lunabelle

Here are a bunch of important facts about service dogs in the United States! Many people don’t know the real laws about these amazing dogs that help disabled people every day–so please share this far and wide to spread the word. 

Remember, all our product sales help support service dog handlers and organizations. We donate 10% of profits and include educational service dog fact cards with all US shipments. I’m also a disabled artist, and the best way to empower disabled people is to financially support them! 

💜(Due to health complications, I’ll be shutting down my shop on Dec 31st–so all decks and art prints will only be available until then. After that, I never plan on selling the Barkana deck again btw!) 💜

Be careful where you get service dog info. There are TONS of scams out there and misinformation. Do not go to a .org. Go directly to the source of the law a .gov website. After you google "service dog" you're probably gonna get a lot of ads from these scam sites.

No access info for any of the venues

Box office is inaccessible

Google “[festival name] accessibility”; get info on their “accessible pricing” (pay £1 less if you want to). No mention of free tickets for essential carers

Do a lot of disability detective work; most venues don’t have wheelchair access

One claims to be accessible, look inside: “we’re an accessible venue. There are three steps to get in, but we can help you with those”.

“Everybody welcome*”

We have people who can carry you up the stairs

Even worse than "3 steps but we can help you!" what do you mean you're going to carry someone up the 1 to 2 FLIGHTS of stairs? What?

So I carefully explained how I have a manual handling plan that sets out how I can safely be moved and that I cannot just be lifted by a random stranger who isn’t familiar with my disability. And that even if they got me up the stairs, my wheelchair is twice as heavy and there is no way they’d get it up the stairs.

I asked them, knowing that, what was their plan once I was upstairs, just lay me in a corner somewhere and hope I didn’t get stepped on*? Cause that doesn’t sound like a good party

It didn’t change anything. Events continued to be in the same venue, and they stopped trying to include me at all.

so. you want to bring a heavy, fragile powerchair upstairs? a powerchair that, if you drop it, could mean... failing out of school, losing a job (and unemployment for months-years), dying of pressure sores? it's not low stakes.

Because of that price tag, in the UK most people who rely on NHS funding for a CRT powerchair don’t have access to funding for a backup chair. I’d imagine this is similar in other places. Without my chair I’m completely housebound with no independent mobility.

That means if you drop and break my chair I can’t get to my workplace, can’t access healthcare, do my shopping, sit in the garden, visit my elderly relatives or housebound friends, or anything at all that means leaving the flat.

It can take so long to get new parts for a powerchair and even longer to get assessed for a whole new chair. Where I live if you can’t get to the wheelchair clinic (say because someone threw your only means of mobility down a flight of stairs) you’re waiting even longer for the assessment to get prescribed a new chair and the wait for any new part to be fitted is also longer because there are only so many engineers, OTs and physios and making house calls takes much longer per visit.

Just vibing in the aesthetically pleasing yet ominous light of the wildfire smoke🔥

They were a bit shy and didn’t say anything bit were obviously wondering at the race briefing about how someone like me in a big tilted back powerchair, neck brace and hand splints is able to sail. But then they see it. They see me and other people getting hoisted into the boats. They sail in our adapted boats so get to see how the steering and seating is different, and they can see how my seating looks different from other disabled people who don’t need the same support to stay sat upright.

User credit: maymarigolduk on insta

Looking forward to more pool time :3

ArtFight attack on @babeysheep ✨