Show your colours – but back it up with action

This weekend, we mark 50 years since the UK’s first Pride March. It is a time both for celebrating and keeping up the fight for equal intersectional rights.

Doubly so, because Disability Pride Month also starts today. This celebration started in the United States in the 1990s but is gaining momentum in the UK too. It’s less well known than its elder sibling, but that’s all the more reason to fly the flag.

Because as anyone in the LGBTQ+ or disability space knows, the fight ain’t over ‘til it’s over. New findings underscored this for disabled people this week.

A new paper from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) shows a serious gap between how disabled people and their non-disabled peers can access goods and services.

Now, if you read last week’s blog you’ll know the argument for designing inclusive services has traditionally been two-fold. On the one hand, it is legally (as per the Equality Act) and morally the right thing to do. And for many organisations, this is reason enough to make sure goods and services are inclusively designed. The other prong of the argument is financial: the simple fact that being accessible to more customers makes better business sense.

Finding exact, up to date stats for the spending power of disabled consumers is challenging, but you can glean a rough figure from the various numbers released over the years, which hovers just under the ￡500million mark for the UK. Not exact, but still a heck of an incentive for businesses.

But as the ONS’s new statistics show, there’s a more urgent argument – health and wellbeing. With the Covid pandemic came a whole new set of barriers to accessing consumer services – including many that are essential for a safe and healthy life. As is too often the case, the crisis seems to have hit disabled people disproportionately: 41.6% of disabled people reported difficulties accessing products in person, versus only 15.8% of non-disabled people. Behind the numbers is a real story of marginalisation: these products included groceries, clothes and medicine.

You may be one of the many good neighbours who stepped up during the early days of the pandemic to help clinically vulnerable and disabled neighbours get their shopping and medication when the virus was at its most dangerous. But lack of access needed action on an institutional level, as it still does now. The gap extends to services, too, with 51.5% of disabled people experiencing difficulties accessing things like banks, hairdressers, cinemas, bars and restaurants, compared to 25.2% of non-disabled people.

Past a certain point, the financial arguments don’t do justice to the urgency of the challenge. A potentially huge number of people are being denied basic rights here, ranging from access to healthcare to financial management and even entertainment.

Some might argue that the internet has rendered this issue moot. But has it? It’s easy to forget that despite the UK becoming a ‘digitised’ society that it isn’t a case of simply being online or offline. Inaccessible websites, expensive assistive devices, and differences in hardware or software have introduced new barriers for disabled people, who make up 56% of adults who don’t use the internet according to a paper by the Digital Poverty Alliance.

There’s no easy solution to all this, but my key point is that we cannot be complacent. In the accessibility world, we often ‘bang the drum’, as we say, for accessible practices. And it’s a well-worn drum. But that doesn’t mean the issue isn’t still an urgent one.

Of course, inequity of access, whether that is to services or jobs, needs to be on the agenda for all organisations. And while companies are saying all the right things – and in the case of LGBTQ+ showing their support by flying the colours of the Pride flag – they need to recognise that inclusion is by its very nature, intersectional. If a business’s practices exclude disabled people, it doesn’t matter if they fly a Pride flag – their practices will still exclude some LGBTQ+ people too. ?

All that being said, I want to end by focusing on the positive – here’s to a fantastic Pride Weekend and Disability Pride Month! Have a wonderful time however you mark the occasions.

Yours,

Ruth