Aargh Ableds* *headdesk*
Jun. 14th, 2022 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidgillonTwice in five minutes twitter has had me not just *facepalm*ing, but full-on head-in-hands over abled attitudes to disability access.
First up were a bunch of pedestrianisation/sustainable transportation advocates arguing public transport meant no one needed cars. Someone had already made a point about public transport not meeting their needs that was probably disability related, so I pointed out mass transport fails as an access solution for disabled people because it doesn't address the mobility barriers between stop and destination. Not the built environment, but the physical environment of how far is it and how steep is the slope that determine accessibility if you have very limited ambulant mobility or are a wheelchair user. Not only did I get a general denial that it's an issue, but I had someone arguing that the solution to disability access was e-scooters (I really, really, really wish I was kidding).
And I just read the twitter profile of the main guy (not e-scooter guy), and he's not some random green, he's a senior transportation specialist at the World Bank. FFS!
Then I noticed a thread about the latest edition of the 'D&D Combat Wheelchair' rules. Yes, it's a thing, there are even figures available, and it's a thing that an ungodly number of ableds seem to find threatening in some way. So threatening that someone has actually spent several hours drawing an annoyingly well illustrated cartoon with character 1, in wooden wheelchair saying "Thank god, an accessible dungeon", and character 2 promptly magicking them them into an abled. So the first post in the thread was "Hey, new version is now out," and the second was the cartoon. After which it degenerated into D&D nerds who don't get the point saying but what about Spell X, and people who don't just get the point but know rather more about disability and why the D&D spells are a very limited solution. But seriously, what kind of a abled arsehole posts that cartoon as an immediate response?
Aargh, Ableds*
* Obviously not all ableds, but far too many of them.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-14 05:34 pm (UTC)Not to mention that buses without wheelchair restraints aren't safe for wheelchair users
a bus took a corner
and my 150kg powerchair and myself were flung across the bus aisle
and I landed on my left side with 150kg of powerchair on top of me
10 years later I still have major pain issues with my left hip...
Oh, and the bay I was flung into was fortunately empty, but most of the time there would have been a pram/stroller in the bay I was flung into, so a baby could easily have been killed
I made a claim for compensation and it was determined that the bus driver was *driving normally* eg, the bus would have been unsafe for any power wheelchair user under any bus driver...
no subject
Date: 2022-06-14 06:02 pm (UTC)I very nearly went over backwards on the train on Thursday when there was a sudden jolt as it pulled away from a station - the instructions do say to park with back of chair against the partition, but if you do that you can't reach the table in front of you. I had to make a quick grab at the table to stop myself.
There was a lad with a large powerchair opposite and if he came my way there'd have been no chance of me stopping him.
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Date: 2022-06-14 06:15 pm (UTC)He kept making divide and conquer points about cars not being available to all disabled people, and cars themselves being in some way "discriminatory". I finally realised he was either ignoring, or ignorant of, one of the fundamental principles of disability law, that equality doesn't come from equal treatment, but from equal outcomes. So if disabled people need cars for equal access, that's equality, not discrimination, in action.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-14 06:37 pm (UTC)I am very grateful that the YIMBY/urbanist/anti-car folks I follow are adamant at shouting down the "no cars are ever needed" and the "look at this cool building we could make if we ignored elevator code" people, but there's an infuriating number of the shitty ones in a movement I care passionately about.
Bikes are awesome! Cities should design with bikes as first principles, not cars, 100%! And I still can't ride a bike, you utter numpties! Or a scooter, ffs. (Even leaving aside how much "it's great to bike in Amsterdam" doesn't necessarily translate to biking being a viable alternative in Los Angeles during fire season, or to Madrid in August, or to any of the myriad places with a more extreme rainy season.)
(On the other side you have people defending self-driving cars running unregulated through US cities as "important for accessibility," and, like, yeah. But. None of you people give a shit about accessibility, which is pretty clear from the rest of your lives; none of the self-driving cars being proposed is a wheelchair-accessible van; Elon would happily eugenicsize us all into space if he could; and in the long time period between "today" and "100% self-driving cars that people who can't drive at all can use", it would help if you assholes stopped doing everything you can to destroy accessible public transit.)
ETA: re my userpic: do you think those are people who don't know that wheelchair fencing is a paralympic sport for amazing athletes? because fuck anyone who likes swordfighting of any kind and doesn't think wheelchair fencing is the bomb.
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Date: 2022-06-15 05:22 am (UTC)You might want to look into Starship for a more reasonable 'autonomous vehicle' implementation. Think a fleet of smallish insulated food carriers tootling about a campus. It at least means they are mapping where the things get stumped.
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Date: 2022-06-15 01:42 pm (UTC)Cars and taxis address that need, and autonomous vehicles would be just as applicable, but they do depend on there still being roads to drive them on!
The core problem is people assuming that wheelchairs can go everywhere they walk, and that all non-wheelchair users can walk a few hundred metres and that's just not the case.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 01:54 pm (UTC)It's pretty clear that some of the people talking about accessible cities, including some of the sustainable transport/cities think tanks, don't actually mean accessible to disabled people, they've just appropriated the term to mean easy for the ableds to get around (cf the one that measures city accessibility by how easy it is for a toddler to get around - those non-disabled mini humans who come with an attached adult to lift them up steps or read the labels on the lift buttons - yeah, that's really relevant to accessibility issues).
Autonomous vehicles are almost a completely separate issue, you could stick the technology on a WAV, you could probably even design a better WAV because no need for a driver's position in the first place, but they're no more relevant to disabled access than non-autonomous vehicles.
And wheelchair fencing is awesome, and far higher energy than people who haven't seen it would imagine = when they're lunging so hard they start bouncing the track across the stage...
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Date: 2022-06-15 08:13 pm (UTC)Yes, this. My mobility varies and I want a range of eco-friendly options compatible with different levels of disability on different days, and I'm only one person. I wish certain sustainable transport people would stop giving the rest a bad name.
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Date: 2022-06-15 01:03 am (UTC)What the fuck?
[edit] I am not asking for an exegesis of the cartoon, just expressing an opinion on the person who considers it an appropriate response.
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Date: 2022-06-15 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-16 03:51 am (UTC)