I also saw this on Friday, and decided to put it up too. We’ve probably said all of this in one spot or another, but I don’t care. The more eyes who see this, the better.
Here’s an awesome article called How To Talk To A Person With Disabilities Without Sounding Like An A-Hole, and it’s great. She’s in a wheelchair, but most of that stuff happens to me too. And I think I’d want to punch the next person who leaned on my wheelchair.
Sometimes I wish that for the AODA awareness training they put people through, they wouldn’t sit them down and talk to them, but in stead they would set them up to have the morning from hell. Basically they would be given a mock disability, and real people with disabilities would get to do every terrible thing we commonly have done to us to them. Talk to the people beside them about them, ask where their helper is, grab them, ignore them, talk loudly to them, all that fun stuff. Then sit them down afterwards and have a debriefing where we get to say “yeah guys, this stuff actually happens to us. We didn’t go above and beyond to dream this stuff up. Now do you get why you shouldn’t do that?” Then talk about the more positive ways to do things, and maybe then have the afternoon of awesome where everybody does everything right, and illustrate the glaring difference. It would be so much more effective than giving them a list of do’s and don’ts.
Anyway, I love this thing, so here it is.
I will try to remember. I can’t imagine leaning on a person’s wheelchair. I didn’t know people did that.
I doubt you’d do a single thing on that list.
Yeah I was surprised to hear that people do that, but I’ve heard it from more than one place, so it must be a thing.