I’ve used a wheelchair for twenty years, and I’ve never been bothered by words (e.g. disabled, handicapped, crippled, lame); and I certainly have never identified on any personal level with the simple and recognizable ISA.
The ISA is just a sign. A sign I look for when I need to park my car where I can open my door wide enough to get my wheelchair out without dinging a neighboring vehicle. A sign that tells me where I can find a route into a building that’s free of stairs. It’s very much like the signs we all rely on to warn us of a wet floor, or to tell us to stop at appropriate intersections.
. . . what really matters to disabled individuals? Access matters. The access that can be improved by curb cuts, wheelchair ramps, brail signage, video description devices, audible traffic signals, closed captioning, TTY devices, sign language interpreters, audio amplifiers, etc. Many of these mechanisms may seem ubiquitous, but after two decades of personal experience, I can attest that they are not.
I was enjoying your comment right up to that point. I sometimes confuse the symbols for toilets and elevators (both have pictures of people) so maybe its not a dead loss. The elevator has a box around it so I suppose the person symbol could be augmented in some way to complete the picture.
Though one complaint I have heard from wheelchair users (especially when forced to use the chairs in aircraft) is that they have handles on the back. It implies you have to have somebody push you around and as an independent person I know I would hate that too. So a less passive icon seems to be a good thing to me.
Hey! That’s me. In the process of tripping and about to place my face flat on the sidewalk. Ouch.
I need to stop wearing pants with such easily tearable knees.
It’s not the artist’s fault as a kid. It’s her mother’s for promulgating the horseshit idea that able-bodied people should go around confronting people who use disability parking and have a permit but who don’t in the busybodies’ superficial estimation appear to meet their ignorant prejudice about what a disabled person looks like.
I agree. The US House of Representatives passed a bill earlier this year that would significantly undermine the Americans with Disabilities Act. Luckily, it seems to be dead in the Senate, but I would guess the GOP will try again. Visibility and symbolism matter, but access matters more, and right now, access is under assault.
Yes, definitely a no parking sign, or maybe just a sun cross.
The diagonal cross also reminds me of the (newly obsolete) label for chemicals hazardous to human health in Europe:
No associations with any kind of disability for me.
My problem with “person first” language is that it is selectively applied to things where the “person first” activist seems to be afraid that the term following the “person” would somehow imply un-personhood if it was used alone.
I’m a software engineer - and there is a fair amount of prejudice about my profession. Some of which is even true about me personally. However,my profession is respected enough so that no one feels the need to call me a “person of the software engineering profession” in order to avoid insulting me by reducing me to my profession. If someone calls me a software engineer, that does not mean they don’t respect me as a human being. So if people insist on using person-first language for some labels applied to people, and not for others, this has very unfortunate implications.
And here I thought it was due to speakers taking umbrage at English’s standard of placing the adjective before the noun, unlike Spanish or French. Hairy dog versus dog that is hairy, and so on. And it does seem to be a discussion only in English.
Oh, and I call myself code monkey, though one of my fellow software developers thinks it only applies to a subset of programmers. But he’s typical German in that he tries to eliminate ambiguities even where things are ambiguous on purpose. Yanking his chain through self deprecation.
I’ve heard similar discussions about the use of various terms in the German language here in Austria (another adjective-before-noun language). And even worse than putting the adjective before the noun is to use a noun to describe a person (English doesn’t seem to have that for disabled people, but German happens to have a noun as well. Think “foreigner” versus “foreign person” versus “person of foreign citizenship” to use a different example).
Many wheelchairs do have handles. Actually, let me revise that. Almost every wheelchair has some sort of handle. I just looked through some catalogs, and the ones that lack handles are mostly “sport” chairs or motorized ones.
If the symbol can be improved for clarity, lets do it. If we are doing it to push someone’s agenda, it seems like a waste of time and money. People are generally aware that many wheelchair-bound persons live very active lives.
Hmm, it’s worth pondering some more: there is a case to be made that in German (and that’s what Austrians speak, so neener neener), there is an implied difference. It’s the sort of thing Gutmenschen (which I count myself as one) can get all too wrapped up in.
Behinderte Menschen (disabled persons) lets you know from the beginning that the adjective is important. BUT. If we say Menschen mit Behinderungen (people with disabilities), then it’s people first, disabilities as an afterthought.
And honestly, though the latter is more feel-good. It defeats the purpose of saying “hey, we need to take this into consideration, this is important!” And German is as susceptible as English is to making the adjective the noun, as seen in the translation of “disabled parking”: Behindertenparkplatz.
Just the view from my vantage point of being an American expatriate in Munich.
To clarify: my comment was inspired by a news article I read about a wheelchair athlete who refused to use the wheelchair provided by an airline to get on to a commercial jet. He finished up crawling on to the plane. I can understand that if you are accustomed to an independent way of life, then handles on the back of your wheelchair would become a symbol of dependency.
