Here’s some examples awkward accessibility being a thing:
Your at a hotel that has a lift to get you from one sub-floor to another, but the lift can only be unlocked and operated by one specific person that the hotel now has to go find. Sure, they’ve made the entrance to the sub-floor is accessible, but now it’s a thing.
The buses are wheelchair accessible but the driver has to stop the bus, take 30 seconds to lower the goddamn ramp, move passengers out of their seats, hook up the straps and then secure you in the bus. Sure, they’ve made the busses accessible but now it’s a thing.
The restaurant has an accessible entrance, but it’s past the trash room and through the kitchen. Sure, the restaurant is accessible, but now it’s an insulting thing.
Here’s some great examples of accessibility not being a thing:
The train to the airport pulls up flush with the platform. I board with everyone else and sit wherever the fuck I want. Riding the train is accessible and not a thing.
In Portland, I press a button the side of the streetcar and a ramp automatically extends at the same time the door opens. I board in the same amount of time as everyone else. This is not a thing.
I get that it is difficult to design for wheelchair accessibility, but folks need to start considering the overall quality of the experience versus just thinking about meeting the minimum requirements.
I have a lot of thoughts about that scene in AWTWB where Agatha, Niamh, Simon+Baz are herding goats @ Watford.
It’s the only time the four of them are together, and the first time Baz sees Niamh in this book. Right away, Baz remembers her name, and he goes into a description of how she used to look at Watford. (She wore the type of boots you’d drive a tractor with…her hair was shorter than Simon’s…) He describes her as very butch, –like he’s more feminine than she is–and I realized that’s probably *why* he remembers her. He’s just one gay teen recognizing another. (Why would he remember some random girl on the lacrosse team, who’s a few years older, anyway?? It’s not like he’s a people person. And he couldn’t place Pippa at first.)
Think about how few gay people Baz knew at the time, and how Simon and Agatha did NOT remember her, how she didn’t stand out to them. They didn’t put the pieces together about themselves and their sexual orientation until much later–but Baz knew. Thinking of teenage Baz seeing another gay student, and maybe seeing something in her that he could relate to, made me emotional. (Also, he was presumably closeted at the time. She was all total butch, but he wasn’t yet wearing flowers.)
In this whole chapter, Baz and Niamh are compared with each other, and contrasted with Simon and Agatha, who still look like the perfect heterosexual couple, (even though that’s not their reality.) Niamh and Baz are both feeling jealous & sad & uncomfortable, and standing apart, as though they don’t fit in, or don’t “look right” next to their partners. Like, that image of what a “perfect couple” should be still holds power, even though it’s a false image.
Simon and Agatha were never really dating each other, they were just dating an image, an idea. Then, when each of them is with Baz, or with Niamh, it breaks the mold, and now suddenly, they are with a real person, not an idea of what relationships “should” be.
