l’azile

This post is my contribution to Blogging Against Disablism Day 2011 (BADD 2011).

I am probably going to get hell for writing about this but anyway, here it goes…

A few weeks ago, I attended a workshop on the sexual rights of people with disabilities. This workshop was part of the Disability and Citizenship Week (Semaine Citoyenneté et Handicap) at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), a major university in the province of Quebec. It was the first time in a long time that I had heard of an event that broached this subject in my part of the world. I had two conflicting thoughts when I heard about it:

1. Hmmm, how come we still need to talk about this in 2011? and;
2. Well, this should be a change from the usual stuff I hear about (like accessibility, HTML5, blablabla).

Continue reading a few thoughts about sex and disability

L’affaire Barlagne fait beaucoup jaser ces jours-ci, cette famille française que le Canada veut expulser puisque la plus jeune de leurs filles, Rachel 8 ans, a une paralysie cérébrale importante et est donc considérée un fardeau excessif pour la société canadienne.

D’un côté, j’estime qu’il est bon qu’on parle enfin au Canada, ou au Québec du moins, de cette pratique discriminatoire vieille comme la terre de refuser l’asile ou l’entrée au pays de personnes handicapées sur la base de leur condition physique sous prétexte que ces personnes sont un trop grand risque de prise en charge, qu’elles finiront par nous coûter une beurrée puisqu’elles sont handicapées et, généralement, considérées non autonomes.

De plus, je souhaite bonne chance à la famille Barlagne. J’espère que cette famille obtiendra gain de cause quoi que j’en doute. Il est très difficile de changer ce type de décision, qui aurait pu aussi bien être prise par un robot car la loi est la loi et elle est supposée être appliquée de manière impartiale. Reste le politique mais puisque le pouvoir appartient actuellement aux conservateurs, je doute fortement que le gouvernement Harper intervienne en faveur des Barlagne. Les conservateurs ont prouvé maintes fois que l’opinion public a peu d’influence sur leurs actions et si on se fit à leurs agissements dans le cas Jodhan, même quand ils ont tort, le sort des personnes handicapées semble très peu les émouvoir. De toute façon, les autres partis ne feraient pas, et dans certains cas n’ont pas fait, mieux.

Continue reading nous sommes tous des immigrés, il n’y a que le lieu de naissance qui change

A little while ago, I captioned a video at Universal Subtitles, an outreach video about reserved parking for people with disabilities (in French). The video calls people out on not respecting handicap parking spaces and dispells some myths (eek!, did I really say that?) about the real consequences of not considering why these things are the way they are.

And actually, I started this project before Christmas but got sidetracked and it took me several, euh, I was going to say weeks but I guess it is months… So anyway, it took me a few months to find time to do this. Because the truth is that you really need to set aside some time for this activity, however you want to categorize it. I mean, unless you are a professional captioner, this will take some time. Have I repeated that enough for you? Have I? Because this project took me several hours. I had to learn the system, revise the document and then had to actually hunker down and do the transcription, synchronization, revision, stressing out on details, etc.

Continue reading between the lines

Today, I attended a conference organized by a consumer group. It was a mainstream event, not a dedicated event on disability and, as far as I know, I was the only person with a disability there. I was tired this morning, I have been struggling with insomnia lately, so I arrived late and to be honest, I did not feel like being there. But I am glad I was because it turned out to be an interesting conference on the impacts of information technologies on consumer rights and interests. Also, I met up with some people I know from another organization and spent the day with them.

Anyway, lunch was provided by the conference organizers and it turned out to be a bit fancy, with big banquet tables and table clothes and linen napkins and fancy silverware and decent fare that reminded me of hotel food. As is often the case in these types of situations, you find a table where there is room and you end up eating with complete strangers. So my two companions and I spotted a table that still had some empty seats and therefore joined a small group.

When you are a person with a disability, you spend a lot of time in your life either being ignored or receiving an unreasonable amount of unwanted and occasionally inappropriate attention. Today was the latter. All through lunch, this woman seated at our table stared at me. Or, more accurately, she spent most of the lunch staring at my hands. I could feel her stare on me and when I would look at her, as a way of letting her know that I was aware of her staring at me, she would hurriedly look away. And as soon as I looked away, she would stare at me again. I could feel her gaze bearing into me, I could see all the questions forming in her face. I almost called her on it but then that would have made things even more uncomfortable for everyone so I did my best to ignore her. But the truth is her behavior made lunch rather tedious.

Continue reading staring back in the glass

Disclaimer: Any views expressed in the following article are my own and, as far as I know, do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizations I am affiliated with.

If you blinked, you may have missed the amended judgment in the Jodhan case, rendered February 09 2011 following the Government of Canada’s motion for reconsideration filed last December. That motion came shortly after the initial ruling in the case which awarded victory to Ms. Donna Jodhan, a blind woman who sued the government for the lack of accessibility of federal government websites.

The November 29 2010 ruling stipulated, among other things, that the Government of Canada had indeed violated Ms. Jodhan’s Charter rights by failing to monitor the application of its own web standards, the Common Look and Feel standards (CLF), which contain a number of accessibility requirements to ensure “equitable access to all content on Government of Canada websites“. The ruling also declared that the government has a constitutional obligation to bring itself into compliance with the Charter within 15 months.

Continue reading amended judgment in the Jodhan case

This is a post I wrote last April 2010 at the height of the whole #a11y vs. #AxS debate that gripped the Accessibility community on twitter at the time. The plan was to chime in, to make it clear what I thought about this whole thing and why I feel the way I do. Note that a large part of the contents of this post were taken, with some adjustments, from an email I wrote to a dear friend at the time. Indeed, I had decided to stop tweeting about it and to write an email, not because I did not want to discuss this subject publicly but because I felt that this was not a discussion that could be well served 140 characters at a time.

And then I thought I should probably commit to collective memory my perspective on the issue and write a blog post about it. But obviously, I never published the article because I kind of got tired of the whole subject and decided to just do my own thing. But, I was called out on this issue again today so I think it will just be easier to post the gawd damn thing and have it over with.

So anyway, last April on twitter, it was proposed that people start using the #AxS (as in “access”) hashtag in lieu of the #a11y (as in “accessibility”) hashtag (see John Foliot’s blog post on the story for more background). My impression is that the primary motivation here was to gain 1 character in tweets. And it seems to me that every other argument was secondary to the goal which, again, was to gain 1 character in tweets. So, lets have a look at some of these arguments[2].

Continue reading a11y cat[1]

As I mentioned briefly in an update to my January 1 post on the Jodhan ruling, the federal government has filed an appeal in addition to their motion for reconsideration. Apparently, an appeal on a protective basis was filed on December 29 2010, giving the government an extra ten days to appeal the November 29 decision and the appeal itself was then filed on January 7 2011.

This information took a while to become public (probably, as the court officer I spoke to speculated, because it lay around on someone’s desk for a while). Anyway, I have since received a copy of the government appeal that I am reproducing in its entirety hereafter (it is not available online but it is public).

Continue reading overkill: Canadian government files appeal in the Jodhan case

Update: Since the publication of this post, the Government of Canada has filed an appeal in addition to the motion for reconsideration. From what I understand, an appeal on a protective basis was filed on December 29 2010, giving the government an extra ten days to appeal the November 29 decision and the appeal itself was then filed on January 7 2011. This information took a while to be published on the Court Index and Docket website and I was only made aware of these developments on January 10 so please keep this in mind while reading this post. These developments do not however change the opinions expressed herein. I will try to write a follow-up soon. (CR - 11-01-2011)

Disclaimer: I want to make absolutely clear that any views expressed in the following article are my own and, as far as I know, do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizations I am affiliated with. Also, I know a lot of individuals who work in government and the following views are not in any way a judgment on their commitment and their work. Finally, I am not a lawyer. And I do not play one on TV.

For the last month or so, many people in Canada had been waiting to find out whether or not the Canadian government would appeal the decision in the case of Donna Jodhan v. the Attorney General of Canada. The Government of Canada had 30 days to appeal the judgment rendered by the Honourable Justice Kelen on November 29. On that day, the Judge essentially ruled that the inaccessibility of federal government websites is a violation of Article 15 (1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as it constitutes discrimination based on disability towards Ms. Jodhan and others with visual impairments. The ruling further stated that the Canadian government had 15 months (now roughly 14 and counting down) to make its websites more accessible.

Continue reading federal government files a motion for Reconsideration in the Jodhan case

Recently, I posted a link on twitter, a youtube video, that was not very accessible to either blind or deaf people. It is the kind of material that makes particular use of those two senses: vision and hearing. Of course, with proper captions for the deaf and audio descriptions for the blind, it could be much more accessible. But unfortunately, that was not the case. I came across this link reading someone’s blog and being a cat person myself, I totally tripped out on this video and had to share it. And even knowing that some people in my twitter stream would not have access to the whole experience, as someone who sees and hears without much difficulty, I posted it anyway.

Continue reading the thin accessibility line

It is funny (not in a ha ha sense but in an ironic sense) that after I got home tonight, this article from Wired.com was waiting for me in my RSS feeds. Originally titled “Why We Freak Out at Freaks” (and, after several complaints in the comments section to the post, changed to “Why We Stare, Even When We Don’t Want To”), the article explains why staring when one sees someone who looks different “actually makes sense, at least in an evolutionary sense”.

I found it funny because while I was out walking around looking for a decent restaurant with a nice atmosphere to have supper in my neighbourhood that would actually be open on a Monday night (I eventually gave up and ordered in Chinese, which ended up being pretty good), I was stopped by a young man on a street corner who asked me what was wrong with me. Needless to say I was thoroughly annoyed but I will get to that in a minute.

Continue reading de-evolution