David Gillon

Twice 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*

So an environmentalist group called Replanet has decided the Ukraine war is the perfect opportunity for advancing their agenda (I have some doubts about their ethics here) and has put out a report advocating #SwitchOffPutin (or #switchoffputin as they had it because they're completely unaware Camel Case is better for accessibility*).

Their plan calls for cutting European dependence on Russian fuel immediately by banning intra-European flights**, switching on all the mothballed nuke plants, limiting all households to a fixed amount of gas usage, and banning cars from city centres.

You can probably imagined I immediately spotted a problem with the last two from the disability standpoint. For the first one with disabled people in general having higher energy usage, especially in Northern European countries, and with some disabled people being absolutely dependent on having their house at a fixed temperature because they can't thermoregulate, and for the second one because it assumes public transport is 1) accessible and 2) can get you close enough to your destination, which is optimistic even in the most access-friendly European cities because for some disabled people close enough to your destination is going to be within 100m, while if it's up a hill and you can't park outside, forget it.

So I tweeted, and I got a response, which was basically "Whoops, good point. This is an emergency, we hoped governments would regulate and make exceptions, just like with Covid***"

Me: So why doesn't your report say that? It would only need a sentence. You forgot about us didn't you?

Them: You're very passionate, why not join us as a volunteer and make sure our next report has a clue about disability

Me: Bugger off, I'm not doing your accessibility audits for free.

* I admit I needed reminding, I tend to do Camel Case more often than not, but do forget when I'm annoyed

** You can tell here that it's an environmental agenda rather than an anti-Putin agenda because it took me 30 seconds to confirm from multiple sources that European AvGas consumption is mainly fueled from the Middle East and India.

*** Another disabled person hopped in on that, pointing out the Covid regs often threw disabled people to the wolves, or were deliberately mis-used to limit access (they're from York, which used the Covid regs to ban disabled parking in the city centre).