Bonfire of the Accessibilities

Oh god, I've been poking at Jacob Rees-Mogg's 'dashboard' of Retained EU Legislation which is on some woowoo 'visualization' tool called Tableau Public, or possibly Public Tableau, it can't seem to decide.  This is the set of several thousand pieces of EU legislation still in force in the UK that our new Glorious Leaderene* is proposing to consign to a bonfire by the end of 2023 - and if she leaves Rees-Mogg in charge it'll be an auto-da-fe, not a bonfire. Rees-Mogg, often called the Minister for the 17th Century, clearly missed his calling, he'd have been completely at home in the Spanish Inquisition.

So anyway, this 'dashboard' has a search function that only does exact matches and doesn't allow combined search terms. In 2022? I have games I bought in beta that have better search functionality. Which effectively means you can only find which retained EU laws affect disability if you actually know exactly what they're called already, and if you don't know they're out there, you're stuffed. Just searching for 'disability' got me four matches, two about copyright and two about where benefits can be paid. So that's bugger all use if you want to poke it for a list of every retained law related to disability rights and accessibility.

I was doing this poking because I knew from the Civil Aviation Authority's website that EC 1107/2006, the PRM** legislation that covers disabled people's right to fly on the same terms and conditions as non-disabled folk, plus passenger assistance, plus compensation etc is retained legislation and therefore up for replacement/burning at the stake, and wondered if the same was true for the rest of public transport. At least EC 1300/2014 the PRM-TSI legislation that does the same thing as EC 1107/2006 for trains is listed as replaced by the EU Withdrawal Act (but if they replaced the trains legislation, why not the planes?), but mindbogglingly the other set of trains accessibility legislation (EC 1371/2007) wasn't replaced at the same time and is still retained legislation.

On top of the whole set of conceptual idiocy that makes up Brexit, I'm beginning to think the whole thing is an utter shambles at the detail level.

As Rees-Mog was virulently opposed to reasonable adjustments in Parliament during Covid, the idea of our accessibility rights in his hands sends a cold shudder down my spine.

And if that thing is accessible to people with visual impairments I'll eat my wheelchair cushion (lots of 'hover the cursor over the visualization for further information')

* God, I haven't used that one in thirty years

** Passengers with Reduced Mobility

Couldn't make it up

Transport for London are relatively good at tweeting when the lifts at Tube Stations are out of action, making them inaccessible to those of us who need step-free access. Someone noticed that those tweets are oddly consistent with shift changes...

After being duly poked, TfL admitted it's mostly not the lifts going out of action, it's that if there's no one available to man the tube station due to staff shortages, they declare the lift out of action. Their logic is that if the lift breaks down people might get stuck and they can get them out quicker if someone's there.

So effectively their solution to someone potentially getting stuck in the lift is to make sure everyone is definitely stuck at the lift doors instead. *headdesk*

(There's a definite undertone of 1960s 'disableds aren't safe to operate the lift on their own' thinking here)