🇩🇪 Kürzlich habe ich für RehaCare ein paar Fragen beantwortet. Das Interview im Volltext gibt’s hier auf Deutsch.
🇬🇧 A short while ago, I answered a few questions to RehaCare. The full text of the interview in English can be found here.
🇩🇪 Die neue Single jetzt auf iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Music, Spotify, tidal, Deezer, BandCamp und Microsoft Groove.
👉 Links zum Anhören und Download gibt’s hier.
Ein herzlicher Dank fürs Mastering geht an den sympathischen und kompetenten Herrn Joy Bausch – Music & Accessibility.”
🇬🇧 The new single, now on iTunes, Google Play, amazon Music, Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, BandCamp and Microsoft Groove.
👉 links for streaming and downloads can be found here.
A big thanks for mastering goes to this nice and competent gentleman, Mr. Joy Bausch – Music & Accessibility.
Inspiriert durch eine Diskussion in der Facebook-Gruppe Blindheit & Sehbehinderung – Infos und Austausch, möchte ich etwas loswerden. Uns Blinden möchte ich Mut zusprechen, und Euch Sehenden möchte ich einmal etwas sagen:
Ihr kleidet gern Euer Ungeschick in den Mantel der Unwissenheit und des “Mann kann sich ja nicht hineinversetzen, wie es ist, wenn man nichts sieht..”. Das stimmt. Man kann sich nicht hineinversetzen.
This is following up on my previous post about Ireland’s pending ratification of the UN CRPD.
Blind people have to shoulder costs of living which do not apply to people with eye sight.
This circumstance is relatively easy to grasp – it is not some abstract notion but rather a pretty obvious fact. There are countries, such as Germany, where these costs are taken care of by the social state through a universal monthly payment to compensate what has been agreed upon by legislators and experts as recurring blindness-related costs of living.
LUSTIG! Eine Aufgabe zum Thema ‘Regionale Akzente’: Höre das Video bis zum Ende (and don’t let the pause after the phone call confuse you).
Herrlich! 😂
Apple’s striving to include accessibility in mainstream products and make them usable by all customers regardless of talents, sensory or physical restrictions is unparalleled in the industry. This is why Garage Band on the Mac is a very popular tool among blind musicians to create and publish their work.
However, myself and other blind users of Apple’s screenreader ‘VoiceOver’ face one big issue in Garage Band; and this issue has been reported by numerous people on numerous occasions: Automations are not accessible.
What does this mean? I, as a blind musician, am unable to fade-in / fade-out individual tracks, regions or define the fade-duration of the entire project. By implication, as these curves cannot be defined by VoiceOver users, other rising EQ effects and the likes are also inaccessible to us.
Garage Band has these basic features which one can expect from an audio workstation, and they are available to sighted users.
This is solely an issue with Garage Band & VoiceOver.
Thanks for sharing and for your support! If we wake up Apple’s accessibility engineers, you may hear more great music by great blind musicians in the near future! 🙂
You can follow this link to sign and share this petition.
I have also put together a short video clip on my Youtube channel to go with the petition.
I would like to encourage all readers to sign this petition to motivate the Irish government to finally step up their game and ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with disabilities (CRPD).
The matter is personally relevant to me and my wife. I am blind, and my wife is in full-time employment. My blindness support is fully means-tested on my wife’s income. In a nutshell:
The more my wife works to support us, the less support funding I get; and
the more my wife works, the more often I cannot avail of her as a driver or assistant, and, as a result, the higher my costs of living are.
This is MY blindness, not hers.
This degrading, demotivating and unfair system is hardly suitable in a 21st-century social state. There are other EU countries which, unlike the Republic of Ireland, have already ratified the UN convention on the rights of people with disabilities, countries where the “blind pension” is not a pension but rather a non-means-tested and non-taxable support payment to compensate higher living costs which blind people evidently have.
The present legislation does not merely deny the existence of blindness-related costs of living but also interferes with the spouses’ fundamental rights under the constitution of the Republic of Ireland.
“As a citizen, you have a right to work and to earn a living, whether you are male or female.
The State is under a duty to protect your right to work and earn a livelihood from unjust attack.”
The means test of the spouse’s income is a prime example for an unjust attack on the spouse’s fundamental right to earn a livelihood. The working spouse should be allowed to spend their hard-earned salary whichever way they wish. They should not be held responsible to shoulder costs which are the responsibility of the social state which they already support as tax payers. It has been highlighted that there are other payments, for example, from the Health Service – also means-tested – and tax reliefs.
I furnished ministers Leo Varadkar (Department for Social Protection) and Finian McGrath (Minister of State for Disability Issues) with my thoughts on the present legislation. Here is my follow-up post with some very telling statements.
