Oh well, I can't manage to be quite as polite as Andrew.
>David Andrews commented:
>
>> Finally, my observations tell me that very few foreign people have
>> good cane travel training like we do at our centers.
And my five years direct observation suggests that few people other
than Americans would have the right combination of ignorance and
daring to make such a comment.
>> If they did, I wonder how much they would be interested in
>> these electronic aids.
>> They may be using them as a substitute for good travel training,
>> which they don't know about. They don't have many expectations of
>> good cane travel.
Do we not indeed, poor fools that we are. This argument has certain
difficulties with evidence I'm afraid. It was reiterated to the point
of a mantra by my Sonicguide instructor that the Guide was absolutely
no substitute for good cane technique. He had, after all, spent the
previous decade as a long cane instructor. At the time no one was
allowed to instruct in the use of the Guide unless they were a long
cane instructor first, a perfectly reasonable policy in my view. At
a later stage during training, when the Guide was making an obvious
positive contribution to my mobility, it was removed for a couple of
days. Can you equate this with an inculcated dependency to the
exclusion of proper cane use?
Andrew has already covered most other points I would mention although
I haven't played the ETA field as widely as he, having found the Guide
an acceptable solution for its domain of application.
My interactions with the American blind community, of which this
interchange is an exemplar, are best left for another place I think.
Appeals for respect for different approaches are clearly pointless.
>When visiting America some years ago, I was walking with another blind
>man. The area was very familiar to him and totally unfamiliar to me
>(though not complicated). I called to him to stop. He didn't and his
>cane clanged against the side of the car parked across the footpath.
This, coincidentally happened to me walking in to work this afternoon,
it was a short trip so I wasn't wearing the Sonicguide. Yes, I
understand the NFB's reaction to such a story, appreciate its
philosophical bases and reject it completely.
Peter Rayner
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