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  • Human Exclusions for People with Disabilities is More Difficult than Digital Technology Accessibility
  • Mental Health: Lack of Accessibility, Inclusion and External Challenges May Create or Compound Mental Health
  • Leverage Collective Intelligence, Accessible Digital Technology and Music: Creates Happiness and a Beautiful World
  • Enjoy Nature by Combining Different Abilities to Enhance Experiences for All
  • How To Publish Photos /Images Even People Who Are Blind Can Visualize
  • Prosper in the New Year: Keep Focused on Goals Despite Distractions and Confusion
  • Slow Down and Enjoy the Fall Season
  • Reach Out to the disAbled for Assistance to Design and Develop an Intuitive and Accessible Application or Web Page
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Inclusion Paves the Way for Success: Accessibility & Usability

I listened to an excellent interview with Yves Veulliet by Jonathan Hassell I believe you will enjoy and find valuable in your personal and professional life. You can listen to that interview at “Do you have to be 'superhuman' to be an inspiration” - Hassell Inclusion.

I am sure you have your own opinions on what specific points of the interview uncovered some feelings or ideas to assist you in your life. Below is just a short list of the many interesting topics discussed in the interview I found could assist me in my personal and professional life:

• When working with people who are disabled or elderly focus on their capabilities and not their disabilities.

• Becoming disabled suddenly, requiring training to learn to use a wheel chair and adapting to accessibility barriers like Yves demonstrates, should not deter you from pursuing your dreams.

• How Yves copes, interacts and lives in a world with accessibility barriers in his new world can be an example for all who experience obstacles.

• Enabling inclusion by designing accessibility/usability into products and services which increases revenue by including the approximately twenty percent of the population who are elderly or disabled and reduces unintentional exclusion.

• When developing products including accessibility features it should be as natural for the designer and developer as including a keyboard with a computer.

When I listened to the interview I could not help to think about some similarities between myself and Yves. We both became disabled instantly, spent many months in the hospital, and required many months of rehabilitation. We also share the passion to overcome obstacles to do the best we can despite the accessibility/usability barriers we face, all while keeping a positive attitude and an overall goal to be happy. 

What did you learn from Yves Veulliet’s interview? Will Yves Veulliet’s attitude cause you to act or think differently? Does the conversation regarding inclusion and the relationship between accessibility/ usability in products and services   cause you to think and act differently? If you are a developer or designer did the conversation assist you in providing new ideas to capture the customers you are unintentionally excluding by not incorporating accessibility/usability into your products and services? 

I look forward to hearing your valuable thoughts and comments. 

Bill Tipton

Contributing Author,

Global Dialogue Center

http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wdtipton

Facebook: http://profile.to/wdtipton

Twitter: http://twitter.com/wdtipton 

 

March 19, 2015 in Accessibility, Books, Disabilities, Inclusion, People with Disabilities, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

That What You Manifest Is Before You

I recently listened to an audio version of the book The Art of Racing in the Rain. Although I am completely blind, I enjoy motorsports racing, as I describe in Day at the Races. I also benefit from the companionship of animals. The combination of these and other topics resonate with me in this book.

I can relate to Enzo's mantra: "That which you manifest is before you." As the author Garth Stein notes on The Art of Racing in the Rain FAQ, “I think it's very important to take charge of your life, not to feel like you're a victim of circumstance or fate, but that you are an active participant in your future.”

You can most likely think of examples of where taking charge of your own life helped you manifest your own destiny, instead of waiting on others to do so, and possibly resulting in an outcome that was not beneficial and did not produce the results you had wished for.

I believe one example where I took charge of my own life and manifested the outcome, was when I returned to employment after an extremely critical medical condition which almost took my life.

After a seven month hospital stay, without a doubt in my mind, I planned on returning to employment as soon as I could. I did not let the fact I could not walk without aids for a period of one year after leaving the hospital, lost all vision and was now completely blind, and had to learn many new skills deter me from succeeding in my dream. I did not let the victimized mind-set take complete control; although I had many challenges and obstacles to overcome. I focused my energy, learning many new skills and meeting many new people expanding my network, enabling me to expedite my education, leaving no time to dwell on my life’s changing events and feeling like I was a victim. When I talked with many new instructors and others, my words reflected my positive attitude about returning to meaningful employment as the new person I had become.

 

What will you manifest in your personal or professional life? How can we assist each other not to feel like we are a victim of circumstance or fate? We all look forward to hearing your suggestions, examples and comments.

 

Let’s all live our life with the attitude of Enzo's mantra to help manifest our dreams into reality.

 

Bill Tipton

Contributing Author,

Global Dialogue Center

http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wdtipton

Facebook: http://profile.to/wdtipton

Twitter: http://twitter.com/wdtipton

February 29, 2012 in Auto Racing, Books, Disabilities, People with Disabilities, Personal Development | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

David Roche- Church of 80% Sincerity

David Roche is a humorist and performer who has transformed his life experience of living with a facial disfigurement into a compelling message that delights audiences around the world.
His presentations are uniquely effective at communicating the social consequences of being perceived as “different” in our society. In early June, 2008, David performed one of his most popular performances “The Church of 80% Sincerity” for the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Happily, that performance was captured on video at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage archives.

I am very grateful to have met David in person and have listened to one of his talks live. I found David’s message very helpful and inspiring to myself. I hope you take the time to watch or listen to the video.

What thoughts came to your mind when listening to David Roche? After watching the video do you think you will act any differently in your personal or professional life? Do any of you have fears of being rejected and being un-loved like David talks about? We all would love to hear your thoughts, comments and suggestions.

Bill Tipton
Contributing Author
Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/

July 10, 2008 in Books, Disabilities, Inspiration, People with Disabilities, Personal Development, Self-Help | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Celebrating Life

I personally believe we all should take time to celebrate our passions and joys in our life.

Time goes by very quickly. If we breeze through the actions of living life like a robot with no emotions, enthusiasm or interactions we would truly miss out on life’s pleasures. We need to take the time to celebrate the joys of living. Be aware of your surroundings, others feelings and share mutual passions. Embrace how different each of us are and enjoy the uniqueness in personalities, viewpoints, skills and perceived abilities.

If we do not take advantage of life’s experiences, whether negative or positive, we will truly miss out on the true meaning of why we are living on this earth.

This month has been very special for me for many reasons. I want to share three celebrations I had the opportunity to experience during a week of vacation from my valued employer. This will get us started thinking about what we all can celebrate in our lives, and how we can help others unselfishly.

To start off my week of gratitude and celebrations my first thought is that I am thankful that I have the ability to celebrate. This month is my wedding anniversary. You can read a post I wrote last year to celebrate this very special occasion with my loving and caring wife Kathy; I call Anniversaries - What They Mean to You.

I tragically missed my twelfth anniversary. Read the post to see why I missed this anniversary and why I do not want to miss any more opportunities to celebrate my anniversary and why I believe I am very lucky to have the ability to celebrate the joys in life.

I was honored and grateful to attend a book release reception with my wife Kathy for a very exciting and valuable book titled: Putting Our Differences to Work. The author of this innovative book is Debbe Kennedy, my friend, colleague, Founder, President and CEO Global Dialogue Center and Leadership Solutions Companies.

I met many positive leaders at the reception who are truly celebrating life to the fullest. They are incorporating all people in their positive and meaningful work; valuing the individual’s unique differences. I have had the privilege to have worked with some of these outstanding creative leaders in the past. Some I continue to do meaningful work with and others I just met at the reception and will work with in the future. This was a very remarkable event to celebrate life and be engaged with others who are making a positive difference in the world.
Read: Putting Our Differences to Work, to learn more about the leaders and how you can learn to be a better leader and make a difference in your organization, community and in your personal life.

To end my week my wife Kathy and I had a very nice dinner with a friend I had not seen in years. My friend and I used to go on tandem bike rides in the foothills near where I live. I started going on tandem bike rides just after I learned to walk again after a very critical medical condition which took away all of my eyesight and the ability to walk for 1 year. I now walk with two canes. I have one support cane and one long white cane.

When I would ride on the bike I would fold up my canes and attach them to my larger fanny pack so I could get to them quickly and easily if I needed to walk. I always wore a helmet on my rides. As we rode I could smell the fresh air and scents of trees and flowers. I could feel the breeze blowing around my face, arms and legs. Our rides were relaxing even when going uphill as we peddled the miles away. I would listen to the birds as we rode trying to figure out what type of bird was singing. We did a lot of talking as we rode. I think I must have talked off my riding partners ears; it seemed to me. I especially liked coming down this one steep hill where we would go very fast through some gentle curves that went from side to side. At times we would have to pass cars on the side of the road or as we made turns down side streets. I could hear when the cars were relatively close to me; but I was never a bit scared or worried. I had complete faith in my friend and riding partner. We always had a great time celebrating life on our rides.
Our night out to dinner and our talk afterwards went by so quickly. It was a very nice way to end a week full of exciting life experiences and celebrations!

If I wanted to I could have stayed at home and not been engaged with others during my week on vacation. If I did this; just think of what I would have missed if I did not choose to share myself with others and allow others to reciprocate. If I took the perceived easy way of life and rushed through this month like a robot I would have missed many opportunities to enjoy what life has to offer and the ability to meet many outstanding people.

I hope that you can live every day to the fullest and can enjoy the celebrations in your life. I hope you do not pass up any opportunities because you are too rushed by the actions of just living life. Instead try focusing on the engagements and opportunities that may come up. If you do rush through life, it is like me and my friend on the tandem bike racing down the hills. You are going too fast to see the opportunities to celebrate life, meet new people and enjoy all life has to offer.

Does anyone have any celebrations you want to share with us? Do you have any suggestions to help others get engaged to find celebrations of life? What makes you feel life is worth celebrating?

We all look forward to hearing your thoughts, comments and suggestions’ to help us celebrate life’s joys.

Bill Tipton
Contributing Author
Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/

June 29, 2008 in Books, Creativity, Disabilities, Film, Inclusion, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership, People with Disabilities, Personal Development, Self-Help | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Collective Intelligence: Include The Disabled for Success

Bill Tipton Purple Logo with First Name Above Last NameHello everyone,

Want to be more productive at solving complex problems in groups? Work better in teams? Utilize all of your resources at their fullest potential, no matter how different some individuals might be perceived to be? Maybe you should study the way some ants bury their dead, ways fireflies in some parts of the world light up in synchronization, or the way field honey bees fly from flower to flower, collecting pollen and sweet juices, or nectar to produce honey. Read on; I am serious!

Have you ever been in a meeting and hardly anyone talked? Maybe the few outgoing people were the only ones voicing their opinions. As you might be sitting back in the meeting and listening and thinking to yourself, my thought is not valuable because it is quite different than all the other ideas that are being brought up; so I do not speak up in fear of being different.

I’ll bet you do not know how much your different point of view helps to make the outcome better for all! Without your different perspective the complete group may fail because you followed the opinions of only a few in the group; right or wrong.

If you have a disability or other unique viewpoints on the topic in discussion, or project, or program you are working on, it makes your input even more crucial to produce the very best output possible. I might even argue that if you are disabled, or have other challenges your thoughts are more important, since others do not have your unique viewpoint to offer such help or guidance.

This is true with software or hardware development as well. You would not want to develop inferior software or hardware products that are not accessible or usable by all people. In this highly competitive global market it is best to not limit your customer base to only a portion of the world’s population allowing your competitors to gain an advantage in which you may never have the opportunity to catch up. Include people with disabilities, we are brimming with innovative ideas!

With so much room for improvements in the current approach to working together, some groups and organizations have started to look at nature for resolutions and new ideas. Nature has done well when many members interact with each other with no one person directing, like the ants, fireflies and bees I mentioned

Do you wonder how such positive collaboration can happen?

Have you ever heard of swarm, or collective intelligence?

Swarm, or collective intelligence in one definition; is interacting as one large, self-organized group of computers or groups of people with all individuals fully participating, without infrastructure limitations. This is an emergent behavior, where complex group actions arise from simple local rules.

From Stephen Strogatz: Who Cares About Fireflies? We see fantastic examples of synchrony in the natural world all around us. To give an example, there were persistent reports when the first Western travelers went to South East Asia, back to the time of Sir Francis Drake in the 1500s, of spectacular scenes along riverbanks, where thousands upon thousands of fireflies in the trees would all light up and go off simultaneously. These kinds of reports kept coming back to the West, and were published in scientific journals, and people who hadn't seen it couldn't believe it. Scientists said that this is a case of human misperception, that we're seeing patterns that don't exist, or that it's an optical illusion. How could the fireflies, which are not very intelligent creatures, manage to coordinate their flashings in such a spectacular and vast way?

The answer on how this can happen is swarm, or collective intelligence.

In the May 1, 2001, Harvard Business Review, Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business by Eric Bonabeau and Christopher Meyer talks about the following.

What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical models to describe this phenomenon, which has been dubbed "swarm intelligence," and they are now applying them to business. Their research has already helped several companies develop more efficient ways to schedule factory equipment, divide tasks among workers, organize people, and even plot strategy. Emulating the way ants find the shortest path to a new food supply, for example, has led researchers at Hewlett-Packard to develop software programs that can find the most efficient way to route phone traffic over a telecommunications network. Southwest Airlines has used a similar model to efficiently route cargo. To allocate labor, honeybees appear to follow one simple but powerful rule--they seem to specialize in a particular activity unless they perceive an important need to perform another function. Using that model, researchers at Northwestern University have devised a system for painting trucks that can automatically adapt to changing conditions. In the future, the authors speculate, a company might structure its entire business using the principles of swarm intelligence. The result, they believe, would be the ultimate self-organizing enterprise--one that could adapt quickly and instinctively to fast-changing markets.

Listen to NPR: How Ants Bury Their Dead by John Nielsen - All Things Considered, December 9, 2006, the weekly Science Out of the Box segment considers the well-ordered world of ants. Their knack for carefully stacking their dead has sent researchers scurrying to see if humans can learn lessons in efficiency from them.

Ants work together in large groups performing very complicated task with no one leader. They fight battles find food and stack their dead in intricate precise patterns; and re-stack them sorting them as they do so. This research is helping to build robots that have intelligence like ants, among many other very exciting projects.

At the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence they are bringing together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing the way people work together. They are collaborating with other educational institutions, organizations and individuals to better understand and find new ways to leverage collective intelligence.

Just a few of the factors that facilitate collective intelligence from MIT’s Handbook of Collective Intelligence.

  •  Diversity
  •  Shared vocabulary and other infrastructure
  •  Awareness

Some of the factors that inhibit collective intelligence from MIT’s handbook.

  •  Biases
  •  Implementation issues

As you have read or listened, swarm or collective intelligence can be interactions between computer to computer, computer to people or people to people just to name a few of the possible interactions. I would like to focus our discussion on improving collective intelligence between people to people and people to computer.

Collective intelligence can facilitate increased productivity in community, global (multiple organizations and individuals) and corporate project, or program teams. Can aid if you do work in Diversity, looking to leverage all employees uniqueness’s effectively or work in Human Resources and you desire your highly skilled and valued workforce to be agile to allow your employees to use their talents when and where best needed at any particular moment. Explaining why it is essential to develop, maintain and procure accessible and usable applications with universal design following such standards as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and leveraging resources like the ones at Trace Research and Development Center and Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) special Interest Group on Accessible Computing to facilitate and allow all people to contribute equally and effectively. Such standards can leverage IT investments, save time, money and reduce duplication of efforts. It is best to leverage what nature has already perfected. People are just starting to understand and utilize techniques to improve outdated processes. Focus your efforts on actions that will facilitate collective intelligence and resolve any barriers which will inhibit your positive results!

If all people cannot equally participate fully with accessible and usable tools you are inhibiting collective intelligence. You need to create ways to facilitate collective intelligence so you can more easily find highly efficient solutions to your most difficult problems. Then you can adapt automatically to changing markets and environments with agility and grace. Make sure the disabled, or others with challenges can fully participate like all others efficiently. These individuals are your most valued path to your success in fully utilizing the benefits of collective intelligence.

Is anyone seeing results with swarm, or collective intelligence? Are you having implementation issues? What parts of your personal or professional life is this helping with? Do you see how it can help the disabled or others with special needs in their personal or professional life?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Bill Tipton
Contributing Author,
Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wdtipton

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.tipton.39

Twitter: http://twitter.com/wdtipton

September 02, 2007 in Accessibility, Books, Creativity, Current Affairs, Disabilities, Inclusion, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership, People with Disabilities, Personal Development, Self-Help, Technology, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (4)