ACCESS DENIED

Daily obstacle course makes life exhausting

CONSIDER the top causes of disability. You’re thinking cancer, spinal injury, old age, maybe limb loss aren’t you? You’d be wrong.

The top causes of disability are a lack of access and a lack of funds to pay for the extra costs incurred to live as a disabled person.

If you’re not disabled, your day might look like this: get out of bed, hop in the shower, dry off, get dressed, get the kids ready for school, make coffee, hop in the car, drive to work.

After you get on with your job, you may pop out for lunch, have a quick look round the shops, go to another venue for a meeting via public transport, hop in the car again, pick up the kids, run them to after-school clubs, maybe grab a quick gym or swim session, pick everyone up, go home, prep dinner, eat, go to bed.

Now let’s look at that same day for a disabled person. You may need help to get out of bed, wash, dry, and dress. Your kids may need extra support to do those things.

You may be on a very long list for accessible housing, so you can’t get round your home as it has dangerous steps in the wrong places, or maybe it’s too narrow for both furniture and a wheelchair.

Your kitchen might be the wrong height for you, and you might struggle to prepare food in it, or move around in it, or have to resort to using only ready meals – more expensive, but easier to eat.

You might need to fork out a lot more on electricity because you need to do a lot more laundry, or run 24-hour lifesaving apparatus, or charge powerchairs or mobility scooters. You might need the thermostat set to tropical all year round because living in constant pain or with breathing difficulties means you can’t live in a cold house, even if it’s hugely expensive.

Barriers to getting on with things everywhere, and we’ve not even got out the door yet.

So consider further how it affects the rest of the day.

WORK

Just over half of us are employed. Whereas four-fifths of nondisabled people have jobs.

This is because not all of us can work and, where we can, employers are often reluctant to give us jobs because they think we might be a burden on the business, take loads of sick leave, or demand lots of changes to how things are done that will put other people’s noses out of joint.

Research by the TUC in 2019 found there’s no evidence to suggest any of this is true.

In fact the opposite is frequently the case – disabled people often take less sick leave than necessary because we are fully aware that we are often being watched.

Businesses often fail to see that we can be huge assets – we are often excellent strategic thinkers and problem solvers because we have to be to navigate the complexity of our daily lives.

And we bring with us the experience of being part of the largest minority, or in business speak minority market demographic, in Britain.

There are 14.1 million of us. Or perhaps you have a job, but the building is not fully accessible.

You have to dial in to meetings in your own building because you can’t get up the stairs.

EATING OUT

For lunch, you try to go to the local cafe but the pavements are blocked with al fresco dining tables, and menu A-boards, and you can’t go into the road because it’s too dangerous.

Paving slabs are missing, causing you to trip over, or tip your mobility scooter over, and drop kerbs are blocked by inconsiderate drivers.

When you do get to the cafe you can’t get over the threshold because the door is too heavy and because of the step. You can’t read the menu because the writing is tiny.

The food doesn’t accommodate your intolerances, or the proprietor won’t blend it for you because you struggle with solids and he thinks it makes his meal less appetising.

You need to drink from a straw – metal straws risk knocking a tooth out, and paper ones get mashed up quickly in your mouth, but they have stopped all plastic straws because of the environment. You need an adapted cup and cutlery, but you’ve never ever found these to use when out and about.

SHOPPING

You try to dip into a shop, but you cannot open the heavy doors, there’s a lip at the bottom of the door frame which trips you, or you can’t quite get your wheelchair over it.

They’ve changed the layout from last week and it’s overwhelming because you have sensory issues. The super-bright lights and tinny pop music aren’t helping with the sensory overwhelm either.

You bump into a mannequin they have put in the middle of the aisle because you can’t see it and didn’t know it was there.

You fail to get your mobility scooter round the ends of the aisles because they’ve added a pair of pallets piled high with impulse purchases, creating a pinch point.

And you loved that top in the window, but you can’t get to it as every time you wheel your wheelchair between the rails of clothes, they are positioned so close together, you either end up wearing half of everything on the hangers or the toddler in the buggy opposite thinks you’re playing hide and seek when in fact you are well and truly stuck.

TRANSPORT

You might need an adapted car, or you can’t drive at all and need to use taxis because public transport is unreliable or inaccessible. You can’t access public transport to hop across town for that meeting – the train station has a stair bridge and you can’t reach your platform.

Or the platform lacks tactile paving, so you risk falling on to the tracks as you can’t see the edge. You can’t take the bus because despite the law saying wheelchair users have a priority space on the bus, the driver refuses to move a buggy in the space.

Or maybe he won’t put the ramp down because you can walk and don’t look disabled enough for him to bother helping.

SOLUTIONS

Are you exhausted reading all that? We’re definitely exhausted living it.

Disabled people have a way of describing what we need. It’s called the Social Model of Disability.

In essence, it says it’s not us, nor our impairments that really cause us to be disabled and stop us from living our lives with the same degree of equality as non-disabled people, it’s the lack of adaptations around us.

We need people who create and run businesses, leisure facilities, shared spaces, schools, housing and transport to understand they can make changes, physically and in terms of their attitudes, which allow far, far greater access for everyone.

And if they think that making changes is a major headache that will only change things for a few people, it’s worth remembering that a fifth of the population is disabled.

Unless someone has the dubious fortune of dying young, they’re not able-bodied – they’re pre-disabled.

That’s the kicker – it might not be you affected today, but if you’re lucky, it will almost certainly be you one day.

And if you are wondering what we need when you come across us in day-to-day life, there’s a really simple thing you can do to find out. Ask.

Don’t ask us about our impairments, that’s a bit rude. Do ask us if we need any adaptations to make things around us work for us. Then work with us to make the changes.

■ The National Register of Access Consultants (nrac.org.uk) lists qualified accessibility consultants. The Government’s Access to Work scheme (gov.uk/access-to-work) helps firms adapt workplaces, this can be free depending on their size.