One week of empathy training (2019)
I do think this is important as an awareness exercise, however, it is worth noting that a lot of the issues CANNOT be seen unless you actually do bring the wheelchair. I learned this in 2018 when as a student I attended a conference with a fellow disabled student in Chicago. I was responsible for pushing her (she could use her arms but it was faster to navigate the city if one of us pushed). Not all train stations have a wide enough platform for wheelchairs to roll across, so your mobility is limited by which stations you can use for the train, which means walking farther from the station to where you actually wanted to go. Accessible hotel room with a pushbutton door shut too quickly for her to get into the threshold. Thankfully one of us was there to hit the button again each time she needed it reopened, but sometimes you had to physically catch and push the (heavier than normal) door before the button would re-open it. If you were just &quot;thinking&quot; about being a wheelchair user, and not actually trying to navigate this, you would not have a sense of the timing of this door. Another complication was her foot in a cast sticking out. The lovely, welcoming residents of Chicago catcalled her using wheelchair-related phrases, one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself, and someone kicked her cast in a crowd. The general attitude toward the disabled, in that environment, is unkind at best.<p>When I was a child (in the US), the science museum in my hometown had an exhibit dedicated to the ADA. You got into a wheelchair and tried to do tasks. It showed how payphones at a certain height are too high to reach, how difficult it would be to go up a ramp with an unapproved slope, etc. I wonder if it&#x27;s still there, because that was my first foray into thinking this way. The Chicago trip however, basically radicalized me.<p>The article has a reference point of the UK and I don&#x27;t know what their laws are with regards to accessibility. But it&#x27;s clear that in both countries public attitudes toward accessibility have a very long way to go. And I&#x27;m sure most other countries can say this as well.