Deaf Communication Choices in Hospitals

Imagine this:

You are pregnant. You know what it is like to give birth. You are deaf. You ask hospital in advance for a live on site interpreter for the birth. Hospital says no. You sue. You lose because hospital convinces a magistrate that video remote interpreting (VRI) is good enough.

Despite reports in news that they will give you a live interpreter when the birth happens you are forced to have VRI. AND the VRI fails as you are giving birth!

You are having surgery. Then at an important time before surgery, in recovery, or in the hospital room, VRI fails.

You are in the emergency room. Right when it's needed the most, like during treatment or post-treatment instructions and discharge, VRI fails.

There is no backup and the hospital refuses to call for a live interpreter. All attempts at getting the medical people to write are failing.

Just how unacceptable are these scenarios/situations?

According to the National Association of the Deaf position statement on VRI, "If a deaf person uses sign language, hospitals should provide a qualified sign language interpreter..."

Seems there's no consensus in the courts about what "effective communication" actually means.

There's a petition going around related to the case mentioned above:

Bethesda Hospital East: Apologize to Margaret Weiss and Respect Deaf Patients' Needs!

Use this hashtag in social media and Twitter! #DeafChoice

Uber Isn't A Public Transportation Service?

First it was NYC with too few accessible taxis, then the mayor claiming that the taxis were a hazard, and now this...

Uber, Lyft, and other similar ride-sharing organizations, are claiming that disability laws do not apply to them.

Uber: Disability Laws Don’t Apply to Us

Say what? What are these guys smoking? Can I have some?

Uber IS a transportation service, not a "technology" company, because it's similar to a car service and taxis. All of them use a vehicle to take a passenger to a requested destination. Denying those with disabilities, or separating them from the non-disabled crowd, is still discrimination. Maybe they'd be a "technology" company if they used a teleporter, but no such luck.

No matter what, Uber's UberWAV and UberASSIST programs should be like how other taxi companies are set up, with the vehicles being used for disabled and not, and treated the same way without being charged too much more.

Want to know something else? Uber's also flooding the job boards with listings that say something like these:

"[job title] - Need to Earn More Money? Join UberX as a Driving Partner Today!"
"Having Trouble Getting A [job name/title/type] Job? Have A Flexible Schedule As An UberX Driving Partner Instead!"
"Entry Level Job Not Paying The Bills? Join UberX & Have a Flexible Schedule Driving Your Own Car."
"Make up to $xxx this Weekend in fares Driving Your Car. Join Uber Now!"

Personally, I'd avoid them til they clean up their act.

Review of Sony's Captioning Glasses - Part 2

In the previous blog post Review of Sony's Captioning Glasses, I tried using the Sony Captioning Glasses for the first time. Then flash forward to recently, when I watched Frozen with the glasses.

This time, I found I missed something from the first time I used them. I didn't make an effort to adjust the noserests. Thus, the way the noserests were at the time, no wonder they caused me so much pain. I managed to adjust them just far enough so I wouldn't have the same problem as before, and it worked. I went the entire movie without the glasses hurting me too much, adjusting them here and there.

Still some room for improvements as I mentioned before. One additional suggestion would be adjustable captions color and font size. I'm wondering if this sort of thing would work with Google Glass with the right adjustments and programming.

Cheers to DC, More Jeers to NYC

Washington DC's gotten some rather nice-looking accessible cabs. Why can't NYC do the same thing?

Hey, Mayor Bloom-boy... Get a load of THIS!

Wheelchair-Accessible Taxis on the Rise in Maryland Suburbs
Wheelchair-accessible taxis available in Prince George’s

Even the DC Metro paratransit has some of these. Can you do this, Mayor Bloomie? Come on, seriously... 13,000+ cabs out there and less than 250 are accessible? DC has a higher ratio than that. I challenge you to say that the MV-1 is hazardous to the non-disabled.

Oh, wait... I guess not...

NYC Taxis Don't Have To Accommodate The Disabled, Rules Appeals Court
Even Though London Will Have Accessible Nissan Cabs, TLC Says ADA Makes It Impossible

Or can it be?

More Handicap-Accessible Cabs Hit The Streets

Bloomberg, my man... Try using a wheelchair, powered or manual, for a week.

Review of Sony's Captioning Glasses

I just recently got back from watching The Dark Knight Rises with captions. In this case, it didn't use open captioning or rear window captioning (RWC). The theatre used the Sony subtitle/caption glasses. They do take a little getting used to at first. No captions will show until the beginning of the movie.

They've got their good points and their bad points. But basically, the glasses have room for improvement.

The good:
- Subtitles are easily readable with green letters
- Tapping Menu on the battery pack with + and - adjusts the captioning mode and brightness
- Subtitles show up no matter where you look

The bad:
- After wearing them, they'll feel a bit heavy and the bridge of your nose may hurt
   (in my case, it was painful due to the noserests pinching me, but didn't hurt til I took them off)
- Might cause some eye strain with some people due to the focal plane of the subtitles. Meaning, you're going to be reading subtitles close to you, then look at the movie screen.

The suggested improvements:
- the ear pieces could be made adjustable, like longer or shorter
- the eyepiece connector or middle of glasses could be made hinged to allow for those with one good eye to see more of the subtitles
- the subtitle placement could be made adjustable
- if not hinged, maybe use wraparound glasses?
- the nose rests could be made adjustable
- possible to make "clip-ons" to display subtitles on the person's own glasses?

Came across these pages/blogs mentioning it as well:

Regal Captions All Movies With Special Glasses - A Review
The future of captioned films
My Opinion on the Caption Glasses

And interestingly enough, a Quick Start Guide for the glasses. There's more like this with a little more looking around.

Update: I tried them a second time and posted about it. (Part 2)

Suit to Add Handicapped-Accessible Cabs Unfar?

An even louder Bronx cheer, wetter raspberries and razzing, and an even smellier fart are directed in Bloomberg's general direction. I posted about this earlier in NYC Taxis Inaccessible! Shame on you, Bloomberg!.

Bloomberg says suit to add handicapped-accessible cabs unfair to 'average' riders, wastes gas, money

You have GOT to be kidding me, Mr. Mayor B! Unfair to average riders, wastes gas and money, and...

Disabled-friendly cabs are a health hazard, would cause injuries & spark lawsuits, mayor says

...a hazard? Hazard to WHO? Yourself? You have more to worry about hubcaps coming off other cars and them spraying water on you than a wheelchair user lobbing a golf ball-sized water balloon at you using a rubber band slingshot. YOU yourself can be a rider of the subways, as many officials, even mayors and related public officials, have been known to do.

Have you even ridden in one of those wheelchair-friendly cabs? Have you even spent time in the DC area seeing how the paratransit system and accessible cabs work? Have you even talked to the owners of those cabs to see if they really are hazardous? Have you been in a modified wheelchair-accessible van driven by a wheelchair user? I DON'T THINK SO. YOU can try riding these things not just once, but multiple times. I've been there, done that.

How about making the ENTIRE NYC subway system accessible, adding elevators and escalators? Adding newer accessible vans would be much cheaper than the huge bill of retrofitting the entire NYC subway system. But yep, looks like they're doing some accessibility work here and there, with 89 out of 468 accessible stations.

MTA Guide to Accessible Transit

NYC Taxis Inaccessible! Shame on you, Bloomberg!

A big Bronx cheer, raspberries, razzing, and to quote Monty Python, a fart in Bloomberg's general direction.

City’s Next Taxi: A Nissan Van Short on Looks, Perhaps, but Full of Comforts
The Nissan Taxi Is Rolling In, to a Bronx Cheer (letters to the Editor)
United Spinal Denounces New York City Taxi Pick

NYC's Mayor Bloomberg and administration chose a non-wheelchair accessible taxi Nissan van that was not wheelchair accessible over an accessible Turkish van. Come on, sirs. You're blowing off and ignoring the disabled community in your city! There may be paratransit services, but this doesn't excuse the fact that even those with disabilities need a taxi! I oughta know, using a wheelchair from time to time due to my knee surgeries. I used a taxi van equipped with a wheelchair ramp or lift coming home from the metro/subway one time.

In DC, they just rolled out a program called rollDC.

Wheelchair-accessible cabs increase DC mobility

While most of NYC's subway stops aren't quite wheelchair accessible, some are. Compare that to DC's stations and subway cars, which are all accessible. I'm sure other cities are just as accessible. I've seen Memphis, TN's trolleys and and I think San Jose/San Francisco's subway trains use some sort of elevated platform for wheelchair users.

Again, Mayor Bloomberg, shame on you. You just passed up an opportunity to help improve your city's economy.

Ridor on "Perseverance or Persistence?"

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I've followed a lot of theatre chains on their odyssey of making themselves accessible to everyone. Some places go all out. Some places need a bit of encouraging and pounding to include a bit more accessibility. What Ridor did in his "Perseverance … or Persistence?" post last week got me thinking and looking back.

Sometimes too many nondisabled people think only of themselves when they build something and include things like captions or other related accessibilities as an afterthought. Building it into the current construction is cheaper than doing it after it's done. Observe curb cuts for wheelchairs and related. Sure, we passed the ADA for a reason, but this kind of thing should be common sense as we're leveling the playing field for everyone and not excluding anyone.

Of interest to Jamie Berke and I was a theatre being built not too far from us that opened about a year ago after about a year of construction. Every now and then, I would sometimes go out to the area just to see how far they had gotten. Currently, this theatre has 2-3 levels of parking below it with an elevator leading just outside the theatre entrance. There are some offices and a couple restaurants as part of the building, and the entire area around it has various retail shops, two grocery stores, a post office, a weekly seasonal farmers market, and is a short bus ride from a metro stop. We've both been there to watch captioned movies. Last time we were there, I observed a man with his wife who used a wheelchair, and they did pretty well getting around.

Another theatre further south of us in an outlet mall also has open captions and/or rear window and was completed about 2-3 years ago.

If theatres think it's too expensive to add on rear window or show open captioned movies, then they should think of how much money they're losing since many deaf only go to captioned/subtitled movies. It's also location, location, location.

Good job, Ridor! You've probably made at least an impression somewhere. Looks like he did in his WFD Conference post and the one before when he and the manager talked.