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Update: Added English translation and pictures on November 23rd, 2007!
When I decided to write this post, I was standing in front of our small post office here at the University of the Nations in Kona, holding a letter in my hands, which the postal service had returned to me. “Requires postage” was written on an acompanying note. And they had added an excerpt of their conditions of delivery, too. It was the result of my first try to send out a letter as “Free Matter For The Blind” here in the United States. I must have missed to follow one of the rules (here you get them as a pdf), but nobody (including the assistant of the postal service, whom I called for clarification) could exactly point out, which one it was.

This was the moment in which once more I started wondering: Somehow, accessibility and services for the blind did not seem to work the same way here in the USA as in Switzerland. I always seemed to have these strange things happening to me, whenever there was an accessibility issue involved. Do other blind people around here feel the same about this? Or am I doing something wrong?

Dreaming of an accessible America

In Switzerland, especially as an employee of the Access For All Foundation, I often thought about the United States and about what a great example they were when it came to accessibility. The law, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the banks and their talking ATMs and Braille Bank Statements and the internet and its accessibility requirements… Just like in the old days, it seemed to me that everything had to be somewhat better and more developed over there. However, I started questioning the truth of this assumption already at the time when I wrestled with my Visa Application Forms.

It began online

In the United States, Federal services, forms and websites have (if I understood this right) to be accessible to anyone, including blind people, as defined by a law called Section 508. Of course, one can find the forms required to apply for a visa electronically - in fact: In most places, the form DS-156 mandatorily has to be filled out online.

DS-156 however was about the only really accessible form I had to fill out during the application process. Another document I had to fill out, called Form DS-157, was only available in PDF Format; I could choose between a version in which my screen reader could not detect any form fields at all (German translation) or a version with a list of untitled form fields and radio buttons, whose order however did not correspond to the requested information (English Original).

I discovered this problem in mid July 2007 and informed the appropriate Section 508 office immediately. At the beginning of August, I received an email promising that the document would be adapted, but also informing me that the conversion process would not be done by the time I had to have the form filled out.

And even now - we are almost at mid November - one still finds the inaccessible version of DS-157 at the official web site of the U.S.: State Department - so obviously, the government and its work towards accessibility seems to be as slow in the United States as in Switzerland.

I have to add though that the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco provided me with an equally inaccessible PDF Form when I tried to register myself as a Swiss Living Abroad (it was another document with not recognized form fields). At least, in this case the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs took only three weeks to provide me with an accessible MS-Word version of the form.

Money: Inaccessible bills, lying ATMS, normal banks

After bringing in my incompletely filled out application forms, answering a ton of questions and giving my finger prints three times, I finally made it into the United States in mid September. One of the daily difficulties blind people face over here is the inaccessibility of the local money bills. They all are the same size, made out of the same material and are missing any tactile sign which could make them distinguishable. Of course there are ways to make them accessible - Rhiannon provided me with some kind of Bill Braille Marker a while ago already. But still, one has to know the value of a bill before one is able to label it correctly.

I don’t have a clue what made the United States introduce such inaccessible bills. There is the Money For All Online Petition, which tries to get them to make the bills accessible; but I can’t help looking at an obvious slowness again in this area.

Of course, they do have those great talking ATMS over here. One has to know though that really not all ATMs in the United States do talk, so it is still possible to have to sometimes ask total strangers for assistance when getting money out of the machine. And then, there are those talking ATMs (we have got one of these on our campus), which simply provide you with wrong information: “Please insert and remove card with magnetic stripe up and to the right”. I got to hear this message about 30 times, when I tried to use this ATM for the first time. It took me about five minutes until I realized that I really could take money out - I only had to insert my card with the magnetic stripe not to the right and up, but to the left and to the front. And now, tell me to actually trust these machines…

Another disappointing experience was the one I had at the American Savings Bank of Hawaii, when I opened my account. Not only did they neither offer any documentation or their statements in Braille, nor did they seem to have ever heard of any bank actually providing a service like this.

Banking seems to be rather inaccessible in general. It is, for example, not only rare, but in case of my bank impossible to do wire transfers (sending money from my account directly to another account) from home - I would have to visit my bank’s counter to do that. In Switzerland, wire transfers are one of the most popular ways of paying bills and other stuff.
The popular thing here in the States seem to be Checks. You fill them out (which means, if you can’t write yourself, you ask someone to fill them out for you), send them to the recipient and let them go to the bank to be cashed in - at least, this is how I understood it. And again I catch myself asking for accessibility: Is there a way for blind people to fill out checks independently? Have I not discovered a special aid yet? Or do blind people really have to get someone to do the writing for them whenever they send a check?

In Traffic: Non-Talking buses and missing sidewalks

Then there are the issues related to my location within the United States. I had been informed prior to my arrival in Kailua Kona, that the town was not exactly overflowing with services for the blind. Kailua Kona, I was told, has about 30′000 inhabitants and is located on the Big Island in the State of Hawaii. Something you hardly find over here is public transportation. There do seem to be some bus lines, which however focus on bringing you from town to town rather than providing in-town transportation.
During a weekend I spent in Honolulu, I was very pleased with the Local bus services, equipped with audible bus stop announcements and friendly drivers. So far, I did not yet check out the bus services in smaller towns, but if you want, you can take a look at Maverik’s Blog (German), where he writes about his experiences during a recent visit to Hawaii.

Something that struck me while I was walking through Kona was a general lack of sidewalks. AT some places, they are missing entirely; Then, there are other places, where you can find a white line (very good for blind people), separating the street from the pedestrian walk; the other sidewalks seem to be OK, but I think one did not really prioritize accessibility when planning sidewalks in this town - probably because pedestrians are generally less important over here than cars. Anyways, I’m glad that Leo, my guide dog, seems to be very capable of correctly interpreting sidewalks with the white separation lines.

At intersections I sometimes notice some kind of tactile mark on the ground. The mark does however not guide you directly to a cross walk, but seems to follow the curve of the sidewalk, going from one cross walk to another. So one should not use the mark to determine the direction in which to cross the street correctly. I’m still working on those marks and trying to make them useful and logical to me.

Blind pedestrians search vainly for accessible traffic lights in Kailua Kona. Just like in Switzerland, one has to correctly interpret the noise of the passing cars to determine the right time to cross the street. It happens that friendly drivers stop their cars, letting you cross although they would have the right to drive. And there are the rather stupid drivers, stopping their cars right on the cross walk - so you can say it is all just like at home.

The Good Things

Now, all these rather strange impressions would really paint too dark of a picture in relation to my accessibility experiences in the United States. Of course, there also were the great, the awesome things:
I was, for example, very pleased when, after I had been waiting for only a month, the National Library for the Blind and physically Handicapped in Hawaii, provided me with a tactile map of my residential area of Kona. This map is doing a great job helping me to gain some basic orientation around town. It came to me at no cost and I was not even required to ask the government to get it financed (in Switzerland, this would have been necessary). Even faster, I was provided with access to tons of ‘talking books’, although I am not even a permanent resident of the United States.
My request for mobility training seems to take longer, but is at least being processed. If everything goes right, there should be an orientation and mobility specialist coming over from Honolulu and assist me in the areas in which my sighted friends at the University weren’t able to help anymore.

Leo, my guide dog, has the legal right to accompany and assist me wherever I go. He is even allowed in hospital rooms (with only a few exceptions) and, at no additional charge, in hotels, including the ones that normally wouldn’t accept dogs. As for Switzerland, I am still dreaming of seeing this freedom being established one day.

During my weekend in Honolulu I attended the yearly convention of the National Federation of the Blind in Hawaii, where I got to meet some of the blind locals. It felt good to notice that there were some awesome and some rather weird ones, just like in Switzerland (which is true for the sighted people too by the way). I also got to hear some of the rumors about Switzerland, which seemed to me about as exaggerated as what the Swiss think of the United States. While for example the Swiss social system was found to be excellent, I am thankful for the good and generous system we have, but I also know that it often can be tough, slow and disappointing. One also told me that the drivers were generally more dangerous in the United States, which is another thing I would not generally agree to; if you ask me, I think one drives generally more dangerous in larger towns (like Zürich or Los Angeles), while keeping a more respectful attitude in smaller places (Thun or Kailua Kona).

What I conclude so far

Yes, there are some laws for the disabled in the United States, which I would love to see being introduced by Switzerland and other countries. Talking ATMs, many Braille Labels, a fast and uncomplicated delivery of tactile maps and talking books are other things I would urge my home country to offer as well. But still, I do not really feel more equal over here. Many of the great and popular Accessibility-Measurements which the United States became so famous for are just not available or known in lesser populated areas like Kailua Kona. On the other hand, I expect there to be some services which I just haven’t discovered yet; it might take a while until I find and effectively use them all.
I would like to know how far the law actually goes. Is a non-tactile sidewalk supposed to be accessible? And how much time is a department allowed to take to provide an accessible version of a rather simple form?

Switzerland has got the previously mentioned Social System as well as better accessible money. Many railway stations are equipped with tactile orientation lines and when building new streets, one takes better care of pedestrians, by providing tactile sidewalks and such. But just like in the States, many good things are only available in some parts of Switzerland. And it does happen that accessibility is not provided, even in the cases in which it is legally required.

In general, I got the impression of blind people being more dependant on sighted assistants here in the United States - take the comments on money and the lack of public transportation as examples. I wonder if this is already what they imagine to be independent? Or did I observe something wrong? And what is the situation like in other parts of the United States?

If you, who reads this, know something about it, please write it below in the Comment Area!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Accessibility, Kona. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.