POSTING #101

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Winter Break; "Accessibility" and "Reasonable Accommodation"

Winter Break

Old timers in Arthur used to talk about their farm ancestors who, after 8 or 9 months of backbreaking work, spent a good bit of the winter with their feet in the oven of the wood-stove. The warmth of the oven was welcome in cold, drafty houses, and supposedly it helped keep the blood circulating.

Our house is warm and my circulation is fine, but I feel the need to honour those brave pioneers. So I am going to take a winter break, and---metaphorically---put my feet in the oven.

Therefore, this will be the last posting until February 13th, 2011.

(I know, I know, this is a pathetic---and transparent---justification for goofing off, but it seems to be the best I can come up with at the moment.)

Please don't forget to come back---February 13th, eh!

"Accessibility" and "Reasonable Accommodation"

During a recent trip we found ourselves in a 'accessibility' hotel room. Most of the features were the same as in a regular room but there were some differences. For example, there were two peep holes in the door (one up high and one down at wheelchair level), multiple grab bars in the bathroom, and a closet with a coat bar that was so low that pants couldn't be hung by the cuffs but was just the right height for a person in a wheelchair to use.

The experience reminded me of how much progress we have made in the last 50 years or so in making life more livable for people who have mobility issues.

Not enough progress, to be sure.

But solid progress.

And the credit has to go to many voluntary groups that kept pressure on the rest of us to recognize their special needs. They reminded us that we TABS ---as they sometimes referred to us--- (the Temporarily Able Bodied) were only one accident or one illness away from needing  what some legislation describes as  'reasonable accommodation', that is an adjustment to normal services that will let the mobility impaired get around.

My career in the Federal Government overlapped many of the policy initiatives to increase accessibility.

Here are some stories about that transition.

In the early 1970's I was working in the National Capital and needed to convene a committee of officers from the regions to give operational input into the design of a new computer program. In response to a call for nominations for the committee, which would meet several times in the National Capital area, the head of our British Columbia region phoned me and said he had the perfect candidate. As he described the man's background experience and training, it was clear that he would be a real asset to the committee,.

The regional head said that there was one point I should be aware of.

The person was in a wheelchair.

He explained that the fellow had been driving on a timber company road on Vancouver Island when a tree that was being cut fell, by accident, on the cab of his truck. He was left  paralyzed from the waist down, and confined to a wheelchair.

This was the 1970s, and I had never heard of someone coming to a business meeting in a wheelchair. I asked how he would travel to Ottawa.

The regional head said that the fellow had made a few trips in BC by air. The airlines would lift him and the wheelchair up by forklift truck to the door of the plane used for loading meals.

One of the trips had gone badly. The forklift operator accidentally swung the wheelchair against the doorway of the plane. When the fellow got to the hotel room at his destination, he found he couldn't  remove one of his shoes. Checking, he found that his leg was swollen. Doctors discovered that the bump against the door had broken his leg. He, of course, hadn't felt anything.

The leg was put in a cast and healed well.

The fellow was tough and he wanted 'to get back on the horse'---to fly again.

I agreed to have him as a member of the committee and had one of my people arrange for transportation from the Ottawa airport and for a suitable hotel room. The room was in a new hotel that boasted that its designers had created a certain number of rooms to meet all the needs of wheelchair patrons.

When he arrived at the office the next morning, I asked him about his trip from Vancouver, and the hotel. The trip was great---no forklift accidents.

The hotel room was super, with wide doors, grab bars etc.

Except for one thing.

The floor in the room was covered with shag carpet, which was spectacularly popular in the 1970's. Younger readers may appreciate this Wikipedia description: " Shag carpets are named after their "shaggy" appearance with longer than usual outward strands that make up the carpet."

"It is a brute to roll a wheelchair over that stuff", the BC fellow said.

The well-meaning hotel had gone out of its way to create an accessible room but its designers goofed badly when it came to carpeting.

Despite the carpeting, the fellow elected to stay in the room because of its other accessibility features. He came several times to Ottawa and made a major contribution to the work of the committee.

For our part, we all learned a great deal about accessibility---and personal courage.

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On another occasion, I set up a committee to review the services we were offering to the visually impaired in our public employment offices. One of the members was a person from my group who got around with the help of  a seeing-eye dog. Another department nominated a woman, who also had a seeing-eye dog.

I felt good that we had two visually-impaired people to advise us.

Until the first meeting.

It turned out that the dogs, normally docile, couldn't stand each other and started to fight. We sorted that out by having the women and their dogs sit at opposite ends of the table.

That solved one problem, but created another.

A key member of the committee, a sighted person, had an allergy to dogs, and she had been hoping to have both dogs at one end of the table, while she would sit at the other end.

There was no total solution to that problem. We just had frequent breaks so the woman with dog allergies could breath some clean air.

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We had another problem with a person with allergies when we moved to a new building that had an open-landscaping layout.

As a digression, I was part of a delegation in 1974 that went to Germany to study its employment department, which had its headquarters in Nuremburg, in a spanking-new building.

I was astonished to see that the floors of the large building were divided into individual offices, with floor to ceiling walls. This was different from the open-landscaping arrangement that we had just moved into.

I asked our guide why, since we had been told that Germany had pioneered open-landscaping, they had chosen to have private offices for all their workers.

"Oh', he said, "we tried that but it didn't work." He talked about noise, distractions and loss of privacy.

I told him that I wished they had told the rest of the world that it didn't work!

Anyway, with our open-landscaping, the designers had tried to muffle noises by replacing the hard-surface screens that divided the cubicles with fabric-covered screens.

Everyone agreed that the fabric-covered screens were an improvement except for one person. She came down with sore eyes and  a runny nose. It turned out that dust mites loved the fabric-covered screens and they caused an allergic reaction among susceptible people.

We had to steam-clean the screens around that person's cubicle on a regular basis.

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When Pat was recovering from her artificial knee operations, and when I had a broken leg, we really noticed and appreciated all the benefits that have flowed from the campaigns to make life easier for people with mobility problems.

Things like automatic door openers, lowered curbs, ramps, handrails, bathroom grab bars and so on are great.

As the campaigners told us, we never know when we will stop being a member of the TAB group!

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One last story.

Writing about people with a dog allergy, reminded me of good friends in Ottawa who had a handsome dog with long brown hair who developed a rash. The veterinarian determined that he had an allergy.

To his own hair!

It was the same dog who used to get depressed at Christmas time. He would lie on his back on the landing to the second floor with his legs propped up against the wall.

Aren't dogs wonderful!

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Pat and I would like to wish you and your families happiness and health in the New Year.

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See you on February 13th for Posting #102 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.

Tags: Accessibility, Reasonable Accommodation,