Monday, August 17, 2009

Billboard Fiasco

Perhaps understandably, I have been in and out of touch a lot as of late. Last weekend, I unexpectedly found myself cut off from the 'net for... well, pretty much the entire weekend. I had 158 e-mails in my secondary e-mail account (which I don't use for mailing lists) when I got back. Newsfeeds and the like? Didn't get 'em. I'm still catching up on blog posts.

As a result, I managed to miss a pretty interesting event, something that's truly unusual in the disabilities field.

It started out pretty typically: York County, PA's Autism Society decided to try some truly uncreative advertising. Upon noticing, a number of autistic (and non-autistic) people promptly complained. This included a letter from the ASAN.

That's where things got strange.

In only a few hours, the president of York's ASA chapter wrote back... and apologized. The ad campaign was promptly withdrawn.

Wow... an autism organization actually taking responsibility for a mistake and apologizing to the autistic people they offended? Who'd've thought?

I'd never heard of Ms. Wallace (the president of ASA-York) before this. She's now earned a good bit of respect from me. Way to go!

No comments:

Post a Comment