Hi to all.

I was amazed at some of the posts I read on this board after reading the article sent by Peter Altschul. Here are some of my thoughts:

1) Colleges and universities are government institutions and therefore come under the requirements of the ADA for said institutions. That means that they cannot hold classes, even as a test, that would exclude disabled individual participation. The federal government and blind people had every right to sue the universities to discontinue these test classes. Had these tests been allowed to continue unabated, it is very possible that over the objection of other student participants, universities would have begun the program with the Kendalls in other classes--classes being taken by blind people.

2) Blind people are a low-incidence, poverty-ridden population. This means that there are very few of us, and most of us don't have the money to own a computer, let alone sue colleges and universities that attempt to block our classroom access by utilizing Kendalls that were not independently accessible to us. Our numbers are so small and we are so poor that frankly, most businesses do not want to go through all of the costs and headaches involved in making their products accessible to us--the financial rewards just aren't worth it.

3) In his column, Mr. Yorke cites the accessible Apple Iphone as the free market at work. Whether Mr. Yorke recognizes it or not, this is a false statement. The only reason Steve Jobs made his Apple IPhone accessible was that he wanted to sell the product to U.S. government agencies. He could not, however, because the law (and the courts) said that any computer equipment purchased by the U.S. government (with some exceptions, if memory serves) had to be accessible to the blind and other disabled users. In other words, it was the power of the Federal government that made the Apple IPhone as accessible as it is today.

4) Mr. Yorke and many other conservatives argue that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) should not be allowed to extend to the Internet. If those views were to hold sway (and they very well could), then all the complaints that we as blind people make about the inaccessibility of websites--whether they are justified or not--will be for naught. We will be relegated to the back of the Internet bus, as it were, hoping for crumbs from those sites that are willing to accommodate our needs.

In short, Mr. Yorke and I have very different views on what responsibilities the federal government has towards its blind citizens, and how we as blind citizens can receive redress for our grievances. He may believe that the suits filed by the Federal Justice Department and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) are frivolous, but I most assuredly do not.

Ted


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