Accommodating Ourselves

Last week Anita spoke at length about making accommodations. She described many different ways teachers, parents, other family members and friends can make learning, games, outdoor activities, and even participation in church accessible for those without vision. Today, I want to focus on ways we who are blind can make accommodations for ourselves, rather than relying on the public, teachers, employers or family members to do it for us.

A couple of years ago, a friend with sight drove me to hear a gentleman who is blind speak about the book he had written. This gentleman put an emphasis on how the world needed to make things more accessible for the blind. He said there should be braille labels on office doorways, braille on restroom doors and changes in the textures of sidewalks so the blind will get a better understanding of their location. My sighted friend said, once we got back out into the car, “I agree that in a perfect world, these things would be done to accommodate blind people, but what about accommodating other people with disabilities? I mean, I have chronic pain, so why couldn’t an accommodation be made for me by having more comfortable chairs?”

This got me to thinking. Perhaps, instead of trying to force a sighted society into accommodating me and my needs, why not rig up what I can to accommodate for myself? After all, who is more aware of my needs than I?

How do we do this? First, we must adjust our thinking. As I just said, no one knows you and your needs better than you. We must become advocates for ourselves and speak up to ask for what we need.

Examples

The restaurant you are visiting does not have braille menus? Ask a server to read it to you and tell them you want to speak to a manager about putting their menus into braille.

The book you need for school is not in an accessible format? Find a volunteer reader, someone perhaps who might be taking the same class. You could also talk to the school’s administration. Inform them of your difficulty and offer to help them come up with suggestions to fix your problem.

Do you find yourself passing up a certain destination on your walk down the block? Use a GPS app on your phone to save that location.

Are you constantly forgetting where you put things? Develop a habit of either noting it down or putting things back in the same place every time.

Do you wish your town or city had audible buttons so you would know where to cross the street? Call your town or city officials and talk to them about it.

Above all, don’t be afraid to speak up for yourself. Also, research what you want to advocate about so that you will appear knowledgeable and in control when you approach others about accommodations.

Now, let’s be real. There are just some things in life that we must put up with, grin and bare, a movie without description, for instance. We need to use our ears and knowledge to guess what is going on or ask a sighted person to describe. Print papers come in the mailbox, and we just have to find a sighted reader or use an app to take a picture and read it to us. Difficult intersection? We need to rely on the training we got from our orientation and mobility instructors and our common sense to know when it is safest to cross or ask for assistance. As for paper money, again, we need to ask for sighted help or use a money identifier. Of course, you could always pay in change. After all, American coins are totally accessible without sight. However, your purse or wallet might get a little heavy if you carry around all that change. LOL When at the cash register, ask the cashier to help you when paying with your credit card. Remember, though, most tactile buttons have a dot on the number 5, so practice entering your private information, rather than giving it out.

My true point for this post is that we should rely less on others to make every day tasks accessible and more on ourselves. Yes, there are laws in place to protect certain rights, but it is not up to the government to make our life easier; it is up to us. We cannot please everyone all the time, but perhaps, if we put less effort into fitting the world into our expectations, this might be a more pleasant place to live.

On Tuesday, I was sitting at a Wendy’s with my mom and two daughters. My youngest who is nine wanted a bag to put her left over chicken nuggets in.

“Go up front,” I told her, “and say to the lady behind the counter, ‘May I please have a bag to go?’.”

“I can’t do that,” my daughter said. “I’m socially awkward.” LOL

“Then, you can’t get a bag,” I said, “because, I’m not doing it for you.”

After much discussion, she ended up going for it. They gave her the bag, and she was able to bring her food home. In order to get the help she needed, she had to ask. So, even children with sight need to learn how to speak up.

In closing, I want to say that I do understand how difficult it can be to speak to perfect strangers. When I was a child, I would sit back and wish for help but never speak up. Then, I would be frustrated and disappointed that no one put forth an effort for me. As I grew older, though, I realized that no one would advocate for me like me. Now, I am in my upper thirties, and I rarely care what others think. This embarrasses my daughters, but I rarely have difficulty making my needs known and getting them met. Disabilities are obstacles, sure enough, but they are not barriers. Just like Grover in “The Monster at the End of This Book”, you might get scared, but like the reader, you just got to keep turning pages until you  untie those pages and knock down that brick wall.

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