Comment Re:Sigh (Score 2) 287
I don't see why the blind or any other group should escape that harshness.
they don't. I've worked for blind people, I've worked for deaf people. I'm disabled as well and we all get no end of crap from tabs (temporarily able-bodied).
I lost roughly 30% of my hand function because I was busting my ass working normal IT programmer hours in a hostile work environment. I was fired from my job, I was denied workers compensation because "it wasn't workplace injury", I've been denied employment because "you can't have any technical knowledge because your hands don't work". I really understand now the discrimination that some women are told they're no longer qualified for the job just because they became pregnant.
I've even been discriminated against by geeks. I need to use proprietary package for speech recognition in order to be able to write and do some command-and-control. there were a few of us that wants to bridge NaturallySpeaking to Emacs but the Breaking with alarming frequency. After explaining the problem to Stallman and a few other fsf types, I was told that the official position of the free software foundation is that the needs of free software come before the needs of disabled people. If that meant that the free software equivalent wasn't going to arrive for a decade, disabled people would have to sit on their hands and wait till arrived or, do without free software that worked with speech recognition. Rather shortsighted, and rather harsh.
As I sometimes say, geeks don't give a crap about accessibility until they become injured and then they can't do anything about it because their hands don't work. They spend a couple of years reinventing and failing with the same solutions that failed for decades in the past and then either they give up and change careers or they fall off the economic ladder.
If we had greater accessibility for all types of disabilities, allow rsi injured, blind and tab programmers to compete on a level playing field by raising us up, not tearing others down, it would be okay for us to succeed or fail because it would be on our merits, not on our disabilities. We still have to deal with the bigotry of hiring managers but that's true for all of us.
The sad thing is, from the work I've been doing with speech user interfaces, I'm coming to believe that it's possible to build a common API to accommodate both text-to-speech and speech recognition user interfaces. With a bit more work, the interface can be expanded to also include a graphical user interface and once you have partition the application into everything else and the user interface, then accessibility becomes cheap, dirt cheap.