After a brief hiatus of four years The Guardian has resurrected its Travelling With Disabiities Blog.
Launching what we hope is to be a regular set of posts is John Horan with "The Wheels Come Off."
In one encounter he analyzes a particular bottleneck and recommends the venerable "teach a class about your disability" approach. Effective. Also tedious for those of us who have been traveling with disabilities for more then 30 years -- or more than 30 days if my memory serves me correctly:
In fact, the Deutsche Bahn train was a model of good disability practice. It had a wide door which could accommodate the widest of wheelchairs, a special disabled passenger cabin with wide corridors and a disabled toilet which was cavernous and well laid out.So what had gone wrong? Quite simply, it was a new situation for all concerned. The German railway staff want to help, but they didn't know how. What they need, then, is for more disabled people to take a risk and use the German railways so that an unfamiliar situation becomes a common one.
After a quite ambitious an upbeat start I was sorry to read of the -- all too common -- disillusionment following episodes of "exclusion by design" where physical spaces, products, policies, and discrimination belie the fact that we live in a world with more than 30 years exposure to the principles of Universal Design:
Now I'm a happy-go-lucky kind of person and can take a few knocks, but after the evening's events, I was distraught. My distress lasted the entire train journey back. People like me have a right to go wherever able-bodied people do, and we have a right to be treated as courteously as able-bodied people.
In the end, the cumulative pressures of bad design, exclusionary policy, and personal discrimination (whether through ignorance or mailce) make day-to-day social participation with a disabiity an "extreme sport" that only rarely gets presented for the education of those still temporarily able-bodied except in momentary glimpses like John's blog.
Sources:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/travelog/2006/09/the_wheels_come_off.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/travelog/2006/09/the_wrong_sort_of_lovely_time_1.html
Other posts by John Horan:
Disability: Just Comedy in a Serious World?
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/travelog/2006/09/disability_just_comedy_in_a_se.html
The Wrong Sort of a Lovely Time
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/travelog/2006/09/the_wrong_sort_of_lovely_time_1.html