Category Archives: accessibility

Spotlighting Kirstenbosch Garden!

Do you know, readers, it struck me that I have never posted about South Africa’s Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden? As the Garden is both stunning and disability friendly, I do not know how this is possible! I must correct it at once.

Kirstenbosch is set on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town and, according to the website, ‘was the first botanic garden in the world to be devoted to a country’s indigenous flora’. It’s part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site!

Kirstenbosch is famous for its Braille Trail. Signed in Braille and large print along a guiding rope, the trail is designed specifically for blind visitors. You can read more about the Braille Trail here. It begins and ends with a fragrance garden, where the sensory emphasis is on touch and smell. Most of the garden is wheelchair accessible, including the Trail.

WheelchairThailand has a video called “Wheelchair access Kirstenbosch – South Africa”:

Video description: Video opens with a panning shot of a paved area surrounded by buildings. At the bottom is the word ‘Kirstenbosch’ in yellow. The next title is ‘Botanical garden Cape Town,’ then ‘Wheelchair friendly areas’ and then ‘South Africa’. Through this, relaxing music plays and there are shots of wheelchair users and non-wheelchair users moving about pathways, experiencing the gardens. There’s a shot of a green signpost, focusing on the ‘Braille Trail’ sign, and then a white sign titled ‘The Forest Braille Trail’. There are then shots of a Braille sign, the rope leading along the trail, and then some guinea fowl doing their guinea fowl thing. After that, we’re back to shots of wheelchair users experiencing the gardens. The ending title card says ‘produced by www.gehandicapten.com’

Address, contact details and operational hours are available here.

Recommended Reading for 17 December, 2010

Gentle reader, be cautioned: comments sections on mainstream media sites tend to not be safe and we here at FWD/Forward don’t necessarily endorse all the opinions in these pieces. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

United States: Tampa’s ‘Sensitive Santa’ allows children with autism to get photographs, too by Shelley Rossetter at the St Petersburg Times:

The mall’s owner, Glimcher Realty Trust of Ohio, started Sensitive Santa in some malls nationwide two years ago and extended the idea to all its properties this year, said Kristy Genna, marketing director for WestShore Plaza.

Ireland: Deaf man can sit on jury, says judge by Eithne Donnellan at the Irish Times:

A HIGH Court Judge has ruled for the first time that a deaf person can sit on a jury in the Central Criminal Court.

Mr Justice Paul Carney yesterday ruled that profoundly deaf teacher Senan Dunne could sit on a trial jury with the aid of a sign language interpreter. He said objections to having a “13th person in the jury room” in the form of a sign language interpreter could be met by the signer taking an oath of confidentiality and the jury foreman ensuring that she or he was confined to translating what went on.

Just updating you on the situation in Sierra Leone (see RR for 3 December): In Sierra Leone, Disability Congress Writes President Koroma by Abdul Karim Fonti Kabia at the Awareness Times:

The NDC highlighted that persons with disabilities remain severely under-represented in political and decision-making positions; disabled hold only 0.01% of parliamentary seats, and; the current representation of disable persons in cabinet is at 0.0%.

Indonesia: City to Soon Issue Bylaw on Disabilities at BeritaJakarta.com

As form of its attention to the disabled, Jakarta capital city government plans to implement local regulations on building facilities and accessibility for the disabled, including the sanctions for the violators. At present, there are approximately 35 thousand disabled people in five administrative areas of Jakarta.

Australia: ‘Warringah Council is seeking feedback on design concepts for the Collaroy Disability Tourism Precinct,’ something you can read about in Disability precinct design feedback wanted at the Manly Daily. Also see Windfall for disabled, also by Brenton Cherry at the Manly Daily:

The vision is to create a holiday destination for people with disabilities and their carers as well as a specialist economic business hub for Collaroy.

It would be a place where not only access to the beach, including to the water using an amphibious wheelchair, is possible, but also restaurants, public transport, accommodation and entertainment facilities.

Here’s the page on the Warringah Council website. Collaroy is a beautiful place on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. I am so excited to hear about this proposal, and hope that more people will be able to enjoy that stunning beach!

Send your links to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com. Let us know if/how you want to be credited. And have yourself a fabulous weekend.

New book: Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader

Living the Edges book cover, with a white title on background of an abstract type painting with a road or path and floating spheres of colourHere’s a book for your list, if you’re celebrating a gifty holiday soon – or just splurge on it for yourself!

Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader, edited by Diane Driedger, was launched last week in Canada, and it should contain plenty of interest for readers of FWD/Forward.

The McNally Robinson book-launch blurb is as follows:

Diane Driedger has written extensively about the issues of women and people with disabilities over the past 30 years. Diane is an educator, administrator, activist, and researcher in the area of disabled women’s issues in Canada and internationally. She is also a visual artist and poet, and holds a Ph.D. in Education. She lives in Winnipeg.

This collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities, both physical and mental. The women speak frankly about the societal barriers they encounter in their everyday lives due to social attitudes and physical and systemic inaccessibility. They bring to light the discrimination they experience through sexism, because they are women, and through ableism, because they have disabilities. For them, the personal is definitely political.

While society traditionally views having a disability as “weakness” and that women are the “weaker” sex, this collection points to the strength, persistence, and resilience of disabled women living the edges.

A partial contents list, from Disability Research Forum reveals a whole lot of must-read articles:

“Feminism, Disability and Transcendence of the Body” by Susan Wendell

“Living on the Edges” by Charlotte Caron and Gail Christy

“Mirror Woman: Cracked Up Crazy Bitch Conja Identity” by Marie Annharte Baker;

“Margins Are Not For Cowards” by Cheryl Gibson;

“Triple Jeopardy: Native Women with Disabilities” by Doreen Demas

“Coming Out of Two Closets” by Jane Field;

“Performing My Leaky Body” by Julie Devaney

“To Be Or Not to Be? Whose Question Is It, Anyway? Two Women With Disabilities Discuss the Right To Assisted Suicide” by Tanis Doe and Barbara Ladouceu

“Living Poorly: Disabled Women on Income Support” by Sally Kimpson

“‘Have You Experienced Violence or Abuse?’: Talking With Girls and Young Women with Disabilities” by Michelle Owen

“The Geography of Oppression” by Joy Asham

There was an audio interview with Diane Driedger at CBC’s Weekend Morning Show last Sunday, in which Diane speaks of the book and of her experiences with invisible disabilities and workplace accommodations.

My transcript of the Weekend Morning Show interview, titled “Double Jeopardy”, is below the cut. All errors in transcription are mine.

Continue reading New book: Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader

Portly + Powerchair + Pedestrian = Panic

Ow. My head hurts.

And this is why.

Power chairs: older and fatter Americans are on the move – St. Petersburg Times:

“A man on a moped crashed into a man in an electric wheelchair the other night in the middle of Fourth Street. There on the front page of the paper was a police tape picture of one of those objects we see all over. The wheeled mobility industry calls it a power chair.

A what? A “power chair”? Wow, I’ve never heard of one of those before! Whatever could this “power chair” item be? What is it for? Should I be frightened? It’s something to do with teh fat, right? Cos there’s “fatter” up there in the headline.

They’re everywhere, it seems, dotting the downtown streetscape, a kind of ant trail from the condos to the Publix and back.

The temptation is to declare these are the new symbols of this city. Used to be folks sitting on green benches, God’s waiting room and whatnot, and now it’s folks sitting on … these.

Truth is, though, power chairs and mobility scooters are far from just a Florida phenomenon, and mishaps are not unusual.

WHAT? These … contraptions … are in places OTHER THAN FLORIDA too? SOMEbody really did just discover powered mobility devices for the first time. And they’re not happy.

[…] Electric mobility devices, or EMDs, are everywhere because of trends in geriatrics and bariatrics. Those are the portions of the health care industry that deal with old people and fat people.

This is America, getting bigger and older, fatter and grayer, rolling into the future.

[Snip prolooooooonged agonising – they’re not quite motorised vehicles, they’re not quite bipeds, what do we CALL them? How do we TREAT them? The sky is falling!]

They don’t need to be registered, after all, and they don’t have state plates. And what about the people in them? They don’t need a license. Does that make them pedestrians? They’re clearly not using their feet.

[More agonised whining. Did you know that now and again, old people drink alcohol? Shocking, I know.]

State law also says sidewalks are for pedestrians. No motors.

Hmm.

Reeeeally? Are you sure about that State law? Did you, say, look up what “pedestrian” means? Here’s a clue, from a the 2010 Florida Code, TITLE XXIII MOTOR VEHICLES, Chapter 316 STATE UNIFORM TRAFFIC CONTROL , 316.1995 “Driving upon sidewalk or bicycle path”, which I found with a 60-second Google search:

(1) Except as provided in s. 316.008 or s. 316.212(8), a person may not drive any vehicle other than by human power upon a bicycle path, sidewalk, or sidewalk area, except upon a permanent or duly authorized temporary driveway.

(2) A violation of this section is a noncriminal traffic infraction, punishable as a moving violation as provided in chapter 318.

(3) This section does not apply to motorized wheelchairs.

Section 3 is fairly recently clarified, but it’s clear from other law sites that motorized wheelchairs were considered pedestrians by custom before the clarification.

Now that that’s settled, back to the “older and fatter” article:

Continue reading Portly + Powerchair + Pedestrian = Panic

Recommended Reading for 10 December, 2010

Well, if it isn’t Friday again. I suppose it is for you, readers of the future, but I am writing this from Tuesday, in the past! Such is the power of the blog’s scheduling function.

Gentle reader, be cautioned: comments sections on mainstream media sites tend to not be safe and we here at FWD/Forward don’t necessarily endorse all the opinions in these pieces. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

An Actor Finds Truth & Power Negotiating her Vision Loss by Marilee Talkington guest posting at Brains of Minerva.

So I decided I wouldn’t tell the directors or anyone on the casting end that I was visually impaired. Which always felt like a betrayal. And I would show up as early as I needed to to re-write the entire script by hand in large print.  I hadn’t learned how to vocally advocate for myself yet in a way that didn’t feel angry or demanding, so at times I flat out lied. I remember calling an audition hotline once using a different name and asked if someone who was visually impaired could get the script ahead of time to memorize.  I was told that they couldn’t because it would pose an unfair advantage over the other actors.

Why CART in Government? by Martha Galindo at CCAC In Action:

1. Good government leads the way for all its citizens by setting best standards for equality and inclusion.

2. To reduce discriminatory gaps which now still exclude many able citizens (who happen to be deaf, deafened, or have a hearing loss, or who need quality text for many other good reasons) from regular and important government meetings, workshops, rallies, advisory committees, and public input to city, state, or federal bodies.

Lene Anderson at The Seated View: Disability Time

So there I am, sitting in the waiting room a full hour and half before my appointment and although I had a book, I was annoyed, so instead I started thinking about Disability Time. You don’t find it mentioned much in Google in the way it’s used in the disability world, but maybe some day, it’ll make its way into search engines. Disability Time refers to the way in which most things take much longer when you have a disability. There is personal Disability Time, as in it probably takes me double the time to make a cup of hot water in the microwave that it would you and then there is the Disability Time that’s imposed by others and there are a couple of those.

Donna Jodham: Out of sight out of mind

A few months ago I had a meeting with some officials of a financial institute to discuss making more financial planning services available to blind and sight impaired persons and at that time I raised the issue of making information available in alternate formats such as Braille, large print, and electronic text. To my chagrin but not to my surprise, the officials admitted that they had never thought of doing so. I also had a similar meeting with a major supermarket chain in Toronto to discuss making their weekly specials more available to their blind and sight impaired customers either online or through a phone service and again, I was told that this had not been thought of up until now.

Claudia Dreyfus for the New York Times: A conversation with Julian L. Seifter, Nephrologist and Patient. It’s an interesting interview with a physician, Dr. Julian Seifter, who just cowrote a book on living with chronic illness.

Q. Has being a patient helped you be a doctor?
A. I’ve certainly learned things I’ve brought back to the clinic. I have a retinopathy, for instance, which can be a complication of diabetes. I don’t have good vision in my right eye, as a result. When this first happened, I said to my ophthalmologist, “I can’t lose vision. I need to read.” And he said, “Any vision is better than no vision.”
That was important. I started thinking, “Concentrate on things you still can do and develop some new things.” I’ve since started gardening, which doesn’t require the most acute vision. It’s something I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. I counsel my patients to replace what they’ve lost with something new.

Send your links to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com. Let us know if/how you want to be credited. And have yourself a fabulous weekend.

Recommended Reading for 3 December, 2010

Gentle reader, be cautioned: comments sections on mainstream media sites tend to not be safe and we here at FWD/Forward don’t necessarily endorse all the opinions in these pieces. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

It’s Your Fault! by that stunning and mysterious being, Chally, at the Don’t DIS My ABILITY blog:

The thing is, people with a disability need accommodations. Accommodations aren’t optional extras, they aren’t something we can give up if we try a bit harder. Neither are we out to get all the money/spots/benefits at the expense of the rest of the population.

Despite his disability, he wages war on HIV (I know, horrible title) by Chaitra Devarhubli at DNA India:

[Amrut] Desai visits various villages in Gujarat, where he conducts programmes on AIDS and educates villagers regarding the same.

UK: Access All Areas: Disability survey

Some 90% of people surveyed by the BBC believe the government should provide funds to make the workplace accessible for people with disabilities.

But 40% felt disabled people turned down job offers even when they were physically capable of doing them.

Deaf moviegoers sue Cinemark theater chain at the Associated Press (US):

Kevin Knestrick, an attorney for the plaintiffs, says Cinemark Holdings Inc. is the only one of the nation’s three largest movie chains not to offer closed-captioning equipment.

Sierra Leone: Disability Bill might become an Act on Friday by Poindexter Sama at Awoko:

it will institute, upon its enactment, a Disabled Commission, provide free education and vocational training for persons with disabilities at required levels, make provision for free medical care, ensure mobility in public buildings and public transports and a host of other facilities necessary for disabilities in all forms.

Send your links to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com. Let us know if/how you want to be credited.

An open letter to abled people who like to glare at people who use disabled parking spaces

Also see: An open letter to abled people who use disabled parking spaces by Annaham, which this is jumping off from. Since I drafted this, s.e. also wrote Dear Imprudence: Who Appointed You the Parking Police?!

Dear abled people who like to glare at people who use disabled parking spaces,

Hi there. It’s great that you’re so conscious that disabled parking spots are for disabled people! I’m pleased you’re so keen to keep disabled spots for disabled people – after all, that’s the law and the right thing. People who aren’t disabled certainly shouldn’t be using those spots.

However, you know what my problem with what you do is? My problem is when you take your anger out on people who are using those spots legitimately. I don’t know if you glare and shake your head and tut because you don’t notice the disability signs/stickers on the front of the car – or if you think they’re faking their disabilities – or if you think those crummy disabled people simply don’t deserve to hog the best parking spots. I don’t know if you do this because you don’t expect to encounter disabled people out and about, so you think the parking spot user isn’t legit. I don’t know why you’re letting dominant narratives crowd out the person there in front of you.

I’d also like you to keep in mind that some people who need disabled parking spaces are prevented from getting the sticker. The red tape involved can be incredibly difficult to negotiate, especially for someone running on the second shift for the sick. Some people who need stickers fall through the cracks formed by the “we need to tighten restrictions because of the tiny number of fakers!” meme.

Just keep in mind that, just as there are a lot of people out there who use disabled parking illegitimately, there are also a lot of people who make life harder for people who are using the parking legitimately.

Don’t be one of them.

Sincerely,

Chally

Accessing Sexual Health Part One: Barriers To Getting There

I gave a bit of a talk recently on what I viewed as the barriers to sexual health and education for people with disabilities, discovering that I have a lot of thoughts about the barriers not only to sexual health but to all levels of health care when one is disabled. These can vary from the difficulties in making appointments to waiting rooms where people who use wheelchairs are told to wait in the hallway.

Sexual health is something that weighs quite heavily on my mind. As we’ve highlighted here (and many other bloggers have highlighted elsewhere), people with disabilities, especially women, are vulnerable to sexual abuse.

Over the next few posts (the other two will be available next week), I wanted to highlight some the barriers I perceive in people with disabilities in getting access to sexual health-related care, and I encourage people of any gender, should they wish, to detail out their own struggles or successes in receiving sexual health care. I would remind commenters, though, that people do search and read comments, and if they wish to give their stories anonymously, that’s perfectly acceptable.

The two things I want to highlight today are getting an appointment, and getting into an appointment.

Over the past couple of months it’s been brought intimately home to me how difficult it can be to get a doctor’s appointment for any reason if you can’t use the phone. I’ve been unable to hear very well due to an ongoing ear infection, and Don has a frozen vocal cord, meaning he cannot speak much above a whisper. Trying to book an appointment to get my ear checked has been an effort in frustration: neither my GP nor the ENT clinic I was referred to have any indication of a way to book an appointment that doesn’t involve using the phone.

When I worked in Health Care I did receive relay calls. For those not familiar, d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing people can use relay calls where they use a TTY phone. They contact the relay center via TTY, and the relay center calls the person you wish to speak to. My understanding is that you then type what you want to say, and the relay operator repeats it to the person who you are talking to. They then type up everything the other person says. (The speaking person says “go ahead” when they want the text-part sent.)

[Interestingly, I only learned how to take Relay Calls when I worked in a call center for a major wireless company in the US. No one when I worked in health care discussed Relay Calls or how to handle them, although in my experience the operators were very kind and forthcoming with that information.]

However, phone issues are not limited in any way to people who may be able to take advantage of Relay Calls. Relay Calls are not appropriate for Don’s needs as someone with a frozen vocal cord, for one example. There are also people with audio processing disorders, people who have phone anxiety issues that make using the phone difficult, if not impossible. There are people whose phone-related issues are temporary rather than permanent and thus they don’t have the equipment available to take advantage of something like Relay Calls. These sorts of barriers to accessing health services, especially sexual health services, can cause people to just give up on the whole enterprise.

One solution to this would be for sexual health clinics and doctors offices to consider making people aware of alternative means of contacting them for appointments, be this via email or fax or even an online appointment booking service. While I have no doubt that these are available currently, I have never seen these services advertised. Certainly when trying to book my ear appointments I would have loved to have done it via email, since I couldn’t hear, which made making the appointment difficult.

Another seemingly simple problem that can be a barrier not only to any health service, but any building at all, is the dreaded Wheelchair Lift.

I mean, let’s pretend that every building you’d want to go to for health services was specifically wheelchair accessible (Note: This is not as true as one might imagine.) In many cases, this will mean a wheelchair lift has been added to one of the stairwells.

As many people who use wheelchairs can tell you, wheelchair access is often “in the back”. This can mean that you need to call ahead to let them know that you’ll be there in five or ten minutes and could someone be troubled to let you in? These doors are not always cleared of snow. The one for one of the buildings that Don’s had to enter doesn’t have a full sidewalk going up to it, so he has to deal with mud when it rains. It rains a lot in Halifax.

However, wheelchair lifts, bless them, do not really help a lot of people with other mobility-related disabilities. You can’t use a wheelchair lift if you use a cane. You can’t use it if you use a walker. Occasionally people in these situations will be allowed to use a chair and sit on it while the lift takes them up the flight of stairs, but this is not always something people are willing to do.

Again, these are physical barriers that prevent people with disabilities from accessing health services. They’re not deliberate, but they have long-term consequences that are easy to forget.

In praise of speech-to-text software

One thing that has helped me quite a bit as a blogger, writer, grad student and person with chronic pain subject to flare-ups has been speech-to-text software. The basic idea is fairly self-evident: You install the software, plug in the headset that comes with it, open up the word processing program of your choice, and start talking.

Repetitive motion is one of those things that can be the bane of one’s existence if that person happens to have chronic pain issues; while there are people who might say, Oh, typing at a computer can’t be that painful or Just work through the pain or some other ridiculous piece of “advice,” typing can, at times, be enormously painful or draining for some folks with pain issues. No matter how much one may want to complete a piece, post or assignment, sometimes it just will not happen due to pain. When it feels like your hands are encased in cement blocks, there is no “working through the pain.” Having your hands and wrists feel like they have been set on fire by pain when you are on a deadline — like a lot of circumstances surrounding pain flares — can be excruciating. It’s kind of like having your hands and wrists feel like the Human Torch, but without any of the cool superpowers.

With speech-to-text, the additional pain brought on by repetitive typing is significantly reduced, as it takes at least some of the typing (but not editing, as I will address below) out of the equation. There are some additional issues to consider, however: one is “fibro fog,” the name given to some of the cognitive effects of a fibromyalgia flare, which can, for the person experiencing the flare, make it difficult to put thoughts, words and sentences together with anything resembling coherency. This is more of a condition issue than one that has to do with typing, but it’s fairly obvious as to how fibro-fog could impact the use of text-to-speech: if your thoughts are jumbled because of pain and fatigue, it’s likely that they will be just as jumbled regardless of whether you are typing or speaking into a text-to-speech headset. I’m fairly lucky with fibro-fog myself, as it tends to be rather mild unless I am experiencing a pain flare that feels closer to acute pain than chronic, but typing is one of those processes that can seem bizarrely confusing during a massive pain flare-up (and the whole “simple things as confusing” side effect is damn near impossible to truly understand unless you’ve been through it).

Of course, there are some aspects of text-to-speech software that are less than perfect: similar to the iPhone’s auto-correct feature (some of the amazing slip-ups of which have been documented by websites such as Damn You Autocorrect),  speech-to-text software can “read” one spoken word or phrase as something else entirely, sometimes producing hilarious (or irritating) fragments that often make no sense within the context of what you are actually writing. My personal favorite thus far has been my speech-to-text program “translating” Judith Butler as Judas butt lark, which made me wonder if I need to work on my pronunciation skills if only for the convenience of my software program.

There is also the cost issue: many speech-to-text software programs are expensive. In a utopia, everyone who could benefit from text-to-speech programs would have a reliable and fairly-priced one ready for use. I’m one of those weirdos who thinks that accessible technology should not be something available only to those who can afford to pay for it, but that, unfortunately, is most likely a long time coming.

Recommended Reading for 25 November, 2010

Gentle reader, be cautioned: comments sections on mainstream media sites tend to not be safe and we here at FWD/Forward don’t necessarily endorse all the opinions in these pieces. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

disability is a feminist issue by Wheelchair Dancer:

This conversation is an icon in the difficult relations of disability and feminism.

Study: Too Many Fat Women Don’t Even Know They’re Fat by Cara at The Curvature:

Trying to define and impose your definition of normal on other people — whether it be in relation to gender, sexuality, physical ability, neurological workings, weight, or some other category entirely, is alienating, damaging, and oppressive. There’s no way that defining people in opposition to “normal” and telling them that they must become normal for their own good is not harmful.

Access and Academia, Again by Liz at Dis/Embody:

Though it’s lamentable that this is necessary, twenty years after the ADA, these cases are exactly the kind of potentially broad-ranging challenges that could strengthen the civil rights protections of the ADA and the accessibility processes used in US institutes of higher education.

Boy With Disability Unable To Leave Apartment by Katie E. at Women’s Glib:

Denial of accessibility is a widespread issue for people with disabilities. Jaime’s education and right to leave his apartment is seen as trivial to the leasing office, but it is very, very important. Why should he be treated as a second-class citizen? Why don’t all people have a right to education?

In a first, Census 2011 to mark people with multiple disability by Surbhi Khyati at The Indian Express:

For the first time in India, people with multiple disability will be a part of Census 2011. The census will not only include the number of people in each disabled category but also recognise diseases like dyslexia and autism as forms of disability.

That’s all for this time. Send your links to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com. Let us know if/how you want to be credited.