Her name is Kiruna Stamell, and she’s an Australian actress who is now based in the UK. She’s appeared on Eastenders, Cast Offs, and the Baz Luhrmann’s masterpiece, Moulin Rouge. She’s shorter than some, but her achievements are totally inspiring. Now, I hate it when the word “inspiring” is used to describe someone who has experienced disability, but this is an exception, because I damn well mean it! Check out her latest video blog below, and tell me you’re not amped to start something similar in your neck of the woods.

Kiruna, I LOVE YOU!

Nic’s website has also just been announced as a finalist in the 2010 Plain English Awards, for sites that are easy to read, understand, and engage with.

Anyway, if you’ve always wanted to try your hand at a culinary masterpiece, or simply learn how to make a mean chicken salad, make sure you check out Nic’s website, The Wheeling Gourmet. If you’re really up with the play, you can even follow the guy on Twitter.

Over the next few days I’ll be updating the site with a new look and feel, so don’t freak out if things look a bit different around here! I’d also love people to help write for the site to keep it fresh so make sure you flick me an email if you’d like to contribute to walkingisoverrated.com

That’s all for now!

Red

Now, while it’s great to see others doing their bit to increase the amount of information available to the disabled traveller, this site (in its current form) is pretty poor. Not only in terms of content, which I’ll cut them a little slack for given their ‘under construction’ notice, but also in terms of design. Every page is actually just one big image, which means you’re unable to resize text, screen readers are useless as they can’t ‘read’ images, and you’re unable to highlight, copy, or paste text or individual images.

AccoMobility is a neat concept, but in its current form performs very poorly on the accessible design front, and in my opinion, needs a major re-work before it goes live (currently slated for June 1).

How “helpful” should one be towards a disabled person, without appearing to be condescending, or patronising?

Every now and then you might see a wheelchair user struggling up a curb or a step. Do you offer to help, and risk offending him/her, or do you leave them be, confident that they know what they’re doing? It’s a tricky situation, for sure.

But how about a blind person? A young Auckland high school student found the answer to this question in a rather unfortunate recent incident aboard a train home from school. This, from the Auckland Trains blog:

Good on the young student who tonight stood up in a very crowded train to offer the visually impaired guy with a cane a seat.

The poor student wasn’t ready for the dressing down he got with the suggestion he was being patronising.

Refusing the offer, the man said: “Do I look like I can’t stand? Do I look like I haven’t got two feet? Why would I need to sit down.”

The student apologised and looked most upset to be dressed down with a crowded audience listening.

Interesting. How would you explain to the student what’s going on?

Indeed it is interesting, and kinda upsetting, yeah? Blind, physically disabled, whatever; I consider myself lucky to live in a country where people actually do offer to help, coz I’m sure that isn’t the case elsewhere in the world! If you don’t want to accept someone’s help, at least be reasonable about it.

Anyway, your thoughts?

So it is at this time that I ask – would you like to contribute to walkingisoverrated.com? It could be anything – a review, opinion piece, video blog, poem?! Whatever floats your boat.

So please get in touch!

For those who don’t know, this month’s Rise magazine featured me and this site within their illustrious pages. Check out the cover art on the right, and to read their wee interview with me, click here.

psst… it’s “Nicholson”, not Nicolson!

The first is a link to self-professed ‘Wheelchair Junkie‘ Mark E. Smith’s blog, who responds to any sympathy-inducing questions around the impact of his disability with two simple words: so what? I really like this. Here’s an excerpt from this particular post:

Often when it comes to the presumed limiting factors of our disabilities, they’re based almost entirely on our own negative thinking – our embracing victimhood – instead of valid barriers. Sure, we could all play the victim, make our own three-page list of how our disabilities limit our potentials – and, we could check off every box as yet another reason why we can’t pursue our goals or live up to what we should achieve, why we’re casualties of disability. Heck, we could even get everyone from family to doctors to society to sign off on that tragic list, validating why we can’t do something we should be doing, acknowledging why we deserve to feel robbed, defeated, and depressed.

At some point, though, if we’re going to fully live up to our potentials – and, most importantly, move our lives forward – we must assume full accountability for how we live with disability, and throw our three pages of disability excuses in the trash, just as my friend has done, where victim thinking is replaced by accountability, where we pronounce to ourselves, I have a disability – so what? and just get on with life.

Also, my favourite disability ad rehashed for those who haven’t seen it:

Cheers to Matt from CCS Disability Action for the image

In a nutshell, the campaign is saying, “If you drink and drive you might end up in a wheelchair, and that would be awful”. Now, whilst I don’t disagree that the experience of suffering a spinal cord injury would be traumatic to say the least, I hate the constant perpetuation of the message that life in a wheelchair is akin to hell on earth. And that seems to be exactly what this campaign is insinuating.

What do you think?