I completed the government Disability Unit's disability survey last night. This is supposed to be used to inform the government's new disability strategy, which they've been promising for several years. If the survey is any indication, then the strategy will be able to be summed up in five words: "I really can't be arsed". (This is pretty much the current strategy). It was so badly written and designed I ended up live-tweeting my progress, which adds up to a couple of pages worth of post.

The survey is here if you're interested, and is open to non-disabled people as well as disabled: https://t.co/KhfMnXVwul 

(Accessibility to any Tom, Dick, or non-disabled Harriet may be a problem, depending on how they analyse the results).

I had a bad feeling as soon as I hit questions 2 and 3. Is it just me, or is thus simultaneously both the clumsiest formulation possible and borderline offensive in equating sex and gender? (And having googled it, it's not entirely consistent with the official government position on sex and gender as that does distinguish between them).

It then goes into a set of questions trying to determine if you're disabled/carer/parent/interested non-disabled. This is so well organised I had a former director at the Equality and Human Rights Commission asking me if I could figure out what it was after.

And in general trying to figure out what quite a few questions were after was so difficult I was seriously tempted to go find the Easy Read versions, which do at least exist, so see if they would shed any light on the meaning.

And this could make a real difference in some of the questions, such as the one asking how many times you've met other people in the last week (which should clearly have been 'typical week' even before lockdown). Whether that's face to face or virtually makes a major difference when you're trying to understand the physical isolation of disabled people.

And if you followed the precise English meaning of the options, there was no option for meeting people once or twice, as the options were 'Less than 1 or 2', '3 to 5', '4 to 7' and so on. If the author had this much trouble with written English then I dread to think what the Easy Read is like if they did that too.

Quite a few of the questions were covertly politically loaded, such as ""To what extent do you agree with the statement “I have enough close friends/family that I can depend on to get the support I need”? The answer clearly varies with whether you agree with depending on friends/family, or think the state should provide that support.

While other questions framed discrimination issues as our problem, for instance:

"50 Have concerns about other people's views of you ever stopped you from seeking {several things}"

Notice how it's worded as your perception being the issue, not the views of others.

Significant parts of the survey are presented depending on your answers to previous questions, more on why this is a problem in a moment, but first

"35. You said you would like more contact. Have any of the below made it more difficult to make more contact? (Select up to 3) "

Which then gives 14 options including 'Other', none of them are "inaccessibility of the built environment" or similar. The closest they get to it are toilets or transport. Obviously I put it in as my 'Other' answer, but this is a major omission, the biggest problem I face getting around Rochester are the footpaths* (they overwhelmingly have a camber greater than national guidelines, so steering in a straight line means pushing the downhill wheel, while braking the uphill one, this is less than efficient), and footpaths and cobbles are neither transport nor toilets. 

* Well, the footpaths and not being able to get through the front doors of 50% of the shops.

And here's that 'intelligent' selecting of the questions based on your answers:

"38. Does anyone help or support you with your care needs? "

"44. What do you consider to be the main reason it was difficult to pay your usual living expenses?"

No, I haven't missed something, q44 directly follows q38 if you answer "none", yet clearly depends on a skipped question

If I change my answer to q38, it opens up q39-42, which relate to it, and also :

"43. How do you find paying for your usual living expenses (this includes extra medical necessities)? "

which is clearly a prerequisite for understanding q44

And then it gets worse:

"47. Are you currently employed?"

Answer you're not currently seeking employment, and it skips the entire employment section. So if you've been driven out of the workforce by disability discrimination, then @DisabilityGovUK doesn't want to know.

If you say you're not currently working, there's no way to access q49, which is about workplace disability discrimination, which is precisely why many disabled people aren't working. If you say you are, there's no way to answer q48 on disability discrimination in recruitment, the other reason. The only way to answer all the employment questions is to keep going back to q47, which it does at least allow, and change your answer until you've worked through all of the options, and then finally change it back to the actual answer you want. (And of course it may then strip out all the answers that don't fit your final choice, but what more can you do?

"Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are complete? "

What does that even mean?

And it's meant to inform a long term strategy, yet the free text question on Covid issues offers 250 words, while the long term strategy questions offer 100 words.

Well, I guess we know just how far into the gutter the Trump Camp is willing to sink.

Ady Barkan, who speaks with a speech synthesizer, interviewed Joe Biden, and someone on 2nd ranking House Republican Steve Scalize's team reworded the clip using the same synthesized voice so Barkan appears to ask Biden to defund the police, and Biden then agrees, which Scalize then tweeted out.

Twitter labelled the tweet a fake and Barkan called on Scalize to delete it, which Scalize has now done, but in such a way that it appears there was nothing wrong with it. Meanwhile a spokesman for Scalize has defended it to the Washington Post as just normal cutting to the essence of the clip, which - whoops - confirms it was done in his office.

It takes real talent to outdo Trump on being openly ableist, but Scalize seems to not just have managed it, but to take pleasure in it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/31/ady-barkan-steve-scalise-doctored-video-disability-biden

A friend has an article in the Church Times, mostly on the research that went towards their PhD on the church* and how it can be poor at adapting to the disability of churchgoers, but leavened with a little bit of post-PhD "well, we're in a pandemic now, maybe what we have to say on access is worth listening to".

Disabled People Say Welcome to Our World

Check out @JoeBiden on #inclusive #education. Thanks for sharing this video with us, Samuel. Let us know if other candidates are talking about these critical issues. #CripTheVote #PwDsVote #RevUp #VoteDisability #RespectAbility #NHPolitics pic.twitter.com/iKjRvunSWU

— Disability Rights Center New Hampshire (@DRCNH) January 31, 2020

Text Description: A young man in a powerchair, using a communication device, and wearing a teeshirt saying "Without communication there is no freedom", approaches Joe Biden with a question on how he'll support inclusive education after identifying himself as a college student. Biden responds saying he'll fund ADA and that all his classes should be accessible (as far as I can tell he implied they were) and then tells him "You're smart, you're smart, you're smart. The disability does not define who you are. It doesn't define who you are.' while reaching in to stroke his face, adding "So proud of you. Presumptuous of me to be proud of you, but I am". Basically a masterclass in how not to respond to any disabled person.

I hadn't really noticed the repetition - too busy cringing - until I sat down to write the text description, but it's almost as infantilising as stroking his face, as though he can't believe any disabled person might be able to understand him first time.

Just been looking at a government disability scheme that has 27 pages of guidance on how to lay out its logo on the page, and no guidance whatsoever on what you should have done to consider yourself entitled to display the logo.

*headdesk*

The Tories, having made an utter, and completely deliberate, hash of the ESA and PIP disability benefits, are now proposing assessing both with a single assessment. Because merging everything else into Universal Credit's single assessment regime has worked so well. The idea is ridiculous, people apply for PIP when their disability makes them eligible, they apply for ESA when they are disabled and lose their job, the two things don't happen at the same time, but Tories....

To give some idea of the cross-over (or not), you get PIP for things like not being able to dress yourself or cook without help, or being able to walk less than 20m, whereas ESA can be taken away from you if the assessor imagines your problems with finding work would be solved by using a wheelchair which you don't have and which Wheelchair Services are refusing to give you. Yes, ESA assessments really do involve imaginary wheelchairs....

The best analogy I can think of is having a single test for both your driving and HGV licenses, and failing the driving test if the examiner doesn't thing you'd do well behind the wheel of a 50 tonne artic.

Nicolette Barischoff just announced on Twitter that the deadline for pitching Personal Essays to Disabled People Destroy SF (see previous post) is tomorrow.

So if you were thinking of pitching, now's the time.

Autism Women's Network: Disability Doesn't Come With Extra Time and Energy

What's missing from the discussion is that disabled people work harder because of the fear of losing their job, and the difficulty of finding one, in the face of workplace disablism. So when people misinterpret it as some positive, that's three separate layers of disablism being compounded into one positive.

First the idea that disabled people aren't as able, which is an aspect of workplace disability discrimination (and wider social discrimination). This is grows out of the (illegal) demand we all be identical cogs in the production machine. It's based on a presumption of incompetence and defending the right of employers to that view.

Worth determined by job? An identical cog in the machine? Disabled people worth less? A refusal to challenge workplace disability discrimination?

We've misread the whole discussion.These aren't the views of concerned parents. they're the views of hardline Tories.

** I wouldn't normally make a point based on class privilege, but in this case I think it's central to the discussion - Monckton can afford for her daughter to be paid less, that's not necessarily true of families or individual disabled people in more straitened circumstances.

Beyond my part in the Spartacus Network response to the Work and Health Green Paper, I wanted to do a personal response as I take a slightly different view of the Disability Employment Gap that Work and Health is supposed to challenge and think it's much more to do with employer/recruiter disability discrimination and tacit government acceptance of the same/reluctance to display employers in a bad light.

I'd set today aside to do that, as submissions have to be in before 11:45PM (and dyspraxic, so bad with deadlines and planning), so of course today was the day I crashed and burned and slept all day because of cumulative fatigue.

The consultation had 46 questions, I managed to answer about 30 of them between waking up and remembering and 11:30PM rolling around which was when I pressed submit (just in time, it wasn't exactly quick to respond).

Which means I couldn't thoroughly respond to Work and Health because it was too much work for my health....

*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*