Brian, Many considerate people subscribe to this list, as demonstrated yet again today. We naturally appreciate some useful suggestions you’ve made and some of the discussions you’ve initiated, such as on differences between visual and JAWS navigation.
However, I have misgivings about someone who presents himself as a computer trainer for visually impaired people but who is comfortable giving second place to accessibility. In the recent CAPTCHA thread, you wrote, “My refusal to say accessibility trumps all is no accident, and I make no apology for believing that.” No one was suggesting that “accessibility trumps all,” but many of us believe that access should be equal. When another lister stated this position on CAPTCHA, you dismissed her as “emotional.” For those of us who have fought much of our professional lives to bring about equal access to technology, such an attitude is distressing, above all when displayed by someone who is paid to assist disabled people. It is equivalent to telling African-Americans in the fifties that they must wait for their time and stay in the back of the bus. Instructors for disabled people should be telling their clients, “go get ‘em,” not, “Resign yourself to second class status.” You say you’re seeking suggestions for improving your teaching methods, but you appear to disregard the obvious ones. People suggest you work with a blank screen at least some of the time, but you resist. You don’t have JAWS on your own system, presumably because of the cost, but you ignore a poster’s earlier suggestion that you run JAWS in forty-minute mode for free. Many suggestions you post come with the proviso that you haven’t tested them with JAWS. I’m curious: Are you certified to teach JAWS? There are a number of JAWS trainers on this list, and I think, and certainly hope, that some are sighted. They all make invaluable contributions. None of them would get “angry” if told their way of doing something is for sighted people. In that light, you mentioned you’ve been working with blind people since 2010, so it surprises me that you feel like such a stranger. More than that, it saddens me because the last thing visually impaired people wish is for sighted people to feel like strangers, any more than visually impaired people wish to be strangers among sighted people. Because you teach JAWS, I urge you to make it a practice to use it in your private, as well as teaching, life, at least for (say) half an hour a day, so that you will become proficient. I also hope you will allow your thinking to evolve on the issue of universal accessibility. You may think such an attitude is realistic, perhaps with some reason as things stand, but it doesn’t have to stay this way unless accessibility runs up against defeatism. In these ways, you will definitely improve your teaching approach. Adrian Spratt
