“Sorry I can’t attend the training session - the lift is broken again.” Or “I’m not coming to this social - the only way to get to that room is a flight of stairs.” Or “I’d love to do this thing, but ableism called, and it says I’m not allowed to do something my able-bodied friends have access to.”
I love the Student's Union, I really do. I love everything it offers me, and I love being part of the community.
However, I don’t matter to it nearly as much as it matters to me.
It’s the one ancient lift that breaks over and over again, when the only service lift in the building is one I can’t go up in (because for some reason, health and safety allows me to use it to go two levels down from Luther’s to the activities store but not two levels up from Luther’s to the activities corridor). It’s the room booking system that doesn’t give me disabled access even when secretaries tick the box that says “disabled access needed”. It’s the lack of awareness, the lack of knowledge, the welfare officer training that says welfare officers are responsible for making things accessible without telling them what accessibility is.
It’s that the only guidance I can find from the Student's Union as a welfare officer on accessibility is about a page hidden in the two-dozen-page-long Inclusive Societies Policy I dug through the website to find. It’s that nothing works when I need it to work, and no one says “here’s what we’ll do for you instead” - it’s just “sorry, you’ll have to put up with it”. It’s the number of people who’ve told me “I know this system is broken” and done nothing about it. It’s the fact that if I’m on level one after hours, I can’t go to the toilet without somebody running down a set of stairs, going back up in the lift, and opening a locked door for me.
It’s that because this is only a problem for disabled students, it’s an afterthought for the rest of the community. If the lift was the only way to get up and down the Student Union, and there were no stairs, it would never break.
If non-disabled folks needed it, it would be there.
But for me, as a disabled person, for my friends, as disabled people, our access is secondary. We are secondary.
This is a conversation that needs to be held. It’s a conversation societies need to listen to. It’s a conversation staff need to listen to. It’s a conversation the whole world needs to listen to, but I’ll settle for just NUSU for now. Disabled voices are speaking, but disabled voices are ignored.
This isn’t a conversation I can hold alone.
But it’s a conversation I will start.