Have you ever considered that people in wheelchairs can’t easily access the beach?
In Greece, they’ve solved the problem for many by installing solar-powered Seatrac Bathing Chairs in 200 beaches. A Greek invention, they allow people who are unable to walk unassisted to “drive” to the sea using remote control. The chairs glide into the water and allow the user to sit in the water or swim before manoeuvring back into the chair and gliding up the beach.
It’s both dignified and fun.
One in six Australians, or 4.6 million people, are living with a disability. This includes 450,000 people who are blind or have low vision, more than 30,000 with muscular sclerosis, more than 40,000 with muscular dystrophy and 34,000 with cerebral palsy.
Not all disabilities are visible. About 30-40 per cent of Australians have some kind of neurodiversity, including people on the autism spectrum and with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder).
Another 5.5 million people have a long-term health condition. Sixty per cent of all those with a disability need help with at least one core activity. Indigenous adults experience disabilities at 2.7 times that of the non-Indigenous population. A huge 50 per cent of people 65 and over have some sort of disability, starting with common things such as restricted mobility from back pain or an operation.
If you add to these numbers the 2.65 million carers in Australia, of which 861,800 are primary caregivers (2018 figures), the people that disability touches are of all ages and come from every part of society.
And yet, somehow, both physical and neurological disabilities and the ever-increasing circles of people they affect is considered something apart from normal life.
People with disabilities travel to work, go on holidays, take planes to visit family members. Blind people climb mountains, play cricket, enter powerlifting competitions in the Paralympics.
You can’t say that determination to travel is lacking in people with physical difficulties. Unfortunately, it seems that bureaucracy and unconscious discrimination are the greatest hurdles to them going anywhere.
Consider the way mobility aids, such as wheelchairs, walking frames and walking sticks, are treated. They’re demonised, satirised and looked upon as a nuisance. How many people, when disembarking a plane, get annoyed that their escape is being delayed by someone needing assistance to get into a wheelchair?
And then there are the jokes about cruises being full of passengers on walking frames? We need to recognise how great it is that a physically incapacitated person can see the world from a ship deck. Walking frames, walking sticks and wheelchairs are freedom machines rather than restrictions.
Disability advocate Tara Moss, who lives with CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome) barnstorms Instagram regularly with images of her walking stick “Wolfie” and skull-decorated wheelchair, “Hera”. She wants to celebrate them, while arguing that, “Mobility aids make disability more visible, and ableism – that is, negative or derogatory attitudes and discrimination against people with disabilities – is so rife in common language and practices, that comfort with using aids publicly can be something that takes practice, and pride,” she says.
My blood boils when I read of stories of travellers like Natalie Curtis who had to crawl along the aisle to get to her wheelchair on a Jetstar flight to Thailand, after the airline suddenly hit her with an unexpected charge to wheel her off the plane. This is far from the only incident.
There are so many obstacles. Private wheelchairs must be checked with luggage and are often lost, damaged or stolen at the airport (over 7000 worldwide in 2021, when no one much was flying) leaving their owners stranded without mobility at their destination. To make the humiliation worse, planes with one aisle, such as the ubiquitous 737, don’t have accessible bathrooms.
Some airlines and airports are better than others. In Singapore Changi recently, I was on a flight with a tight connection. The ground staff identified everyone who needed to make the connection, assembled us at the gate and waited until the three wheelchair passengers were assisted and ready, before taking us as a group to the next flight.
I don’t think anyone with a disability expects travel all to be smooth going. According to UK figures, one in 10 avoid travel altogether and 50 per cent find holidays stressful to plan and book. But it’s 2023 and the treatment of the disabled in transport sometimes seems Dickensian. Perhaps not intentionally cruel, but disregarding and disrespectful.
We should all press for change. Looking at it selfishly, we are all one misplaced step away from disability.
Source : The Sydney Morning Herald