Who knew? Cartoon advises disabled should take tights off before a "bum shuffle"
Tanni Grey-Thompson’s tweets about a recent accessibility fail, inspired disabled cartoonist Hannah Ensor to create the above image. On arriving home late and discovering the lift in her building was broken, the disabled Baroness had to crawl up ten flights of stairs to her London flat, dragging her chair up too. The retired Paralympian tweeted during the ordeal that she would be removing her tights beforehand, so as not to ladder them. The cartoonist liked the disability detail: “Take your tights off before you bum shuffle. That’s Something,” Hannah says, “that’s so real to my world but alien to other people’s worlds. Noone tells you that as a wheelchair using woman.” Tanni was so impressed with Hannah’s image of her on the stairs, that…
"I’m a crawling mummy": how one disabled mum looks after her son
Laura got alternative parenting ideas from a support network Laura Miller lives in Glasgow with her husband and 13 month old Jonathan. As Mother’s Day approaches, the wheelchair-using mum explains how she cares for her little boy who she cannot carry. “I do most of my parenting sitting down,” says Laura. She can transfer from her chair to the floor and move around after her son on her hands and knees. But because she can’t pick him up while standing, she’s had to find other ways of getting Jonathan to where she wants him to be in the house. At bedtime, Laura lures Jonathan to where his cot is by switching off all lights in places she doesn’t want him to be, leaving on only the…
"Cold, getting warmer, hot": New app helps blind people find each other
Emma tests a new prototype app that lets blind people find other blind people. “We’d arranged to meet at a shopping mall but, as time went by, I began to wonder why my wife was so late,” says Doug Wakefield, one half of a married blind couple visiting the CSUN accessible technology conference in San Diego last week. His wife Judy picks up the story: “Eventually, someone came up to me and said, are you waiting for a man with a guide dog? “We were to meet at the main entrance but I was to the left of the door and Doug was standing to the right, only ten feet away.” Lots of blind people have blind friends, so This game of cat and mouse…