I disagree. My grandmother went deaf when she got into her seventies. I saw how it isolated her. She couldn’t get phone calls from her sons who lived out of state. People would get frustrated with her. Or, she would see how frustrated they were getting and then get frustrated herself because she was doing the best she could.

Proper communication is a fundamental human right essential to everyone’s well-being, in my opinion. But, I’m a loud mouth.

Changing sidewalks for wheel chair access made it easier for the blind, or so I am told. I know it made it easier for the elderly who had to use walkers. Someone who needs a walker because of a balance issue, not a strength issue, is more likely to fall at a curb. So the strength can fade away from unwillingness to walk and fear of being tripped up on curbs. Thus ramps have helped more than the wheel-chair bound.

As for my grandmother, I set her up with a phone that did email. The sons could send her email and she could hear from them, even if she never did figure out how to respond (this was the middle of the 1990s). That meant a lot to her.

These new access standards also address limited cognitive abilities, cultural differences, and alternate languages. As a former teacher, I am aware of cultural bias in testing. Cultural bias exists in web pages too, like when they assume that you know what wild cards are in a search engine and which one does which function. That’s technical bias.

People omit things to make them brief (unlike my letter here) or to make themselves elite (because you have to be in the know to understand). Requiring brevity by omitting things is not the same as including it and allowing people to skip what they want. A sighted person just skips over double wording as standard operating procedure. We see it so often. If you have to go back and decode something, that takes longer.

Tonea