Great things about being blind. September 11 and dogs vs canes.

As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I heard a very interesting interview with a man who escaped the world trade centre with his guide dog. There were two men who did that. One has spoken publicly about this for years and is very wonderful to listen to. He has recently written a book called thunder dog which is very good. The other man hadn't spoken until now. The thing that shook me up was that they said that all guide dog users got out of the building and all blind cane users died inside. That gave me the shivers. I was a cane user for many years and still do use my cane but for myself really prefer having a dog. And having a dog in a chaotic situation would seem much less scary I would think. Every blind person has to make their own choices about how they travel safely. For me, it's a guide dog all the way. It feels like driving a really cool car to travel with your dog, it is much less mentally exhausting for me, and it's great to have such a wonderful creature with me all of the time.

Great things about being blind. White cane bars?

I was assessing some web sites for accessibility the other day. I do this sometimes to help with web access and to make a little money too! If anyone wants me to assess their web site and/or if anyone wants unique and fun disability awareness training, contact me and we can talk about this. I love giving workshops and leading groups and talking about disability awareness.
Contact me at
kimjkilpatrick@gmail.com
On to the blog.
On one web site, they mentioned that they had white cane bars. I have never heard this term before. What are white cane bars? My imagination went wild. White canes are the colour of canes people who are blind use for mobility purposes. My white cane is here. I use it a little but mostly use it to dig things out from under the bed these days. Anyway, back to white cane bars. Are they bars where white canes congregate and complain about all of those blind people getting guide dogs and forgetting about them? Or how the public steps on them and never says, "Oh what a beautiful cane you have?" Or is a white cane bar, a special bar for blind people to go? Perhaps all staff are blind there and it is totally dark? I have no idea what a white cane bar is but I love imagining these situations.