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Hero of quadroplegic game controllers to retire, replacement needed

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Ed sez, "With a retired Bozeman engineer's 70th birthday approaching, disabled gamers say they fear there will be no one to replace Yankelevitz, who has sustained quadriplegic game controllers for 30 years almost entirely by himself. The retired aerospace engineer hand makes the controllers with custom parts in his Montana workshop, offering them at a price just enough to cover parts."


Class action lawsuit filed against Uber over lack of wheelchair access in NYC vehicles

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A disability rights group is suing Uber over charges that the ride-hailing service violates New York City human rights laws by failing to ensure that enough of its vehicles are accessible to physically disabled riders.

(more…)

"Monster Imagery Taught Me I Was a Monster": Riva Lehrer on Beauty, Deformity, Disability

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Standing in the Mütter Museum of medical oddities, contemplating a neat row of  jars, each containing a malformed fetus with spina bifida, Riva Lehrer realized just how easily she, too, could have ended up a specimen in a bottle, an object of curiosity, pathos, and, yes, revulsion. "Their spinal column failed to fuse all the way around their spinal cord, leaving holes (called lesions) in their spine," she writes, in a New York Times essay so scarifyingly honest it feels like self-anatomization. "Some extrude a bulging sac containing a section of the cord. These balloons make the fetuses appear as if they’re about to explode. This condition is called spina bifida. I stand in front of these tiny humans and try not to pass out. I have never seen what I looked like on the day I was born."

Born with Spina bifida, the survivor of scores of surgeries, Lehrer is "less than five feet tall." She writes, "I have a curved spine. I wear huge, clunky orthopedic boots." Yet as she notes in her Times essay, she no longer winces at her own reflection. Through her stunning, photorealistic portraits of people with disabilities—people like Mat Fraser, a.k.a. Sealo the Seal Boy from American Horror Story; Nomy Lamm, born with one leg smaller than the other; Lynn Manning, a blind actor and 1990 World Champion in Blind Judo shown brandishing his white cane like a katana—she has come to see "disabled bodies as unexpected and charming and exciting. Each one stretched the boundaries of what it meant to be human. They made the world big enough to include me"— and the rest of us into the bargain. Riveting, moving, powerful, profound, her essay as well as her art recall the well-known quote from the Roman playwright Terence: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" (loosely, "I am human, and nothing human is alien to me").

"Theresia Degener," by Riva Lehrer.

A gallery of Lehrer's astonishing work is online, at her site, here.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He has published widely on media, technology, pop culture, and American mythologies. His latest book is the essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. He is writing a biography of the artist and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey, due out from Little, Brown in 2018.

Top image: Riva Lehrer, “66 Degrees,” 2016. 24″ x 36”, acrylic on wood panel. All rights reserved.

This 'wheelchair dance' company asks, 'Where's the disability?'

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At the Disability Rights Legal Center fundraiser gala this past weekend in Los Angeles, Apple was presented with DRLC's Business and Technology Award for their accessibility work, and 'Infinite Flow - A Wheelchair Dance Company' was featured as a cause auction recipient for an Apple Watch Series 3, which was designed with a number of accessibility-expanding features. Of particular note are its wheelchair-specific features, VoiceOver for the blind, and the Taptic Engine (haptic feedback for navigation and notification).

What's the connection between Apple Watch and wheelchair dance?

Activity on the Apple Watch is optimized for wheelchair users. taking into account different pushing techniques for varying speeds and terrain, Apple Watch tracks daily activity, encourages healthy routines through wheelchair-specific workouts, and prompts users to move with Time to Roll notifications.

(...) With sensors configured to address different surface types, inclines, and transition moments, such as moving from a wheelchair to a seat at a desk, the Apple Watch Series 3 is designed with accessibility in mind and ideal for the variety of dancers in Hamamoto's inclusive classes and performances.

Infinite Flow was founded in 2015 by Marisa Hamamoto, a professional ballroom dancer who became temporarily paralyzed, then later regained the full use of her body.

Her group is America's first professional wheelchair ballroom dance company, and works to encourage others to dance inclusively, with and without physical limitations.

https://youtu.be/lq5XhHjKmwM

At the DRLC event on the Fox Studios lot, Hamamoto and guest artist Piotr Iwanicki did a live cha cha cha performance.

They've done other fun projects together, including one in Japan featured below.

“Thank you, Apple, for continually creating and innovating technology that everyone, including people with disabilities, can use,” said Hamamoto later on the dance group's Instagram.

More on Apple's accessibility features here. If you missed their video with Sady Paulson when it made the viral rounds last year, you should watch it again. The people behind this work at Apple really mean it, and some of them are my friends.

https://youtu.be/XB4cjbYywqg

Here's a transcript of the DLRC's introduction for Apple at the award ceremony:

For more than 30 years, Apple has provided innovative solutions for people with disabilities. Apple’s built-in accessibility features make them powerful and affordable assistive devices, drastically simplifying the buying process and learning curve for users with disabilities. By including these features within mainstream products, Apple has cleared the way for more advancements in this important field, opening up countless possibilities for people to be creative, collaborative and independent. We cannot be more honored to recognize them for their commitment to the disability community.

More of the dance group's inspiring work in the embedded Facebook videos below.

Watch this guy demonstrate his state-of-the-art prosthetic fingers

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Naked Prosthetics creates custom-fitted hand and finger prostheses that allow an impressive range of fine motor skills to be done by the wearer, like holding and striking a match or unscrewing a tiny cap.

Matt Finney lost parts of two fingers and his thumb from gangrene stemming from a blood clot. It's cool to hear him talk about how this changed his life. Here's some of the many other demonstrations on their channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu1s2EW26E0

Naked Prosthetics Matt Finney (YouTube / Naked Prosthetics)

Holiday carols, one-handed guitar, stump duct tape pick

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“I was born without my right hand and play guitar with a duct tape pick I made,” says IMGURian abshow. “I play drums too!”

Here is the ABShow YouTube channel.

This is a clip of my drum cover of Pentatonix' version of this Christmas classic! Hope you enjoy -- feel free to SHARE and let me know your thoughts below! Check out the rest of my channel to see how I do other things with only one hand!

Pretty excellent. Follow @abshow on Instagram:

• @abshowA clip of my drum (one handed) cover of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” by @ptxofficial 🥁🎄

A wonderful series of questions and answers with the artist follow in this IMGUR thread.

One Handed Guitar (Duct Tape Pick)

Deaf couple say Delta agent "refused to communicate" with them, kicked them off flight

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When Melissa Elmira Yingst and Socorro Garcia checked in for their flight at Detroit, they were told they'd get a seating assignment together. But at the departure gate, the request was denied—and they claim the gate agent would not communicate with them except by talking at them. Thing is, they're both deaf.

The gate agent rolled her eyes at us. Melissa asked for her to write. After a few moments, she finally wrote on a piece of paper and said, the flight is full and can’t book us together. I wanted to continue to communicate and decided to try and write on that same paper but instead of giving us the paper we asked for, she crumbled it in front of us and threw it in the trash.”

Yingst says she pleaded with the agent — who allegedly refused to give her name but whom they identify as “Felicia” — to write down her end of the conversation, arguing that she was “denying us our communication access” by not doing so.

Here's where they story diverges: one of the women says "Felicia" pushed her when she tried to retrieve the note. But "Felicia" claims she was assaulted. In any case, "Felicia" summoned airport security and the women were removed from the flight.

Delta is backing its gate agent, stating that the women were barred from the flight because Garcia went behind the gate desk and "pushed" the gate agent when trying to retrieving the crumpled up paper. The women deny this and say Delta falsely told the media it had reimbursed them. Read the rest

Loving German Shepherd eyes. Wait 'til the end.

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Meet Dogbert the German Shepherd.

Such a loving gaze from this German Shepherd to their owner, who's rolling video.

Dogbert is rolling, too.

Watch it all the way to the end.

Loving German Shepherd eyes

[via]


Disabled patients in Iowa state-run home used as "guinea pigs" in sexual arousal experiments, lawsuit charges

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A federal civil rights lawsuit filed this week claims that severely intellectually and physically disabled patients at a state-operated home in Iowa were used as "guinea pigs" in sexual arousal research experiments.

A 38-page complaint was filed on Monday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa.

In it, former University of Kansas assistant professor and child psychologist, 63-year-old Jerry Rea, is charged with experimenting on the "highly vulnerable" patients at the Glenwood Resource Center.

The Des Moines Register reported that Jerry Rea's affiliation with the University of Kansas ended when Rea moved to Iowa. Rea was fired from Glenwood when the feds started looking into abuse allegations last December.

"The deeply disturbing allegations come after the same Iowa facility found itself in federal law enforcement crosshairs," reports Olivia Messer at The Daily Beast:

The lawsuit claims that Rea, along with the facility's other top administrators, used taxpayer money to purchase tools under the auspices of research, including silk sheets, boxer shorts, sexual lubricants, a computer, a software program, and pornographic images. The facility's administrators did not "obtain informed consent" from the patients' guardians prior to beginning research and later "scramble[d]" to "get consent on behalf of patients that had been experimented on after receiving notice of a new Department of Justice investigation" in 2019, the suit claims.

The plans for Rea's research allegedly included the use of a portable GPS device for measuring sexual arousal, and the plaintiffs note he and a partner received a federal patent in 1998 for a device designed to detect and monitor the sexual arousal of an individual while they are exposed to "real-life sexual stimuli."

The initial 1996 patent application describes how the device measures, in males, the size of the individual's penis using "a penile plethysmograph" and, in females, "vaginal wall reflectivity," as well as heart rate, blood pressure, and skin temperature.

Read more:
Rogue Professor Ran Sexual Arousal Experiments on Disabled Patients: Lawsuit
[thedailybeast.com, Olivia Messer, Published Feb. 13, 2020 3:58PM ET]

Husband builds 'accessible' Nintendo Switch battle station for wife with aggressive MS

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All for the love of Animal Crossing in the coronavirus pandemic.


"My (relatively) young wife is in a nursing home with very aggressive [multiple sclerosis], writes her husband, IMGURian @KWIP.

"She LOVED the previous Animal Crossing games, but it broke her heart she was no longer able to work the controls of a gaming system because of her MS."

So he built an accessible rig for her to use in the nursing home.

All the feels.

The setup was inspired by "My Mate Vince's" post on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZsaFPN0IrA. Powered by a Nintendo Switch, using an Xbox Adaptive Controller and the MAGIC-NS Controller Adapter for Nintendo Switch to allow the Controller to communicate with the Switch. My (relatively) young wife is in a nursing home with very aggressive MS. She LOVED the previous Animal Crossing games, but it broke her heart she was no longer able to work the controls of a gaming system because of her MS. On top of that, the nursing home has been on lockdown for several weeks now, so we haven't been able to see each other (other than every night on video chat, thank Gord!) and she's been bored out of her mind.

So I built this system to allow her (and other residents of the nursing home – provided she shares!) to be able to have something to do. The whole thing is placed on a wheeled, height-adjustable desk that can be moved into her room or any available area and adjusted to fit the wheelchair height of whoever is using it. It has headphones to keep the disturbance down (probably not enough to stop my wife from yelling obscenities/talking trash, though).

I could have built the entire thing much cheaper – as pictured, it's about $1k (yes, I know – but what else am I going to spend that sweet covid19 bonus check on?). I was in a rush to get it finished by my wife's upcoming birthday. Not only did I have to build/configure everything, but arranging to drop it off at the extremely locked-down nursing home was a monumental task itself. Thankfully the staff there are awesome and were willing to work very hard to make it happen!

And yes, I realize the monitor is off-centered and it bothers me, too. It has since been adjusted so that all things are in balance…

More below.

A handicapped-accessible Nintendo Switch battle station for my wife

Check out the entire gallery here on IMGUR:
"A handicapped-accessible Nintendo Switch battle station for my wife."

Company makes beautiful RPG miniatures of characters in wheel chairs

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As someone who spent years needing the assistance of a wheel chair, seeing these miniatures made me very happy. It's wonderful to think of special needs kids (and adults) being able to see characters they can relate to, whether they choose to roleplay that way or not. I love the attention to detail in the designs of the wheel chairs.

The minis are available as downloadable STL files for 3D printing or as resin/metal casts. 25% of the sales of these minis goes to support work with the physically challenged.

H/t Richard Gould

Images: Product photography

How open source designs and 3D-printing make prosthetics more accessible

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Vice France has a great new article about the ways that 3D printing is disrupting the prosthetic limb industry. While a standard upper-body prosthetic can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $120,000, the e-NABLE online community is essentially hacking their way to accessibility through open-source design and 3D-printing. — Read the rest

How TikTok crowdsourced an open-source 3D-printed pill bottle opener plan for people with Parkinson's

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The Auto Pill Bottle is a pretty cool invention that automatically dispenses pills, instead of forcing people with physical disabilities such as Parkinson's Disease to struggle with pressing down and unscrewing the bottle cap. But the story behind it is even cooler. — Read the rest

How the language of special education denigrates kids with disabilities

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Growing up in the 90s, I remember the phrase "differently-abled" being upheld as a synecdoche for the absurdity of "PC language." And as a kid, I almost certainly fell in line with accepting that it was all a bunch of silly stuffy rules. — Read the rest

Woman with a disability asks to be euthanized after being denied accessible housing again

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From CTV News in Canada:

A 31-year-old Toronto woman who uses a wheelchair is nearing final approval for a medically assisted death request after a fruitless bid to secure an affordable apartment that doesn't worsen her chronic illnesses.

[…]

She desperately wants to move to an apartment that's wheelchair accessible and has cleaner air.

Read the rest

DRM wheelchairs take us nowhere

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Cory Doctorow writes about the appalling reality of DRM wheelchairs. When these devices fail they trap people in their homes and beds, and manufacturers use copyright law to prevent them being repaired by anyone except themselves.

So why is it so hard to fix wheelchairs?

Read the rest

Comments about disabled worker could land Musk in more legal trouble

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In a pathetically desperate attempt to curry the favor of right-wing shitposter Catturd, Elon Musk tweeted a comment about firing a disabled Twitter employee that could result in legal action, says Chris Williams of Above the Law.

In the tweet, Musk claimed that the employee, who has muscular dystrophy, did no actual work and used his disability as an excuse for not typing, while simultaneously tweeting frequently. — Read the rest

10 principles of disability justice

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At the beginning, and throughout the first two years of the ongoing, yet to be over, COVID-19 pandemic, ideas pioneered by disability justice organizations were finally given credence by larger swaths of the population. This is no longer the case. Given the ongoing pandemic, and the disproportionate short and long-term consequences for the communities most directly impacted, the insight provided by people on the front lines of eugenicist medical policies should be revisited. — Read the rest

Air Canada told a disabled man it had no time to get him a wheelchair. He dragged himself off the flight.

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Rodney Hodgins, 49, has spastic cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. Air Canada staff told him he'd have to do without when his flight landed in Vegas. He did without, literally dragging himself off the plane.

When the attendant said Hodgins would have to pull himself off the plane alone, the couple at first thought she was joking – but then she repeated the request.

Read the rest

The post Air Canada told a disabled man it had no time to get him a wheelchair. He dragged himself off the flight. appeared first on Boing Boing.

Woman loses £650,000 disability lawsuit after it emerges she won Christmas tree-throwing competition after claim

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