An access horror story--starring a linguistics professor

Should teachers go out of their way to help blind students? In a detailed message sent to a mailing list, David Faucheux told what happens when the blind do not enjoy sufficient access to the books and other material they need to "make the grade." No favoritism requested. David didn't get full access to the books he needed. "I asked the professor for some additional help," he wrote, "and was told in no uncertain terms that this would not be fair to the other students in his class. He said that perhaps blind people had no business in English linguistics anyway." David wrote his post in 1996, but despite anti-discrimination laws, it is not entirely out of date. In fact, he cited his experiendes in a recently sent letter to Newsweek in response to a column complaining that professors were cutting students too much slack.

My own take: David F's experiences are a powerful argument for a well-stocked national digital library system using a format friendly to speech synthesizers and Braille printers. "If TeleRead had been around," David notes, "any book would be available in electronic format thus negating the delays in waiting fro the book to be prepared in an alternate and usable fromat for the blind."

Indeed! A good, economical way to mainstream the blind and reduce their unemployment rate of more than 70 percent is to think of them from the start when designing libraries, e-bookstores and other sources of information. That would not just be compassion by the sighted--it would be enlightened self interest: insurance. Most blind people today have started life with seeing eyes.