Sorry for the radio silence. My mom’s been in the hospital. Plus, no surprise, I have my own health crap to deal with and sometimes I just don’t have the spoons for blogging. It’s one of the reasons I so hope that people will start sending in their own submissions.
But I want to take a minute to explain something because I don’t think abled people will truly get this:
This blog is not just about righteous indignation. It’s not about taking pot shots at businesses and people for funsies. It’s partly about commiseration with other people who live with a disability. But it’s also about trying to show the world how every obstacle of inaccessibility we face shrinks our world.
I embrace the social model of disability. Look it up. But the tldr is that impairment (for example, not being able to walk) only becomes disabling in a society that is not designed for wheelchairs. One common analogy I see is that an abled person has the impairment of being unable to fly. But we live in a society designed to accommodate that impairment. It’s why we have airplanes and helicopters. So if society were set up to accommodate wheelchairs, needing to use a wheelchair would not longer disable a person from accessing the same portion of the world that an abled walking person can enjoy.
So stop and consider this: impairments in this world already disable so many people from accessing so many things. We’re already limited to only existing within spaces that claim to be accessible to us (and often only when we supply our own devices, modifications, and/or supportive people). When we then encounter an obstacle in a place that was supposed to be accessible to us, the world we can access loses yet another piece and our sphere of existence shrinks.
That’s why partial or false accessibility matters.