The Guardian (London)
Monday, June 10, 2002

Media: New Media: The ouch factor: A new website for disabled

By Kate Watson-Smyth

Dressed in the requisite uniform of jeans, trainers and a short-sleeved
shirt, Damon Rose looks like any other internet "techie". A former local
radio DJ, he is a fan of indie music and admits to watching too much TV and
"surfing too much web".

In fact his fondness for the latter has just landed him a plum job as
editor of a new BBC website that will be launched on June 17. But, unlike
most other website editors, he will never see what he has been working so
hard to produce. Blind since the age of 13, 31-year-old Rose is at the head
of a team of disabled people who are producing the site. Ouch!, says the
publicity blurb, will not be adopting the "gentle and worthy approach of
other disabled sites but will instead tell it like it is".

Or as Rose puts it: "You only need to spend 1% of your time getting
information about medical and social security benefits, because the other
99% you have to get on with living your life."

There are already dozens of sites that offer information and resources for
disabled people, but Rose is determined to do something more
lifestyle-based: "The other sites tend to duplicate each other and I wanted
to do something that was completely different from what was already out
there," he says.

"For example, we are going to send a team of disabled people to Glastonbury
to report back on how they manage. Hopefully it will encourage others to go
and try something they might otherwise have thought would be too difficult."

Regular columnists will include the disabled comedian and former Grange
Hill star Francesca Martinez, the presenter-turned-rock-DJ Mick Scarlet and
Cherry Moore, an actress with Down's syndrome who will be making videos for
the site.

And while there will be plenty of useful information, such as the best bars
and restaurants in any given area, Ouch! will also have plenty of
alternative content such as The Vegetables, a cartoon looking at disability
from the point of view of a potato in a non-potato world.

"Disabled people have a very dark sense of humour and this will be
reflected in the content of the site. We have a different agenda to the one
you see reported in the media and we often have a different slant on
things," says Rose.

"A lot of people are very precious about disability and they don't know how
to handle it, so we will be trying to redress that balance."

It may look like Ouch!, in common with other similar sites, is simply
trying to deal with some of the issues faced by disabled people, but Rose
is adamant that it should not be classed as such.

"I don't like the word 'issue'," he says. "People always relate disability
to issues and they immediately think it is about big issues, whereas
sometimes it is the minutiae of day-to-day life that you want to focus on."

Even the name Ouch! was carefully chosen to reflect the site's take on the
subject. The team wanted to be recognisably different from sites such as
Yourable.com or readywillingable.net.

"Those other sites are all doing a really good job but this will be
different and we needed to reflect that in the name. We quickly came up
with some really dull ones. There is one particularly hideous phrase around
which is 'concentrate on the ability not the dis', and we wanted to get
right away from all that. But no one wanted the word 'disability' either,
because that is so negative. In the end we came up with Ouch! which works
on so many levels.

"There is the literal sense of someone bumping into you on the street, as
well as the figurative one of being patronised because you are disabled,
which is a big ouch factor."

Rose himself is reluctant to talk about how he lost his sight, mentioning
only that it happened suddenly and he "quickly moved on and got into the
swim of it". But he appreciates that other people may take longer than he
did to come to terms with a progressive or sudden disability, and he
stresses the importance of the message boards.

"People will be able to chat and share information on things. It will be
very inclusive. We want to build communities around this site that will
leave disabled people thinking 'I'm normal'," he says.

It was for this reason that he chose to hire a mainly disabled team. "They
know the territory. Like any job you look for the people you know can do
it. That's why we have a disabled photographer. A lot of pictures of
wheelchair users are taken looking down on them rather than on the level.
That is something a disabled person is more aware of."

Although Rose had not used the internet before he became blind, he has a
good visual memory and is completely at home on the web. "Many blind people
tend to be techies by default," he says. He uses a standard PC with a voice
synthesiser "that sounds like Stephen Hawking" which downloads the content,
and a braille keyboard. He refers to it as both his pen and his newspaper.

Ouch! is the latest website to come out of the BBCi factual and learning
department and the corporation is confident it will find a niche. There are
an estimated seven million people who are deaf or hard of hearing in the UK
and one million blind or partially sighted people, the majority of whom are
unemployed. Put that together with those who rely on wheelchairs or suffer
from progressive illnesses and there is a sizeable community to reach out
to, many of whom should find something that appeals to them.


For as Rose says: "From our point of view disability is the norm and that
is the angle that we will be coming from."




************************************************************
* ACB-L is maintained and brought to you as a service      *
* of the American Council of the Blind.                    *
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [log in to unmask]
For additional commands, e-mail: [log in to unmask]


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html