Authored by a UTS student and SLAC (Student Learning Advisory Committee) member.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), 1 in 6 Australians have a disability. Despite this, from personal experience, public spaces often lack adequate accessibility measures for many. I believe it is important to come to terms with the fact that anyone can become disabled at any time – I experienced this firsthand when I was around 6 years old.
Going from being able to speak and communicate fluently with peers to being an outcast and isolated due to a speech impediment in the span of a week made me aware of how much of a gap there is between disabled and non-disabled people. It felt as though I had been thrust into an alien world, where my new reality was constantly having to fight to be heard, to get accommodations, and to just participate in society like everyone else. It goes beyond just a speech impediment – many fail to consider how pervasive the struggles associated with it are.
Simple things become complicated
One significant experience that comes to mind is how I am unable to make phone calls for official matters, as I usually cannot speak without a severe stutter, and thus am disregarded as a scam caller – a frustrating experience for everyone involved, which often makes me wonder how a mute person would even be able to communicate at all in such a situation if they had no aid. Most sites that do include a written option such as a live chatbot often redirect me to call up the company to discuss my matters, rendering them useless in my situation.
A lack of education regarding these matters is also unhelpful – family often tell me to just keep calling and trying if I am cut off halfway through a call until I can ‘get over my stutter’. However they don’t experience the humiliation and embarrassment arising from having to constantly make that effort trying to get someone to acknowledge my existence. It is easy for others to parrot phrases such as “it says more about them as a person than you” – although I understand their intention is to console me, after years of hearing the same thing it begins to ring empty. Regardless, after a lifetime of being ignored and unable to engage in normal social activities, it means little to me what it says about that person, and more that I just need to complete whatever task it is I have at hand.
Finding community
Despite these struggles, it is because of my stutter that I was able to meet others in a similar position to me and learn from them. I realised that disabled people are often far more resilient than others I have interacted with, and have a different kind of strength to be able to power through life no matter the setback. Discussions with others also help me confront gaps in my own knowledge and the importance of people with lived experience giving insight on how things can be made accessible for everyone.
A discussion about someone with colour blindness reminded me of my brother who is red-green colourblind. To my knowledge, he has never asked for any sort of extra support such as patterned legends for charts with colours, and I wonder if it had anything to do with it not necessarily being considered a ‘disability’ in my family either. No one even realised he was colourblind until he was a teenager. I didn’t consider my stutter a disability either due to assumptions around what was a ‘valid’ disability, and struggled through most of my student life, particularly when it came to oral presentations and group work.
Accessibility and support
In regard to support for accessibility, the unfortunate reality is that the majority of people I have come across refuse to go through the extra effort of reading what I have written or typed out, but also refusing my text-to-speech alternatives on the basis that it “interrupts the natural flow of conversations”, or that it is “too much effort to keep up with”, disregarding that I also have to put in a lot of effort for almost every aspect of my life. A few minutes of their time and patience would go a long way, however they fail to realise the significance it holds.
As an outsider, it may be easy to disregard or view others’ accessibility requirements as a hassle or a nuisance, or something that isn’t relevant to them since they don’t need those requirements – however anyone could become disabled at any time. I have had friends go from completely healthy one day to being bed bound in hospital paralysed neck-down the next, and coming to terms with the fact that you will have to abandon the way you lived in the past and transition to a completely new one comes as a shock and is difficult to adapt to, particularly when society offers such little support. As such, I believe accessibility in every situation is an extremely important discussion to hold and to advocate for, regardless of whether you are disabled or not. It could happen to anyone at any time, and it could even happen to you.