Kavita Murugkar on Accessibility

What is accessibility? Who does it enable? Why must we ensure it?

To simplistically put, accessibility is simply the ability or the possibility to be able to access anything and everything that encompasses our physical world.

Now, it could be the physical infrastructure which becomes the backdrop for us to perform our daily activities or it could be the digital or virtual infrastructure, uh, that we, nowadays, use, uh, again, to…to enable our lives and our work.

Now, accessibility is not only the needs of persons with disabilities.

Why so?

Because accessibility is rooted into enabling people of all kinds irrespective of their differences by providing an environment that caters to their diverse needs.

Now, persons with disabilities are, uh, you know, mandate…identified or are recognized through the RPWD Act but one could undergo disability as a part of their life cycle or maybe through a temporary disability or a phase like pregnancy etc.

So, the whole concept of accessibility is all-encompassing, it is universal and it benefits not just people with disabilities, but everybody.

And that is why we must invest, we must ensure that whatever we create, whatever we produce, it is accessible.

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Who can enable accessibility?

Now, you could be in the position of a designer, you could be a decision maker, you could be in a managerial role, you could be a strategist.

Uh, well, in any role, you definitely would have a scope to include, to ensure, that access of persons with disabilities or people of all kinds is ensured.

Accessibility can be to, like I said, the digital uh, the digital interfaces, the physical interfaces and solutions can be technological or they can be based on construction or architectural interventions.

So let’s, let’s ensure that access is provided to all and let’s understand how accessibility can be integrated into a built infrastructure by doing or ensuring simple things that have to be uh integrated into a building.

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What is inaccessibility? What are the barriers one encounters in it, and how can we prevent them to create and promote accessibility?

Inaccessibility is simply encountering barriers. Right?

Now barriers could be of different kinds.

They can be environmental barriers, they can be communicational barriers or language barriers.

They can be institutional or policy barriers and they can simply be social barriers which come out of a mindset, right, which is prejudiced and which confirms or which refers to stereotypes.

Now, inaccessibility is created only when an individual comes in contact with a barrier so the whole approach has to be to disrupt these barriers.

Well let me give you one simple example of how accessibility can be created in a building.

Imagine there is a theater which has the latest Bollywood film uh, you know, premiered there and you are wanting to uh see it, uh the first day-first show.

Now, there’s also a wheelchair user friend of yours uh who also wants to accompany you.

But unfortunately when you reach there, you find the theater does not have a ramp for the wheelchair user to get into the building.

Now what is that creating?

It’s creating inaccessibility and hence, exclusion.

So, a mere provision of a ramp next to the steps would have created an enabling condition for your friend to get into the building.

A simple intervention can, of a ramp can create accessibility for a wheelchair user.

Now with that example, I’d also like to bring to your attention that most of the times accessibility is equated to provision of a ramp.

A ramp is not necessarily the need of all diversities in people.

Imagine a blind, or a deaf, or a person with hearing impairment.

Now, for a blind person, what he needs, or she needs, is a tactile guiding path that can lead the person to independently navigate, move around without anybody’s support.

Similarly, for a person with hearing impairment, probably a well, uh you know, designed space with good signage that gives all the required information for the person to reach his or her destination, is Universal Design.

Now we have understood that accessibility is a universal need.

It’s my need, it’s everybody’s need.

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Who can become an accessibility champion?

Each one of us can become an accessibility champion.

And there are ways of being a contributor to this whole movement for creating accessible environments and an inclusive world.

You can…what you can do is, identify places that are not accessible and put them into the social media and create, uh, you know, attention, uh or catch people’s attention.

Tweet it to the concerned people.

Create uh awareness, create a noise about it. Right?

That’s the first one.

Second one, wherever you’re working, wherever you’re living, if you find that there is somebody who is struggling with access, it could be a senior citizen, raise your voice.

Ensure that your voice is heard.

Become a part of the decision making team, and get the required provisions integrated into any kind of retrofitting or uplifting plan.

The third way of creating accessibility could be by simply spreading awareness about this.

Word to word, mouth to mouth, uh, you know, publicity or promotion of this cause, of this need, is something that is going to really matter the most to change the mindsets, to change this world.

So wherever you go, talk about accessibility, talk about how disabling the environment is, talk about good examples, and connect to people uh who can help you to spread the awareness.

So I think these three things are something that each individual can do to become an accessibility champion.