Accessibility - Always an Afterthought !

 It was business as usual, for me, last Saturday, and as is my routine, I went for a morning walk, only to slip and have a bad fall, all thanks to the heavy rain and slippery walking path. I ended up bruising my right knee quite badly ; and along with the pain came the painful memories of another rainy day , a decade ago, when I fell while on a vacation to Coorg and ended up with a badly fractured tibial shaft that took seven weeks of keeping my leg immobile in a cast to heal- seven traumatic weeks during which I underwent multiple x-rays.

The fact that I was able to get up and walk back home re-assured me that, thankfully , this fall did not end in a fracture . Yet, getting an x-ray done to rule out any major damage was imperative. Soon, I reached the same orthopaedic clinic where I was treated a decade ago, to get an x-ray of my knee. Nothing had changed in a decade, including the height of the bed that you had to climb on to for the x-ray. But this time around, I really thought about how difficult it is, not just for an injured me, but for anybody who is in some kind of pain, to climb a bed at that height to get an x-ray done to figure out the cause of pain. And, it’s also a fact that people get x-rays only when they are injured or they are in pain; and the bed and it’s height is probably the most contra-intuitive design that anyone could have come up with! Yet, beds in examination rooms, x-ray rooms and scanning rooms are, by default, at a height which entails that most Indian women of average height make the effort to climb, oftentimes by climbing over a footstool, pain, broken bone or pregnancy notwithstanding!

This , to me, is just one glaring example of accessibility being a mere afterthought. The more that I think, I realise that as adults with no physical disabilities, we do not,  even for a moment , stop to think about how inaccessible our public spaces are. Crowded footpaths with cobbled stones, steep steps at building entrance, makeshift ramps designed to replicate a ninety degree angle, roads with potholes that double up as mini ponds during the monsoon, spiral staircases that defy the law of gravity…. The list is long, long enough to conclude that as a society we do not exclude people by design, but our spaces and systems are so designed that people with disabilities are forced to confinement at home! Accessibility is a mere afterthought; and sadly , sometimes it is not even that. 

Disability is a lot more common than we care to acknowledge. An able bodied person who fractures their leg is disabled until they recover. Someone with a bad migraine has as much need for a quiet space with muted lights as someone with sensory differences and a person with sore throat who’s lost their voice would communicate using text, pretty much like an AAC user. When we design for disability, we do ,indeed, design for all!