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The big, blind world
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Do we see a differently-abled person beyond the wheelchair or the white cane, asks ROHINI MOHAN on the eve of the International Day for Disabled People
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PEOPLE ON two-wheelers stare straight ahead. Cars roll up their windows. Those peeping out of bus windows tuck their elbows in and look intently at the passenger's head in front. As the signal turns green, they all start their engines and zoom away, happy to have ignored and escaped from the cripple beggar who "accosts" them every time.
Image trap
Yes, there is unease about impostors and those who stick a paper in your face certifying that they're mute and you must help them. Not to worry, the very self-indulgent "whom to trust" discussion is for another day. But an issue it raises is the non-disabled person's dependence on images we associate with disability. When non-disabled people look at the disabled, we see wheelchairs and white canes. We see helmets and hearing aids. With a few exceptions, we don't pick up on how individuals differ from one another; we notice the tools they use. And those tools, to us, equal "disability".
But tools are only the first step to visibility. The second is the behaviour that is expected, given a particular set of tools. We'd be shocked if someone used a white cane to board the bus, but then fished out a book to read on the journey; or if someone used a wheelchair to get to the door, then stood right up and opened it. It is people who don't conform to our popular notions of disability that we suspect. "I can't see what's wrong with him," we might think. "He was struggling to get up and stand, but look how easily he's walking now."
Some non-disabled students who were scribes when spastic students wrote exams say that only after continuous interaction with them did they know exactly what the disability was. "Many spastic children speak perfectly, leaving you wondering why they needed help at all," says Prasanna, a scribe. "But when I spent more time with them, I slowly understood that just because someone could speak didn't mean he could write. Some of them spoke one day, and couldn't get a word out the next."
Cal Montgomery writes in Ragged Edge Magazine: "As you come to know me, you'll get better at spotting the barriers I face when I want to participate in the life of my community." Montgomery has one such disability that he is told is "invisible".
If we look hard enough, we'll find a person stopping at a curb anticipating help to cross the road. Surprising, we might think, since she looks like she could navigate. Montgomery says: "(Your) failure to see my barrier doesn't make it invisible."
Different kinds of disability have become more familiar, and we've developed a fixed idea of what "accessible" means too. So when "invisibly disabled" people complain of barriers we can't pick out, it's easy to dismiss them as unimportant ones that distract us from the "real" issues — issues that "visibly disabled" people are concerned with. We might provide a ramp at the entrance of a building where a meeting is held for disabled people. But inside, if the meeting uses only audio, the hearing impaired will leave in a fit of rage. So the meeting wasn't really accessible to all, was it?
Uniqueness
Montgomery writes: "Every person is unique — though the defenders of the non-disabled status quo would like to believe we are all the same." Guru Rao, a resident who has been fighting the cause of disabled people for years now, has locomotor disability and is enraged when people offer to carry him up the stairs. "I'm supposed to smile gratefully and accept favours instead of rights," he says: "My real disability is not obvious to the eye. That means my access is my problem."
Why should some disabled people's requests be treated merely as statements of personal preference and others' as reasonable demands of justice? Barrier removal and equal access will need to be an ongoing process, not a half-done accomplishment we can safely put behind us.
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