Connect the dots: newsletter of the South Carolina State Library Talking Book Services

This Summer 2016 newsletter from the South Carolina State Library, volume 42, issue 3, features news and updates about the Talking Book Services, a federally-funded program to meet the reading needs of South Carolina residents who are physically unable to read or use standard printed materials.

Connect the dots: newsletter of the South Carolina State Library Talking Book Services 

This Spring 2016 newsletter from the South Carolina State Library, volume 42, issue 2, features news and updates about the Talking Book Services, a federally-funded program to meet the reading needs of South Carolina residents who are physically unable to read or use standard printed materials.

Connect the dots: newsletter of the South Carolina State Library Talking Book Services 

This Winter 2016 newsletter from the South Carolina State Library, volume 42, issue 1, features news and updates about the Talking Book Services, a federally-funded program to meet the reading needs of South Carolina residents who are physically unable to read or use standard printed materials.

Connect the dots: newsletter of the South Carolina State Library Talking Book Services

This Winter 2015 newsletter from the South Carolina State Library, volume 41, issue 1, features news and updates about the Talking Book Services, a federally-funded program to meet the reading needs of South Carolina residents who are physically unable to read or use standard printed materials.

Connect the dots: newsletter of the South Carolina State Library Talking Book Services 

This Summer 2015 newsletter from the South Carolina State Library, volume 42, issue 1, features news and updates about the Talking Book Services, a federally-funded program to meet the reading needs of South Carolina residents who are physically unable to read or use standard printed materials.

Language, respect and the power of protest: Linguistic stereotyping and people with disabilities in Japan

Discriminatory language became an important social issue in the west in the late twentieth century, when debates on political correctness and minority rights focused largely on the issue of respect in language. Japan is often criticized for having made only token attempts to address this issue. This paper investigates how one marginalized group—people with disabilities—has dealt with discriminatory and disrespectful language. The debate has been played out in four public spaces: the media, the law, literature, and the Internet. The paper discusses the kind of language, which has generated protest, the empowering strategies of direct action employed to combat its use, and the response of the media, the bureaucracy, and the literati. Government policy has not kept pace with social change in this area; where it exists at all, it is often contradictory and far from clear. I argue that while the laws were rewritten primarily as a result of external international trends, disability support groups achieved domestic media compliance by exploiting the keen desire of media organizations to avoid public embarrassment. In the absence of language policy formulated at the government level, the media effectively instituted a policy of self-censorship through strict guidelines on language use, thereby becoming its own best watchdog. Disability support groups have recently enlisted the Internet as an agent of further empowerment in the ongoing discussion of the issue.

Address of the Literary and Philosophical Society of South-Carolina, to the people of the state : on the classification, character and exercises, or the objects and advantages of the lyceum system, with a view to its general introduction into our towns, villages, and the country at large.

Mode of access: Internet.

Designing with people with disabilities : adapting best practices of DIY and organizational approaches

Individualization of design is often necessary particularly when designing with people with disabilities. Maker communities, with their flexible Do-It-Yourself (DIY) practices, offer potential to support individualized and cost-effective product design. However, efforts to adapt DIY practices in designing with people with disabilities tend to face difficulties with regard to continuous commitment, infrastructure provision and proper guidance. We carried out interviews with diverse stakeholders in the disability services sector and carried out observations of local makerspaces to understand their current practices and potential for future collaborations. We found that makerspace participants face difficulties in terms of infrastructure provision and proper guidance whereas Disability Service Organizations face difficulties in continuous expertise. We suggest that artful infrastructuring to blend the best of both approaches offers potential to create a sustainable community that can design individualized technologies to support people with disabilities.

A journey access tool to facilitate mobility-related access for people with disabilities in low and middle income countries

People with disabilities (PWD) experience difficulties in accessing the transport system (including both infrastructure and services) to meet their needs for health care, employment and other activities. Our research shows that lack of access to the journeys needed for these purposes is a more significant barrier in low and middle income countries than in high income countries, and results in inadequate health care, rehabilitation and access to education and employment. At the same time, the existing transport system in low and middle income countries presents much higher road crash risks than in high income countries. By combining the principles and methods of Road Safety Audit and disability access, and adapting these Western approaches to a low/middle income country context, we have worked with Handicap International Cambodia to develop a Journey Access Tool (JAT) for use by disabled peoples’ organisations (DPOs), people with a disability and other key stakeholders. A key element of the approach is that it involves the participation of PWD on the journeys that they need to take, and it identifies infrastructure and service improvements that should be prioritised in order to facilitate access to these journeys. The JAT has been piloted in Cambodia with a range of PWD. This presentation will outline the design of the JAT and the results of the pilot studies. The information gained thus far strongly suggests that the JAT is a valuable and cost-effective approach that can be used by DPOs and professionals to identify barriers to access and prioritise the steps needed to address them.

Community participation and inclusion: People with disabilities defining their place

Disability-related public policy currently emphasises reducing the number of people experiencing exclusion from the spaces of the social and economic majority as being the pre-eminent indicator of inclusion. Twenty-eight adult, New Zealand vocational service users collaborated in a participatory action research project to develop shared understandings of community participation. Analysis of their narratives suggests that spatial indices of inclusion are quiet in potentially oppressive ways about the ways mainstream settings can be experienced by people with disabilities and quiet too about the alternative, less well sanctioned communities to which people with disabilities have always belonged. Participants identified five key attributes of place as important qualitative antecedents to a sense of community belonging. The potential of these attributes and other self-authored approaches to inclusion are explored as ways that people with disabilities can support the policy objective of effecting a transformation from disabling to inclusive communities.