Wagner James Au sez, "Second Life resident lilone Sandgrain, who IRL manages a large group of severely disabled people in a care center, recently convinced her bosses to give her nine clients an SL account of their own, to share. Since then, she's been slowly introducing them to the world. (And vice versa.) Avatar customization, online flirtation, and object creation take on new meanings, when they're conducted by a group of nine disabled people with wildly varying backgrounds from their wheelchairs."
"How did we decide on what we would look like, and our gender? We formed the man avatar first, because that day, we had more men in the group. We always wanted a female one, but we haven't taken the time to create her yet. Mary and Johanna would like that very much. We decided on how wilde would look first by starting with skin colors. We have both black and white in our real life group, and didn't want to have those because neither is better than the other. So we picked orange…
"Micah and Charlene could use the mouse," lilone replies, when I ask her if it's possible for each member of wilde to enter Second Life directly, perhaps with their own individual accounts. "John and Nichole could, but wouldn't alone. Micah can't read. Charlene has one hand, but can read." She shrugs. "None of them, really."
Their solution, for now at least, is lilone effectively acting as their interface: she sits at the keyboard, with the wilde group gathered in a semi-circle in a cramped care center room, peering over her shoulder and into the monitor, at the world inside…
(Thanks, James!)
