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Update: Tiptree Award renaming is in progress
Thursday, 19 September 2019 05:09 pmThe Motherboard listened, and they're changing the name.
( suggest new names, read two wonderful essays )
We’ve read your thoughtful and pain-filled emails, tweets, and Facebook posts. We are sorry for the harm that’s been done, especially to some of the most marginalized members of our community.
We recognize that the award is necessary to the community, but can’t go on under its existing name. Now we need to figure out what to do next and how to do it. We’re working on it. And we’ll say more within a month.
( suggest new names, read two wonderful essays )
About that $350 LEGO braille printer
Thursday, 13 February 2014 06:55 pm(cross-posted to ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
access_fandom)
I'm not going to provide a link, for reasons that will become clear.
That announcement pushed a whole row of my Assistive Technology Geek buttons, and I gotta rant. I'll use the LEGO braille printer "BRAIGO" to illustrate why I get so hot under the collar when I see this shit. (My cred: I've hung out with people who use assistive technology since 1982; I designed and sold braille translation software and embossers in the late eighties; and I've personally depended on assistive technology since 1991.) Based on thirty year's close attention to the development/PR/funding/purchasing/abandonment cycle for assistive technology, here's my take on the BRAIGO announcement.
( DESIGNERS GET COOKIES FOR PROTOTYPES, NOT AFFORDABLE PRODUCTS )
( DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT EXPERT ENDUSERS IS POINTLESS ) That's why the BRAIGO can't create useful braille.
( PR BECOMES DISINFORMATION ) A $350 embosser would be an amazing thing. Hundreds of well-intentioned editors and readers are willing to take the inventor's word for it. But this device is not a embosser.
( EXPERTS ARE AVAILABLE on REQUEST! ) We live in a press release culture: what the company wants to say is what we hear. Or in this case, what a 12 year old (who mentions absolutely no contact with braille users) says gets broadcast.
( FAST FACTS RE EMBOSSERS & BRAILLE )
Start from the first dot at the RNIB's Learning Braille site or pick an excellent start for adults at the Achayra firm in India. Teach more at the National Federation of the Blind's Braille is Beautiful resource for kids.
tl;dr Just because assistive technologies are tools for people with disabilities doesn't mean we must accept only good intentions. We want the best engineers working on our designs, the best marketers making them affordable, and the best politicians making them subsidized.
access_fandom)I'm not going to provide a link, for reasons that will become clear.
That announcement pushed a whole row of my Assistive Technology Geek buttons, and I gotta rant. I'll use the LEGO braille printer "BRAIGO" to illustrate why I get so hot under the collar when I see this shit. (My cred: I've hung out with people who use assistive technology since 1982; I designed and sold braille translation software and embossers in the late eighties; and I've personally depended on assistive technology since 1991.) Based on thirty year's close attention to the development/PR/funding/purchasing/abandonment cycle for assistive technology, here's my take on the BRAIGO announcement.
( DESIGNERS GET COOKIES FOR PROTOTYPES, NOT AFFORDABLE PRODUCTS )
( DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT EXPERT ENDUSERS IS POINTLESS ) That's why the BRAIGO can't create useful braille.
( PR BECOMES DISINFORMATION ) A $350 embosser would be an amazing thing. Hundreds of well-intentioned editors and readers are willing to take the inventor's word for it. But this device is not a embosser.
( EXPERTS ARE AVAILABLE on REQUEST! ) We live in a press release culture: what the company wants to say is what we hear. Or in this case, what a 12 year old (who mentions absolutely no contact with braille users) says gets broadcast.
( FAST FACTS RE EMBOSSERS & BRAILLE )
Start from the first dot at the RNIB's Learning Braille site or pick an excellent start for adults at the Achayra firm in India. Teach more at the National Federation of the Blind's Braille is Beautiful resource for kids.
tl;dr Just because assistive technologies are tools for people with disabilities doesn't mean we must accept only good intentions. We want the best engineers working on our designs, the best marketers making them affordable, and the best politicians making them subsidized.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama Family Oratory
Monday, 20 May 2013 12:19 pmMr Coates calmly and coherently lays out where the President and First Lady have failed in addressing African-American institutions (it's commencement address season)
How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America
"Convenient race-talk" from a president who ought to know better at The Atlantic
How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America
"Convenient race-talk" from a president who ought to know better at The Atlantic
begin quote But I also think that some day historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. And then they will match that rhetoric of individual responsibility with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks, and the timidity they showed in addressing a foreclosure crisis which devastated black America (again.) And they will match the rhetoric with an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug-war which daily wrecks the lives of black men. I think those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk. quote ends
Recommended Browsing
Thursday, 31 March 2011 05:36 pmETA: Cut. Sorry about spamming your droll. :(
Let me offer you a link paté -- I've actually read all these stories, and wanted to share their greatness with you:
( Link Paté )
Let me offer you a link paté -- I've actually read all these stories, and wanted to share their greatness with you:
( Link Paté )