My Journey Begins….
I recently attended an event in London. The details about where the event was held were quite sketchy. As somebody who experiences accessibility barriers every day, this made me immediately sceptical. Once I arrived at the event, I realised that this was because the event was internal and therefore probably didn’t need to be more specific.
I arrived at the place where the event was held to be told that it was about a 10-minute bus drive away followed by a 15-minute walk. This did not faze me as my wheelchair is very fast and a 15-minute walk is more like five minutes.
At that point, I had no idea that the biggest challenge would be physical accessibility rather than finding the venue itself.
So, I arrived at the bus station after being given directions by staff and boarded the bus. I promptly noticed that the button I needed to press to alert the driver that I needed the ramp was inaccessible to me, situated just out of my reach. So when the bus came to the stop, I called out to ask the driver to release the ramp.
The Pitstop
I was on the pavement and the bus had driven off. I opened Maps on my phone to see where I was going next. Easy, it’s a straight line!
However, when I looked around me, I noticed that I was on a high pavement. Looking to my left I could see there was no drop curb. Looking to my right I could see there was no drop curb.
This isn’t simply an inconvenience. It is an accessibility barrier that completely changed my journey.
Luckily for me, just at the moment as I was thinking “oh my gosh, what on earth am I going to do” (or words to that effect), a van pulled up in the car park next to me. Two people got out and came over to see if I was ok.
Asking for help to get off the curb, I explained where I was going. The man (George) told me the walk was riddled with pavements without drop curbs. To ensure I reached my destination, he would walk with me.
Sure enough, by the time we’d reached the venue, George had helped me navigate (and by navigate, I mean lift my wheelchair) five curbs.
The Re-routing
Upon arrival into the venue, I informed reception of the event I was attending and they informed me that I was given the wrong information and it was in another building.
The incredibly generous George offered to take me back to where I needed to be.
As an employee, George had access to the staff shuttle bus, which would take us straight to the venue doors. However, when the shuttle bus arrived, it was not accessible. They informed George that none of the staff shuttle services were accessible.
We headed back to the main bus stop that would take us to where we needed to go. When the bus arrived, it had what I call a manual ramp which required the driver to operate. I manoeuvred around an incredibly tight gap. This was to fit into a small, cramped space where I didn’t have room to move. So, I sat facing the wall.
This highlights the importance of workplace accessibility. Creating an accessible workplace isn’t just about what happens once you’re inside the building. An accessible workplace is about considering how somebody experiences the journey to and from your workplace.
The Arrival
Despite all this, we had arrived.
George signed me into the building and escorted me to the room. To get to the room, we needed to use the lift. The lift was opposite a wall, meaning that I had to navigate a tight gap and turn on a difficult angle to enter and exit the lift.
Upon entering the room, it was immediately obvious that I had managed to gate-crash an internal event.
Accessibility barriers relevance
When we talk about disability inclusion in the workplace and creating an accessible workplace, we often focus on attitudes, policies and reasonable adjustments. Yet physical accessibility still has the power to exclude someone before they have even reached the building.
If George wasn’t there, I would have literally been stuck at every point after I got off the bus.
At the beginning of my ordeal, I thought that was a bit unusual. After the third barrier in a row, I decided that this had to be documented.
As a disabled person, I am used to checking ahead of arrival that the venue is accessible. What I don’t do is check the route to the venue for accessibility. These days I take that as a guarantee.
The support I received from George was amazing and without it, I would have given up probably when I arrived at the bus stop. Due to his understanding, empathy and persistence, the afternoon turned out to be incredibly productive and worthwhile.
However, it shouldn’t have been down to George’s persistence to ensure I made it to my event.
The impact of the ordeal
When I arrived at the venue (one hour late), I was slightly windswept, cold, tired and stressed but I had to immediately put all of that to one side to behave in the professional manner that I wanted my potential new contacts to remember me by.
I am not the first, nor will I be the last disabled person to experience these, or comparative barriers and then to have to immediately put them to one side and adapt to the environment.
Nor am I suggesting that non-disabled people haven’t experienced similar situations where they’ve had to swallow what they are feeling to present themselves in a certain way.
However, the barriers that I refer to are unacceptable and surprising.
I don’t often purely talk about the physical barriers presented to disabled people, but in this case, the front-facing services of this business clearly show that they are making an effort to be inclusive and accessible for disabled people.
However, behind the scenes, this doesn’t seem to always be the case for their employees.
Whether this is deliberate or not (and I very much doubt it is deliberate), the message it sends to disabled employees, and to disabled people considering working for this business, is negative. The message states that physical accessibility in the workplace has probably not been considered.
We talk about unconscious bias but what about unconscious influencing? When developing an inclusive workplace culture, to non-disabled employees it could contradict any messages about creating inclusive environments.
The Learning
When thinking about your disability inclusion strategy, it is so important to think about every area of inclusion. Not just the attitude of your staff. Not just the opportunities for disabled employees to achieve. Not just your disability inclusion training. Also think about your physical landscape and the everyday experience of people travelling to and around your workplace.
In your business, there will be things that you can change relatively easily but there will also be things within your external environment that are seemingly out of your control.
When planning your workplace accessibility improvements, don’t forget to think about these things and how, if that environment does not belong to you, you can influence councils, landlords and the wider community to make meaningful change.
Because true disability inclusion in the workplace doesn’t begin when someone reaches reception. It begins the moment they start their journey.
