Flight into Fantasy

One of my friends, whom I reconnected with on twitter a few months ago, has an expression. There are things in life that keep happening, over and over, that are annoying each and every time they come up. My friend has a number of these, and I do, too. My friend calls these his bowls of petunias, in reference to a quote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The one line the bowl of petunias gets in that book, if you’ll recall, is, “Oh, no, not again.” Which is generally the reaction that I have whenever my bowls of petunias come up. Naturally, I’m usually not quite as resigned as the bowl of petunias is in the book, and I’m more inclined to post repetitive blog rants.

So, let’s just talk about one of my particular bowls of petunias one more time. I am, of course, speaking of ebook accessibility, a subject about which I feel somewhat strongly, by which I mean it is the one topic guaranteed to make me want very much to punch people who disagree with me in the head.

Anyway, the latest development on this issue is that a journalism student at the University of Arizona is suing his university because the university is putting in place a pilot program in one of its classes where sighted students get to use the Amazon kindle. Darrell Shandrow, our blind plaintiff, naturally, does not.

I feel like I’m repeating myself, but it’s necessary. Equal access to books should be a right, not a privilege. It’s wonderful that there are resources out there for students like Shandrow, but you know what? They’re not enough. If everyone else in the class is using Kindles to read their course work and a blind student is not, I consider that to be a case of separate and unequal treatment. Presumably the kindles will be used for a specific purpose, and it will, at the very least, take longer for a non-kindle-using student to keep up with his classmates during class if they use another format.

There was and still is an ongoing conversation between Shandrow and several of us blind folks on twitter about this issue. Some people consider him to be an accessibility evangelist, whatever the hell that even means, and think he has been going about his crusade in a beligerent and undiplomatic way. Naturally, I am not one of these people. Being a university student myself, I can see the benefits of using the Kindle. I have also stated, more than once, that my money is as good as a sighted person’s. If this lawsuit is the only way in which Amazon will recognize this fact, then I want someone to sue, too!

Talking of ebook accessibility seems to step on a lot of toes in the blindness community. Even writing this, I find myself wanting to backpedal a bit to make sure that the people who volunteer their time for Bookshare or the folks at Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic know I’m not impuning what they do. I think any service that provides books in ways that blind people can read them is to be commended. Further, if we ever do get an Amazon Kindle that is completely accessible, the need for such services will hardly diminish. But those services are hardly enough. The day I can read any book I want, the same as my sighted peers, the instant I want to read it, will be the day that I consider myself as having equal access to printed materials as sighted people. Telling blind people we should be content with what we have is, I feel, a lot like telling black folks they should have been happy with separate schools, rest rooms, etc., or telling GLBT folks that they shouldn’t be so goddamn uppity and be happy with the domestic partnerships they can get instead of campaigning for marriage equality. Maybe that’s a bit of a harsh statement, but I won’t apologize for it. Too often, I feel that in general, disabled people are under more pressure than other minorities to be nice and not rock the boat lest we appear ungrateful for what we do have.

Well, being nice isn’t going to get us the services we need. I hope Darrell Shandrow’s lawsuit is successful, and if it takes a bunch of other blind people suing a bunch of other companies in order for these needed changes, then I hope they come through and do so in an unapologetic fashion. Because we shouldn’t apologize for wanting what we by rights ought to have.