Time for a mild rant. Am I the only one who finds it annoying to constantly hear variations of the word blind used to convey meanings like ignorant, foolish, stupid, unthinking, and so on? It's an incredibly popular metaphor, and on a near daily basis, you can read and hear in the media some form of the following expressions:

On March 27, 2012, I downloaded the Facebook messenger application for my iPhone.

I’ve been hearing lots of buzz around the tech community about this fantastic application for the iPhone, and I was curious as to how accessible it was.

Once again, the installation of the application was simple and straight forward; I was able to successfully install the application with out any problems.

I then proceeded to log in with my Facebook user account and password and got in with no problems.  VoiceOver was able to read the information with out any problems as well.

Once I was logged in, I was able to view all the messages on my wall sent from other Face Book members.

When it comes down to it, we could easily compare it to a slice of pie.  What am I going on about today?  Well, here goes!

In my humble opinion, we are each assigned a slice of pie when we come into this world.  Each slice is of the same exact size but we can increase or decrease the slice of our pie depending on our actions throughout our life.  If we take our slice and make things happen, if we take it and use it as a means to help expand our horizons, and if we take it and use it to help others, then the size of our pie will definitely grow.

In early February 2012, a certain Canadian Federal agency decided to run some very important surveys but there was a bit of a twist to this.  For whereas these surveys should have been made accessible and available to all Canadians, it was not and why not?  Because it appears that some blind persons and persons with hard of hearing challenges were turned away. 

On March 22, 2012, I downloaded a DAISY player application for the iPhone called Read2Go.  I simply went to the app store on my phone, and in the search box gave the query “Read2Go.”  See http://read2go.org/ for more information.

Instantly I was presented with a search to this application, and was told that it only costs $19.99 out of my iTunes account.  I figured that this was a pretty good bargain for a DAISY player for my iPhone.  After hearing about it through Vision Australia’s web site through their tutorial section, I figured that I’d give it my two cents worth in accessibility.

In a recent post at the Blind Spot Blog, Hannah Thompson provides an excellent and thoughtful description of her experience watching a film with audio description for the first time.

Thompson identifies three visual aspects of film that are conveyed through audio description and that, when conveyed, greatly enrich the experience of watching a film. I'll quote liberally below, but I urge you to read the entire post for yourself.

On March 13, the legislative committee considering Bill C11 finished its clause-by-clause review of the bill. Some forty or so amendments were proposed altogether, the majority of which came from the opposition parties. Approximately half a dozen of the amendments were directly related to the ability of people with perceptual disabilities to access copyrighted works. All but one of these amendments—the one put forward by the Conservatives—were defeated by the Conservative members of the committee.

In a recent post by Anthony, he talked about the strategy of going into business for oneself as a potential response to an unsuccessful stretch of looking for employment.

I've known this approach to work for some in the past, and, since reading his post, I've come across a resource that may prove very helpful to anyone considering the path of self-employment.

The Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship (FCE) is part of the Hadley School for the Blind's Adult Continuing Education Program.

According to the website:

On March 10th, 2012, I downloaded a driver for my Roland v-studio 100 audio sound card to install on my new IMac which I received last Tuesday March 6, 2010.  I have been using this audio card for two years for music production and recording on the Pc platform, and, after receiving my Mac, I wanted to install the Mac driver to operate the card on the Mac OS platform as well as the Windows Platform on the same unit.