly responsable positions of authority. Unfortunately, university is different to pretty much any other environment you will find and sinse I finished my degree I've only ever found that level of open mindedness around students, which is just plane depressing.
@gene, one thing I've noticed about a lot of blindness org ganizations is they have very much a "our rules or nothing" sort of mindset. "jaws" is what they! offer so they tell people it's best irrispective of anything else, they have set cane teaching techniques that they use for a set amount of time for eaqch person irrispective of sight level, preferences or anything else. I will say this is my I have issues with a lot of blind people who've gone the institutionalized route sinse they tend to have adopted this mind set, that they assume there is only one set method or set idea in life, and take what is given and don't enquire outside it.
Oddly enough it makes me feel rather more alone among other blind people, sinse when i mention having friends who aren't blind or using the train or what not and get the disbelief response it can be rather annoying, plus I've noticed a tendency among rather a few blind people to associate only with that small number of people they met during their t ime at specialist school and nothing else.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
