“Inclusive community arts festival!” “Everybody welcome!” “Events for all!”
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*”
*excludes wheelchair users, you can get fucked
If it's okay for me to add, my favourite (aka most rage inducing):
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?
and also you just KNOW they wouldn't. They're imagining someone who can't go up stairs being a waifish 90 pound grandma or child cancer patient. Most wheelchair users I see are heavy enough that it's absurd and frankly offensive to say that they can "just carry you up the stairs."
I had this at uni. The LGBT society had inaccessible events and when I pointed it out they told me that they could carry me up the flight of stairs.
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.
*other risks include: suffocation, pressure sores, infections and muscular skeletal injuries but I figured that was a bit too complex to explain.
