RE: priority of 5.8

Dick Brown wrote:

quote
One thing that's sometimes a problem with installation is entering product
IDs that are printed on the back of CD cases, but unfortunately not in
Braille.
unquote

aloha, dick!

that is an excellent point, dick, and one which is often overlooked...

but even if CD-ROMs were to be distributed with braille on-the-back, that still
wouldn't help the sixty-five to seventy-percent of blind people who -- for
whatever reason -- can't read braille...

which is the Achilles's heel of attempting to do business when you are blind --
a lot of entities (such as the utilities company that provides gas for my
apartment) don't offer online account management, and even those that do, do
not always make your statement available to you online, or at least not in a
format that is usable if you are blind, and their quote solution unquote to
providing equal access to information is to offer me my bill in braille...  the
only problem with that is that the illness that caused my vision loss also led
to a loss of sensation in my fingertips, with the consequence that i cannot
read braille when it is embossed on paper because i simply don't have the
requisite sensitivity, so an embossed paper version of my bill is as useless to
me as a printed version...

which cuts (in a roundabout and incoherent way) to the heart of the matter --
all too often, the quote disabled unquote are saddled with one-size-fits-all
solutions that -- while they may meet the letter of the law, certainly violate
its spirit...   braille on elevator panels is great, but you have to be able to
find the panel before you can use it...  and even when you do find the panel,
you need to figure out with which buttons the braille labels are associated, by
which time you're already on a floor you didn't intend to go to...  unless
every such panel were placed in exactly the same spot on all elevators, and the
labels for each button were uniformly placed so that you would always know
which button they were meant to label, then equal access has NOT been
achieved...

all of which is a convoluted way of saying that, in the instance of the product
ID codes, i would not be opposed to a software manufacturer maintaining a
consumer profile, so that when i receive an upgrade in the mail (such as that
which i received for Office2000), i wouldn't have to wait until i could find
someone to read the code to me, but could retrieve it via email or over the
phone or via the web...  of course, i'd want to make damn sure that the
customer profile was being used exclusively to provide me with this
information, and not for any other purposes, but that is a concern for another
list!

gregory.


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He that lives on Hope, dies farting
     -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1763
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Gregory J. Rosmaita <unagi69@concentric.net>
   WebMaster and Minister of Propaganda, VICUG NYC
        <http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/vicug/index.html>
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