Conrad's Accessible Blog

At last - a reading solution!

2009-11-15T08:17:00.000-08:00

I've gone on at length about my irritation with the design of the new e-books, because although they could be ideal for people who cannot use their hands, up to this point there has been no way of accessing the units by voice, or through environmental controls. But out of the blue, there is a solution!

Kindle, the e-book reader distributed by Amazon has just been produced in the form of a free download for Windows PCs (a Mac version is to follow). This means that anyone who is able to use a PC via voice recognition or other system will be able to read Kindle books. Once the book has been opened, the only key that is really needed to move through the pages is the 'Page down' key.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking users will be able to use the new software and read completely independently.

Result!

You can download the new software from, http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

I would be very interested to hear how other people get on with it.

A stay in hospital

2009-11-08T07:29:00.000-08:00

We have had reason to test the NHS over the last few weeks! Christine developed a bad chest infection that turned rapidly into pneumonia. It all happened within about 24 hours. The GP came, took one look, and called an ambulance. It's all quite spectacular with a paramedic arriving firstly in a Volvo, followed by the ambulance.

In many ways, the hospital experience was very good and without prompt availability of antibiotics and oxygen, Christine would almost certainly have died. But if the medical treatment is excellent, there are aspects of being in hospital when you are quadriplegic and having no movement at all that could be so much better. And an awful lot of money is being wasted!

Some of the stuff is really basic, like having a call system available that can be operated without having to press a button on a handset. Christine uses an environmental control system which she operates via a switch using her chin. There are all kinds of switching options available for people with severe mobility impairments, but hospitals don't have any of these.

And bathing is a nightmare due to a lack of any suitable system to transfer Christine to a bath. Eventually, after a lot of complaining we were able to take her to another ward which had a system for transferring patients to a bath without having to sit up in an uncomfortable plastic chair. We can do this because we know enough about systems and equipment to press the right buttons, but what about patients who don't have this sort of knowledge?

Perhaps the most ridiculous thing was that hundreds of thousands of pounds have been completely wasted in installing tracking ceiling hoists in each bay. These are not being used and have never been used either because they are broken, the remote control (they operate via infrared) cannot be found, or the unit has been left in the wrong place and is not charged. What a waste of money!

On the other hand, staff are beginning to learn that the presence of Christine's PAs (someone needed to be with her 24 hours a day for the first few days) is neither a criticism nor an intrusion on their responsibilities. It simply that we all know Christine best and can manage her condition. It doesn't take long before nurses and care assistants begin to know us, trust our judgement, and appreciate that it is better for Christine's care and recovery and takes pressure off them.

There's no such thing as 'hands-free'!

2009-10-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

A particular bugbear of mine is technology which is advertised as 'hands-free' but isn't!

Christine and I have been trying for years to find a genuinely hands-free mobile phone. You may wonder what I'm going on about as virtually all mobile phones advertise a 'hands-free' facility, and yes they do all have this, particularly in relation to voice dialling. But they are not hands-free - you have to press a button to access the facility, and that is something that Christine cannot do.

Now I can see that we are about to go through the same frustrating process with e-book readers. Like them or loathe them, they do away with the need to turn pages, a complex skill which is beyond many disabled and older people. E-book's should be the ideal solution. But they won't be, not because the technology isn't available, but because the designers haven't bothered to apply it.

I've already checked with the Sony e-book, and I see that the Amazon Kindle 2 is about to be launched in the UK. Same problem - you have to be able to press buttons to use them.

There would be two solutions, neither of them beyond the reach of current technology. The first is the control (Christine uses a Sony Ericsson K 700i mobile phone at the moment which has partial voice control), or alternatively an interface that would allow phones, e-book readers etc to be operated with environmental controls such as Fox and Possum.

I would love to be wrong, so if anyone knows of a mobile phone (or e-book reader) that has a genuine hands-free facility Christine and I would be very pleased to hear from you.

Frustration, frustration..!

2009-10-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

We think we have learned to be pretty good at overcoming the many barriers that face disabled people - that some, you can't do anything about!

We were recently have reminded us of this. I know it's sad, but we wanted to go and see Cliff Richard and the Shadows (remember them?) at Sheffield Arena. The concert had just been advertised on TV so I rang up straight away to book tickets. Any seats available? No problem. Good so far, but we need one wheelchair space? Very sorry, no wheelchair spaces available.

Sheffield Arena is a large and modern venue but we miss 80% of the shows that we might want to see because when you try to book, all the wheelchair spaces have gone. It should be possible for venues to be more flexible so that wheelchair space can be matched to the demand for any particular performance. Until it is, this is certainly an area in which we will continue to feel discriminated against.

Testing out the holiday accommodation

2009-09-13T09:07:00.000-07:00

Christine and I have just come back from our annual holiday. Anyone who uses a wheelchair will be all too well aware of how fraught with difficulties and disappointments finding suitable accommodation can be.

For us, we do at least have the advantage of choosing from the range of high quality accessible holiday accommodation advertised on the APR website. This year we chose Fowl Green Farm in North Yorkshire as we like the North York Moors and wanted to spend a bit of time in Whitby as well.

The accommodation is converted from old farm buildings and has been very well done. We could park right beside The Cow Byer(!), and because the conversion had been done from scratch with access in mind the whole experience was just about as pleasant and easy as it could be. Things like really wide doorways, mainly open design, and a really large level access shower room with a decently powerful shower make all the difference.

The owners had also taken the trouble to check out that personal assistance could be booked via a local agency. This can make such a difference when you are working with someone who has no independent movement and Carol, the PA who came for two hours every morning was excellent. I think this idea of checking the availability of help from a local agency is something that a lot of owners could learn from. It costs nothing in terms of investment, but it can certainly help to encourage bookings from those who need or prefer a little help.

The one thing that units at Fowl Green don't have is profiling beds. This can be a costly investment (and probably between £500 and £2000 depending on the quality and functionality), but it does open up the option of holidays for a not insignificant group of disabled people who need this level of equipment. We take our own! Well, it's actually a reclining garden chair that it happens to have exactly the right profile to suit Christine's needs. However, it would be better if we didn't need to do this.

We also take our own mobile hoist. Reasonably straightforward if you have a largish vehicle, but again investment in a hoist that can be made available if needed by guests gives the right message and makes the choice of destination that much easier.

Final point while I'm thinking about it - where owners get it right, they do get bookings. We had to take our holiday two months later than planned because September was the first available slot.

If you haven't got the message by now, let me beat you over the head with it! Investment in access benefits everyone. With more than 10 million people in the UK identifying themselves as disabled and an ageing population demand is only going to increase.

Cross with Cardiff!

2009-08-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

I'm cross with Cardiff! Well, I'm slightly miffed with the whole of Wales but that's for a different reason.

Actually, it's just Cardiff estate agents that I'm cross with. Trouble is, what is true in Cardiff is equally true for a whole lot of cities across the UK.

We were asked this week to find an accessible property (sale or rent) for a disabled person in Cardiff. There are none currently advertised on the APR website so I used our favourite database to see what I could find. The answer is that, although nearly 3000 properties are available for sale in Cardiff, not one can be identified as wheelchair accessible (actually, that's not quite true - there is one but it's sold!).

The reality is that, like most places, there will be a number of accessible properties available, including some which might well meet the requirements of our specific client, but estate agents don't identify them. If estate agents don't identify accessible property there is no way that we or any other search can do so. So, it's all down to estate agents...

Except is it? Are we all too accepting the situation? We don't expect estate agents to identify accessible property, so they don't recognise a demand, so they don't identify it, so we don't expect them to.... etc, etc. More pressure needed here, I think. And just about everywhere else in the UK.

My more general miffedness is to do with tourism board website Visit Wales. Both Enjoy England and Visit Scotland now make it fairly easy for visitors to identify accommodation that will meet their access needs. I sort of assumed that it would be the same with Wales but there is simply no way of identifying wheelchair accessible accommodation from the website.

I did get an apology and an acknowledgement that they are 'aware of the situation'. Let's hope being 'aware of the situation' turns into some sort of action sometime soon.

Approved estate agents

2009-07-14T01:13:00.000-07:00

One of the most difficult features of developing the Accessible Property Register has been persuading estate agents to get involved. Quite a number have posted an individual advert when they have suddenly found themselves with a property containing some strange feature like a through the ceiling wheelchair lift and haven't really known what to do with it. I suppose it's progress that they bother to advertise rather than demand that the vendor rip it out! But persuading agents to identify and advertise accessible property consistently has proved nigh on impossible.

We are trying a new tactic - publishing the contact details of APR Approved Partner estate agents in a new APR Approved Partner database. This is certainly a first as there has never been a database of agents committed to promoting accessible property before. Agents are offered free advertising and vendor referral as an incentive to sign up. It's early days, but at least the database is up and running and we will have to see how it progresses.

If you happen to be an estate agent, have a look at our Information for estate and letting agents.

The other thing that helps enormously in building this database is if anyone with accessible property to sell and looking for an estate agent uses our 'Find an approved estate agent' service. It's absolutely free - and we now have a colleague with extensive experience of the estate agent business identifying suitable agencies for us. Any agent recommended will be a member of an appropriate professional association and will be members of the Property Ombudsman Scheme.

A question...!

2009-07-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

Question - why do neighbours who come home late at night or leave early in the morning all drive cars with a minimum of 193 doors, each of which has to be slammed 87 times?!

Good but wearing

2009-05-17T03:40:00.000-07:00

To Great Malvern at the weekend for the Spring flower show. Well worth the trip and it even stayed dry, but the effort involved can be pretty wearing. And at least some of it could be avoided by better facilities and less unnecessary barriers!

Travelling from Sheffield and back would be a bit much for one day so we decided to stay overnight in a Premier Inn at Worcester. Premier Inns are okay and you can select a disabled room (shouldn't that be an adapted room?!) when booking online. But things could be better...

If you have read the earlier part of this blog (what do you mean, you haven't got round to it!) you will know that whenever we stay anywhere overnight an awful lot of equipment has to go with us. In addition to the usual things that anyone would take to a hotel, add a portable hoist and an adjustable chairbed because Christine can't sleep on a flat bed - it has to profile. There are also various bits of medical equipment.

So for one night, we arrive at the hotel with two wheelchairs (one power, one manual), one hoist, one bed and four bags of clothes and sundry bits and pieces. I suppose it's unreasonable to expect a hotel to have a hoist available? Or is it? Same applies to a profiling bed - maybe.

Anyway, until things change we are stuck with it. The nice people at Premier Inn are always very helpful, but that is not necessarily true of their architects! At Worcester, the disabled room (plenty of space) is on the first floor so you have to use a lift. It is then right at the end of the floor through three fire doors plus a right angle turn.

The other problem is that we do need to use the hotel bed to get Christine dressed and undressed. That involves use of the hoist and this means clearance of around 10 cm is needed under the bed. Premier Inn beds are divans so they don't have this clearance. This means getting out the plant pots (see previous blog) and raising the bed to create the necessary space. It really doesn't need to be like this, does it?

But it is always worth it. It didn't rain, we enjoyed the show and without making this sort of effort we would never go anywhere. I would just like it all to be a little bit easier...!

Signs of improvement?

2009-05-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

A journalist from the Independent is working on a piece about accessible property. His questions, my answers... What's your experience?

You have had the APR for some time now. During this time, have you seen the attitude or approach of 'mainstream' estate agents and websites towards adapted homes on sale change in any way? Have agents been more willing to publicise adapted homes or do they still routinely play this down for fear of deterring other buyers?

No, depressingly there is very little sign that estate agents are any more aware of the importance of promoting access than they were three or four years ago. The fact that we have an increasingly ageing population (plus more than 10 million people who identify themselves as disabled) seems to have passed them by completely! Only around 20 estate agents have ever registered with us and most of them have only posted one or two properties. Only one agent (ELR in Sheffield) has added an accessible property section to their own website.

The reason that APR is now advertising around 500 accessible and adapted properties at any one time is that we have given up waiting for estate agents to provide the information, so we go out and get it! Improvements in search technology mean that, if wheelchair access is mentioned anywhere in property details (however well hidden!), we can usually find it. Did you know that Globrix have adopted our access criteria and being able to search their site for wheelchair access has made an enormous difference?

Agents still fear that promoting access (and particularly adaptations) will put people off - and of course they are right! Who wants to live in a house once owned by a disabled or older person. We might catch it! It's not all the fault of estate agents. Their job is to sell houses for their vendors and they do it the best way they can. But I do believe that by sidelining access, they are reducing their market and in the process making it far more difficult for older and disabled people to find suitable property.

2. Have buyers and sellers with disabilities changed over the years? Have they become more impatient with developers/agents/websites for not appropriately addressing needs or publicising appropriate properties?

I don't think buyers or sellers have changed much. The need for suitable accommodation is the same, but an ageing population means that more is needed. My conversations with people suggest that there is still little expectation that estate agents will understand anything about access needs. Try ringing up a selection of estate agents and telling them that you are a wheelchair user looking for property in the area and have they got anything suitable?!

I do think people are more aware that there are alternatives and there is no doubt that services like APR are greatly appreciated. Changes in the public environment have made it much easier for people with mobility impairments to get out and about and there is increasing awareness that the barriers can be reduced. Have you noticed how many more mobility scooters you see nowadays? Same with public transport and all these things create a changing climate and expectation.

I think the real difference will come through changes to planning regulations requiring firstly social housing developers and then private developers to build to Lifetime Homes standards. The supply of top-class accessible housing is increasing and even better, most people won't notice that it is accessible until they need it. What they will notice is good design, a lot of space and it's easy to get your three-piece suite and your baby buggy in. I don't know if you have ever been around a Lifetime Home but I was pretty impressed.

3. The slowdown has, of course, reduced business for everyone. In what way has it affected demand/supply of adapted properties, or the number of clients with disabilities?

The slowdown is probably good for us. When agents have to work a bit harder to shift property, they are more inclined to look at alternative routes. And lower prices have pluses and minuses for disabled people just like anyone else.

There is certainly no decrease in people visiting the APR website. We are running at around 15 to 20,000 hits per month at the moment. What we do notice is that, when we check adverts after 90 days to see whether the property is still available, 90% of it is. The percentage unsold after this period has significantly increased since the downturn.

I fell for it...!

2009-04-07T06:41:00.000-07:00

Not about disability today. I'm really seething about having been caught by an Internet scam. Usually, I'm really smug - think with running two websites I've seen it all! But no, I dropped straight into paying for something that is free!

I'm managing to get abroad for a week this year and needed to renew my E111 medical cover for Europe. So I put E111 into Google and clicked on one of the first links that came up. All was fine. I was presented with a brief pro forma to fill in my details and then paid £9.50 by credit card for the service. As someone pointed out to me later, the new European Health Insurance Card that replaces E111 is free of charge. I had just been scammed into paying for a free service!

The card does arrive, but the purpose of this blog is to warn anyone else applying for a European Health Insurance Card to avoid the sponsored links on Google. The site I stupidly used was http://www.e111.org.uk/apply.html, but there are others. Go instead to http://www.nhs.uk/nhsengland/Healthcareabroad/pages/Healthcareabroad.aspx and get it free!

Take your own bed!

2009-03-16T03:17:00.000-07:00

Mostly, when people go to stay in a hotel, they don't have to take their own bed. We do!

When you don't have any independent movement, lying all night on a flat bed is 1. Very uncomfortable, 2. Likely to lead to pressure sores.

The solution for us would be a profiling bed (one that changes shape so that shoulders can be raised independently of knees and feet) like we have at home. Anyone who has been into hospital in the last few years will be familiar with profiling beds.

Unfortunately, hotels don't have profiling beds (we have never found one anyway). They are still quite rare in self-catering accommodation, but this is improving, which is great news. You can see our current list of accessible holiday accommodation at the Accessible Property Register.

Our compromise is to take a bed with us! Well, actually it's a folding garden chair with a pressure relieving air mattress is from a hospital trolley. Sounds bizarre, but it works. What's really irritating is that you have to go to these lengths to have anything resembling the choices the non-disabled people have. Inclusive world? Long way to go!

Don't forget the plant pots!

2009-02-21T07:50:00.000-08:00

Staying at home is fine - you have all the equipment that you need and things are organised to work as easily as possible. Not so with hotels!

We use hotels quite often, both for business and pleasure but the list of things that we have to take with us to make a hotel stay possible is unbelievable - let's start with the plant pots!

Yes, I really do mean plant pots! To be completely accurate, they are plastic plant trays about 30 cm long and 10 cm deep. You can get them in any garden centre. We take six.

The plant trays are used to raise the type of divan bed used in most hotels ( no space underneath) so that we can use a portable hoist. It's really irritating and unnecessary. All it requires is for hotels either to have beds with sufficient space underneath, or at least to provide bed raisers. But most don't...

But the plant pots work well. They are lighter than bed raisers, they can be stacked inside each other so they take up less space and you can use them either way up. This is particularly useful when you are trying to raise a double bed that is in two parts with castors in the middle. That needs a tray the right way up with the castors inside!

Simple. Doesn't everyone have to do this when they go to a hotel?!

Travels with wheelchair

2009-02-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

I'm not disabled but I can't get away from wheelchairs!

My partner is disabled and uses a wheelchair. I run a unique property website called The Accessible Property Register www.accessible-property.org.uk. So I get to know a lot about wheelchairs. We have three - well four if you count the shower chair. Conspicuous consumption of wheelchairs!

The Accessible Property Register (APR) has a pretty good wheelchair accessible holiday accommodation section so I thought I would write a little bit about how we manage to overcome the barriers involved in taking a holiday, or even staying away overnight.

My partner can't move at all apart from her head. Her head works fine. Her brain is as razor sharp as it has always been but the body is another story ...

She has to be transferred to a chair or a bed using a hoist. And she can't sleep on a conventional bed because she needs one that profiles (you can raise the shoulders and legs). Just to add to the problems, the kind of hoist that we use needs around 10 cm space under the bed. So the divan beds that you find in most hotels are useless.

So just for starters, when we are choosing somewhere to stay even for one night, we need wheelchair access including bedroom, a profiling bed, a ceiling hoist or space under the bed for a manual hoist (bring your own!). And if Christine wants a shower, we need a level access (roll in) shower with a wheeled shower chair.

If you know any hotels like this, do let us know....