‘Sorry, you’re blind drunk!’
Dan Williams
Workplace Assessments for Employees living with sight or hearing loss or other disabilities. Staff training
Avoiding disability discrimination at the door
People with disabilities have social lives, enjoying mainstream pubs, bars, clubs and gigs with friends.
Whilst legislation has made more venues more accessible physically, some of the invisible barriers to entry still remain.
Increasingly, we hear stories of people with visual impairment being refused entry to events by door staff who lack the necessary disability awareness training to distinguish between inebriation and physical conditions associated with sight impairment.
This type of experience is clearly not only humiliating and ostracising for the individuals concerned, but also opens businesses to potential disability discrimination lawsuits, costly on more than one level.
Disability awareness and your business
So what exactly should the disability awareness policies of businesses incorporate - and the training of door staff include - to ensure these situations and issues are avoided?
Disability awareness is about creating a culture of open-mindedness when engaging in social and professional interaction with people with impairments. Legislative expectation is not that businesses will train staff to recognise all sight impairment conditions experienced by potential customers, but that they will show awareness of, and sensitivity to people with visual disabilities, and make reasonable adjustment to facilitate their needs.
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Training your team
For treatment of customers with visual impairments, sensitivity and adjustment needs to be demonstrated on several layers.
A door person needs to be aware that traditional indicators of inebriation (rolling or red eyes, or stumbling for example) may also be potential indictors of visual impairment. Jumping to obvious conclusions may not only be misguided but deeply incendiary.
Disability awareness training also needs to cover appropriate communication strategies for ascertaining the disability status of the potential customer, whilst causing neither offence nor embarrassment by singling the individual out in a hectic, noisy, social situation. This takes sensitivity, understanding and empathy, and is not a simple skill to learn.
Judgement calls
Often, staff may need to navigate the blurred lines between making adjustments for visual impairment, and judgements based upon levels of inebriation. The medication taken by a person with a disability could have impeded their balance and left them feeling dizzy. It may also be that they have been drinking. Yes, shock horror, people with visual impairments do sometimes drink to excess too. Just like anyone. Would you be disability confident enough to deal with this sort of situation?
For more information about our disability awareness training programmes, call?us on 07472 305 268 or visit our website? to see how we can help you.
#DisabilityDiscrimination #VisualImpairment #DisabilityAwareness #AwarenessTraining
LIVED EXPERIENCE WELLBEING PRACTITIONER actively promoting a REALISTIC, POSITIVE MENTALITY though the 'EXPERTISE' of real life experiences. Advocating for Efficient and Effective Communication and Connection.
8 个月Dan ... some very interesting and relevant thoughts here fella. There is a general lack of knowledge and/or (occasionally) interest in identifying behaviour concerned with both physical and mental impairments. Progress has been made but there is still quite a lot to be getting on with. Working on education, patience and attitude are all so important if we are to stop people deliberately or accidentally discriminating against and demeaning the worth of others.
Managing Director / Specialist Occupational therapist at Vitality360
8 个月Thank you for all the work you do to build awareness Dan Williams . My son who has Retinitis pigmentosa was actually thrown out of a bar because he walked into a table and spilled the drinks. They assumed he was drunk but he simply couldn't see due to poor lighting.
Office Coordinator at Centre for Accessibility Australia Ltd
8 个月So True, also people with Cerebral Palsy or head / Brain injury who are a bit unsteady on their feet with slurred speech, also get confused with being drunk.