The year is 1988. Billy Ocean is singing “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car”. Steven Hawking has released A Brief History of Time. Rain Man is topping the box office. Big hair and thick scrunch socks are in. Partying involves the Blue Light Disco hosted at the local concert hall by the police. Google is not yet invented. Mobile phones are not on the market. A bag of hot chips costs less than a dollar. And this is high school. My Perkins Brailler, invented in 1951, yet still the most used mechanical braille writer in the world, weighing in at 4.8 kilograms thumps awkwardly against my thigh. Its bell tinging ever so slightly with the movement of my footsteps as I hurriedly lug it down the shabby corridor toward my designated room. It’s a room that by its very necessity marks me as someone who doesn’t belong, despite what my school uniform is designed to portray. It’s a room […]
Continue readingTag Archives: braille
A Braille Menu Please
I think we live in a society that does not value diversity, difference or disability. If anything, our society sees anything other than sameness as a burden, bother or threat, unless it is temporarily convenient to view it as otherwise to meet an ableist objective. We don’t seem to realise that it is our cultural, community and communication values, as well as the systems and structures we continue to put in place that are the real problem. We continue to overlook the untapped potential and unused resources of our vast and creative population. But for what purpose? It is our intricacies that necessitate the drive for innovation, and it is our need to belong that brings us together and pulls humanity into the future. But what happens when we continue to create barriers to participation? Not only does it hold people with disability to ransom, and ensures they remain beholden to a society that is intent on punishing them for it, […]
Continue reading