As a person who is blind or has low vision, I’ve never considered it my right to use the designated disabled toilet. I’ve always thought of them as amenities for people who use wheel chairs, walking frames, walking sticks, crutches, or maybe an ambulant adult with children who aren’t yet at an age to be unsupervised in public restrooms, and their isn’t a designated parent’s room around. As a cane user myself, I confess that until recently I hadn’t considered just how essential disabled toilets also are for people who use guide dogs to navigate the environment. Could you imagine trying to fit thirty kilos of blond Labrador at your feet in one of those tiny, awkward to manage, let alone move in cubicles that are so often found in public areas? It’s not exactly an equitable or dignified prospect. After all, a dog isn’t the same as a white mobility cane. A girl can’t just fold it up and put […]
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Social Equity Is No Trip To The Park
Social equity is more than a theory. Exclusion comes in many forms: an interactive shopping centre map, a multi service lift access point, a self service appointment check-in desk. What do they all have in common you ask? Well, apart from usually being flat and indistinguishable touch screen devices of course, most of the time they do not have a text to speech provision built in, let alone activated for people who are blind or have low vision to utilise. Therefore, they decrease our sense of social equity just a little more with each encounter. However, it isn’t just the prevalence of technology as a wayfinding tool that invalidates my very presence in society as I attempt to navigate the built environment. In this case, it is the lack of a simple zebra crossing at a very busy intersection on the way to our local park. A park that has recently been upgraded, complete with full fencing, well thought out skill […]
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The Odyssey. A Journey Home
I’m not sure I can do this, I think with increasing certainty as I hover in the blustery blackness, silently suspended between moments. It’s as if I’m frozen, but the rest of the world keeps moving around me. I wonder where I am. I know my home is just over there. Just over there being less than fifty metres away, but it may as well be as far as the moon. Here between one second and the next, I don’t know where the footpath ends, and the road begins. I listen for the space, which means the park is on my left, and just ahead. I listen for the wind rustling the autumn leaves. I listen for the car tires slowing down as they slide through the roundabout in the middle distance. I listen for the unmistakable thud of the units beside me. I listen for the gap between buildings. I listen for the sharpness where I know a spindly tree […]
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