I have a friend who's just had brain surgery to remove a tumor (second attempt). And he may have lost all or some of his vision in the process.
Times like this make me wish I'd decided to be a doctor instead of a programmer. What am I going to do, write him a Perl script to fix his sight? Not that being a doctor would be of much more help, most likely.
And yes, I saw that guy's presentation as OSCON 2001, and yes, it was super-cool, but I still want a goddamn magic fucking wand.
I create accessible web sites and am always happy to get mail from a blind or low vision person thanking me for providing access to government data. It may not seem like much to us, but working on accessible IT makes a big difference in the lives of disabled persons.
In fact, the American Federation for the Blind is looking at Open Source tools to help them with this, and GNOME has an accessibility initiative.
Re:Helping the disabled
autarch on 2002-07-12T19:48:36
Yep, that's cool. I am just frustrated because I want my friend to magically be healthy and there's nothing I can do about it. Being a programmer isn't necessarily, the problem, though.
