I am about to reflect on how, I think, accessibility can influence everybody’s life. That will be great if you feel free to tell me your view.

I’m using a wheelchair since I’m 10 years old. Before that, I used to walk, during a few years, then used braces. It took me four years to stop considering the word « handicapped » as an insult. I grew up in an environment where I was the only one I knew as having a disability.

Before the age of 14, for me, the accessibility was not part of the conversation, not even in my thoughts. I used a manual wheelchair and was helped by my big sisters, the little one too, my brothers and my parents, when I needed anything. Let’s say that, I was a bit like a Queen/King. Later, for some reasons, I wouldn’t have that much support anymore, therefore « Petit Cyborg » was born, when I had my first electronic wheelchair. At school, I became able to spend my playtimes with my mates or without them, by choice. I was not staying alone into the classroom, because I wasn’t anymore tired to walk with the braces, tired to push my manual wheelchair with my small muscles and I would not depend on mates to go around the playground. Before the electronic wheelchair, there were years when a friend made the choice to spend every playtime with me in the classroom because the school was not accessible. Making friends was not easy…

Having that new device and being in a wheelchair friendly school freed me and introduced me to socialization. As I could go around alone, the others could get to know who I was as an individual, and my friends were free to spend time with their other mates and friends without feeling the responsibility to spend time with me. And when we were spending time together, it became a real pleasure for both sides. They didn’t have to drive me around when they were spending time with their friends. I became independent. I was lucky to depend on such nice people though!

Being able to move around is great as long as the environment is accessible to you. An accessible world for people, is important for everybody. If you are not a wheelchair user, imagine if the world was built by taking into account only very tall people, that would be challenging for you to be integrated. And the challenges would be for many aspects of your life…

• Going outside of your house, knowing that you will find many obstacles like big buses and big buildings with big steps, that would not allow you to get into it without being helped, would make you stay at home most of the times and only go out when you would need to.
• You could hardly find a job in an environment which is not accessible for you. Indeed, everything you could use at work would be too heavy or too large for you. And not having a job (paid or not), other than not participating in society, means that you don’t get to meet and often interact with people.
• It is not easy to have hobbies when you don’t have a job and without hobbies, you could not easily have friends or keep them.
• Making friends and keep them, would be hard for you if you were in an inaccessible environment, without job (paid or not) and hobbies, as not much about you, would be interesting, because without center of interests and opportunities to meet, discuss and confront your opinions with others, you don’t get to evolve.
• How could it be easy for you to have a love life if you could not have any job (paid or not), have hobbies and have friends? I hardly see it coming… I guess we all agree about the fact that getting sentimentally involved starts with attraction, right? And to be attracted to someone, more than only the physical attraction, we need to find that one interesting enough to feel a connection. Without any connection, things could get boring I think. And if no one sees you nowhere, because the places where you could socialize are inaccessible to you, how can anyone see you, as you are nowhere?

Fortunately, you don’t live in that kind of world but I guess you understand my point here… accessibility is important. We have to work on making our cities and countries accessible to everybody. We all get old and we would not like to suddenly get exclude from society because it will get difficult to have access to what we used to, while we were younger.

Fill free to give me your opinion…
Enjoy the week and take care of your loved ones,
Petit Cyborg