What do you think when you hear someone scored one out of three?  In baseball, that’s a great batting average, on a school test it isn’t even passing.  Today one advocacy issue came to a happy conclusion and two more didn’t.

The President has signed into law: …

  1. 2559, the “Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Act,” which provides for the implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled.

This is great news for blind and visually impaired people from all over the world! All of us who truly love to read are so pleased this treaty has finally been ratified. More books will be available no matter where one lives.

On the other hand, I stumbled on a piece of county code law that apparently says one cannot attend county meetings electronically.  The fear is someone else could call in and pretend to be you and cast a vote without them being sure you did it. How many people would care to listen through county board and committee meetings just to make one vote is questionable. This item came to my notice because the ADRC board was creating a committee on which one recipient of Meals on Wheels for the “homebound” was supposed to serve or someone who had a family member on the meals. But it goes deeper to me because if we want our government to be truly representative, we need divers voices including those of people who can’t leave home much.  This should be an issue that the ADRC would champion; I’ll lead the charge.

Then I heard back from the university’s facility director that the university won’t put a rumble strip, truncated domes strip or anything to tell blind people when they’re walking off campus right on to a street because the ADA does not require them to do so. Nobody I’ve discussed the problem with thinks it’s a bad idea and many are all for it, so it’s a matter of finding out who can wield enough power of persuasion to get the university to do something they don’t have to to keep students, staff and visitors who are blind safe.  Sigh! I wrote a letter to the student newspaper about advocating for this in honor of the upcoming White Cane Awareness Day.

I feel too tired to celebrate the one out of three, thinking of the two that remain. That’s just one day’s haul of issues!

p.s. But then a fun little fourth problem came along: the ear buds I use to listen to the talking ATM get all tangled up in my purse. A friend told me to wind them around a cork and push the jack into the end of the cork. I immediately sent out an SOS to my wine-drinking friends about my need for their next cork. I’m confident this one will be solved quickly.