The Canadian Conservative Party has sent out direct-mail flyers boasting about the party's track record on initiatives to help people with disabilities. The flyer has some of the text rendered in fake Braille — a picture of raised dots that are not, themselves, raised at all.
Nicolas snapped a photo of the flyer and put it on Twitter this week, saying the “mailer about accessibility has a PICTURE of Braille on it. How very sensitive and supportive.”
Some of Nicolas’s friends in Winnipeg told her the flyer was also sent around Elmwood-Transcona, riding of Conservative MP Lawrence Toet. It also surfaced in Peterborough, home to MP Dean Del Mastro, and in Ottawa West-Nepean, home riding of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.
“It’s shocking to me that a party that big, and that well-funded, could be putting out something so ignorant,” Nicolas said in an email to the Star.
Jim Tokos, a vice-president at the Canadian Council of the Blind, said he found the flyers simply “baffling” — especially since the whole purpose of the pamphlet was to boast about how much the Conservatives were doing to make life easier for disabled people in Canada.
Conservative flyers on disabled initiatives contain fake Braille [Susan Delacourt/Toronto Star]
(Thanks, Cliff!)
