In a small, but chilling example of societal resistance to complying with the legal requirements of providing access to mass transit to people with reading disabilities, the manufacturer of new technology told the following story to a convention of 2,500 members of the National Federation of the Blind: a device has been developed that, when installed on city buses, will verbally announce each stop, a great boon to anyone whose vision prevents the reading of street signs. According to the regulations developed to implement existing law, bus drivers are expected to announce the stops, even without the device, but the device was developed because of well-known reluctance to do so and noncompliance with the law. However, the manufacturer of this technology revealed to the assembled convention-goers from every state in the nation that not even the installation of this technology was solving the problem of assuring that blind passengers could know where they were; bus drivers were turning off the device because they did not like having it as a routine part of their day. |