Disability and Accessibility

A non-comprehensive guide to some of the styles available.

Whichever you go for, they're all generally around £4000/$5000 . YMMV.

Depending upon your location, a dealer may bring one to your home for you to trial them. You're spending a lot of money so do not be afraid to ask.

Searching YouTube for these brand names should come up with a lot of examples.

Single Rear Wheel:

Smart Drive and Smoov are small motors with a single wheel that attach to the back of your manual chair. You control propulsion with a speed dial near your lap, and you steer the chair using your hands on the wheel push rims as normal. You can also push to contribute towards propulsion if you like. The extent to which they contribute towards overall speed is variable dependent upon your needs, but they can propel the chair entirely on their own, meaning all you have to do is steer.

Pro:

• They are both easy to attach/remove.
• comparatively light
• you have full control of steering

Con:

• sometimes have difficulty with steps/curbs as they're just clipped to an axle bar
• can feel less ergonomic/immediately responsive than devices attached to the wheels themselves.

Dual Wheel motors:

E-motion and WheelDrive style power assists are two motors, one on each wheel, which are connected to each other via Bluetooth. They each respond to how hard your hands push their respective wheel. This means you can set them to double your input, or treble your input, etc. They also have cruise control so they can propel the chair entirely on their own.

Pro:

• responsive, feel ergonomic. The force is kinda/ish coming from your hands rather than from a motor behind your bum

Con:

• rely upon Bluetooth, YMMV
• double the weight of single motor devices as there's one on each wheel, so if they fail for some reason, your chair is now very heavy
• you have to be careful how you push as every push is amplified and affects each wheel independently. Something to be aware of when you aren't pushing with each hand evenly, e.g, on slanted pavement/sidewalk, when you're turning/dodging, etc

Tricycle style devices:

These attach to the front of your chair with handle bars and a front wheel with a motor.

Pro:

• Great for longer distances
• some prefer handlebar steering

Con:

• less manoeuvrable. Your turning circle becomes very large.

Powerchair style:

There are also systems like the e-fix which turn your manual chair into a form of powerchair with a joystick to steer.

Pro:

• some prefer this less demanding mode of steering

Con:

• They add a lot of weight
• There's no middle ground, it's on or it's off, it's doing all the work or none of the work

Hope this helps

Please feel free to add first-hand experiences or any thoughts to this post, or let me know if I should edit anything

A Game Jam was just announced where the goal is to test the technology you want to use for bigger blind accessible projects.

Sign up here: https://itch.io/jam/bare-1

This is a mini version of this game jam: https://itch.io/jam/games-for-blind-gamers-2

If you're not a developer but want to help, make sure to stop by and rate the games and give feedback to the devs who make entries!

I make blind accessible games as a hobby and have participated in a lot of jams trying to make blind accessible games.

So if anyone has questions I'll do my best to answer them!

School was pretty terrible. School is the hub of our communities, and I was segregated within school. So I was therefore segregated from my community. Within school for years, people talked about me like I couldn’t understand them. And even like I didn’t exist. I was easily controlled and manipulated by adults, restrained and secluded and made to complete repetitive tasks with the belief that I didn’t understand them or my surroundings. I was in a perpetual state of discomfort and dysregulation within my own body. There was so much I wanted to say, so much I wanted to add and so much I wanted to change that was all built up in my head.

(Note: Autism Awareness Month was back in April, but this is still a good article.)

After having chronic pain for numerous years, I finally found a doctor who believed that a healthy 20-something could have chronic pain. Two MRIs later, arthritis was found in my spine (C3-C5, L3-L5). Since then, I've been put on pain medication and undergone radio frequency ablations.

I've never met anyone else with arthritis in their spine. If you're out there, please chime in!

"May we re-member and re-embody the knowing that resisting abled supremacy is a love practice. Reducing community transmission in the spirit of collective responsibility is a love practice that is liberatory to every bodymind where abledness is temporary. " A 2 part essay. Part2 is here: https://www.itsjiyounkim.com/blog/love-ethic-in-a-pandemic-2

As a person with ADHD I do enjoy spinning in my chair, and feel sad when it is missing. Do you think all chairs should spin so that people like me can feel happier?

Has anybody with ME/CFS found a way for reducing or preventing hand/wrist/arm pain and stiffness? Since it's not really muscle or tendon related, things l have tried (compression gloves, larger handles) have made very minor or zero difference. Any ideas?

I want to be able to write in a notebook, draw or play video games for longer than extremely limited short times or nuking my ability to use that arm for a while afterward. I recognize this may be an unrealistic goal, but I figured I'd ask anyway? I seek the wisdom of the ME collective on this one.

This article is two years old but still relevant to social media in 2023.

One of the biggest barriers is the assumption that blind people just won’t be interested in visual media. “Just because they’re visual doesn’t mean that they’re immediately not attractive to people who are blind or low vision,” says McCann. “I think that’s one big misconception: ‘Oh, well, they don’t care about pictures.’ But we do.” When culture is molded on social networks, it sucks to lose out on a shared social language because you can’t see the images everyone is talking about.

Christy Smith Berman, a low vision editor at Can I Play That, responded to a TT Games tweet that announced the delay of Star Wars Lego with text on an image. When she replied with a request for alt text, Smith Berman was met with responses from people expressing disbelief that blind people would even be on Twitter to begin with, let alone care about video games.

"This is the true harm of the hegemony of the overcoming disability narrative: the idea that your access needs are a mere hindrance that you should always be working to be rid of."

Via @[email protected]:

…consider tools like GitHub Copilot, which claims to be “your AI pair programmer”. These work by leaning on the code of thousands and thousands of projects to build its code auto-complete features.

When you copy broken patterns you get broken patterns. And I assure you, GitHub, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, stacks of libraries and frameworks, piles of projects, and so on, are rife with accessibility barriers.

Colectomies, colostomies, ileostomies, j-pouches, colo-rectal cancers, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis - I searched but did not find! Where are all my gutless wonder peeps?

Are you unfamiliar with how blind people use computers? Are you new to the concept of screen reader software?

NVDA is free, open-source software for Microsoft Windows used by many blind users to interact with their PC through non-visual senses. While NVDA's foundation, NV Access, subsists on donations, the software has become the second most popular screen reader in the world.

This half-hour documentary by ABC News serves as a great introduction to NVDA and the stories of its creators. This show won't tell you how to use NVDA or how it works, but instead will tell you why it exists and why it needs to exist.

(Also, follow NV Access on Mastodon!)

So long story short at my original pain mgt clinic the only thing they would prescribe me is buprenorphine and tramadol. Buprenorphine made my knees and below swell. They put me on 300mg tramadol daily. With that I still can barely do anything everyday. Due to their restrictions I went ahead and went to a new pain mgt clinic.

I’ve had a couple apts there along with physical therapy but today was the day they finally got my urine test results and we were able to talk about medications. Since the max dose of tramadol is 400mg daily I do not have much room to go. She wants to try tramadol xr with ir to supplement it.

We are going to do this for a month but she is completely willing to go to stronger opiates. Even with my tramadol dose I’m at a 6 or 7 everyday. I was completely honest with her and told her my thoughts on it and how much pain I’m in even with tramadol. She is probably late 20s or early 30s and I’m only 25 so I think she is able to relate to me more and understand how important is it for me to be able to participate in life.

It was incredibly reassuring that I have finally found someone who is actually willing to work with me and give me the medication that I need even if it won’t be for a month. This whole year I’ve been stuck in my apartment only going to the grocery store. This whole time I haven’t been able to see the near future where I would be able to do anything. Now I can with her being my new doctor. I’m really excited even though I need to suffer for another month but I understand that she probably just wants to show that she did try something before going stronger.

An article talking about the details of the health supremacy ideology that is inbuilt into the way our systems work.

A very educational post about a ME/CFS /Long Covid experience from the perspective of a person with an occupational/physical therapy background.

Here is a very interesting text from Itxi Guerra originally written in Spanish and translated to English by Anti. It talks a lot about the relationship of anarchism and disability, but I believe it can an be interesting perspective to read for any kind of activists. In the first section there is also an informative list of all the various models and definitions of disability.

Hello! I’ve got chronic pain and just wanted to make a post here. Today has been a pretty tough day. Cabinets under my sink flooded yesterday so I had to clean all that up and really ruined my day and I woke up today incredibly sore and just in so much pain. It’s been tough but the day is almost over so hopefully tomorrow will be better