I am an irregular listener to Radio 4′s “In Touch” magazine programme for blind and visually impaired people. Though I am not blind or visually impaired.
It may be that I was influenced by the fact that as a teenager there were blind students (from the Royal National College for the Blind) in my church youth club. They were a bit older, living away from home and listened to songs with swearing in. I thought they were pretty cool. Or it may be that I listen to the entire Radio 4 output without discrimination or variation. You decide.
Either way I had the opportunity to listen to a set of interviews with people caught in the travel disruption last week.
For those of you unfamiliar with the detail of UK weather recently, it has been raining. Despite what you may believe it does not always rain in the UK. Or if it does it tends to be a light drizzle or passing shower. We have been experiencing sharp, high volume downpours that have caused surface water flooding along with rivers and streams burting their banks. There have been landslips, railway routes have been severed and transport operators have really struggled to get passengers to where they want to go.
What In Touch brought was the real experience of people caught up in this disruption. It was a confused and dynamic situation. The experience of blind and VI people was distinctive. How do you locate station staff on a packed and confused railway platform if you can’t see them? How worrying is it to board a rail-replacement bus travelling an unfamiliar route when you have to rely on others telling you where you are?
These are not issues I had really considered and I don’t have simple tasks that would help to address the issues raised by the programme.
It does make me consider several issues though:
- people are infinitely varied, better emergency plans plan for humans with a wide variety of needs and abilities
- listening to people is amazingly valuable, given how easy it is now to collect direct testimony from people affected by emergencies it is surprising that we don’t do more of it
- listening to the perspectives of people with disabilities is the best way of understanding the needs of people with disabilities as Lisa Lipscombe found when she sat down with her local disability forum
And it makes me think that effective use of digital tech might remove some of these barriers. Why try to fight your way around stations when you could just tweet or text customer services and get your answer there.