Kestrell

Kes: Now that Twitter is used as an everyday tool for government, educational, and research use, I wonder if it falls under the ADA? I suppose we'll find out when the blizzard of blind lawyers descends upon Musk's head and files a law suit through the DOJ.

The following tweets are from Girard K. Cohen, who identifies himself as the former engineering manager of Twitter’s accessibility experience team.
Original source
https://twitter.com/gerardkcohen/status/1588584479072714752

I am officially no longer the Engineering Manager for the Accessibility Experience Team at Twitter. I have words.
As hard as things were they would have been impossible without our beloved Nightingales, accessibility champions that helped expand our reach.
Please, show them some grace. We heard & listened to all of you, good & bad, & we felt it all genuinely. I hate
the way this ended, but I’m so very proud of everything we were able to accomplish together. Now I have other places to help make accessible 💪🏽
We also got to work with qualityisking taking care of us as our tester. Peter was extremely thorough and his
reports were beautiful.
So, the Accessibility Experience Team at Twitter is no longer. We had so much more to do, but we worked hard! There aren't
very many people that have had the opportunity to make such an important global platform like Twitter accessible, but we understood the mission.

Kes: Also, from Wired:

Elon Musk Has Fired Twitter’s ‘Ethical AI’ Team
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ethical-ai-team/

Here's the link, but blind readers note I share some invisible disability experiences after the link

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/style/invisible-disabilities.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR29dfq2Ib0T-H9EvGzJlVmksLegSNV3bA_hPPVihrpHpJ-6MGmchjaXuBg

Kes: When I was growing up, I had juuuuust enough functional vision in one eye to be able to walk around, and to read with the book literally touching my nose. I didn't use a white cane or think of myself as blind because my family and ophthalmologist didn't want me to "act disabled," so they didn't even tell me how bad my vision was. I just fell down stairs a lot and spent way too much time on the wrong bus (let me tell you, spending time on the bus to Schenectady is time spent in Purgatory) , because I was so insecure, I wouldn't even ask the bus driver which bus it was. As many times as I tried to explain that sitting in the front row of class didn't mean I could see the blackboard any better, adults would just tell me to stop being lazy and try harder (confirming once again my opinion that adults would always choose to believe whatever they wanted to believe, rather than anything that upset their tiny mental apple carts).

So, yes, for the first twenty-something years of my life, my being blind as a bat was pretty much invisible to everyone around me and, to some degree, even to myself. Once I became actually blind *and* stopped worrying about people who didn't want me to "look blind," I had all this energy I used to put into passing and could do so many other things, like go to MIT. Though, when I was doing my undergrad degree at UMass Boston, I still often had the "you don't *look* blind, because you're looking at me" argument quite frequently.

So, goal for the next thirty years: Can we get rid of the "you don't look disabled" prejudice? As the article points out, we are going to have more people who have acquired invisible disabilities as a result of Covid-19, and these are going to include disabilities associated with anxiety, trauma, respiration, the immune system, the heart, and many other physical problems which we aren't even aware of yet.