Hugo nominations and disability

Enthusiastic cheers regarding the Hugo-nominated Uncanny Magazine's "Disabled People Destroy Science fiction" issue
https://uncannymagazine.com/uncanny-magazine-issue-24-disabled-people-destroy-science-fiction-cover-and-table-of-contents/
Note that the Kickstarter for this project won the
D Franklin Defying Doomsday Award, which recognizes
disability advocacy in science fiction literature.

I also want to send congratulations to Archive of Our Own on receiving a Hugo nomination
https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/12419

AO3 is where I spent most of last summer while I was shifting my sleep schedule from being an early bird to a night owl.

One thing that totally thrilled me was discovering how much
disability fanfic
https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Disability/works
there is now. And a lot of it is really good stuff that reflects the real-world struggles PWD have in the world.

Still, it came as a surprise to find that
this essay I wrote about disability fan fic
https://kestrell.livejournal.com/150847.html
might be
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Disability_Fic
my most cited
https://www.academia.edu/5521575/Shipping_disability_fanfiction_Disabled_fanfiction_producers_doing_disability_online

piece of media studies writing.
Note: that last article is in an inaccessible Power Point format and, yes, irony.

Another awesome intersection of disability and fan fic is the Harry Potter ASL project—you can see it in action here
https://thecreativepensieve.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-world-of-harry-potter-asl.html#main
and read a recent article about it
Harry Potter Signs in ASL
http://www.mugglenet.com/2019/01/harry-potter-signs-in-asl/
Also, there is a British group of deaf fans who taught Daniel Radcliffe how to do some signing
https://www.dailymoth.com/single-post/2017/03/13/Harry-Potter-Star-Daniel-Radcliffe-Signs-in-ASL-and-BSL

Why I'm not longer buying assistive technologies

Recently I posted a link to Bookshare.org's survey results regarding what apps their readers are using https://kestrell.dreamwidth.org/290709.html
along with the comment that my advice to readers with disabilities was to support the trend toward using mainstream tech and avoiding assistive tech as much as possible.

Here is the story behind that.

A couple of weeks ago my BookSense ebook reader, an assistive tech ebook reader produced by HIMS, Inc.
https://www.hims-inc.com/
died after years of hard use. Sad, but not too tragic, because I had a new ebook reader I had bought a couple of years ago when I thought my Booksense was kaput. This was the replacement model for the Booksense, the Blaze EZ
https://www.hims-inc.com/product/blaze-ez/
Note that price tag of $595. Also, the "EZ" part is a joke, since the interface for this device is nonintuitive and pretty random. I've been using ebook readers since 2002, and I'm loathe to bring up that degree from MIT, but if users can't figure out this interface, it isn't a reflection on their intelligence, but rather on HIMS poor interface design.

I spent that night charging it, and hours the next day updating the software, as the manual recommended.

I loaded a bunch of ebooks onto the Blaze, and began to read, but noticed that chunks of text--sometimes the front matter, sometimes part of a sentence, sometimes a chapter--were being cut off and not read.

I was still trying to figure this out when the Blaze froze. Any button I pushed just made a "clunk" sound, but didn't respond. I tried popping out the battery, but the back of the device is almost impossible to remove unless you use something like a screwdriver--and put some muscle in it-- to pry it off. But popping the battery out and back in didn't reboot the device, so I found another sharp piece of metal to insert in the tiny pinhole and do a system reset. That worked, but still, the Blaze would read for a while and then crash.

After a few days of this, I began to wonder if, despite HIMS claims that the Blaze could handle most of the major formats, it actually couldn't, so I changed the XML ebooks I had been using to HTML and the RTF format ebooks to TXT. That seemed to mostly work.

I say mostly because many things still seemed to cause the Blaze to crash. If I fell asleep while reading and the battery ran down to twenty or ten percent, it crashed, and I had to do the sharp piece of metal reboot thing.

One of the other features the Blaze advertises is Web radio, so I tried out some of the BBC stations and that was fun until the afternoon I was kind of stuck downstairs waiting for a service person and the Blaze crashed while I was trying to listen to the BBC. You do not want to be in the kitchen when a pissed-off blind bibliophile experiencing book withdrawl is tearing through the drawers snarling that what sort of kitchen doesn't have sharp pointy pieces of metal anyway??

Additionally, HIMS Blaze is supposed to be able to read audiobooks from the National Library Service, and this is one of the main reasons why I bother with these assistive tech ebook readers at all, but I have yet to get the Blaze to locate and read one of these books.

You may wonder why I hadn't already tried to contact HIMS. As I mentioned, I've been using their products for years, and the company is pretty resistant to doing anything outside of the warranty period, and sometimes even during the warranty period. The Blaze had just spent the last two years swaddled in my sock drawer and, even though that was probably more careful treatment than it would receive on a warehouse shelf, I was pretty certain that there was no way anyone at HIMS would even talk to me.

I thinnk the moment I really became infuriated, however, was while reading
_Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design_ by Bess Williamson (New York University Press, 2018), which documents the history of disability and technology in America beginning with WW2 veterans. At one point veterans got disgusted with the government-issue prosthetics that were constantly breaking and organized in order to change the laws so that they would be able to choose their own prosthetics. Intriguingly, the person who threw her support behind this movement was Edith Nourse Rogers, the first female Congresswoman from Massachusetts (she would also fight for rights for women in the American military).

Through the entire book, however, the struggle for disability rights is demonstrated to be inextricably intertwined with PWD having access to their own choices for technology, which frequently involved more robust and personalized technologies than the ones the government often chose for them.