#and of receiving zero accommodations as an autistic kid

[findmeinthefallair]

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[doberbutts]

your post about how the lack of accessibility for one need isn't the fault of that person with the need really resonated with me. ive got both physical and mental accessibility needs to go places, needing space for a wheelchair, a "quiet space" for sensory issues, various needs for my deafness depending on where im going, etc. every time i look up what the activity/business's accessibility options are, i get both sides of me ignored in different places. one site might mention tons of accessibility options for autism (and, often framed like it's specific to autistic kids but that's a whole other conversation to be had) and not even once say if there's an elevator or a ramp. one place might mention they have elevators and ramps to get into all entrances and floors, even offer a PCA employee, but then mention nothing at all about a quiet space. and my Deaf accomodations are almost never mentioned at all.

i just can't relate to people who have these experiences and blame it on the other disability for existing and receiving accommodations, instead of directing their annoyance at the ableism of the business/event for not being thorough and specific. it happens an equal amount across all my disabilities, so to me it makes zero sense to blame other disabled people for it

Exactlyyyyyyyyy. Accessibility sucks for everyone and it makes no sense to be mad at other disabled people because they happened to be the ones most helped by the lackluster accommodations provided at that specific venue. The problem is that ableist society never takes into account anything besides what they're legally required to, and often not even that, and the legal requirements are mostly a joke when it comes to what the people they're supposedly designed to help actually need, and they themselves were hard won against ableist politicians that were mad they couldn't make the icky disableds disappear.

[loki-zen]

I’m not gonna do a point by point @discoursedrome because this is starting to get unfun for me as a discourse topic but tbh i think you’re weirdly focused on defining ‘disabled’ and i don’t really see why that’s necessary. Like when I say people are kidding themselves that disabled people are far fewer than they really are all I mean is they’re kidding themselves that their mental model of Standard Human Being Who Needs No Help Or Accommodations Ever is a fair approximation of far more of all of the people than it really is.

And I think you’re way too dismissive of the ways in which a single accommodation can vastly increase accessibility for whole swathes of people.

Take for example a doctor’s office committing to communicating by email as well as telephone. This accommodates Deaf and Hard of Hearing people, people with sensory processing issues that make it hard to hear people on the phone, people with anxieties affecting their ability to make phone calls, people who speak English as a second language and find it easier to read and compose text at their own pace, and also people who just for a host of other reasons can’t randomly make or receive phone calls during the working day. It even automatically creates a record of what was said so that people who are forgetful and/or have low executive functioning resources to spare - whether because they’re ND or just Like That or because they have a full time job and two kids under five - can check back on it.

Or take the automatic door at that same doctors office. If you’re in a wheelchair you need it. If you’re pushing a pushchair, or have a baby in your arms, or have one arm and are carrying something, or have arthritis and it hurts to push doors open, or have weird autistic extra-tasks and crossing-thresholds problems, or are germphobic and don’t want to touch door handles, it’s invaluable.

If you thought about any of these things only in the narrow terms you’re promoting - only in terms of what benefit there might be to people with one specific issue that definitely is ‘a disability’ and not anything else - they would seem totally not worth it, probably. And that’s why that sort of framing is harmful.

I think you’re also underestimating the potential benefit of having the staff at the doctor’s office trained to expect that people trying to use the doctor’s surgery are quite likely to have disabilities - it’s a doctor’s office after all - including ones that might produce needs that haven’t been specifically accounted for, and then the staff would be given the flexibility to make adjustments on the fly and praised for doing so.

As opposed to the status quo where pretty much all frontline staff in anything ever increasingly have zero discretion about how they do anything and will get in trouble if they deviate from The Script.

The Script is based on the idea that there’s such a thing as The Consumer, basically. And what’s important is that people learn that that’s at best an abstraction and, mostly, a lie it’s just a lie; the healthcare system for instance is set up for the convenience of a Healthy Patient who isn’t even a majority of the ‘at least 51%’ kind for most practical purposes bc surprise, Perfectly Healthy people go to the doctor less, but also fucking c’mon man it’s not okay to take just anyone’s/everyone’s (delete as appropriate for your country/healthcare system) money and dispense a service that’s ‘cost efficient’ bc it can treat the most ‘normal’ and ‘textbook’ and ‘no other problems having’ ~80% of people really quickly and cheaply while throwing everyone else on the garbage heap to die.

Like in my ideal world other stuff would be accessible too (maybe it would even be different mechanisms that wind up making this happen*) but essential services first.

It legit doesn’t matter where you draw the lines. It’s just important to recognise that there’s no essential difference between glasses and a wheelchair. Hell, there’s no essential difference between a wheelchair ramp and a road. (As a society, we have put vast amounts of resources into accommodating assistive technology that allows humans to overcome their endemic disability of not being able to walk 30 miles in half an hour.)

*I kind of remain flabbergasted that pure market forces don’t seem to have incentivised the existence of one pub/restaurant/cafe in a given city distinguishing itself from competitors by actively striving to be (and marketing itself as) ‘the place you can actually hear your friends talk’, which would also make it uncommonly accessible to people like me with sensory sensitivities and/or auditory processing problems.

Even aside from the draw for totally non disabled people, I feel like while there probably aren’t enough of us by ourselves making money to financially support this, when you add in the fact that if somewhere like this existed i would always go here with all of my friends and my family and their wallets pretty much any time I went to town, (and if I knew about one in another town I would go there every time I went to that town, and honestly be much more likely to visit that town because I would know there was somewhere I could socialise with people) and I would win all arguments about which place to go to because of the reasoning, and people diagnosed with stuff like I have are disproportionately likely to have pretty well off families, it kinda seems like a slam dunk that could surely find ways to compensate for the inability to make people drink faster by turning the music up.

I mean, tbh, late capitalism and all - for all I know this totally would be viable and make shit tons of money but can’t exist bc it doesn’t sound good to a few wealthy investors