When people suffer the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, they live with some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with numbers. But they also inherit the “Williams Personality” - infectious affability and a love of conversation and company.
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Helping Hands serves quadriplegic and others with severe spinal cord injuries or mobility-impairments by providing highly trained monkeys to assist with daily activities.
As live-in companions, the monkeys provide 20-30 years of service, bringing the gifts of independence, companionship, dignity and hope to the people they help.
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Many older people remain resistant to computers and, therefore, are without e-mail. As one person told Marty, “E-mail is too zippy.”
Presto Services Inc. now offers technology that lets people without computers read e-mail. Recipients get printed e-mails but have no keyboard or computer screen for responding.
Brian Bergstein, the technology writer for the Associated Press, tested the Presto system on his grandparents who are in their 80s. His grandfather thought he wouldn’t like using it.
But the opposite happened - his grandparents were elated by even being brought part way into the e-mail fold, which meant a steadier stream of photos of their great-grandchildren.
“When you’re 86 and 87, such new sources of joy aren’t always easy to come by,” said Bergstein.
A pat on the back to the London producers of this video on disability. Watch it.
(via Jack’s Blog)
After several visits to Buddakan, one of the flashiest restaurants in Manhattan, Frank Bruni, a New York Times’ critic, thought he’d seen every bit of it.
But it wasn’t until he went there with someone in a wheelchair that he noticed, just inside the entrance, a tiny elevator in a closet. That’s where his companion was steered.
The elevator descended 10 feet to a grimy corner behind the bar where she was trapped by a thicket of cleaning equipment, including a mop and bucket. She waited while employees did what they should have done as soon as she arrived: cleared the way.
Then she was steered to her table - away from the other diners, on another floor, where she could glimpse the lavishly decorated main dining room but had no hope of getting there.
“Its fanciness reminded me of Oz,”she said, “when Dorothy and Co. see it sparkling in the distance.”
Bruni said he was struck in that moment how even the most accessible restaurants fail to accommodate disabled diners as well as they do the rest of us. Read the full story
The AARP says 63 percent of Senior Center directors favor dropping the word “senior” from the name of their centers. It seems up and coming Baby Boomers - people in their 50s and 60s - won’t go to a place labeled “senior” now or in their future.
Cait had a friend who enjoyed her exercise class at a community center. She liked the people in the class, the instructor and the less-demanding pace of the workout - that is until the class was repackaged with a new name: Senior aerobics.
Cait’s friend never went back, offended that at the age of 56 she would be in a class called “senior.” Same class, same people, same instructor, different name.
We call ourselves Gimpy because we embrace, celebrate and even satirize the state in which we find ourselves. When Cait was in her twenties she took a senior fitness class because it was the only one around with exercises for people sitting in a chair.
In our mission statement, we mention “aging Baby Boomers,” but in this age of botox and breast lifts, does aging gracefully mean much anymore? Do the ever more health-conscience Boomers have different needs than past generations and, therefore, a need for different names? Or is this just vanity?
We’ve all had medical appointments where we haven’t felt heard, respected and understood.
That’s why Cait dresses for business when she sees the doctor.
Having a visible disability, being rounder than she would like, and turning the corner on middle age threaten to render Cait invisible to the medical profession.
Being invisible means not getting the care and attention she knows she deserves. Not being respected means being left out of the decision-making process over her own body.
Dressing as if she is on important business is Cait’s shield against invisibility and disrespect. Dressing up arms her with the confidence to address medical staff as peers in her own medical care.
So for all of you out there who feel less than confident when you enter a doctor’s office - dress up for Gimpy’s sake. If you dress for respect, the people around you are much more likely to see and hear you and understand what you need.
More than 60 percent of light trucks tested by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have been found to provide inadequate protection against neck injuries in a rear-end crash, the most common type of accident.
“Any given day, you’re more likely to need a good head restraint to protect you from a neck injury than you are an air bag to protect you in a head-on crash,” said David S. Zuby, a senior vince president of the Insurance Institute.
Only one pickup truck, the 2007 Toyota Tundra, received the highest rating of good in the rear-end crash tests.
Disneyland’s newly redesigned “Submarine Voyage” has something not envisioned when it debuted in 1959 — an alternate experience for Gimpy guests.
The “Imagineers” at The Walt Disney Co. couldn’t retrofit the hatches and spiral staircases of the original 52-foot submarines to accommodate wheelchairs. So they did the next best thing. Read the rest of this entry »
New York City touts its subway as one of the largest and the best. That may be true for most riders, but for the Gimpy “it’s one of the worst,” said Michael Harris, a wheelchair user and well-known advocate for New York’s disabled.
The New York City Transit Authority consistently ignores the needs of riders with disabilities and treats “us like second-class citizens,” Harris told the City Council. Harris encountered three broken subway elevators just trying to get to City Hall for the hearing.
New York subways have another problem: the platform gap makes getting on the subway difficult for those in wheelchairs. At some stations, wood boards are being replaced this year with wider boards made of a durable, flexible synthetic, said transit officials.
