I often see blind people on the subway, and random strangers always help them. Most people have obviously read the same pamphlets I have, because almost everyone does it right. They give them specific verbal instructions ("The subway door is two feet to your left"), they allow the blind person to take their arm and guide them to a seat, basically whenever there's someone with a white cane, everyone's looking out for them and someone almost always jumps in and helps.
I wonder if this gets annoying for the blind people though? If every time I see a blind person a stranger is helping them, then blind people must get helped by strangers all the freaking time! I wonder if that ever gets annoying to them? Sometimes when I'm making my way through the crowded city, I really just don't want to deal with any people at all. I wonder if blind people ever feel like this and wish people would stop helping them?
2 comments:
I think lots of people with disabilities get really tired of people offering to help.
There needs to be more public awareness about when you should or shouldn't help, because it's really hard for the uninformed observer to tell. There's this one guy I often see at the subway station my office is at, he's blind and has a cane and can do all kind of amazing things with it. He stands on the platform just past where the back of the train is going to end up, then walks up to the train and taps it with his cane as it's slowing down, and then he can tell from this where the door is going to be. (He's better at it than I am - I've taken to standing near him because he always ends up right by the door I want.) But to anyone who's never seen him before, it looks like he's planning to walk straight off the platform and onto the tracks, so people keep helping him. And unless you've seen him do his thing before, you can't really tell that he's got it under control.
That's like when the CNIB was doing those "Not everyone we help is blind," and showing people who had white canes but had some eyesight. Okay, but what do I do with this information?
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