#inaccessible environment

[enbycrip]

This is doubly the case for *actual* accessibility aids, which are so often far out of the reach of actual disabled people, the majority of whom are kept deliberately in poverty by “state disability benefits” being kept deliberately below the poverty line and workplaces being unwilling to provide the reasonable accommodations that would allow disabled people to work.

I had a remote job for 8-15 hours a week during lockdown, when everything was forced to be remote. Even on the lowest hours, I made about as much monthly as my usual social security payments.

Of course, once things opened up again, my workplace, a grassroots charity, was forced to merge with a larger charity and my job was lost. Finding another salaried remote PT job that allows me actual freedom to choose my hours and doesn’t involve phones has been pretty impossible.

It’s also notable how many incredibly helpful accessibility aids are proposed and made as prototypes by large corporations to showcase their skills, but never actually go into mainstream production. They are basically fancy PR and marketing campaigns.

Sedgeway, notably, started out as a plan to build a modern wheelchair that could handle the inaccessibility of the world, but once the designer started getting excited about marketing it, he dropped the idea of making it an accessibility aid and started aiming it as “a revolution in personal mobility” at wealthy abled people who could already navigate the world perfectly fine. (I highly recommend the Sedgeway episode of Tim Chambers’ Cautionary Tales podcast on Pushkin for the entire story.)

[enbycrip]

I had this moment last night where I was sitting on a wall outside the back door of the Theatre Royal waiting for my spouse to come and pick me up, and we had just seen this incredible play about breaking and transcending different kinds of constraints, and I feel like a terrible disabled person because the night was cool and it was quiet and all I could think of was transforming into a bird and flying into that dark sky full of possibility, and leaving this shitty and constrained body behind.

My dark secret is that every disabled person talks about their wheelchair as an instrument that has made life much better for them, and, honestly, the main thing they do for me is bring me up against environmental limitations of accessibility constantly.

And the hardest thing I find about it all is that every fucking set of accommodations involves talking to people. It involves phone calls and waiting around to be collected and having to talk to people the whole time you’re doing that. And so often having to talk to people I don’t know is just an *immense* energy sink for me and when I really need a accommodations that’s when I *really* don’t have that. And then whoever is meant to be providing those “helpful accommodations” starts getting angry and aggressive and that’s how you end up nearly getting thrown into train tracks.

I hurt myself so much because so often it is easier to stumble along and fall and crawl with my crutches or even my rollator sometimes than it is to have to deal with a taxi driver talking an entire journey which can easily mean a barrage of racism or misogyny or transphobia, or incredibly intrusive questions about my disability, and by the time I get to the place I’m meant to be I’m beyond spent.

The way you can book ordinary tickets for things with a few clicks online but accessible ones mean long, long, spoon-draining conversations with people who don’t even have accurate information about the place you are going is an access barrier no one ever thinks of.

[enbycrip]

While it *is* absolutely true that there’s no such thing as universal accessibility, that doesn’t excuse *not* making the general environment as accessible as possible on a day to day basis.

The fact that trains and buses don’t come with automatic ramps as standard, instead relying on inconsistent and grudging aid from staff who are frequently either surly and aggressive or difficult to find is ridiculous.

The fact that accessibility information about layouts isn’t standard on websites and menus outside establishments is ridiculous.

[enbycrip]

In doing literally *anything*, you have to build in accessibility from the start, and to decide to value *not excluding people who need accessibility* or you’re going to decide that accessibility is “too expensive” and “doesn’t add enough value” for cost.

You have to build it in from the start, when looking at facilities. Allocating tech. Assigning budget. Recruiting staff, if what you’re doing involves that, paid or volunteer.

If you don’t, you will not, in fact, be accessible. You will, at best, salve your conscience and make what you’re doing *possible* for a *few* disabled people. Not “easy”, not “on the same level as abled people”, but “possible”. They will still be paying a price abled people will not, and it may well be devastating. Thus, the people able to soak that cost to show up, attend, take part, contribute etc etc, are likely to be the least-marginalised disabled people there are; not only in terms of their disability, but on an intersectional level.

This applies everywhere. Housing. Education. Employment. Community.

[enbycrip]