Disabled Segway Rider Banned from DC Metro
The local NBC station is reporting that a disabled woman who uses her Segway as a mobility device was initially prevent from riding the Metro this morning. Eventually Metro let her on the train, but only with a police escort. As Arlington County, VA, is the only municipality in the DC area that does not have local regulations prohibiting Segways on the Metro, the woman could be subject to arrest if she rides Metro outside of Arlington County.
Metro allows electric wheelchairs, but since Segway is not classified as a mobility device, it is a disallowed electric vehicle.
Accessibility
Production-side Accessibility, Take Two
Jim Flowers responds to my thoughts on the Georgia bill that would require publishers to make digital copies of their printed works available to educators who are meeting the needs of disabled learners. Jim points out that there are potentially some tricky implementation issues in this bill. He’s right, there are some hefty implementation issues that are not specifically addressed in the legislation (or poorly addressed).
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Accessibility, Education
Production-side Accessibility
Jim Flowers writes:
Suppose you are a professor, a publisher, or a software/hardware company that provides materials used for instruction in a college (private or public), technical college, or university. Suppose further that the legislature passes a law requiring you to provide, on ten days notice, an electronic version of those materials so that students who are “print access disabled” can access the material (and, there electronic version can have no differences in content/context from print version).
What would you do?
Answer: I would applaud!
Apparently a bill, HB 1020, of the Georgia General Assembly would require the publisher to provide the material in digital format.
Please note that a “print access disability” does not mean you don’t have access to a laser printer! It refers to “a condition in which a person’s independent reading of, reading comprehension of, or visual access to printed material is limited or reduced due to a sensory, neurological, cognitive, physical, psychiatric, or other disability recognized by state or federal law.” E.g. blindness, reading disorders, etc.
This certainly puts an onus on the providers of print material, but since no commercial print material makes it to press these days without beginning its life as digital bits, the onus isn’t that large (except perhaps legacy texts).
Having worked extensively in a Deaf education environment, and also with some Deaf/blind learners, I’m all for legislation that puts the onus of accessibility on the purveyors of content, instead of making analog-to-digital conversion an issue the institution has to deal with.
Accessibility should take place on the production side, not the consumption side. Georgia has it right!
Accessibility, Education