Darrell Shandrow Hilliker

It appears that even the Supreme Court has refused to save Terri’s life! We’re really coming down to the wire on this one, boys and girls! It seems that all judicial and legislative processes have been exhausted. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of us out here in blog space are rooting for Terri. Let’s all continue to make our voices heard loud and clear! Check out these blogs for Terri:

• Wittenberg Gate
• Attempted Murder: The Terri Schiavo Coverup
• Blogs for Terri
• Blogs for Terri Schiavo – Feed Aggregator

Check out this Fox News article covering the bloggers’ side of the Terri Schiavo case.

Wow! I sure did have a great time at CSUN! Check out some fun, lighthearted banter between myself and Jeff Bishop immediately preceding the BrailleNote versus PAC Mate presentation on Saturday morning at CSUN. Did I just say “Fun”? Fun? What’s that? Why? Yes! I believe I did. Do wonders ever cease to amaze?

Listen to an audio recording of this exchange of commentary about the impending presentation as it happened, right there in the front row of seats in the Atlanta Ballroom at the Los Angeles Marriott on Saturday morning at approximately 10:40!

Despite all the technical difficulties preventing me from providing you with the anticipated full CSUN conference coverage, I was able to conduct and record a demonstration of Talking Signs.

Talking Signs is an innovative line of products that can enable easier, more effective independent navigation by the blind in locations where they have been installed. The blind person points a simple infrared remote control type receiver in various directions, hears a descriptive voice recording of his or her surroundings and moves toward the desired location as the signal becomes stronger and stronger. Feel free to listen to my informal demonstration of this technology on the ballroom level of the Los Angeles Marriott at the 2005 CSUN conference and browse to the Talking Signs web site for more information directly from the manufacturer.

You may listen to this demonstration, recorded on Saturday morning at CSUN, in streaming MP3 format with Winamp or any other compatible player:

• Talking Signs Demo Part 1
• Talking Signs Demo Part 2

As this demonstration represents my first attempt at providing live coverage of an event as it happens, please provide feedback so I may improve upon my work in the future!

On Friday afternoon, March 18, all food and water were withheld from Terri Schiavo. It is now Tuesday, March 22. Terri has had no food or water for almost five days! She is literally being dehydrated and starved to death! Point your web browser to www.helpterri.com and help save Terri Schiavo now! Let’s save Terri’s life and send a clear message that the American people are against euthanasia!

Thus far, we at Blind Access Journal have made a financial donation to the cause, and have contacted our Arizona Congressional representative, Arizona senators and Florida legislators asking them to act immediately to save Terri’s life! We urge you all to do likewise immediately as time is wasting. Terri is dehydrating and starving to death by the second while the government officials and politicians “think it over”! Act now to persuade them to
do the right thing immediately; ask them to reinsert that feeding tube and save Terri right now!

I sent the following letter to our Arizona legislators in the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Please, everyone, contact the politicians right now. Ask them to save Terri immediately!

March 22, 2005

Dear Senator McCain, Senator Kyl, and Representative Hayworth,

I am writing to ask you to do everything within your powers to save Terri
Schiavo’s life. I was born prematurely in August of 1973. The long list
of my disabilities included blindness, deafness, a heart murmer and a bone
deficiency. Doctors told my parents that I would never live a successful
life, that I wouldn’t even learn to sit up until age 5 or 6 and that they
should just give me up to an institution. Obviously, my parents did not
heed that poor advice. That’s why I am able to write you today. Though
I’m still blind, all my other disabilities have disappeared. Most
important, my hearing problems were successfully corrected at age 5! I am
now a successful information technology professional, accessibility
advocate and publisher of the Blind Access Journal found at
http://www.blindaccessjournal.com.
Who knows where I would be if my mom
had listened to the pesimists? I can say one thing for sure, it wouldn’t
be anything good.

Terri Schiavo is, indeed, severely disabled. She is minimally conscious.
Nevertheless, her parents and numerous doctors tell us that she does
respond to stimulation and that she even tries to talk from time to time.
Terri’s family wants to take over the care of their daughter from a
husband who has long since decided to move on with his life. Despite his
words, his deeds speak much louder. In addition to Terri, he has a common
law wife with two children! Please, don’t give Terri’s husband any
credibility in this matter. Terri didn’t tell us in writing what she
wanted to do in a circumstance such as that which she has faced for more
than 15 years. He clearly doesn’t care about Terri’s best interests.
Please don’t listen to him any longer.

The slow, painful government-sanctioned murder of Terri Schiavo will set
an extremely dangerous, public precedent for the treatment of people with
disabilities! We must not only save Terri’s life for her own sake, but
also set a precedent for doing the right thing, always voting in favor of
life rather than euthanasia! Please, please, I ask you to do everything
you can for Terri right now! Terri remains without food and water. She’s
suffering and dying right now! There’s no more time to “think about it”!
Please act now and encourage your Florida state legislative colleagues and
Governor Bush to do the right thing by saving Terri’s life and sending a
clear message against euthanasia!

I have just heard that the Senate and the House have agreed on language
for a bill to save Terri Schiavo’s life.
PLEASE, show bi-partisan support for this legislation, and vote to SAVE
Terri Schiavo from starvation. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Darrell Shandrow

I first learned about Jonathan Mosen in late 1996. At that time, he operated a web site called The Arena. Not only did this site contain lots of wonderful blind community resources, but there was also a neat section called “Voices from the Keyboard” where you could hear the voices of those who participated in the Internet portion of the blind community. I met Jonathan briefly while attending my last NFB convention in New Orleans in 1997. Jonathan went on to form an innovative Internet radio station called MBSFM, where he broadcasted the first significant, live blind community radio talk show called Blind Line. Sometime in 2000, Jonathan began his directorship of ACB Radio, continuing Blind Line and featuring such enlightening new programming as the Main Menu technology demonstration and information radio show. As he moved on to his current employment with HumanWare, he began The Wave, the fun, innovative and witty radio station to which we must now say “goodbye” and “so long” for the present time.

I woke up this morning to the sad news that, due to various technical problems including lack of available Internet bandwidth, The Wave is closing. The loss of The Wave is already being felt by us here at Blind Access Journal. I and many others are going to especially miss The fun, humorous and always interesting Mosen Explosion music, request and talk show, which Jonathan hosted on Friday afternoons here in the United States, noontime on Saturdays in New Zealand.

Jonathan, despite our disagreements over such important issues as the Bookshare accessibility model and the war in Iraq, you have been one of my favorite people since I learned of you in 1996! I have looked up to you as a model of success and as a real, sincere person. You inspire blind people all over the world! Please do come back to Internet broadcasting very soon; we miss you already! I can actually feel tears welling up in my eyes. Please come back soon, Jonathan; we need you!

Welcome to our coverage of the 20th annual International Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities (also known as CSUN) sponsored by California State University at Northridge! Please feel free to listen to this introductory audio message and stay tuned for exciting live audio and text coverage of those happenings that are important to the blind community.

Skype is a revolutionary new way to communicate on the Internet using your voice. Voice contact between Internet users is free of charge, while it is possible to place calls to regular telephones at extremely competitive discount rates. Skype is able to effectively work around most firewalls and other challenging network configurations that stop other voice over Internet solutions dead in their tracks.

Naturally, Skype is an excellent candidate for adoption as the voice communication solution of choice for the blind community. Sadly, despite numerous attempts to communicate with Skype concerning accessibility, each new release of the Skype software seems to be moving in the wrong direction, away from accessibility! Increasing awareness of accessibility is always the first step to positive change, and Skype is certainly no exception. Blind Access Journal is sending the following letter to Skype requesting that attention be paid to the accessibility of its software to all current and potential users, including those of us whom happen to be blind.

March 13, 2005

Dear Skype Management Team:

The Skype voice over Internet software represents a revolution in voice communications technology on the Internet. Its ability to provide high quality audio while working around firewalls and other challenging network configurations has the potential to reduce complexity and increase the usability of voice over Internet technologies for everyone, including Internet users whom happen to be blind or visually impaired. I am a blind information technology professional, accessibility advocate and publisher of the Blind Access Journal found at http://www.blindaccessjournal.com. The purpose of this letter is to request that Skype show leadership by integrating accessibility into the design of its software so that all may participate in the voice over Internet revolution.

Creating and maintaining reasonable accessibility need not be difficult nor costly, especially for the talented programmers employed by your company. I would like to make the following recommendations to improve the accessibility of Skype:

• Enable tab and shift+tab navigation among all program controls, fields and other elements.
• Enable arrow key navigation and Windows keyboard support in all fields such as edit boxes, combo boxes and lists.
• Enable the option of using a Windows standard focus or highlight bar to indicate selection in the contact list and other places in the program as appropriate.
• Use standard Window classes for all controls or implement Microsoft Active Accessibility to provide this information to assistive technology.
• Include text labels for all graphics in the program.

There are tens of thousands of current and potential Skype users in the blind community. Your software is a natural fit for blind people, who are always looking for affordable international voice communication technology. We are concerned that, with each new version of Skype, the program is actually becoming less and less accessible. There is a small group of blind programmers who are feverishly working to maintain a set of script files for the popular JAWS for Windows screen reading application. As each new Skype release changes the user interface, these scripts break, must be revised and distributed to all affected users. While Skype is less complex than other solutions for sighted users, this need to constantly update a set of scripts that can’t even provide access to all Skype features increases the complexity of Skype for blind users to a level that is simply unattainable by most. As we have observed the design of each new Skype release become less and less accessible, we are concerned that a point will soon be reached where the maintenance of the scripts will become impossible and we will be permanently locked out of the Skype revolution. It is also critical to serve the thousands of blind people not using the JAWS screen reader, for whom the scripts are unable to help.

I ask you to show your leadership on the Internet. Please work cooperatively and proactively with us to insure the ability of everyone to use the Skype software and all associated free and fee based services. I look forward to a response from someone on your management team in the very near future. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Darrell Shandrow

Blind Access Journal

I am now asking you to write and send a similar letter to Skype. I am hopeful that our requests for greater accessibility will receive attention if we all make our voices heard. Follow Skype’s report a problem with Skype link and contact Customer Service to submit your letter. It is highly encouraged that you submit at least a problem report, even if you have only used Skype’s free services. We are strongly urging you to submit both a problem report and customer service feedback if you have ever placed a call using the Skype Out service. This is an opportunity for us all to participate in an effort to gain greater accessibility to information technology. I expect everyone to rise to the occasion and squeak this wheel as loud as possible!

Blind Access Journal is a dynamic, constantly evolving blind community resource. We are experimenting with a blogging capability known as trackback. This new functionality enables aggregation and exchange of articles and associated comments among blogs. Trackback provides us with the potential to expand the influence of the journal throughout the Internet community and to track the progress of our efforts. Your feedback and patience are appreciated as we are bound to cut our teeth on this new system in the beginning.

You may be wondering what happened to all the old comments. They’re not gone. Simply click the link to the post time for each article to view all comments entered before the implementation of trackback. Please use the new “Comment” and “Trackback” links to submit all new responses.

We feel we have improved the overall quality and usefulness of Blind Access Journal by adding this new comment management and trackback functionality. As always, we welcome your feedback and will do our very best to resolve all reported issues these new features may cause.

Here’s some food for thought. If a sighted person is clumsy or disorganized, it is typically accepted and just blown off as being no big deal. If a blind person exhibits the same behavior, it is immediately attributed to their blindness and considered to be further evidence of the supposed overall incompetence of the blind in general. Like it or not, we must, at all times, stay on our toes and work tirelessly to prove ourselves to be above this ridiculous double standard.

March 9, 2005

Dear GoDaddy Management team,

I attempted to perform a Whois domain name search at
http://whois.godaddy.com
and was stopped dead in my tracks by your company’s visual verification process. I am a blind information technology professional with over ten years of
experience, an accessibility advocate and publisher of the Blind Access Journal found at
http://www.blindaccessjournal.com.

I am not able to physically see the characters in the image to type them into the edit field in order to pass a visual verification test. Though the purpose
of these tests is to insure that only a live human being is using the service, they’re really testing and admitting only sighted humans when no accessible
alternatives are provided. In your company’s case, a telephone number (480-505-8899) is provided as a means for gaining access to the Whois information
when the user is blind or visually impaired.
I called 480-505-8899 this morning. After working with your IVR, where no mention is made of the correct option to select for this accessibility situation,
I spoke with Max. He was unable to simply provide me with a verification code, but offered to verbally read the requested Whois information over the phone.
He was helpful but did not have the answers to most of my questions about the inaccessibility of your visual verification process and was unable to tell
me whether or not TDD service was available for the deaf-blind. I was transferred to Dirk, Max’s supervisor, who advised me to write to this e-mail address.

According to the current state of the art in visual verification technology, a commonly accepted way to provide an accessible alternative is to allow the
user to click a link that plays an audio version of the characters being displayed in the image. I am strongly requesting that GoDaddy implement this
audio alternative right away to enable reasonable, independent access to this information for most of the blind and visually impaired. Please do this
in very short order. Companies such as Microsoft, PayPal and SpamArrest already employ this accessibility measure. Please also continue to offer the
alternative of calling the telephone number for those who are unable to use the audio solution, such as those whom are deaf-blind. Of course, please insure
that TDD service is available at this telephone number, or offer another method of contact such as e-mail or instant messaging for these users.

GoDaddy is a leader on the Internet. Please show this leadership by providing real accessibility to your visual verification processes. Enable the audio
solution right away!

Blind Access Journal is covering the impact of inaccessible visual verification systems on the blind, exploring current and innovative new solutions to
the issues and advocating for implementation of accessibility to these systems by everyone who relies on them to protect the security of Internet resources.
A copy of this letter is being posted on the journal. We in the blind community hope to be able to place GoDaddy into the good guys camp as an example
of how to protect Internet users against spam and other abuse while allowing all human beings access to products and services regardless of disability.

Sincerely,

Darrell Shandrow

Publisher

Blind Access Journal: http://www.blindaccessjournal.com

editor@blindaccessjournal.com

After sending this letter to suggestions@godaddy.com as recommended by Dirk on the phone this morning, I received a mail delivery failure notice. I hope this is, in fact, a real e-mail address and that GoDaddy is dealing with technical difficulties. On my lunch break, I will be attempting to determine how to effectively complete the delivery of this letter to Godaddy Software. Let’s keep fighting the good fight! Inaccessible visual verification schemes pose a clear and present danger to our continued ability to access the Internet!