I used to work for Comcast and one of my responsibilities was making sure their mobile apps passed their annual accessibility tests. The company faced enormous FCC fines for failure to pass these tests, but somehow the only person aware of this was me and I was only a contractor. Comcast has thousands of vice presidents of this and that, and one of them should have been on top of this stuff, but their turnover rate was so high that they never usually even lasted a year in one position, so it was up to me to explain the situation to each new one and try to convince them that it was even important.
You wouldn’t think that a person at that level would ever say “who cares about blind people?” but they almost all said that or something to that effect, until the reality of a million-dollars-per-month fine set in. They even at one point hired a vice president of accessibility – a man who was himself blind and obviously never said “who cares about blind people?” – but he quit after less than a year because of his frustration with getting the company to give a shit.
I was a CNA (for non-Americans, I was a trained nurse’s assistant) for the first 8 years or so of my adulthood. I worked in long-term care facilities, mostly Alzheimer’s and Dementia care units and psychiatric locked wards, but I worked in other wings too.
It was absolutely eye-opening. It was a rich, and at the same time immensely painful, experience for someone who had no disabilities and no firsthand experience with disabled family. I was proud to be a part of my patients’ lives (even when they were assholes about it), because they taught me some of the hardest and most important lessons I ever learned about humankind.
First and foremost, that it can and will happen to anyone and everyone.
No matter how careful, no matter how reckless, no matter how healthy, you will end up needing help. Accidents and disease do NOT give a flying fudge-flavored fuck about you, or the plans you made with your life, or the things you did and didn’t get to do.
Second, shut up about the "You're so inspiring!" bit. Shut up. Please.
Ablebodied people lionizing daily agony and begrudging survival can be part of what makes them end up bitter. It’s exhausting to be chronically ill, and sometimes what makes their day actually better is treating them like a normal, average god damn human. Talk about your day. Show interest in theirs. Express opinions. Share your gripes. Ask them for help with something. Tell a fart joke. Make eye contact. Smile. Something. Just don’t fucking ask about their oxygen tank or their wheelchair. They’re literally sick of it.
Third, don't touch their stuff. Ever.
Helping them without invitation is fucking assault. Professional caregivers give aid when invited or when the patient is incapacitated. Our focus should be on assisting with just the things they physically cannot do themselves. Let a human being have some god damn dignity. Moving their wheelchair because they were in your way or going slowly scares the fuck out of them and pisses them off. Picking up someone’s cane and moving it is a day-ruiner. Reorganizing pills is a great way to cause agony without meaning to. Don’t fucking do it unless they ask. They know their limits better than you, respect it.
Fourth, carpe diem. No regrets.
I spent long enough sitting and talking with people on their deathbed, listening to them weep about the things they missed doing. It was, invariably, spending more time with friends and family. Taking that trip. Making that phone call. Giving them that hug. Going on that spontaneous adventure. People who died alone in our care? We were the closest thing to a family they had. And we wept for them. I swore to myself, I would not die like that. I would remember the last lesson they got to teach to someone young.
End rant.
People move wheelchairs out of their way?! Jfc
Or try to ‘help’ when they see someone wheeling themself and just grab the handles uninvited. It’s rare. But common enough that literally every wheelchair user I know has had it happen to them at least once.
It’s assault. It’s unwanted contact. And if you try to move them and they fight back, or shout for help, it can even constitute kidnapping. There’s a reason disabled people buy shit like sword canes or wheelchair handle spikes.
That’s insane. I don’t understand people that don’t respect the agency of others. That’s like grabbing someone in front of you and shoving them through a door because they’re in your way.
Exactly the same idea, and the same indignation. It’s awful.
Where I am, there’s a requirement for 15% (I believe) of new condo developments to meet accessibility standards. You wouldn’t believe how people—potential buyers, not developers—are against that, saying it’s too many. That’s just new developments. All the existing old stock is not accessible, so that percentage of total accessible living spaces is, actually, still tiny. But it’s still too much to accommodate accessibility.
Literally everyone is one accident, illness, or old age away from being disabled in some way. I can’t believe how stupid and short-sighted people are. (Maybe that’s their disability.)
I kind of get it, in a tiny flat, making everything wheelchair accessible means objectively worse space usage for a non disabled person.
Solution is to just not buy it if you don’t like it though.
I was just thinking about the student apartments I lived in. They were 2-storey with wooden staircases up to the second floor. They were built in 4-apartment units; so figure the left apartment is mirrored on the right, with a mirrored pair stacked on top. These were 50% wheelchair accessible, to make them 100% you’d have to install like 16 2-storey elevators. Again this is student housing, they had some deal where you had to prove enrollment in a college or university to take out a lease, and so they had pretty quick tenant turnover. So what you do is fill up the second floor first, keeping spots open on the ground floor for disabled students as much as practicable.
Where I am, there’s a requirement for 15% (I believe) of new condo developments to meet accessibility standards. You wouldn’t believe how people—potential buyers, not developers—are against that…
I’m against that!
It should be 100%. There’s no excuse not to use universal design principles in every new building.
blind to our privilege
On a related note, I want to plug an app that I have had installed on my phones for a few years called Be My Eyes. People with reduced/no vision use it to ask for help from a sighted person. I recommend everyone install it to help out!
As a sighted user, my experience goes like this. I get a phone call that is simultaneously ringing to several helpers’ devices. If I picked up first, I am connected to the helpee in a one-way video call. 1 I say hi, the helpee says hi, and they ask for help. I try to help them, and the helpee ends the call. It usually takes <5 min.
Here some of are the calls I’ve answered:
- A teacher wanted to sort “thank you” cards made by the students into piles by recipient.
- “Why did my washer not finish the cycle?” - I read the LEDs and knob positions to determine that it hadn’t drained, and suggested settings to run a quick drain cycle.
- “What is my clothes dryer set to?” - I described the two knobs and listed their options in order, and confirmed their current settings.
- “Which vitamin bottle is which, and what is the dosage?” - I asked them to move the camera and bottles so I could read the labels.
1 If I don’t pick up, it will keep ringing the other helpers until it finds someone. I assume there’s some logic that picks helpers based on how often they have picked up, because once I finally answered a call in time, I started getting more.
I watched a movie where a blind girl used that to navigate around her house to escape a home invader. Didn’t realize it was real
Fascinating! Do you recall the name?
I had to do some searching, it’s called “see for me” .
… am I a crazy person? Who actually stands in an elevator and thinks “the floor announcements sure do ruin my day” What is wrong with these people?
and the title of the post? wheelchair ramps were the problem? the fuck?
That’s the world we live in. I’m confident if you gave some people $100 for free, they’d get mad it wasn’t $200.
Some people are just under immeasurably inhumans amount of stress, to the point that anything could trigger just an irrational seething hatred for some small, random noise, or inconvenience, or whatever.
We were not meant to operate under the conditions that a lot of us slave away at each and every day, due to survival, obligation, duty, and more.
I live in a society where people get pissed that they have to take their headphones off in an airplane to explain emergency announcements.
One example would be people on the autism spectrum who struggle with overstimulation from noises. Of course it’s more important to have them there for visually impaired people but it’s perfectly possible to find the sound annoying or even difficult and not be an asshole.
A dog taught me about crosswalk accessibility. I was walking someone’s blind dog, and we were waiting at the crosswalk. When the opposite side of the street started chirping when the light changed (as it always does), the dog started crossing the street toward the source of the sound before I ever indicated it was time to move. I’d never thought much about the chirping sound until then.
I find that people were a lot more helpful with old people back in the day. Now it’s seems we are just in the way and get bumped and jostled.
Ignored, mostly. Sometime between age 50 and 60, people started looking right through me.
I wasn’t annoyed by them before, but I definitely found myself VERY appreciative of wheelchair accessible automatic doors when I broke my foot last year. I was on crutches, but still.
It was a weird new experience for me, being forced to not do something. Not because someone was stopping me, but because I physically couldn’t do it. Simple stuff , like taking the trash with the stairs. Weird.
Sorry to be that person, but in which way is this a meme??
We are all the same height once we are fallen.
Everything is about the young and beautiful and exploited being overdriven or neglected so he/she becames a cripple. It is like the worst cult. The temple of disease. A serious and operational effort for self destruction. The only thing operational. The way of the modern life.
I am baffled how everything gets a solution, but these ones are swept under the rug. Then people go who wants a cripple in the penthouse.
I am also sad nobody made MK Jax like prostethics for an accessible price.
Every doorway in a house should be at least 36" wide. For each level of a house, the floor should be flat, no steps between slightly different levels. Every house should include at least one ADA compliant bathroom.
Very few houses or apartments are fully accessible. Closet doors are 28" wide, there are unnecessary steps between indoor and outdoor spaces, showers are too small, etc.
Why 36" ?
So a wheelchair can easily pass through them.
The thing I never understand is disabled parking it places like Disneyland. Ok so it’s closer to the park entrance, is that useful to people, does the distance magically not count once you’re inside the compound?
Wheel chairs are not the only disability. There are lots of people who have limited mobility, for whom adding a trek across the parking lot is too much on top of walking the park. Even a non-electric wheelchair is a hardship to push (for the person sitting or someone assisting them).
Wdym? Surely reducing any travelling for people with mobility issues is a benefit, non?
This counts for temporary and invisible disabilities too, like recent hip surgery or a chronic migraine disorder. If you need to grab something important from the car, like medication or a breathing device, having it close to the entrance can make or break the difference between a bad day and a bad day in the ER.
In my early 20’s I took a date to an amusement park while she had a broken foot. Almost all of the roller coasters had elevated stations, and all of them had elevators, a couple had ADA compliant queues, all ramps no stairs. We rented a wheelchair from the park, I mostly pushed her, we’d take the elevator up to the station, get on the roller coaster being careful not to whack her cast on anything, enjoy the ride, then take the elevator back down to sidewalk level.
They didn’t issue her a handicapped placard for a foot in a cast but it would have been nice, she did the distance between the car and guest services on crutches.
There’s absolutely no need to be ashamed of your reaction. It would annoy most people if each floor was announced. We’ve become far too sensitized to possibly offending someone, and when we live in fear of doing the wrong thing it sometimes stops us from doing anything.
