Wow!
For quite some time, CSPAN1 and CSPAN2 have offered live streaming of the televised portions of congressional activity. They’re captioned on TV, but of course on the Internet not so much. So in following political stuff, I’ve had to scramble around for transcripts and such since my job precludes me from […]

Good heavens:
With New Device, Police Shake, Rattle and Roll
Meet the Rumbler.
The high-tech blaster is being used along with the traditional siren. It is aimed at grabbing people’s attention and getting them to make room for officers responding to emergencies, helping police navigate through traffic faster and safer. People can feel it from about 200 feet […]

Nothing new, of course — many people have pointed out similar things. But I keep coming back to the whole question of deaf education and how it’s gotten so screwed over by the ADA.
I mean, when the ADA came out I thought it was great. Not perfect, nothing ever is. But in […]

Being that I’m a paralegal, though I don’t work as one, I went looking for the court filings so that I could see them myself. They don’t appear to be stored online, unfortunately. I emailed the public defender’s office with a query about the filings. Here’s what she said:
Thank you for your […]

UpdateThe public defender for Wright is at tsmith@minnehahacounty.org.
Her lawyers are preparing a defense for her that basically says that she’s too stupid, on account of being deaf, to be properly tried for anything:
Court papers filed by Daphne Wright’s lawyers say that people who’ve been deaf since early childhood have severely limited vocabularies and a hard […]

I thought for a change I’d talk about something I know very well
There’s been some mention of dogs for the deaf on DeafRead and if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to train dogs.
Although let me go on a brief rant: ALL DOG OWNERS SHOULD PICK UP AFTER THEIR DOGS!! Doesn’t […]

Well, there’s the good news and the bad news
First the wonderful news: it looks like all the pressure on the FCC is paying off. They have granted more reasonable blocks of time to prepare objections to the requested exemptions; previously it looked like the FCC was going to simply railroad things through […]

There are plenty of applications that can read off printed text. Windows has had that capability available in its setup for several years that I can recall now. And for the visual impaired that’s extremely helpful. There’s even a voice recognition module that lets you control things by speaking to it, again […]

There have been some very good posts out on the recent FCC activity in granting “permanent” exemptions to the ADA’s requirement for closed captioning. In a nutshell, the ADA when enacted provided for “total” captioning to be implemented by January of 2006. Looks around herself. Nuh, uh, not by a long shot. […]

This is a subject I’ll doubtless return to again. I’ve commented here about mainstreaming deaf students, Moi had very good observations why it’s vital to have ASL-speaking teachers (and students) and not just interpreters floating about to “give access.” Both Banjo and I pointed out some of the predation problems with both residential/boarding […]