My aunt is older, she has no recognized disability, but she does have many difficulties moving due to her age. He lives in a two-story house, but he never goes upstairs anymore. “Lucky I have a room and a bathroom downstairs,” he told me recently. My husband is in a wheelchair. Nor there are hardly any friends and family houses that I can go to: the one that does not lack the elevator has some steps or an insurmountable curb at the entrance. And in the homes that you can access, often the width of the doors prevents you from entering the bathroom or again there are curbs that make it impossible to go out to the patio where the party takes place. I’m talking about both old and modern houses. Although the most recent ones usually have ramps and elevators, their interiors are often also limiting.
While we feel agile, autonomous, we don’t think about getting older and we will not be able to go up or down stairs or we will need to walk with the support of a walker. Nor do we imagine that disability in any of its forms can reach surprisingly and make our home an uninhabitable environment or a prison. Some 10,000 people with disabilities in Spain cannot enter and leave their homes normally.
The situation when walking on the street, entering establishments, is not much better. Huge curbs, garage drop-offs on narrow sidewalks that would make a wheelchair overturn, uneven cobblestones, holes… I encourage you to pay attention when doing your usual route from home to work or to pick up the children from school, you could travel independently if you were in a chair, with a walker or if you were blind. Probably not. Also look on these routes at how many establishments or portals have entrance steps that are impossible for someone with reduced mobility. You will be surprised by the number of them.
We can believe that accessibility is an issue that has almost been overcome and nothing is less true. Improvement is continuous, it is true, but There is still no awareness when designing buildings, homes or urban environments of the need to think about all citizens and not just those who are fully capable.
When we are young, if we are healthy, we often believe we are immortal, like the gods of Olympus. Invulnerable to illness, disability and death. The big lie to which we must be held accountable as the years go by or bad luck strikes. A self-deception that prevents us from seeing the difficulties of many others that surround us, unless we have them directly under our care. We cannot live in fear, but neither can we be oblivious to that reality and the need to build solutions.
#Impossible #houses #opinion #Melisa #Tuya
