Trouble Is Everywhere

I'm sorry this image is so small. It's an image from the new Google video that explains their plans for how to change your privacy policies! it's not subtitled, despite Google's recent commitment to totally being accessible to people with disabilities. Thus I turned on YouTube's AutoCaption.

The video says:
With fewer words, simpler explanations, and less legal gloop to wade through.

The captions provide:
With fewer words simpler explanations and leslie copeland tweeter.

Supreme Court Affirms Right of Religious Organisations to Foster Bigotry by Andrea at This Ain't Livin'

For SCOTUS to uphold the right of a religious organization to fire someone merely because they have a disability, not because they performed their duties poorly but merely because the non-disabled employers were uncomfortable and scared about that person’s disability is shameful and appalling. Confirming the right of religious organizations to discriminate on grounds that have nothing to do with religion is morally reprehensible. Even more repulsively, every major religion in the US, every major Christian denomination (and quite a few minor) filed amicus briefs in favor of their right to discriminate. Only one Sikh organization filed an amicus brief, along with a stellar line-up of civil rights organizations, humanists, and atheists, arguing that religious organizations do not need a legal right to discriminate against people.

Meanwhile, religious organizations including churches will continue to discriminate. They will continue to refuse to make their houses of worship accessible, and now they can easily refuse to even consider hiring someone who is disabled, and if an employee becomes disabled, they may claim that person is a minister and terminate their employment to avoid paying health insurance or disability insurance costs.

Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

I'm doing some circle maintenance and removing access from folks I haven't interacted with in the better part of a year. If this is an oversight on my part (clicky boxes are hard!) please let me know! (Comments are screened)

I know a lot of people skip titles of posts. Please read the title of this one.

I had an argument with someone at school on Thursday and it's still sitting with me. I think this is because we'd had an earlier argument on a similar subject on Tuesday. As you can probably imagine, it was about disability, or more specifically, about how disabled people have existed and advocated for themselves since long before the mainstream folks started paying attention, and well before I ever started paying attention.

The argument on Thursday was about my colleague's disagreement with the abstract for a master's research paper on disability discrimination in the Montreal Metro System. I'm not from Montreal, so the place this system has in Montreal was a bit much for me to grasp. Apparently it's a big thing, a progress thing. A thing about how Montreal has been advancing into the future. When it was opened in 1966, it was opened to everyone.

Everyone, of course, except people who can't walk up and down stairs.

The presentation and follow-up short video talked explicitly about ableist constructions of public spaces. She called it out very bluntly: this is discriminatory. This has always been discriminatory.

The part that others tend not to get, the part my colleague at the university didn't get, is that the people at the time knew this.

This is one of the things about disability-based discrimination that drives me up the wall. The theory that many people express is that no one in the past could possibly have been expected to think about disability as a category because this whole disability rights thing didn't start until [the speaker learned of it, whatever time period that is] and obviously not a moment before. (See: many feminist responses to disability-based critiques online that ignore even something as simple as the presence of disability activists at the Beijing conference in 1995. I've been told again and again and again that disability only became a "thing" to consider in the past few years and it's mostly "oversensitive" types at that. Arg.)

So, let me lay some facts on you:

The late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Metro was being built to be inaccessible to many people with physical disabilities, was also the time when people with disabilities were getting out of unwanted institutional settings. It's called "The Great Exit," and I'm pretty sure you haven't learned of it. The Great Exit didn't happen spontaneously, and it wasn't an austerity measure. People with disabilities campaigned for it. They fought for it. Just like they fought for employment and education in the 1800s and early 1900s in Nova Scotia.

Once they left institutions, people with disabilities fought for employment rights and to live free from discrimination. To some extent, they won. The Quebec Human Rights Act included disability as a protected class, passed in 1975.

Except for transit users. Explicitly, transit was not included, you could not sue for a human rights violation for not being allowed on a bus if you were disabled.

In 1988, ADAPT (a US-based protest group) came to Montreal to highlight how inaccessible the transit system was. This PDF has some of their information [in English] about the protest. It was all over the news, and people were arrested for crashing through barricades with their wheelchairs.

And still, the Metro remained inaccessible. In fact, it wasn't until 2004 - Sixteen Years Later - that the law saying that you couldn't sue for inaccessible transit was struck down, and it wasn't until 2006 that a Metro station was made wheelchair accessible. And even then, it was a debate, and one that apparently was won because it "looked bad" that the Metro was still inaccessible. Not that it was bad, that it looked bad.

The Metro in Montreal is currently being retrofitted to be accessible. The current rate is less than one transit station becoming accessible per year. Again, The Montreal Metro System will be fully wheelchair accessible in 2058.

My colleague argued that it is wrong ("presentist," the worst thing to accuse an historian of being within the discipline) to chide people in the past for not thinking of people with disabilities when they made the Metro. "They didn't know better then. We know better now."

This is a lie. They knew. Disability-based historians and disability rights activists know how far back the fight for equal access goes. It didn't spring, fully formed from the head of Hephaestus, in 1995 in Beijing. It didn't suddenly arrive the day you first learned of it. It's always been here. In ignoring that, in assuming that his ignorance is in fact the truth, my colleague (and many others like him) are betraying their own attitudes about disability, about history, and about what matters.

Don will be 78 years old when he can physically get into every Metro station in Montreal. The lifespan of people with Don's disability is less than that.

It's Vote Day, Vote Day, Everyone Get Out to Vote Today!
Everybody's looking forward to the results!
It's Vote Day! Vote Day! Get Outside and Vote Today!
Everybody's looking forward to the results!

Parties and parties and parties and yay!
parties and parties and parties and yay!
Looking forward to the election.....

According to a letter I just received from the TTC, buses are not to be put in service if their ramps aren't working. Drivers are to do an inspection of their buses before their shift, including the ramps, and if the ramps aren't working, they're not supposed to drive them.

Okay then.

Completely non-poll-technology Poll:

Do you believe this?

Yes, of course!
No, of course not!
I'm sure it's the policy, but not put into practice.

So, that's what's going on there.

Things are so busy here I hardly have time to breath.

The TTC is putting drivers on wheelchair accessible routes who have never been shown how to use the basic safety equipment provided for people who use wheelchairs.

According to our driver home this evening, he has never been shown how to use any of the equipment required to stabilize a motorized wheelchair on the bus he is driving. He advised us (politely) that our options were getting on the unsafe bus, waiting "maybe all night" while he tried to figure out how to use the safety equipment on the bus, or waiting for the next bus. As you all may recall, our luck with "waiting for buses" has been poor, so we chose the option that was unsafe.

Don's electric wheelchair weights 250 lbs without a person in it. Don, who is 6'10" tall, weighs around the same amount. Can you imagine the injuries that could be sustained by Don, or anyone near him, if his wheelchair tipped over because it was not safely secured? The wheelchair swayed back and forth during the whole trip, and on at least one tight turn I was worried it was going to knock right over into the window. I imagine Don's experience of this was even worse.

Don's disability includes a chronic pain condition that is exacerbated by both movement, and having to brace himself. Right now he's doped up on a full morphine dose just to recover from the bus ride home.

PS: Tried five times today to call Wheel-trans. The line was busy every time.

The TTC is putting untrained drivers on late evening routes. Do you feel safe?

Google is looking specifically for people who are fluent in Sign to test out some features of their new Google+ social network. If people who are fluent in various types of Sign, they are hope you will help them test a video-chat feature called "Hangouts".

They are definitely looking for ASL users. I know a few BSL users have indicated an interest to Google. I didn't notice anyone with AusLan or any other form of signed language.

Please pass along to your relevant d/Deaf & HoH networks!

Hey Everyone! Let's play a fun game! Let's play "How much hatred towards people with disabilities can one location support?" A fun and exciting game that leads to wondering how many people sitting in the same room as you wish you would die.

(Exclamation Marks are Sarcasm Indicators.)

( I am a cut tag for your scrolling-by enjoyment! )