Daily Archives: 16 March, 2010

Creating Accessible Campuses

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My Student Union is doing work right now around issues of student residences. This is something that’s very much on my mind right now in light of the recent highlighting of difficulties of having a service animal when living on campus. In reading the Yummy Puppy Adventures – or, more accurately, the Mount Holyoke College Accessibility Fail – I started to really think about what an accessible residence experience would look like for students with disabilities.

So of course I brought it up to one of my student union executives, and instead of, say, asking students with disabilities for feedback on the issue, or contacting student accessibility services, he suggested I send him an email detailing out my concerns.

(In his defense, it is a month until school is over, and he is busy, and he doesn’t even know what to ask. I’m not irritated with him, just with the situation in general.)

So, this is the short list of things that I’ve come up with, but I know from previous discussions with the community that I will miss important things that should be considered.

In no order:

  • Clearly post that service animals are allowed around campus and in campus dorms and facilities.
  • List on both your residence page and your student accessibility services page that there are residences for students with disabilities.
  • Private washrooms with grip bars for toilet & shower/bath.
  • Wider doors & hallways.
  • Barrier free access to all dorm rooms.
  • Residence Orientation that mentions accessibility features to all students, including re-iterating scent free policies and that service animals are allowed on campus.
  • The ability to change any room over to have lights that flash for alerts.
  • A map of campus that indicates all barrier-free access points to all buildings.
  • Highlighting menu plans that accommodate food allergies or intolerances.

I’m certain I’m missing obvious things.

Please, give me your thoughts?

Bake Sales for Chemo

medical practice, politics, Uncategorized

I recently read a story of a woman forced to have fundraisers to cover her chemo treatment after she was excluded from purchasing insurance coverage because of a separate pre-existing conditions:

Iowan grandmother Deb Robben  shopped the insurance market, looking for a company that would cover her. Unfortunately, after a lengthy search, she was unable to find a single insurer that was willing to offer her coverage; the companies denied her coverage because they considered the benign cysts in her breasts to be a pre-existing condition.

Last December, Robben was diagnosed with colon cancer. Because she has been unable to obtain insurance, she has had to pay the costs for treatment out-of-pocket. For chemotherapy treatment alone, Robben expects to pay almost $2,000 a month. “She’s only two months into chemo and already she’s at $50,000. Oh my, what is another four months going to bring,” says Melissa Gradischnig Nelson, a friend of Robben.

In desperation, Robben’s friends and family have turned to local fundraisers to try to pay for her treatment. Over the weekend, they held a $5-a-plate pasta dinner in the hope of putting “a dent” in Robben’s massive health care bills. Local news station WHO-TV recently interviewed Robben, who told them, “It’s kind of hard when you can’t get insurance. To say, lady you’re going to die or figure out how to come up with the money. It’s not right.”

This reminded me of the bumper stickers I used to see with the slogan “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.” So I’ve modified it to reflect our modern times:

Graphic image of children on jungle gym with slogan about bake sales and bombers, modified to read "it will be a great day when people get all the health care they need and nobody has to hold a bake sale to get what they need to live."

Oh Canada: This week in Canada & Disability

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It’s been an interesting week or so in Canada regarding issues around disability. “Interesting” here means hit and miss.

I could, for example, direct you to the coverage of the Paralymic Games, but that site appears to be inaccessible to screen readers. It’s very busy, and has a lot of flash on it. There’s an audio slide show – the first I’ve ever come across – but you need to download something in order to run the audio.

So, hit and miss there, I guess.

Of course, then we get this story: No sugar-coating for disability exhibit: Co-curator’s trip out west parallels struggle to overcome obstacles in Out from Under

For disability rights activist Catherine Frazee, the personal overlaps with the political even when she doesn’t intend it.

That happened with Frazee’s recent journey to Vancouver from Toronto for Out From Under, a unique exhibition on the social history of disability in Canada.

As one of its three curators, she felt it was important to be here for the exhibition’s opening during the Paralympic Winter Games.

Frazee, the director of Ryerson’s Institute for Disability Studies, can’t fly for medical reasons having to do with living with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic neuromuscular disease characterized by the degeneration of the motor neurons. When she travels, she is accompanied by an attendant and Patricia Seeley, her life partner.

The only option for her was to take the train.

Frazee was willing to make sacrifices to travel out west, such as sleeping in her electric wheelchair. She can’t be separated from her wheelchair, which is uniquely customized to her body’s needs. At times, for example, she has to tilt it slightly back to help with her breathing.

When she contacted Via Rail, she was told that she and her wheelchair had to travel separately.

Of course she was. *headdesk*

The exhibit itself sounds amazing and I wish I could see it. But it’s telling to me that in my country, where politicians regularly tell me they really care about the needs of people with disabilities, it’s impossible for Catherine Frazee to travel to Vancouver. Ultimately, she and her partner traveled through the US, where the Americans with Disabilities Act, as poor as it may be, still required that there be train cars that Frazee be able to use.

Or another hit and a miss: Promoting rights of disabled new foreign policy focus: Cannon

Promoting the rights of disabled people around the world will become a key foreign policy focus for Canada, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said at the United Nations Thursday.

Cannon made the declaration after delivering Canada’s ratification of the world body’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Awwww. Isn’t that awesome?

Meanwhile our Prime Minister held a TalkCanada event that was inaccessible to blind or partially sighted people.

Yesterday morning Prime Minister Stephen Harper performed a first, by being the first Canadian Prime Minister to have his remarks streamed live through YouTube. Before and after the PM’s speech, and up until Sunday at 1:00pm ET, Canadians can login to the Talk Canada YouTUbe page to submit and vote on questions, which the PM will answer in another live stream on Tuesday.

As a completely blind Canadian and an Information and Communications Technology Accessibility Consultant (I help make information systems work for persons with disabilities), I take exception to the PM using technologies such as YouTube and Google Moderator (used for the questions and voting). These technologies were poorly accessible to me, and to other blind and partially sighted Canadians, including Derek Wilson who wrote about the barriers he faced. This is not the way that things need to be, it would have been very possible, should the PM have cared, to make the Talk Canada event easily accessible to a much wider range of Canadians, including the blind and visually impaired.

[I also have no idea if the actual videos will be subtitled, Signed, or a transcript provided.]

Oh, and Canada continues to refuse immigrants when family members have disabilities. The only ‘hit’ there is that we’re talking about it, I guess, since it’s been going on forever.

I’m frustrated. Politicians, business owners, school officials, everyone tells me that they really care about the needs of people with disabilities. They often do grand gestures: Ooh, we’ll show highlights from the Paralympic Games! We’ll agree that yes, we’re going to support the needs and rights of people with disabilities in other countries! We’re going to put in a Student Accessibility Services Office (because all people with disabilities on campus are students) and that will solve all the problems!

What we won’t do, apparently, is ensure that people with disabilities in Canada can get from Nova Scotia to Vancouver with minimal fuss and drama, like the currently non-disabled can. We won’t discuss how inaccessible politicians are to people with disabilities. We will express disdain that the laws in Ontario now require universities to be accessible to students before students spend months or even years self-advocating. We will approve bursaries for students purchasing equipment that helps them write their essays and do their school work in February – 6 months into the Academic year.

Oh Canada. Please do better.

Recommended Reading

recommended reading

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Nisha at bell bajao: Regulation of Disabled Women’s Sexuality

The pressure to ignore the bodily experiences for a collective voice to locate and challenge the barriers “out there” has made disability theorists and activists collude with “the idea that the ‘typical’ disabled person is a young man in a wheelchair who is fit, never ill, and whose only needs concern a physically accessible environment.”[14] This collusion has led to the sidelining of disabled women, non-visible impairments, intellectual impairments, elderly with chronic conditions[15], and disabiliy’s interaction with gender and other social, cultural oppressions[16]. Further, it has ended up contributing to the disappearance of the embodied experiences from most disability literature[17]. […]

The social norm of sexuality which is based on being “able-bodied” and the material situations of disabled women as “asexual objects” creates “rolelessness” – “social invisibility and this cancellation of femininity” prompts some disabled women to claim essential femininity which culture denies them[25]. This may give the impression that most disabled women have freedom from the standards set by the patriarchal male gaze and that they are in a position to develop and lead happy alternative lifestyles. In reality, imagining them as “antithesis of the normative woman”[26] adds to their disadvantage of being women.

Lisa I. Iezzoni and Laurence J. Ronan at the Annals of Internal Medicine: Disability Legacy of the Haitian Earthquake

Even before the earthquake struck, Haiti had few rehabilitation professionals and little capacity to manufacture essential assistive technologies, including prostheses and wheelchairs. While international organizations are assisting to fill these gaps, ultimately rehabilitation programs and assistive technologies will need to fit the specific demands of Haiti’s culture and rugged natural physical environments. As Haiti rebuilds its public and private spaces, ensuring accessibility to persons with disabilities will be critical.

About.com: Wheelchair-Using Child Actor Sought for NBC Pilot

If you’ve been unhappy with a character who uses a wheelchair being played by an actor who doesn’t on Glee, here’s some promising news: An open online casting call has gone out for a child actor who uses a wheelchair to play the son of Paul Reiser (pictured) in a pilot for NBC. The casting call, seeking performers age 10-13, describes the character as “sweet, funny, really smart and upbeat. He loves sports, music, and everyone he meets — especially adults. Inquisitive and with a mind like a steel trap, he remembers everything — which can be good or bad! He can easily get anxious and sometimes gets a bit obsessively focused on things. And oh, he has used a wheelchair since birth.” Not quite sure how you use a wheelchair at birth, but I applaud the intention.

NSW Human Services: Community garden for people with a disability

A community garden at Macleay Valley Community Care Centre is proving its value to people with a disability. Not only does the garden offer a place for them to enjoy or simply relax, it also provides them with fruit and vegetables.[…]

The project involved erecting a fence around the garden, screening under an existing deck, laying concrete paths and removing existing diseased trees. Six planting troughs were concreted into an area that is wheelchair accessible and garden beds are at a suitable height so they can be easily reached by older citizens and people with a disability.

World Health Organisation: Marking International Women’s Day [podcast transcript]

Veronica Riemer: Women are also facing discrimination in their opportunities for education. Bliss Temple from North Carolina in the USA, is a medical student who uses a wheelchair because of her disability. She talks to us about the challenges she has faced in taking forward her studies.

Bliss Temple: When I went to apply to medical school, because of my disability, I knew that it was unchartered territory. So I applied very widely to 28 different schools. About a third of them rejected me out of hand and said “you are too disabled; we won’t even consider your application”. It ended up that I did get accepted in several places and at the school that I chose, Duke University, I was the first person who was a wheelchair user. I think the first with what many people would classically think of as a disability; although there have been people with mental health problems.

Veronica Riemer: Bliss tells us why it is important for persons with disabilities to be accepted for medical training.

Bliss Temple: The world of medicine can really use people with disabilities. We are health care consumers of course and it is really important that we have more providers that understand the experience of having a disability.

The Wichita Eagle: Disability advocates ask court to halt cuts

A petition filed Friday by InterHab, an association for developmental disability service providers, seeks a temporary restraining order and asks that $10 million cut by the [Kansas] governor and Legislature be returned.

The cuts mean services for Topeka advocate Nancy Spano’s daughter Heather have been greatly scaled back. Heather is 24, but health problems and severe developmental disabilities mean she functions more like a 5- or 8-year-old child. Spano said her daughter needs round-the-clock care and help with basic hygiene. After the cuts, Heather was left alone at night and had no staff for help on the weekends. She frequently called her parents at all hours of the night, frightened.