Hi All,
Please consider signing the petition described below.
Ciao
On 1/25/2016 1:18 PM, Donna W. Hill wrote:
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Hi Ana,
Hope you guys are doing well. I don't know if you've heard about this,
but thought it might be of interest to the list. The following is a
letter to the
editor, which I sent to our local papers. It concerns a White House
petition asking President Obama to release the internet regulations that
would make
the internet accessible to blind people like myself. The technology has
been around for years, and the President promised to do this by 2010.
The petition is free and simple to sign. The deadline is coming up soon
- Feb. 11th.
As a blind person, who is trying to live as independently as possible
and to pursue my goals, I am asking your help to level the playing field.
If you want further information, please contact me. There is also a
recent post about this issue at:
http://donnawhill.com/2016/01/22/life-without-accessible-websites-and-easy-fix-sign-petition-wake-up-obama/
Thank you in advance for your support on this issue,
Blessings,
Donna
***
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570-833-2708
dwhill@epix
[log in to unmask]
DonnaWHill
http://DonnaWHill.com
Dear Editor,
I'm a novelist. I'm also blind. I just spent two-plus hours composing
yet another tech-support email to a website that isn't making their site
fully "accessible"
for users like me who rely on adaptive technology to access the
internet. If you could stand to read it, you'd understand why blind
people need President
Obama to release web-accessibility regulations. These are necessary
because the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted three
years too early
to fully cover the major accessibility issue facing blind Americans
today -- digital access. He promised to do so by 2010.
The technology to make websites, software and digital interfaces
accessible to blind people is here. It's been here for decades. There
are even free resources
to help companies learn to include the appropriate 1s and 0s right from
the get-go. The problem is that companies use it or fail to do so at
their own
discretion. This leaves blind people at a significant disadvantage at
school, in the job market and in the marketplace. Thus, unemployment,
poverty and
isolation persist for blind Americans.
My latest missive doesn't even come close to representing the worst of
the problems. An academic study several years ago by former Keystone
College IT
professor Dr. Brian Wentz (now Professor of Management Information
Systems at Shippensburg) concluded that fully 80% of the internet is
unavailable to
people like me. In my ten years of using a text-to-speech program,
accessibility has gotten worse, not better.
What do you believe? Should people like me have the right to live
independently, without having to share our personal financial and
medical information
with strangers? Should we have the right to pursue our career and
personal goals without continually having to take time out to compose
highly technical
letters to web developers who don't consider us part of the general
public? If you say yes, please sign this petition and get others to do
so, ASAP. The
deadline's February 11th.
Enter your first and last name, email and zip code, and then click on an
email verification that they will send you. It, unlike composing
missives to websites,
really does just take a minute.
petition/direct-us-department-justice-promptly-release-ada-internet-regulations
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/direct-us-department-justice-promptly-release-ada-internet-regulations
Thank You
Donna W. Hill
-- The Heart of Applebutter Hill - a novel on a mission:
http://DonnaWHill.com
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