April 13, 2010

• I remember reading Playboy as a teenager. Hefner's Playboy Philosophy ought to be carved in stone.
• I was looking at some Braille just the other day and it got me wondering. Are there people with vision who can read Braille just by looking at it? And assuming there are, can they read it faster by looking at it than they can by touching it?
• Touching article.
• Seriously though; it drives me nuts that society treats the handicapped like they are children. Perhaps it is the parenting gene gone awry, or simply a lack of exposure to and education about the handicapped in general.
• From the first link: "It is an erotic book for the blind and visually impaired, though it can be enjoyed by the sighted as well." This image of a masked shirtless man is somewhat frightening. I don't see how anyone is likely to find it erotic to look at. Unless they have a ghost fetish. http://media.thestar.topscms.com/images/67/f1/8176fb3f4eaea430c9abeb665bcc.jpeg
• Hmmm... I'm just thinking I could close my eyes and do this with a willing nude subject, and it would have a distinctly less papery, but still 3-D, effect. I will ask for volunteers later.
• Preface: I work at CNIB, producing talking books in the Library. (Disclaimer: I do not speak for CNIB, yadda yadda.) I did spend a little time a few years ago working for the (sadly defunct) Tactile department. I may have met Lisa Murphy when she volunteered there. (Oh, and I'm sighted.) Here's the book's homepage, by the way. bernockle: I can read Braille by sight, but only slowly. I suspect that an experienced braillist could sight read faster than an experienced braille reader could read by touch. Hoser Bluenoser: Yeah, there's a lot of that. Partly it's leftover puritanism (or eugenics), partly it's a question of mandate (how many public libraries stock pornography?), partly it's a question of funding. Most organizations that produce accessible material are charities or non-profits, who would be worried about losing donations or funding if they create controversial material. It's estimated that only 5% of everything published is available in an accessible format. We have limited resources to produce accessible material. So, we have to prioritize, based on what's popular, and what we can produce. This inevitably leads to censorship. Take the Left Behind books. They're extremely popular, but we can't produce talking books of them ourselves since our recording is done by volunteers and they don't want to read that crap. So we fob them off on Christian Blind Ministries, who have a hard time themselves finding volunteers because the books are so unchristian. But there is a demand for these books, and artificial factors stand in the way of getting them to people who want them. As well-intentioned we are, and as horrible as the books are, it's still censorship. It's not total censorship; we do carry stuff like The Story of O and Harlequin romances. But, as a library, we tend to only have, well, library stuff. And we're the number one producer of accessible materials in Canada. We used to stock Playboy, but we don't any more (and yes, clients called in to request tactile images of that). On your point more generally, yeah, sexuality is denied to many people with disabilities. I was in a play last year about a quadriplegic woman (a real person) who's in her 50s and has never had a lover. And other options just aren't available to her. It's only fairly recently that sex aides for disabled people have been on the market. Blue Horse: It's not actually papery. Thermoform is another name for vacuum-formed plastic. It's an inferior tactile experience to paper, but it's impossible to make a paper tactile image that you can duplicate, has a decent level of detail, and doesn't deteriorate rapidly. $225 for 17 pictures. That's actually reasonable---tactile is expensive. However, there's not many who can actually afford this, as disability and poverty are correlated.