Peter S. Lopez wrote:
(..) We must always strive to maximize human potential to the utmost of one's real capacity. The DDN Movement should strive to remove all obstacles that stand in the way of really bridging the 'tech divide' {a reflection of dominant class-economic property relations in present-day society}.
True but at times it's really uphill to try to make deciders understand issues. Recently an equal-chances-through-ICT lady guru showed me the prototype learning platform she was using in a program to enable women to acquire needed skills in ICT in order go back on the work market after their kids start going to school. The platform was in old flash, i.e. non vocalizable and with no possibility to copy the text, so wide you had to keep scrolling left and right. She herself acknowledged that she had to have a tech person upload the files for the courses as the platform was rather complicated to manage.
I pointed out that participants should learn how to use normal platforms/groups/communities/mailing lists for when they would have finished the course and wouldn't be able to access that "prototype" anymore, and added that said prototype was not accessible to blind people anyway. The equal-chances-through-ICT guru retorted: "Come on! How could a blind person possibly use a computer?!" And her program is funded by the Swiss Federal Equal Chances Office, because equal chances here is exclusively understood in gender terms. Besides, the same "prototype" platform is being experimented in a few middle schools here for grade 6 math, and there is a strong risk it will be adopted in all middle schools for all subjects in grades 6-9.
The Swiss Disability Insurance won't pay for disabled people's broadband connection, on the pretext that the rest of the family might use it too. So disabled people here remain cut off from the opportunities the internet would offer them: in particular from the opportunities to learn about devices like the ones described in this thread, and to organize and lobby through the internet.
Switzerland in particularly backwards in this, granted. But I wonder if this deciders' tech and tech-accessibility illiteracy isn't slowing down progress elsewhere too.
Claude -- Claude Almansi Castione, Switzerland claude.almansi_at_bluewin.ch http://www.adisi.ch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADISI http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/Claude http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/claude http://www.digitaldivide.net/community/languages _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
