AT Keyboards

Some nice AT keyboards used with CC permission from Flickr user Rain Rabbit

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Unions Push for More Opporunities for Actors with Disabilities

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Our Rank? 20,971,845

Well, as we enter 2009 our ranking is 20,971,845 according to Dataopedia.com.

Is that bad? Well, according to a 2007 survey, there were 108,810,358 sites, while another site lists it at approximately 150 Million as of January 2008, and I'd suspect that's gone up significantly since then.

Google Analytics helps me monitor site traffic. Since adding analytics to Maine VRC in July, I have received some interesting information. From July we have a 61% bounce rate, average page views are 2.13, and average time on the site is 1 minute 47 seconds. The top referral site is Google, with Blogger coming in second.
This tells me that we're getting a few people that are coming regularly and checking out the content, while we have a larger portion of people who hit the site from a search engine or other source and either find the post they want immediately (good) but don't stay around and check out the archive or other posts (bad).
In 2008 we had some problems with the Blogger account which caused significant disruption in posts, and lasted nearly 4 months (from August through December). As challenging as this was, it also encouraged me to focus some energy on redesigning the site, some other projects and freelance work such as Techdirt and Associated Content.

For this New Year, I'm looking to deliver some more original content while still providing some links to quality content around the web. I'd like to improve my traffic, and more regular readers.

Thank you for supporting Maine VRC, and Happy New Year

Thanks for supporting Maine VRC.

Flickr photo used with Creative Commons permission from Redver

1 in 5 Americans have a disability

Reporting on recently released census results, Medical News Today reports "About one in five U.S. residents - 19 percent - reported some level of disability in 2005, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today. These 54.4 million Americans are roughly equal to the combined total populations of California and Florida."

On the working front,

Nearly half (46 percent) of people age 21 to 64 with a disability were employed, compared with 84 percent of people in this age group without a disability. Among those with disabilities, 31 percent with severe disabilities and 75 percent with nonsevere disabilities were employed. People with difficulty hearing were more likely to be employed than those with difficulty seeing (59 percent compared with 41 percent)."

Census Homepage
Census Report "Americans with Disabilities" pdf

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2008 in 40 Seconds

To end 2008 and start off 2009, this video gives a beautiful recap of 2008. I feel bad for those who don't get to experience the variety of the seasons.

Happy New Year!


One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

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Sign Tube

Okay, so virtually everyone has been to You Tube at one point or another. If not, then they've watched one of their videos embeded in a news story or blog (such as this one). Though You Tube recently added captioning, its not widely used by video producers. One limitation of the You Tube method is that only the person who uploaded the video can add captions to it.

There's now a video site out there for those who are Deaf, Sign-Tube. Funded by the UK based Deaf Enterprise Partnership, it is for "deaf people or those who wishes or involved in Sign Language or in the deaf community to share the news, information, events and even fun with people across the world."

It looks like the site is fairly underused, as there are only 500 videos listed currently (as opposed to YouTube which has 10 hrs of video uploaded to the site every minute and has hundreds of millions of views per day). A quick search on You Tube for Sign Language gets 42,000 videos.

Sign Tube is an interesting idea, especially as it intends to develop community as part of it. I'm not sure if there's a need for it, as YouTube seems to be hosting a significant amount of sign language videos, but that's what is nice about the internet, you can always put something out there and see what sticks.

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David Patterson SNL Parody- Did it go too far?

A recent sketch by Saturday Night Live has drawn some criticism for its portrayal of David Patterson, the Governor of NY who is blind. Quoted in the LA Times, Patterson said "I can take a joke," Paterson told the Daily News on Sunday. "But only 37% of disabled people are working, and I'm afraid that that kind of third-grade humor certainly adds to this atmosphere."

The National Federation for the Blind was also quoted as saying "The biggest problem faced by blind people is not blindness itself, but the stereotypes held by the general public," spokesman Chris Danielsen said. "The idea that blind people are incapable of the simplest tasks and are perpetually disoriented and befuddled is absolutely wrong."

Read my opinion after the video



Did SNL go too far? I'm not sure if too far is the right phrase. They didn't do anything original, this was juvenile humor. The cliches they missed was him walking into a wall, or being surprised that he was black (ha, ha, didn't know he was black because he's BLIND! yawn).
Aside from this poorly written skit, it raises a good question about the use of real or fictionalized characters with disabilities in humor. Is it okay to use someone's disability in a humorous skit? How? What would make it too far? What about the character's comments about someone "with a gamy arm...giant gums with the tiny teeth", is that humor?

Ultimately, I'd love to see David Patterson go on SNL and show them was humor is. The little I've seen him speak, he appears to have quite a sense of humor and can laugh at himself. He also seems to have a good sense of how far is too far and how they could use his blindness in a skit.

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