Against zero-sum games

On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 08:21:19AM -0700, William Loughborough wrote:
> At 05:53 AM 5/13/01 -0400, Marti wrote:
> >Did you know that a curb cut makes it hard for many blind people to find 
> >the curb edge so they can line up...properly?
> .... a little bit about how the curbcut ramp problem was seen by a blind 
> guy who participated in these issues early on as well as the problems you 
> cite could have been solved by proper implementation.
> http://ubats.org/jeff.htm

I very, very strongly recommend reading that page and applying the
lessons to what is going on here. If you publish a gudeline that says
"Cut curbs at intersections", you will disable blind pedestrians.
If your guideline says "Cut curbs offset by one meter from the center
of the sidewalk", then you will enable wheelchair users and _not_
disable blind pedestrians.

On that website, Jeff Moyer writes: "As we all know, that wise and
collaborative design was not followed elsewhere, with often disastrous
results to many blind and low vision travelers." When you repeat
history, the first time is tragedy; the second time is farce.
The crosstalk on this list could be reduced if we agreed to take each
other's concerns seriously, and acted accordingly. Let's start with
the goal of making relevant web sites accessible to people with
cognitive disabilities _without_ making them inaccessible to people
with visual or motor or attention deficits. Can we try to write
guidelines to do that?
-- 
				Adam Reed
				areed2@calstatela.edu
				 
Context matters. Seldom does *anything* have only one cause.

Received on Sunday, 13 May 2001 16:34:26 UTC