Re: a few complaints about the blind comunity
While I see where Bryant and others are going I'd like to point out that the entitlement attitude isn't something exclusive to blind people or even people with disabilities. I can safely say that human beings tend to be fairly selfish by nature and the entitlement attitude is one shared by people regardless of race, gender, or disability. There is always someone who wants something for nothing, or expects preferential treatment just because they think they have a right to it. Their reasons may very, but the fact of the matter is it is a common enough behavior that is by no means exclusive to the blind community.
When I was in high school my mom use to work at a variety of part time jobs such as fast food restaurants, and the Walmart one hour photo department. If you really want to know how people are just go to work for a fast food restaurant or a major department store like Walmart and you'll find out that there are plenty of people with a huge entitlement at titude. My mom use to come home night after night and tell me stories about how this or that person was rude to her, demanded they get this or that, and acted like the world owed them something.
For example, when my mom worked at the one hour photo department people would come in the day after Christmas and ask how long it would take for their film to be developed. My mom would tell them it would take one hour as per the sign hanging next to the counter. There would usually be a couple of people who would get bossy and demand that they get their film back in 20 minutes or they were walking out and taking there business elsewhere or that they felt they should have a discount since they would have to wait the full hour for their film to be developed.
Obviously, such people didn't stop to consider the fact that the day after Christmas is the busiest day of the year for a photo department. Any major family holiday be it Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day , etc are bound to be very busy, but Christmas especially means everyone will have to work harder to keep up with the steady flow of people dropping of their film to be developed. They also didn't consider the fact in order to get their film done in the specified amount of time everyone would have to drop everyone else's film and do their film. Simply put those people are narcissists and think they deserve some special treatment over and above what the photo department would grant to any other customer.
When my mom worked at various fast food restaurants she experienced pretty much the same sort of entitlement attitude from some customers. There would be grouchy old senior citizens who would demand their senior citizen discount, and even when they got it they would complain it wasn't enough off their order. There would be customers who were in a hurry and would wine and complain if someone else got their food before they did, even though in that kind of bu siness its on a first come first served basis unless they have to make something special which takes more time. I could probably give a long list of examples of ways people tried to boss my mom around or demand discounts for food they didn't really deserve all because the customer was selfish and thought he or she was something special.
As for access technology that is a somewhat complex subject. I don't think a lot of blind users have any real idea how much it costs to run a company that develops accessible software and hardware. Its easy to wine and complain about the price of what those products costs, but equally I don't think they consider how much that company has to pay its employees to make those products. Its a case of the uninformed asking for lower costs for access technology regardless of who gets shorted in the long run to make that happen.
On one hand we can't blame them for wanting the cost of their accessibility aids to cost less. Howe ver, on the other we can blame them for being uninformed about what it really costs to produce this or that piece of software they claim is too expensive. Most of them don't realize that the average programmer makes about $60,000 or more a year and therefore the company has to sell several units of their software just to pay that one employee let alone more programmers, tech support staff, secretaries, office management, and so on. Put simply most of those doing the complaining have no idea what it costs to run a company of any size, and only can see the cost they themselves are having to pay for that access technology, and want it to be less regardless of how much it takes to keep that company going.
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