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Can you remember a time when people around you assumed you were like
them, or to behave in a certain way, and yet you knew that what they
expected wasn't really who you knew yourself to be?

Perhaps this is also a question.
the world says we are blind, incapable, poor, unable, limited, and
whatever else they say. Do you accept that? Do you sit back and let
that be true? Is it true? Or do you find the courage to stand up and
say first, "no, I am not that." I am far more than you see or
understand. Let me tell you who I am!"

What is it like to find the courage to dare to be more, perhaps
different than what the world says? What is it like to find the words
to make a statement so challenging to most of the world? Do you do it?
Have you ever done it? Can you imagine the courage it takes?

And what if, being who you really are would mean changing every
relationship, every assumption others would have about you in order to
bring such a change about?

Hi Everyone,

Sorry to be this late with what's on tonight's show. I just got in from
being in school all day. But tonight, we have our own chrissie
Cochrane. Many of you know herwearing several hats with ACB Radio. She
is a friend to many,.
tonight she is willing to share her own personal story Some of you may
have heard it before. I hope, even if you have, that you will come back
and tune in for what may be an even deeper perspective.

Call in, skype, messenger, email.
Skype: debbie_hazelton
888 476-4616, 407 413-9336
messenger: healinghands4u@bellsouth.net
email: dhazelton@acbradio.org

It's ACB Radio Mainstream
http://www.acbradio.org/mainstream
2:00 UUTC. That's Saturday, beginning at 10:00 EDT Friday in the US,
7:00 Pacific, replaying every 3 hours throughout the broadcast day.

Hope to see you there!

All the best!
Debbie Hazelton:
helping people feel better, one person at a time!

For immediate release — please distribute as appropriate 

Dear friends and colleagues:  The  U.S. credit reporting agencies announced today that free on-line credit reports will comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by October of this year.  Credit reports will be available in Braille, Large Print, and on audio CD by December.   This announcement is the result of an agreement signed by the American Council of the Blind and others using Structured Negotiations.  The full agreement is available on line at www.LFLegal.com/2008/04/credit-report-agreement.  The press release below is also available on line at 

National Credit Reporting Companies, Blind Community, Announce Landmark Initiative to Provide Accessible Online Credit Reports 

"I'm a concerned citizen running for office, and I want to hear from you! We
in New Jersey's 5th Congressional district need to work together to bring
about real change and a return to common sense."

Now, those words may not seem much different from what we are hearing around
the United States these days during this year of fascinating politics. So,
why do I quote them? Because the person who speaks them is totally blind.

On the next Marlaina, meet Dr. Dennis Shulman, a psychologist and ordained
rabbi from New jersey who is running for a seat in the Congress of the
United States of America.

Dennis Shulman, renowned author, educator, and clinical psychologist, has
dedicated his life to serving all segments of the community.
Blind since childhood, he has overcome significant obstacles to earn an Ivy
League diploma and rise to the top of his profession – and become an
ordained rabbi.
Dr. Shulman is running for Congress in New Jersey's Fifth Congressional
District because he believes fundamental change is needed in Washington.
"I am running for Congress not as a career politician, but as a concerned
citizen,"
says Shulman. "I believe that Congress could use more candor and more people
with diverse life experiences. We keep sending career politicians to
Washington and what do we have to show for it? A big mess. It may very well
take a blind man to show Congress the light."
Dennis has spent his entire life confronting challenges – and surmounting
them. Growing up working class and losing his sight at a young age, some
predicted that Dennis would never graduate high school. During high school,
Dennis worked in a toy factory to help his family pay the bills. However,
neither he nor his parents accepted that anything would keep him from
achieving the American Dream, and Dennis' success in high school led to
acceptance to college.
He graduated from Brandeis in the class of 1972 Magna cum Laude and Phi Beta
Kappa.
That same year Dennis' volunteer activities on behalf of the developmentally
disabled earned him a Special White House Commendation for Outstanding
Humanitarian Service and The David Aranow Award for Outstanding Achievement
in Social Welfare.
Dennis next moved to Harvard University to begin work toward a Ph.D. in
Clinical Psychology and Public Practice. Just two years into the program
Dennis won a Training Fellowship from the National Institute for Mental
Health and married his college sweetheart, medical student Pam Tropper. He
also began what has become an extended series of teaching positions,
professional publications, postdoctoral studies and speaking engagements.
Graduating from Harvard, Dennis began his career as a clinical psychologist
and as an educator, including more than a decade at Fordham. In 1997, Dennis
founded the National Training Program in Contemporary Psychoanalysis at The
National Institute for the Psychotherapies, which he continues to serve.
In 2003, Dennis was ordained as a Rabbi. That same year he published his
book, The Genius of Genesis: A Psychoanalyst and Rabbi Examines the First
Book of the Bible.
In addition to continuing to treat patients in his psychological practice,
Dr. Shulman currently serves as the Associate Rabbi of Chavurah Beth Shalom,
a synagogue in Alpine.
Dr. Shulman has lived in New Jersey's Fifth Congressional District for more
than 25 years. He has been married to his wife, Pam, an obstetrician, for 33
years. They are proud parents of two adult daughters, Holly and Julie.

I have known Dennis since 1968, when we spent a summer together at the
Carroll Rehabilitation Center just outside Boston in a summer youth program.
some of you got to know Dennis through his speech at ACB's recent
legislative conference. On the next Marlaina, Dennis will spend time with
us, and will respond to your questions and comments. Believe me when I tell
you, Dennis is a vibrant, warm and caring person whose perspective on life
is like a breath of spring air.

The Marlaina show is heard on ACB Radio Mainstream.
It all starts on Sunday night at 9 PM Eastern, 6 Pacific, which is Monday
morning at 1 Universal. The program will replay for 24 hours, and of course,
is available via podcast from the ACB Radio replay page. As always, we'll
take your calls at our toll-free number, 866 666 7926.

Please save this message and either click the link below, or paste it into
your browser directly on Sunday at 9 PM Eastern, 6 Pacific or Monday at 1
Universal to listen.

Feel free to distribute this message to others whom you think may be
interested.

As always, thank you so much for your continued support of my ACB Radio
work!

Marlaina

To listen to the show, just click this link or paste it into your browser
http://www.acbradio.org/pweb/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=8&MMN_position=14:14

Attorney Linda M. Dardarian on Structured Negotiation
April 12, 2008. By Paul Halpern
Lawyersandsettlements.com

Oakland, CA: Traditional litigation is often an expensive, time-consuming,
and adversarial route to resolution. Sometimes it's inevitable, but some
areas of law lend themselves to a collaborative approach that yields
benefits for both sides. It's called structured negotiation, and Linda M.
Dardarian, partner in Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen and Dardarian
(GDBBD), described how it's done.

LawyersandSettlements (LAS): Is there an area of law that you've found is
especially amenable to a non-litigation approach?

Linda M. Dardarian (LMD): Within our firm's general practice areas, I do
primarily disability rights work, and within that arena, we've carved out a
specialty called structured negotiation. To date, we've made about 28
agreements with some of the largest corporations in the country, which
involve access to technology for the blind. Our clients include the American
Council for the Blind and many ACB state affiliates, and the American
Foundation for the Blind, as well as individuals.

Our clients will tell us about an access problem that they couldn't solve
themselves via customer support. If we find a pattern or practice of
technology not being accessible, we write a letter to the general counsel of
the company laying out the nature of the problem, the facts and legal basis
behind the claim, whether it's the Americans with Disabilities Act or
California or other states' laws, and what we think the solution is that
they should work with us to achieve. We offer to sit down with them and work
on solving the problem.

So structured negotiation begins with us writing that letter. If they're not
interested in meeting with us, we explain why we think we'd win in
litigation. We always make a polite request, but behind it there's the
spectre of a lawsuit. They know we're a serious firm that knows how to
litigate hard and well and successfully. Generally they agree to sit down,
since they're big corporations like Citibank, Wachovia, and American
Express, and they don't want to give the impression that only sighted
customers are eligible for their services. So we've been pretty successful
in working these out.

LAS: What kind of solutions have you reached this way?

LMD: We've worked with major banks to get them to install talking ATMs, for
example, so that a blind person can now go up to any ATM in the country,
plug in an earphone, and hear a description of
everything the ATM does, be taken through all the steps, and access all its
features without needing help from a sighted teller or an assistant. Before
this, a blind person either had to go in only
when the bank was open or give their PIN to a sighted person and trust them
to withdraw the right amount and not rip them off-which is something that no
bank would expect them to go through.

All major banks now also provide Braille and large print on their bank card
statements, because without that a blind customer would have to have a
sighted person read it to them. Blind people are entitled to the same right
of confidentiality as sighted people, and this provides that.

We've also worked on making online banking accessible for blind people who
use screen reader software that reads aloud what's on the computer screen.
The banks or retailers just have to code their web sites so the screen
reader can recognize the screen content. There's no change to the site's
look and feel, it's all done on the underside.

A lot of major retailers like Wal-Mart, Radio Shack, and Rite Aid, have
increasingly used point-of-sale machines at their checkout stands. Many of
these have had flat screens, so to use a
debit card you have to use a stylus, which is inaccessible to a blind
person. Similarly, with touch-screen machines, blind customers have to tell
the clerk their PIN, a situation no one should have to tolerate. We've
negotiated with Trader Joe's, Seven Eleven, and others to integrate a
tactile keypad that visually impaired customers can use just like sighted
customers.

We've done all this without having to file any lawsuits, which is a credit
to the companies and to our clients for their patience. My main job has been
to facilitate the communication between them to work these things out
instead of facing years of fighting before anything got worked out
post-litigation.

LAS: So you haven't encountered a lot of resistance to entering
negotiations?

LMD: To their credit, most of the companies we've contacted have decided
that it's mutually productive to sit down with us rather than take the risk
and expense of litigation, since most of that winds up in settlement anyway.
It avoids the fees and the frequent bad feelings involved in hard-fought
litigation.

We end up meeting with the company counsel. Sometimes they bring in outside
counsel; we bring our client representatives and the companies bring in
their business and tech people, and there's a series of meetings focusing on
how to solve the problem. We were invited into a company's tech labs once to
test possible talking ATMs, since there was no off-the-shelf solution
available. Our clients actually scripted the words the machine spoke, which
was incredibly empowering to them and made the whole thing work much better
than if a sighted person in the lab had written the script.

A huge amount of trust gets developed through this process. We end up having
ongoing relationships with these companies, making sure the solutions are
properly implemented over the years, and they bring access issues to our
attention for help on how to work them out. It's quite extraordinary.

Attorney Linda M. Dardarian received a BA from California State University,
Chico, in 1983 and a JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University
of California, Berkeley, in 1987. Her work on making technology accessible
to vision-impaired persons has earned her honors from advocacy groups such
as the American Foundation for the Blind and the American Council of the
Blind. She has been a partner at GDBBD since 1998.

SOURCE URL:
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/10412/dardarian-structured-negotiation.html

We're working on finalizing the self-voicing GRE. We need some individuals
with low vision to try it out for usability. We have tried earlier
prototypes with individuals who rely exclusively on synthetic speech to
access the test. However, the test includes a visual display with
magnification and color options. We'd like to identify some individuals
with low vision who customarily use a combination of audio AND screen
magnification to access computer content. We're interested not only in the
visual display itself but in how well it works in combination with the
speech, since we anticipate some test takers who will use both.
Although participants will not receive scores, we'd prefer that they have at
least 2 years of college so that they'll be comfortable with the academic
content of a grad school admissions test.
It'd take about half a day, we anticipate. There is an honorarium. We'd
prefer to find at least one or 2 people able to travel to Princeton on a
weekday for this; of course we'd cover transportation costs. If that's not
possible, we will be able to send materials for a few participants to try on
their own computers. These participants will then debrief by phone, either
while they're trying the test or afterward. We'd like the tryouts to be in
late April if at all possible.
Anyone interested is invited to email me:
mailto:Rloew@ets.org Rloew@ets.org
.
Thanks!
Ruth C. Loew, Ph.D.
Assistant Director
Office of Disability Policy, ETS
phone: 609-683-2984
fax: 609-683-2220