Wheelchair Users Quotes

Why is it the business of the nondisabled to determine what it means to be blind, or the business of the hearing to determine what it means to be deaf? Why are people who don't use wheelchairs policing the visual of a wheelchair user?

Writing about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child's-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests. Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.

I learn so much that I previously did not know about the world of the immobile that it is hard to believe it all takes place over a few hours. At random: I learn about the casual indifference of the London cabbie to the wheelchair user and that the clearance on accessible entrances is measured in millimetres less than a knuckle. I learn how intractable it is to push a grown man around for hours and how spontaneity is the privilege of the able-bodied. In solid counterpart to all this grief, I learn about the lengths nurses are prepared to go to assist a purely recreational and ambitious project by one of their patients.

Ronald Mace, a wheelchair user who became an architect devoted to the theory and practice of accessible architecture, is credited with introducing the term universal design to the public in 1985. In part, the coinage was strategic, recasting features of design that had been considered “special” as simply good design, resulting in products and buildings that were straightforwardly “usable by all people.

Disability is a set of innovative, virtuosic skills. When abled people fuss about how hard it is to make access happen, I laugh and think about the times I’ve stage-managed a show while having a panic attack, or the time the accessible van with three wheelchair-using performers and staff inside broke and we just brainstormed for two hours—Maybe if we pull another van up and lower their ramp onto the busted ramp folks can get out? Who has plywood? If we go to the bike shop, will they have welding tools?—until we figured out a way to fix the ramp so they could get out. If we can do this, why can’t anybody? And this innovation, this persistence, this commitment to not leaving each other behind, the power of a march where you move as slowly as the slowest member and put us in the front, the power of a lockdown of scooter users in front of police headquarters, the power of movements that know how to bring each other food and medicine and organize from tired without apology and with a sense that tired people catch things people moving fast miss—all of these are skills we have. I want us to know that—abled and disabled.

One of the greatest difficulties we human beings seem to have is to relinquish long-held ideas. Many of us are addicted to being right, even if facts do not support us. One fixed image we cling to, as iconic in today’s culture as the devil was in previous ages, is that of the addict as an unsavoury and shadowy character, given to criminal activity. What we don’t see is how we’ve contributed to making him a criminal. There is nothing more intrinsically criminal in the average drug user than in the average cigarette smoker or alcohol addict. The drugs they inject or inhale do not themselves induce criminal activity by their pharmacological effect, except perhaps in the way that alcohol can also fuel a person’s pent-up aggression and remove the mental inhibitions that thwart violence. Stimulant drugs may have that effect on some users, but narcotics like heroin do not; on the contrary, they tend to calm people down. It is withdrawal from opiates that makes people physically ill, irritable and more likely to act violently — mostly out of desperation to replenish their supply. The criminality associated with addiction follows directly from the need to raise money to purchase drugs at prices that are artificially inflated owing to their illegality. The addict shoplifts, steals and robs because it’s the only way she can obtain the funds to pay the dealer. History has demonstrated many times over that people will transgress laws and resist coercion when it comes to struggling for their basic needs — or what they perceive as such. Sam Sullivan, Vancouver’s quadriplegic mayor, told a conference on drug addiction once that if wheelchairs were illegal, he would do anything to get one, no matter what laws he had to break. It was an apt comparison: the hardcore addict feels equally handicapped without his substances. As we have seen, many addicts who deal in drugs do so exclusively to finance their habit. There is no profit in it for them.

wheelchair users “have impairments that limit mobility, but are not disabled unless they are in environments without ramps, lifts and automatic doors

Almost everyone who experienced disability and who had been the subject of a feature story (and a vast percentage of people considered "truly disabled" had been profiled in their local newspapers or on their local TV news programs) had found reporters turning their accounts of bigotry, social ostracism, prejudice, discrimination into stories of inspiration and overcoming, either glossing over  -- or never noticing  -- aspects of the story that knit it into the larger fabric of nationwide disability discrimination. A story a wheelchair user told a reporter about being denied job after job ended up not as a piece on the issue of job discrimination but a feature on the pluckiness of the disabled jobseeker.

Paternalism often must transform its subjects into children or people with childlike qualities. This is the most salient aspect of paternalism as it concerns disability. Paternalism is experienced as the bystander grabs the arm of a blind person and, without asking, “helps” the person across the street. This happens for wheelchair users as well. It is the experience of the waiter asking a companion of a person with a disability, “What does she want to eat?” It is the institutionalization of people against their wishes. It is the child taught only handicrafts, or the charity pleading for money to help cute crippled kids. It is these and a thousand other examples of everyday life. It is most of all, however, the assumption that people with disabilities are intrinsically inferior and unable to take responsibility for their own lives.

Just managed to finish the accessibility mods to the other building before the whole block went historic-landmark, thank God, or I’d still be in a paperwork fight with the city. And I still had to promise to never modify this one, to soothe all the ruffled feathers.” “People had a problem with you making a brownstone that a wheelchair user could live in?” She snorts. “Welcome to New York.

As a wheelchair user, I can easily tell when I have rolled into a poor, undervalued neighborhood: The sidewalk becomes cracked and curb cuts get increasingly precarious or disappear altogether.

I have often observed rangers asking hikers what kind of terrain they want, how long they want to hike, and what level of difficulty best suits their needs. As a wheelchair user, however, I am seldom asked these kinds of questions, as if my desired level of difficulty were self-evident.

[T]he definitional shift away from the medical/individual model makes room for new understandings of how best to solve the “problem” of disability. In the alternative perspective, which I call the political/relational model, the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being. For example, under the medical/individual model, wheelchair users suffer from impairments that restrict their mobility. These impairments are best addressed through medical interventions and cures; failing that, individuals must make the best of a bad situation, relying on friends and family members to negotiate inaccessible spaces for them. Under a political/relational model of disability, however, the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies. The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation.

- Jag har en kusin som också sitter i rullstol. - Jaha. - Motorcykelolycka. Chloe undrade ofta varför vissa människor kände sig manade att berätta sådana saker för henne. Som om det faktum att de själva hade en vän eller en släkting med ett handikapp skapade en självklar samhörighet.

A future where disability justice won looks like queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, folks of colour, and women, girls, and nonbinary humans are living in a world where disability is the norm, and where access is no longer a question but a fait accompli. Gone are the days where our disabled bodies and minds are compared to the able-bodied and able-minded. We’ve flipped the script. We still like our non-queer, non–people of colour, non-disabled friends and we’ll have them at our fully accessible dance parties (which include comfy chairs and couches for our aches and pains, subwoofers that make you feel the vibrations, active listeners, and personal support workers, so we can fully enjoy our time out, and plenty of room as well as fully accessible bathrooms for wheelchair-users to dance, dance, and dance as well as pee with ease, and no stairs in sight and clear paths to sway or rest as we please). Because, please, did you really think this could go on, this able-bodied and -minded domination? It’s not that we’ve flipped the script to exert power and replicate oppressions on our able-bodied and able-minded friends, they just over time learned to not take up so much space and not be offended or feel left out if we don’t organize with them in mind. Actually, in our accessible/disabled future, binaries are broken. We fully live on and in the spectrum of possibilities of non-stigmatized minds and bodies. In this spectrum, we are fully connected to one another, which means that decolonization has happened and is still happening and that patriarchy has been toppled and much more. This interconnectedness that we now live daily means that sometimes our able-bodied and able-minded friends are learning every day, including from their mistakes, and are understanding in how many ways our differences and disabilities manifest. This also means that we have collectively built this future and thus have learned and understood differences and disabilities, and all of us are still doing that important work even when it is hard because this future world is ours! -KARINE MYRGIANIE JEAN-FRANÇOIS AND NELLY BASSILY, DAWN (DISABLED WOMEN’S NETWORK) CANADA

I told them my new entity would make a series of apps—I had learned the language well enough to counterfeit a convincing plan—constructed around the GPS location software now built into most every device. Users would tag their experience in the street, in bars and clubs, on different modes of public transport. “So, like Foursquare,” my interviewer said, with the doubt of a young person looking at an old man in front of a computer. “Exactly like that,” I said, “except that our users will record incidences of hate. We’ll be working initially to produce a live map—like a traffic congestion map—of more and less racist areas, safe routes home, institutionally racist police forces and local authorities, local populations. We’ll have a star rating system and so on. Eventually I want to roll out iterations for anyone who is not part of the obvious privileged class—for women, for trans people, for people of colour, for the blind and the deaf and so on so that we can map prejudice and racism intersectionally—but one must start somewhere, so I’m calling version one Walking Whilst Black. I have some concerns about the name because I don’t wish to rule out those who are in wheelchairs or mobility carts, but the phrase is there in the language and I feel it is well understood.

Kosmochem Private Limited is engaged in import and distribution of hospital consumables and home healthcare products for over 20 years. Kosmochem Home Healthcare, a division of the Company serves end-consumers by offering a wide range of quality home healthcare products for home use designed for convenience of users and care-givers and to support independent living. Our range of products help in management of Incontinence (involuntary loss of urine), Rehabilitation, Toileting, Blood Pressure monitoring, Diabetes, Obesity and Weight control. We put our best efforts to provide our customers with quality products by carefully selecting premium brands across the globe. Our experience in healthcare industry combined with quality control enables us to provide comfort, security and satisfaction to our customers.

This body is a scrounger if it needs the state, a faker if it holds down a job.

I spent a lot of time with the disabled extras we had in the film, and they taught me a lot. I already knew from Mike Shaw how difficult life in a wheelchair could be. You just need to push someone around for a day and you realize how hard it is, and how little things make a huge difference. Things like kneeling down to talk to wheelchair users at their eye level. No one’s educated about it, are they? And because they aren’t, it creates a barrier. How hard would it be to replace one, just one, trigonometry class for a lesson run by a disabled person, explaining what would make their lives easier? Because everyone would do it. Even the toughest kids would do it. And it would make a huge difference to society.

If I’m having a pain day and a hard time processing language and I need you to use accessible language, with shorter words and easiness about repeating if I don’t follow, and you do, that’s love. And that’s solidarity. If I’m not a wheelchair user and I make sure I work with the non-disabled bottom-liner for the workshop to ensure that the pathways through the chairs are at least three feet wide, that is love and solidarity. This is how we build past and away from bitterness and disappointment at movements that have not cared about or valued us.