Required to be creative. Everyday ways for dealing with inaccessibility

Abstract

Today’s society promises that people with disabilities can access anything, but in practice there are numerous obstacles, and the ways in which people deal with them can be easily missed or taken for granted by policy makers. This article draws on a project in which researchers ‘go along’ people with disabilities in Sweden who demonstrate and recount accessibility troubles in urban and digital settings. They display a set of mundane methods for managing inaccessibility: (a) using others, (b) making deals and establishing routines, (c) mimicking or piggybacking conventions, (d) debunking others’ accounts and performing local politics. The employment of these shared but tailored methods shows the difficulties to be accepted that people with disabilities still face, as well as the wide-ranging tension that exists between the grand rhetoric of inclusion and modest results. The tension implies that people with disabilities are required to be creative.

Points of interest

• Declarations and policies often say that people with disabilities should have access to anything, but in practice this is not the case.

• This study investigates what people with disabilities actually do when they have trouble accessing various places or resources. The results show their common and practical ways, and these ways are often taken for granted, overlapping, and combined.

• People with disabilities ask others to support them when they face troubles to access places or resources, they make deals with important actors and they develop routines. They also observe, imitate and follow others’ actions, to pick out precisely those ways that suit their needs.

• When people with disabilities find their ways in today’s society they also act with words. They argue against other people’s excuses or justifications for not providing access.

• The study has found a lot of frustration among people with disabilities who get blocked, excluded or delayed. This gives them motives to engage in politics.

Keywords:

• Accessibility
• disability
• go-along
• ethnomethods
• creativity
• exclusion

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the helpful comments I have got from the project team members Hanna Egard and Kristofer Hansson, from the PhD student Lars Crusefalk, from other researchers within the Research Network 20 on qualitative methods within the European Sociological Association, and from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FORTE, the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare.