Archives

Many of you will fondly remember the people and products from Raised Dot Computing. Their newsletters are archived and nicely indexed. What made them unique was that they didn’t just discuss RDC’s products but products from other assistive technology companies as well, including their competitors. Because of this their newsletters are another great resource for learning about the history of blindness assistive technology.
https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/news/

—@DavidGoldfield

Plus, there’s this week’s edition of Blindness Briefs with 25 stories on blind people and blindness from around the world, https://www.worldblindherald.com/blindness-briefs-edition-66/ along with this week’s Science Briefs . https://www.worldblindherald.com/science-briefs-edition-29/

—@worldblindherald

Unibility is a website that aims to become a global, crowd-sourced hub of disability- and accessibility-related resources, and you can find it at https://www.unibility.org/

—@worldblindherald

Good Tuesday everybody. Volume 1 Issue 14 of World Blind Herald is here, with a featured from our own Itto Outini on Amy Pedid’s Unibility project. https://www.worldblindherald.com/the-heroine-with-a-thousand-interfaces-amy-pedid-tells-a-story-of-a-world-that-can-work-for-us-all/

—@worldblindherald

One of the reasons christian literalist ways of interpreting Jewish texts is often asinine is that paleo and biblical era Hebrew did not have vowels. It had root consonants, and the interpretation of a word depended on context, not text. And each set of consonant roots has a WIDE range of interpretations.

Take the word chametz – one interpretation is leaven (yeast), but the root itself means puffed up or inflated, as well as harsh, vinegar, oppressive, and distasteful, and so on. Each root has a full circle of meanings depending on the vowels and tense *you* choose to insert, as well as the topic of the surrounding text – each root of those words also having a wide range of meanings. And those vowel insertions are man-made, not scripture. Not “god’s word.”

Men’s interpretations.

Literalists cherry pick what interpretation they want, and insist that is “THE” meaning, when it is no such thing.

https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/clearing-out-how

#Mazeldon #Hebrew #Passover #Chametz #linguistics #spirituality

—@ShekinahCanCook

I remember when Aaron Swartz was criminally prosecuted for downloading too many academic journal articles, but, sure, it’s totally cool to scrape everyone’s personal photographs as part of a commercial effort to market discriminatory surveillance tech to police departments.

https://www.businessinsider.com/clearview-scraped-30-billion-images-facebook-police-facial-recogntion-database-2023-4

—@maxkennerly