Written by Dan Wilkins
(from www.thenthdegree.com/intacces.asp)

As I was getting out of my van in the parking lot of an area store this older woman with white hair pulled into the accessible parking space next to mine. I sat on the lift waiting for her to get out of her car and lock the door. She had a placard on the dash. Suddenly, as she was making sure she had her keys, a man walking by stopped, took one look at me, and addressed her somewhat demonstratively, saying, “You can’t park there!!!” He pointed at the sign and then at me. “That space is for people who use wheelchairs…You can’t park there.” This guy, it seemed, was trying to advocate for ME!
Read the rest of this entry…

Several churches have written to ask about funding resourcces. Please comment here about how your church has funded its accessibility projects and/or what your conference or association Accessibility/Inclusion Committee offers.

Thank you.
The Web Editor

By Timothy Shriver
Monday, December 25, 2006; Page A29

I believe in the principle of last-first: The last thing you think will
be valuable is likely to be the first and most important. This
Christmas, the lesson came to me in a particularly powerful story: the
scandal of Misty Cargill.

Driving home from Christmas shopping, I couldn’t believe what I heard
on NPR. Misty Cargill is a woman with a mild intellectual disability
living in a group home in Oklahoma. She and her boyfriend go to movies
regularly and play in a weekly bowling league with friends. She works
full time at a nearby factory. Her life is normal in almost every
respect except one: Misty Cargill needs a kidney transplant.

I’m no expert on the gut-wrenching ethics of transplant decisions, nor
am I a doctor. But when I heard that Cargill was told that she was not a
candidate for transplant because of her lack of mental competence, I was
outraged. The University of Oklahoma Medical Center decision makers
claimed that she was unable to give informed consent and turned her
away.

They did this despite her own physician saying that she is perfectly
competent. The hospital then suggested she get a medical guardian, but
state officials refused to play the role, because they rightfully
determined that she was already fully competent. Most recently, the
hospital has offered to conduct its own assessment of her competence,
and that’s due next month.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. In one survey quoted by reporter
Joseph Shapiro, 60 percent of transplant centers reported that they’d
have serious concerns about giving a kidney to someone with mild to
moderate intellectual disability apparently based on fears that these
patients can’t handle the complex post-transplant care. The facts are
exactly the opposite: People with intellectual disabilities who have
been lucky enough to get a transplant do as well if not better than
non-disabled people, probably because of their fidelity to instructions
and their network of caregivers and supporters.

Lurking below the surface is the more likely reason for denial: Someone
determines that people with intellectual disabilities are inferior,
human beings of lesser value, the last priority. They’re put last in
line because they’re thought not to matter quite as much as other
people. For Misty Cargill, like another vulnerable person who is being
celebrated today all over the world, there is no bed available. And for
Cargill, being turned away may well cost her life.

But the transplant physicians’ attitude is common. According to a
Special Olympics Gallup survey in 2003, a strikingly similar number of
Americans, 62 percent, don’t even want a child with intellectual
disabilities in their child’s school. In studies of health care
providers, Special Olympics has found rampant negligence in the care of
people with intellectual disabilities. Some doctors even report that
they don’t want people with intellectual disabilities sitting in their
waiting rooms. One confided that when care is given, it’s usually “quick
and dirty.”

All of which brings us to the real question that Christmas invites: Who
matters? A child in a malaria-infested zone? A transplant surgeon? Misty
Cargill?
During this season when we’re confronted with the world’s injustices,
we’re challenged to muster the willpower to make a difference for those
who suffer from inequalities.

But what about when the problem is not an absence of willpower but the
presence of won’t power? What about when we are the innkeepers –
confronted by too little space and finding ourselves uttering the
terrifying words to those who we decide matter less: “There is no room
for you.” What about when we ourselves construct the edifice on which
the shocking and outrageous devaluing of human dignity rests?

We search for a way out. The Americans With Disabilities Act forbids
such discrimination by public entities such as the hospital that turned
Misty down, does it not? The recently adopted United Nations Convention
on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities forbids such discrimination,
does it not? Medical ethics would disallow such behavior, would it not?
Political leaders committed to protecting human life will act, will they
not?

Maybe. But on Christmas, we might remember that no matter how many
restrictions and rules we create, the enigma of humanity remains our
inability to follow the mystery of love all the way to its awe-filled
conclusion: Every human life matters. There are no exceptions. There is
no hierarchy. The presence of the divine can be seen in the tiniest and
most vulnerable just as it can be seen in the strong and powerful.

But it can be seen especially among those who are demeaned, reduced to
a stable, having no room at the inn.

The most celebrated character in literature with a disability, Tiny
Tim, famously proclaimed, “God bless you, one and all.” He was an agent
of change — the cause of poor Scrooge’s transformation from misery to
joy.

Perhaps Misty Cargill is today’s protagonist of change inviting us to a
deep and terrifying view of the world we have created. She is the
embodiment of the last-first principle: She may be last on the
transplant list, but she may be first in her power to invite a
rethinking.

I pray that she will inspire us to feel differently about human life,
both hers and our own.

The writer is chairman of the Special Olympics.

Michael Steinbruck, M.A.
Project Manager, Self-Directed Supports Training and TA
Program Administrator
The Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities – UCEDD
UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Department of Pediatrics
P.O. Box 2688
335 George Street, Suite 3500
New Brunswick, N.J. 08903-2688
Phone: 732-235-9308
FAX: 732-235-9330
Web Page: rwjms.umdnj.edu/boggscenter

November 6, 2006

E-Commerce Report
By BOB TEDESCHI, NY TIMES

ACCORDING to an advocacy group, Target declined last year to make its Web site fully accessible to blind people with specialized screen-reading technology last year. If true — and Target has denied the accusation in court — it was a public relations blunder, and it may have been illegal as well.

The National Federation of the Blind sued Target, contending that the company’s inaction violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because the Web site is essentially an extension of its other public accommodations, and as such, should be easily accessible to people with disabilities.

A Target spokeswoman would not comment on those assertions, but in court the company offered testimony from three blind users rebutting the federation’s arguments.

On Sept. 6, a federal judge in California held, in a preliminary ruling on the suit, that in some instances, Web sites must cater to disabled people.

Legal scholars say the full reach of that ruling will not be clear until the case is decided, if it reaches that point.

But in the meantime, the dispute shows that although commercial Web sites have made considerable strides in serving this small fraction of their customer base, there are still substantial difficulties on both sides of the screen.

“Web sites are more useful than they used to be, but there are still a few more hurdles than you’d like to have to go through,” said James Gashel, an executive director of the federation, based in Baltimore.

Mr. Gashel said that most sites accommodate screen-reading technology, which tells blind users the layout of a Web page and describes images, search prompts and other fields into which users can type information to find a product or complete a purchase. (The most popular screen-reading software, Jaws for Windows from Freedom Scientific, sells for around $900.)

When sites do not accommodate screen-reading software, the online shopping or browsing experience breaks down for the 200,000 or so of the nation’s 1.3 million people with vision disabilities who are online, according to Mr. Gashel.

Most online stores go to great lengths to make sure that their sites are accessible to people with disabilities, simply because it is good business to allow as many people as possible to shop. And online-shopping technology specialists say it is not so difficult or costly a task.

“It’s very straightforward to make a site accessible,” said Dayna Bateman, senior information architect at Fry Inc., which operates e-commerce Web sites on behalf of large retailers including Brookstone, Eddie Bauer and Spiegel.

Ms. Bateman said that the more software coding a Web site could offer to help screen readers and other technologies navigate a site, the more likely it was that the Web site would show up on search engine results, because Google, Yahoo and others looked to the same coding for clues about the Web page’s content.

“So it’s actually an advantage in the marketplace,” she said. “I just don’t think a lot of folks are schooled enough in accessibility to know that.”

For advocates of people with disabilities, the most effective tool for ensuring a smooth online experience has been the Americans with Disabilities Act. But because the law was signed in 1990, before the Web was in common use, its language offers little guidance on how to approach questions of online accessibility.

A variety of lawsuits based on Disabilities Act provisions have been brought against online companies, notably one brought by Mr. Gashel’s organization against AOL in 1999, but the suits were settled before judges could offer clear guidance on how, or whether, the law applied to Web sites.

In denying Target’s motion to dismiss the suit two months ago, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of United States District Court in San Francisco held that the law’s accessibility requirements applied to all services offered by a place of public accommodation. Since Target’s physical stores are places of public accommodation, the ruling said, its online store must also be accessible or the company must offer equally effective alternatives.

So what about online-only Web merchants like Amazon.com, BlueNile, Drugstore.com and RedEnvelope as well as fast-growing young online companies like YouTube and MySpace?

“That issue is still up for grabs,” said Michael R. Masinter, a law professor who specializes in Disabilities Act and civil rights issues for Nova Southeastern University, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Mr. Masinter said the Target suit, since it involved an offline merchant’s online operations, would not address that issue.

The case, though, is important to Amazon, because it runs Target’s online store as it does those of a handful of other big offline merchants.

An Amazon spokeswoman, Patricia Smith, said that “as a matter of course we work cooperatively with all of our retail partners to develop and implement the tools and features they want incorporated onto their Web sites.” Amazon, she added, “is already generally usable for people with screen readers.” It has offered a text-only, streamlined site designed for such devices (amazon.com/access).

Mr. Masinter said one potentially thorny issue in the Target suit was whether phone services offered by online merchants were suitable substitutions for the Web site when the site did not work well for technologies like screen-reading software. Given the high cost of maintaining phone-based customer service operations, the question would be of particular interest to retailers and disabled people.

Companies in one emerging category of Internet commerce, online education, have the most ground to make up in adapting their offerings for the disabled, according to Jane Jarrow, president of Disability Access Information and Support, an education industry consultancy.

Most online-only schools, Ms. Jarrow said, “are oblivious to the fact that they have a significant issue here.” Many online-only schools rely on chat rooms, for instance, for class discussions, and screen-reading software does not function properly with chat rooms — nor can learning-disabled students often keep pace with the discussions.

The issue has become critical because many online-only schools became eligible this summer to receive federal student aid. But to get such funds, organizations must adhere to regulations in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which has been updated to say that all Web sites of groups receiving federal money must be accessible to people with disabilities.

Capella University, a Minneapolis-based institution known for online courses, employs a full-time disabilities specialist, who, among other things, has guided the school to avoid using online chat rooms for its courses. Some online schools follow similar approaches, but most do not, said Richard Allegra, director of professional development for the Association on Higher Education and Disability, an industry group.

“I think people are starting to understand their obligations to make their services accessible,” he said. “The question they have is, how to do that?”

Subject: Church of England Supports Baby Euthanasia

The Sunday Times
Peter Zimonjic

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2087-2450134%2C00.html

November 12, 2006

The Church of England has joined one of Britain’s royal medical colleges
in calling for legal euthanasia of seriously disabled newborn babies.

Church leaders want doctors to be given the right to withhold treatment
from seriously disabled newborn babies in exceptional circumstances.

Their call, overriding the presumption that life should be preserved at
any cost, follows that of the Royal College of Obstetricians and
Gynaecology, revealed in The Sunday Times last week.

The church’s position was laid out in a submission to an independent
inquiry, due to publish its report this week, into the ethical concerns
surrounding the treatment of severely premature babies.

In the submission Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark, states: “It may in
some circumstances be right to choose to withhold or withdraw treatment,
knowing it will possibly, probably, or even certainly result in death.”

The church’s submission does not say which medical conditions might
justify the decision to allow babies to die. It argues that there are
“strong proportionate reasons” for “overriding the presupposition that
life should be maintained”.

It says it would support the withdrawal of treatment only if all
reasonable alternatives had been considered, “so that the possible
lethal act would only be performed with manifest reluctance”.

In its proposal the college of obstetricians argued that “active
euthanasia” should be considered for the overall good of families, to
spare parents the emotional burden and financial stress of caring for
desperately sick infants.

The college said in its submission to the inquiry: “A very disabled
child can mean a disabled family. If life-shortening and deliberate
interventions to kill infants were available, they might have an impact
on obstetric decision-making, even preventing some late abortions, as
some parents would be more confident about continuing a pregnancy and
taking a risk on outcome.”

Both submissions were made to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an
independent body that publishes guidelines for how the medical
profession should deal with ethical questions such as euthanasia.

The council was set up nearly two years ago in order to consider the
implications of advances that enable infants to be born half-way through
pregnancy.

In the Netherlands babies born before 25 weeks are not given medical
treatment in certain conditions.

The report, to be published on Thursday, is not expected to set an age
limit as a criterion.

_________________________________________________________________

More disability news issues>disability news issues