So far, I haven’t found a good way to compare organizations for the blind other than reading their wikipedia pages.
And, well, blindness organizations are frankly a political issue. Finding unbiased information on them is horribly difficult. Add to this my relatively weak Google-fu, and I haven’t found much.
Conclusions:
NFB is identity politics. They’re also extremely assertive.
AFB focuses on technology, inherited Hellen Keller’s everything, etc.
ACB… umm… exists. They did give me a scholarship, and made the case for accessible money (Good luck with that. :P), I guess.
I want to find the one with the most to offer, and take advantage of those opportunities.
The difficulty is figuring out which one is the most useful. NFB comes across as cultish and pushing their ideology on anyone who comes to them, and they seem to be ignoring medical professionals advising them against using sleep shades on people with residual sight in their training programs. Also, their specialized cane sounds like an identity symbol more than a utility maximizer; it has better reach, but is flimsy-yet-unfolding and gets in the way. I do like the implication that it optimizes arm usage, but otherwise it sounds annoying.
On the upside, they seem to be the loudest, and as we all know, America is the country where the loudest get large chunks of attention. I’ve read some of their legal recommendations, and they seem to be the work of someone who knows how to aim for a goal and shoot until they hit it. Also, they’re intense about braille.
Meanwhile, I’m imagining AFB being a possible avenue for getting my hands on a blasted tactile display, and possibly other meaningful technology-related projects, without having to put up indoctrination shields. Eah, there doesn’t seem to be as much to say on them, which tells me that they have much less to criticize, but at the same time, it makes me wonder if they’re powerful enough for the vague notion of whatever nonspecific ideas spawned this investigation.
NFB’s sleep shades and specialized cane are rational for their purpose: to force the trainee to strengthen blindness as an identifying quality. They have other excuses—sleep shades prepare people for the possibility of losing what sight they have, the specialized cane provides better reach and is easier on the arms—but in light of the responses to these, and their responses to those responses, it’s pretty clear that the identity advertisement is their main purpose. And quite frankly, that’s annoying; my vision is not an identifying quality I care much about, so much as it’s an obstacle that’s made its troubles much clearer to me as of late. None of the other organizations seem to be functionally equivalent to the NFB, minus that element. Their main rival, the ACB, doesn’t seem to do much of anything other than have fancy meetings and occasionally talk to legal people.
Gah, I would just continue ignoring them all, as I always have, if I wasn’t living in a freakin’ box.
The trouble is that there are multiple areas of interest, and I’m not sure which is best to focus on: life skills? Technology? Programs that I could improve? Etc. My primary strategy has been to determine the goals of each organization and how much success they’ve had in achieving them, and the trouble is that these are hard to measure (we can tell how much policy influence NFB has had, at least. I haven’t found much about how many of AFB’s recommendations have been enacted.).
Then it seems that you should recurse a level: Rather than trying to evaluate the organisations, you should be deciding which of the possible organisation-goals is most important. When you’ve decided that, judge which organisation best achieves that optimal goal.
I still can’t find much useful information on the AFB, but the NFB publicizes most of their major operations. The only successful one I’ve come across so far is the cancellation of the ABC sit com “Good and Evil” (it’s worth noting that ABC denied that the NFB protests had anything to do with this). They don’t seem to be having success at improving Kendel accessibility, which is more a political matter than a technological one (Amazon eventually cut communications with them). They’re protesting Goodwill because 64⁄165 of their stores pay disabled employees less than minimum wage, in a manner that strikes me as poorly thought out (it seems to me that Goodwill has a much better image than the NFB, so this will most likely cost the NFB a lot of political capital).
This isn’t really enough for me to determine whether they’re powerful, or just loud, but so far it’s making me update ever so slightly in favor of just loud.
It is worth noting that all of the above information came from publications written by NFB members, mostly hosted on NFB web sites. If my confidence in their abilities is hurt by writings seemingly designed to favor them, I can only imagine what something more objective would look like.
[edit]Originally typed Givewell instead of Goodwill! Fixed![/edit]
Lighthouse International publishes scientific-looking research (although most of them appear to be single studies with small sample sizes, so they could stand further vetting). This and this match my experience pretty well, although matching my experience isn’t what I’d call criteria for effectiveness. If nothing else, I expect that they would be the most likely to help me get a quantitative picture of other organizations.
So far, I haven’t found a good way to compare organizations for the blind other than reading their wikipedia pages.
And, well, blindness organizations are frankly a political issue. Finding unbiased information on them is horribly difficult. Add to this my relatively weak Google-fu, and I haven’t found much.
Conclusions:
NFB is identity politics. They’re also extremely assertive.
AFB focuses on technology, inherited Hellen Keller’s everything, etc.
ACB… umm… exists. They did give me a scholarship, and made the case for accessible money (Good luck with that. :P), I guess.
I want to find the one with the most to offer, and take advantage of those opportunities.
The difficulty is figuring out which one is the most useful. NFB comes across as cultish and pushing their ideology on anyone who comes to them, and they seem to be ignoring medical professionals advising them against using sleep shades on people with residual sight in their training programs. Also, their specialized cane sounds like an identity symbol more than a utility maximizer; it has better reach, but is flimsy-yet-unfolding and gets in the way. I do like the implication that it optimizes arm usage, but otherwise it sounds annoying.
On the upside, they seem to be the loudest, and as we all know, America is the country where the loudest get large chunks of attention. I’ve read some of their legal recommendations, and they seem to be the work of someone who knows how to aim for a goal and shoot until they hit it. Also, they’re intense about braille.
Meanwhile, I’m imagining AFB being a possible avenue for getting my hands on a blasted tactile display, and possibly other meaningful technology-related projects, without having to put up indoctrination shields. Eah, there doesn’t seem to be as much to say on them, which tells me that they have much less to criticize, but at the same time, it makes me wonder if they’re powerful enough for the vague notion of whatever nonspecific ideas spawned this investigation.
NFB’s sleep shades and specialized cane are rational for their purpose: to force the trainee to strengthen blindness as an identifying quality. They have other excuses—sleep shades prepare people for the possibility of losing what sight they have, the specialized cane provides better reach and is easier on the arms—but in light of the responses to these, and their responses to those responses, it’s pretty clear that the identity advertisement is their main purpose. And quite frankly, that’s annoying; my vision is not an identifying quality I care much about, so much as it’s an obstacle that’s made its troubles much clearer to me as of late. None of the other organizations seem to be functionally equivalent to the NFB, minus that element. Their main rival, the ACB, doesn’t seem to do much of anything other than have fancy meetings and occasionally talk to legal people.
Gah, I would just continue ignoring them all, as I always have, if I wasn’t living in a freakin’ box.
Perhaps it would be easier to help if you said what you wanted help with. “The most to offer” in what specific area?
The trouble is that there are multiple areas of interest, and I’m not sure which is best to focus on: life skills? Technology? Programs that I could improve? Etc. My primary strategy has been to determine the goals of each organization and how much success they’ve had in achieving them, and the trouble is that these are hard to measure (we can tell how much policy influence NFB has had, at least. I haven’t found much about how many of AFB’s recommendations have been enacted.).
Then it seems that you should recurse a level: Rather than trying to evaluate the organisations, you should be deciding which of the possible organisation-goals is most important. When you’ve decided that, judge which organisation best achieves that optimal goal.
I still can’t find much useful information on the AFB, but the NFB publicizes most of their major operations. The only successful one I’ve come across so far is the cancellation of the ABC sit com “Good and Evil” (it’s worth noting that ABC denied that the NFB protests had anything to do with this). They don’t seem to be having success at improving Kendel accessibility, which is more a political matter than a technological one (Amazon eventually cut communications with them). They’re protesting Goodwill because 64⁄165 of their stores pay disabled employees less than minimum wage, in a manner that strikes me as poorly thought out (it seems to me that Goodwill has a much better image than the NFB, so this will most likely cost the NFB a lot of political capital).
This isn’t really enough for me to determine whether they’re powerful, or just loud, but so far it’s making me update ever so slightly in favor of just loud.
It is worth noting that all of the above information came from publications written by NFB members, mostly hosted on NFB web sites. If my confidence in their abilities is hurt by writings seemingly designed to favor them, I can only imagine what something more objective would look like.
[edit]Originally typed Givewell instead of Goodwill! Fixed![/edit]
Lighthouse International publishes scientific-looking research (although most of them appear to be single studies with small sample sizes, so they could stand further vetting). This and this match my experience pretty well, although matching my experience isn’t what I’d call criteria for effectiveness. If nothing else, I expect that they would be the most likely to help me get a quantitative picture of other organizations.