ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

Tom Shakespeare is an academic based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He is also a person of restricted growth. He was travelling on the city’s metro recently when he was verbally humiliated and intimidated by a group of schoolgirls.
Was he a victim of a disability hate crime?
BBC News Magazine
It might seem obvious that the answer is yes. It [...]

Read: Disa-bully-ty »

Yes, it’s soon to be silver surfer week which is all about championing digital equality and inclusion for older people. They are even offering some free computing books. The whole ‘iTea and Biscuits’ thing is their idea as an alternative name for the Silver Surfer week, and I have to say I like it.
For [...]

Read: iTea and Biscuits »

This is not going to be news for those of you who work in the IT field, because you’re likely to have already heard about this sort of thing, but I was having a discussion the other day about the general public’s apathy as regards politics, and how people are content to live in their [...]

Read: Why online consultation is not democratic »

It just ain’t funny.
Apologies for those of you who are used to my lighter tone, but as Paul Canning’s blogging again, I get to find out some of the unpleasant aspects of our world that I otherwise wouldn’t come across.
Athough gays suffer murderous persecution ( a ‘deathzone’) in Iraq and many other nations, these [...]

Read: Executed For Homosexuality »

I think that a lot of non-disabled people are frightened by the language of disability. They’re worried about saying the wrong thing: using the term “handicapped” rather than “person with a disability”, worrying whether they will cause offense if they say “see you later” to a blind person and so on.
For the most part (while [...]

Read: Bloopers aren’t disablism; brutality is »

Okay, I know this report came out a little while ago, but I’ve been too busy with other stuff (working with the PSWMG to contribute to an accessibility supplement for SOCITM’s Better Connected report, amongst other things) and it’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to consider accessibility issues here.
So now I’m going [...]

Read: Antisocial Networking »

The Holocaust is an emotive subject. It’s difficult not to get emotive when you’re dealing with a subject that involves the slaughter of approximately six million Jews and another three to five million from other persecuted groups. It’s not the sort of subject that you’d want to treat lightly; it represents a shameful part of [...]

Read: Hoaxing the Holocaust »

Or to put another way “what century are we in again?”
I accept that I probably know more about disability rights than most of my non-disabled friends, because of my interest in web accessibility, my passion for equality of opportunity (including as it relates to race, gender, sexual preference and the like), but even so, I [...]

Read: Disability Discrimination »

This is going to be somewhat of a long post about accessibility, about a lawsuit that relates to accessibility, and to the attitudes of people towards disability. It’s therefore going to touch on legal matters and technical matters, but mainly it’s going to be around the arguments around different attitudes towards accessibility/disability issues and the [...]

Read: Accessibility vs the Free Market: Attitudes to Target »

Sometimes being someone who is committed to web accessibility feels like it’s not a good thing.
You get the feeling people feel you’re some kind of zealot (even if you aren’t); you get the feeling that other people think that when you raise the issue of accessibility you’re being awkward or causing problems, that it’s [...]

Read: Accessibility: Making it all worthwhile »