Re: a few complaints about the blind comunity
@Gene, yes, specialized schools do have this issue, although unfortunately it's the ones who adapt to the environment and can't live outside it who tend to have the most trouble.
@Afrim, I have met blind couples who live together quite well, but like anything else it's something that needs both parties to be compitant and know what they're doing. Unfortunately as regards romance one thing I will say is that for women the situation is far easier and it's far more common to find blind women having less trouble than men, because you know men do all the asking. In disability generally the ratio of married women to men is huge, about 6-1, but again, this is societys usual sexist crap that men are put through and people don't recognize, aside from disability attitudes.
Btw, no, I do not mean that there is no sexism towards women, only that while there are many people who are always ready to point this out and also people and or
ganizations who go against the grain on this, sexist attitudes towards men don't get the same attention, indeed often people don't believe it's even possible.
As regards people and communications Afrim, your correct that it depends upon the environment and the people, but I've come to think that sinse I left university things are bloody difficult however compitant and together and skilled you are at coping there really! ought to be some extra compensations somewhere.
@Sean, firstly perhaps you could please include more punctuation in your messages sinse it makes them rather hard to read with orphius jabbering away without stopping.
sinse when you read a sentence that goes on like this and doesn't stop so you don't know what it is saying sinse it has no punctuation marks whatsoever and the person might be making lots of different points but there is no distinction between them sinse there are no pauses in the speech it
makes things a trifle hard to read especially when the person is relating their own experiences and telling several different stories or making points which are likely very interesting but you don't really know what they are sinse there is no distinction between them and the voice just rattles on.
To actually answer your question however,
I agree technology is vastly improving, but whether that goes along with a change in attitudes I don't know, indeed your comments about jobs and the government in Newzealand illustrate that.
My gran was probably the most compitant and together blind person you could imagine, she was one of the first people in the Uk to have a guide dog, she could travel pretty much anywhere using techniques that now to me seem nuts, like telling buss routes by the rythm of the bus, she cooked regularly using pretty much everything and was also one of the most social and extravert people imaginable.
However, even she! complained at people's attitudes and was regularly treated as if she didn't exist.
Unfortunately I'm coming to the conclusion that whatever technology or compitancy you learn, you cannot actually have inclusion until people's attitudes change, for example you can have a company hier a blind person for a high powered job, but how efficiently they do that job depends upon how well people around them treat them, and that's even assuming a company wants to hier a blind person in the first place sinse more frequently than not these days the anti disability discrimination laws actually have the opposite effect, where a company believe a blind person is incapable of performing a given job but instead of asking or making enquiries they just deny the person on some flimsy excuse.
Equally, you can have a blind person join others for a social group, but if nobody actually talks to the blind person or treats them as thou gh they have a brain, it will just not be successful. blindness in general seems to go along with some of the worst attitudes among the none disabled population, and I have no idea why, but it's a regular pain in the kneck.
OPf course it isn't universal, however it is rather telling that most of my friends are either friends I met at university, friends I met at things connected to university which I joined later, or friends I meet at my aims summer music school which is like university. I don't know any sort of generic people I meet on the street or in a pub or at some social event or occasion at all, and even with meeting uni students, it still usually takes an hour or two, and for me to engage all my conversational skills and empathy to get people past the "whaaa! weerd blind man" syndrome.
For example, last week where was a try out choire thing, where 600 people got together in a big hall to sing duel of the fates and zadok
the priest in a concert with the Halli orchestra. The one person who actually bothered talking to me was surprisingly a uni student.
When we actually did the performance itself,I went in full Jedi robes, just because when else would I get a chance to sing Korah! mahtah! Korah! rahtahmah! in Jedi robes? Lots of people commented on the costume or made one liners, but nobody actually had a conversation with me or stopped to talk, and when my brother turned up who can make eye contact more frequently people talked to him about me than to me, which was pretty dam depressing, for all that I did enjoy the experience itself.
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