Re: If there would be a way for getting your sight back, would you do it?
[[wow]].
Yeah to cae, I know right?
27 posts yesterday now look at it.
A lot to respond to.
I personally think we were better before when we were warehoused in institutions maybe not all of it but we knew where we were going.
In the 80s about the time I was born a move was underway for change, just like the cloud of today the word was mainstreaming.
Mainstreaming just like the net of today promised, equal opertunity coupled with specialised training skills the blind would become part of the sighted world and be better intergrated into the worlds new opperating system.
The world had been running for so long on unix and dos and now it was time for windows, massive disk storage, and all round freedom.
And in the beginning the utopia held itself pritty much together.
True I had bad teachers and aids, tutors for braille and some service issues, sadly this meant my math and some of my education was not up to snuff but I never had to many issues at least up to highschool.
In highschool, there were still special units and seprate arieas which in the beginning we all thought was good.
Sadly just like in win3x where programs often grabbed ocupied memmory addresses causing a crash, the school grabbed money meant for me and used it for itself, we didn't have protections like our educational union in place like we do now.
Things went south quickly and I was happy to get out of there having achieved well something but not really much.
At the end of this I put it down to it being a new system.
I hit university and the new utopia seemed to be in place, on sight information and transcription, monitering and service requests, if you or your teachers had a problem they simply reported it to it and some guru would come and fix it.
Sadly it wasn't all that good for me.
Up till now service from my organisation had been good, instructors were good, I even had some life skills training.
However thats where it fell over.
I have already mentioned this in more firy detail but will go into it here.
It was necessary for me at the time to apply to a disability government agency for my equipment and some other things.
The mistake I made almost immediately was to insist I got the equipment I wanted.
I got some cheap and nasty laptop from a cheap and nasty company which had no wish to support me at all.
The agency said it had worked with others for the last 2 years.
And they would be right since 2 years was what I got out of it.
Though in practice it would be 9 months of actual use and the rest of the time of babysitting.
Basically everuy time I turned it on, it would either not start, or start but menus wouldn't work right.
This was the first month of work, start it up, it would run, a couple weeks later it would be full of something, menus stopped working, I reformatted.
After a month of this I was really cheesed.
I managed to get tweakui 1.33 which cleared histories out and that seemed to at least temperarily fix the issue.
2 months later I updated and xp wanted to remove updates again, what?
Why?
I decided to stop it doing that.
And it started but no keyboard, another reformat and reinstall and it worked.
Next try to connect my serial dectalk synth and see if it worked, no dice, 5 reformats later and I gave up.
I had an old pcmcia card synth and it failed had hal 2, got upgrade, it worked again.
Then bliss for 6 months the unit lived, it rumbled forward and I was happy.
But it kept locking up and the fan it was loud.
I took it in, they basically told me, fuck off, we are not interested blind retarded helpless fucker, fuck off and go home.
Not exactly this but there was no interest at all.
Finally I decided to update bios, it started beeping and beeping and beeping and I turned it off then I turned it on, and it didn't work.
We took it in and they tried it, turn it on and it got vary hot.
We took it back to the company that made it.
They were shocked with service we had recieved.
The unit we had got had defective chips in it, how it was sold to that store which doesn't exist anymore is still a mistory.
We had ensurance for it, it was the cheapest unit at the time they said and we got 1400 bucks from them which was what it would cost to repair it.
I went back to another toshiba I brought myself and it actually worked properly.
Later on I tried again to get jaws for a complex class, and it came at the end of the course and was completely useless.
With university over well to as far as it would go, it was time to get a job.
They tried, and failed, then sent me to their job agency.
They came round and assessed me.
They got me to do a cv which I did.
The agents burned out like an old lightbulb.
Sometimes my data was preserved, at which case I was given another agent.
But mostly it wasn't so they assessed me again.
Eventually I had had enough.
5 years after being promised through school then uni and with all my advisers telling me I would get a job, and not getting one I was about to commit suicide.
I just couldn't see a way out at all.
So I simply decided that everyone of these guys wasn't giving me service and so I said I don't need you your fired!
I did need them but they are not much help to me if they continued as they were.
To exit was hard enough though quit sure, your gone.
But a few months their parent companies, charities etc rang me up and said, please give us cash.
At which point I said, I quit, please remove me, or else.
Luckily I didn't need the police but I would have done so to get rid of them.
That was when things changed.
Up till now the general rule was see an adviser who is helpfull, and they will help you with ideas, most of them are blind to so they know what to do about it all.
Sadly they are suddenly promoted.
THe new one, subscribe to these lists, go on these sites for jobs, and ask about.
Nice idea to chuck the book at me.
Subscribe to this list and that, and get nothing back much nothing I want.
I got out of that.
Subscribe to job sites.
Bar spam, malware and about100 reformats I got nothing from that.
No one told me to join linked in, it seems that that is where I should have gone, to late to get a job now probably.
The world has changed, funding is controled, but mainstreaming has also changed I think if I went again it would be different.
My condition that made me blind has also been to a large part been prevented.
So I am the last of a breed of blind people at least of a strain of the blind.
With the tech we have now there hopefully will not be anyone else like me.
In fact I have a friend who has a son exactly like me and he didn't become like me so I guess thats a comfort to know that there will not be anymore.
However it seems in this modern tech world there is no more room for creativity the machines know best, at least facts and figgures.
But machines are not creative, yet, as a result things have changed a lot since I started.
I do think chucking out all the institutions was a bad idea.
For me, mainstreaming and education maybe with a support centre and assistance when I need it would have been good, either over the phone, in person or via computer link.
Then units where we were taught stuff we needed.
As well as this, maybe places we could go if it wasn't working for a few weeks, get instruction, have fun and a few other things.
And while there were a few of these courses about not many existed.
For example if I had an issue, say what I had above I'd like to simply show up to one of these places or contact them and say I really have issue with well a few things, mention them, get support I needed and get them addressed.
Never happened.
A weeker person would have just ended themselves, I was even thinking about ways I could kill myself.
It took guts to say you are useless to the institutions that said they were helping, go away and leave me alone.
I am not against welfare but yeah there are some people, some that can't help it but definately some cultures that just shouldn't get special treatment, we are all equal even though from time to time we have done bad things to eachother like stealing others land and such.
Sadly its degenerated into one side saying give everything to me because I am me and I am entitled to what I want because you abused and mistreated me and therefore I will cause a scene and maybe kill people and robb them and stab them and protest because I am not getting a fare deal.
Some of them have just grievence but most don't.
I live in a city devided, to the south are the others.
They are not us, and while they may be good people poor as they are, we have no need to mix with them.
They are trouble and cause a lot of it.
We handle it like we handle everything else.
Which I don't necessarily agree with either but oh well.
I do think though that with our attempt to intergrate the disabled into normalcy that part of the good things and services have dropped out because we think that we don't need them.
For example external speech synths.
A lot of sound cards have effects now.
And a lot of control panels are visual.
I have one such external soundcard and I agree.
Run sound effects through it, audio dramas, books, and music yeah they really work amazing.
Run games through it and they work amazingly but run speech through it.
Firstly speech is just a bit short for any effects to be put on it by just a bulk standard card.
Sure if speech engines were designed for effects maybe we wouldn't have this issue to much but they are not and so we do.
Speech is chopped off, sounds really bad and well not everyone gets it right.
I used card drivers from the manufacturer which were so bad that even with effects off they just didn't sound.
if I used generics windows would try to install updated drivers which were just as bad.
I have older but broken drivers which work with effects but of which I can handle it.
I think either bring back external speech, or exclude speech from sound effects or well add effects back to your speech and you can do things with it.
I mean have your email read to you by the borg hmmm.
I suspect in our attempting to make things better we will probably loose more than what we gain before we gain it back.
As for work I don't work because there isn't a job.
But says the government we can't have poor helpless disabled retarded people blind or otherwise sitting about.
So if you are a poor blind helpless retarded disabled we won't give you any money and if you don't have a job we will put you somewhere were you can put bottle caps on bottles or something utterly demeaning.
So I say to the government, I am looking for work and sometimes even I have a job.
I lie basically so I get support and I hate doing that.
But what do I do.
I read from coolblindtech of all places articles stating the blind are working nitting military uniforms, making bottled water and paper towels and serving their country.
And they say how wanderfull it is, I find it disgracefull and fucking demeaning the blind shouldn't have to be reduced to such work.
We are not that retarded that we would want work like this, maybe those that think its fine are retarded.
It work and they get a wage, but maybe its how they get their benifit who knows.
With laws being passed its certain that the sighted world wants more control on what it does and what it doesn't.
The big monster corps don't want the blind telling them things are screwed up they need time to make an excuse.
Then again, I live with family now and not as yet in an institution for retarded disabled, and at least till my family dies, thats not going to happen, after that, oh well.
Maybe thats all I will be good for but at least I have had freedom for most of my life.
I know friends that grew up inside, and are the retarded helpless that all of those people are, I don't blame them they know no better, but they have no future, none at all.
If you grow up in there the only place you are used to is another institution.
I have an old friend sadly with dementure who had an dieing husband.
She lived an ok ish life and did a lot for those around her.
With the death of her husband she was transfered to a place she could get some help.
This was some sort of institution.
At the start she planned to leave, but by the end of the year she was happy to be locked away, and wouldn't want to leave.
They tell her its the best place for her and that its where she must be.
I do think though we are losing to much, taking it all down isn't the way, maybe having somewhere you can go if times get bad, get resources you need, have help on the side when needed.
Unless you are able to have somewhere to be you are basically on your own at least it feels that way to me.
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