Body fit 

Comfort 

Awareness 

Understanding 

Wellness  

Social integration 

Personalization 

ANSA McAL (Barbados) Limited is embarking on a Fully Accessible Barbados (FAB) programme in association with the Barbados Council for the Disabled. 

Mrs. Roglyn Hinds, Group HR Manager recently announced this after a joint meeting with the Council. She said, "We are delighted to partner with the Barbados Council for the Disabled in line with our goal of ensuring accessibility and inclusivity for all of our stakeholders. Fully Accessibility Barbados (FAB) is a programme of evaluation and recognition that seeks to accredit properties for their level of accessibility to a variety of persons with and without disabilities; not only the structure but also in terms of the general treatment of patrons with challenges. The FAB standards and criteria are based on international accessibility requirements." 

Mr. Nicholas Mouttet, Group CEO also noted, "All of our physical locations will be assessed in line with international standards of access and accommodations made in line with recommendations. ANSA McAL (Barbados) Ltd. is the first commercial entity within the private sector to embark on the FAB accreditation programme."

Roseanna Tudor, Operations Manager of the Barbados Council for the Disabled noted, "by embarking on this journey, ANSA McAL through its subsidiary companies is making a contribution to our wider goal of focusing on universal design to create an inclusive society. This also raises the standard of service delivery by incorporating a 'universal design'. This is an approach to the development and improvement of products, services and the environment so that they are usable by as many people as possible regardless of age, ability or situation".

Disability Inclusive Research Collaboration Conference (DIRCC), Research Rights: Disability Inclusion Change, 13-14 June at the University of Sydney. The conference is being organised by a group which includes organisations of and for people with disability, and universities and their research centres.

A series of workshops will be run across the two days where participants will hear how people with disability have been actively engaged in planning, doing research and disseminating findings. All workshops will be interactive and aimed at participants learning about specific research strategies that have proved to be inclusive.

Workshop presenters will:

1. Overview the projects that they have been involved with either as people with disability or as co-researchers with people with disability.
2. Facilitate a series of activities where participants will learn how to make research more inclusive and accessible for and with people with disability.

Keynote Speakers

Professor Christine Bigby, is Leader of the Living with Disability Research Group, at La Trobe University. Christine has an established national and international reputation for her research on ageing with a lifelong disability and the social inclusion of adults with intellectual disability. The focus of her work is policy issues, program effectiveness and the quality of front line practice to support engagement and inclusion.

Dr. Sally French is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, UK where she teaches health, social care and social science courses. Her current research interests include the history of disability and the experiences of disabled people in health and social care. Much of her work in the area of Disability Studies has its roots in her earlier work as a care assistant and a physiotherapist and her experiences as a disabled person.

Dr. Edurne Garcia Iriarte is Director of the M.Sc. in Disability Studies at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Edurne has worked at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the National Institute for Intellectual Disability, Trinity College Dublin where she has supported people with disability to join research teams as co-researchers.

An Italian patriot mght tell you  that if you trace most good ideas to their roots some brilliant Italian has probably already written about it.

Vitruvius wrote about architecture. Michelangelo drew the Vitruvian Man as a summary so he didn't have to carry around all those heavy books. Ron Mace invented Universal Design to remind Vitruvius and Michelangelo that some of us read books while sitting down. In fact, that American architect Ron Mace noted, some of us read the world from that position. Ron too was a tetraplegic.

When you realize that someone accessible to you is the source of something valuable, like good insights, it becomes natural to direct your time and attention to them with new passion. Simple observation becomes an active inquiry - an appreciative active inquiry. The other person is respected as valuable specifically because they are different. As they hold a sustained, but different, gaze on the world they scan the world for ways that they do or do not fit into it. Sharing a future with that person engages you in their struggle to eliminate the barriers that sometimes only they can see.

Universal Design looks at the world and imagines it beyond the barriers it has constructed. It can do that because Universal Design has first imagined people who are different moving into the world from the margins to inhabit it with full access to participation. 

Universal Design is a framework for the design of places, things, information, communication and policy to be usable by the widest range of people operating in the widest range of situations without special or separate design.

Universal Design is the sustained gaze from  from the outside asking what it would take to be on the inside. Looking - and living - from the margins, Universal Design sees how resources are arranged to serve systems of power - systems that exclude by design.

Universal Design arose when Ron Mace, and others intimately familiar with the experience of disability, arrived at a consensus on how to use some very specific skills. In 1997 these skilled professionals gathered in North Carolina for a "Vitruvian Moment" to capture what are now known as the Seven Principles of Universal Design. Around the world these principles interacted with local knowledge generating alternative names such as design-for-all and inclusive design. The impulse there was to emphasize the dialogic and iterative nature of Universal Design to counterbalance a heuristic "comply-with-a-checklist-of-features" mentality that "excluded the excluded" from the very design process for their inclusion!

The dialogue reflecting on the practice of Universal Design has recently begun to converge on a new consensus emphasizing enculturation (Universal Design - India) and reasserting process (the Seven Goals of Universal Design.)

Can we achieve a new "Michelangelo Moment" where we new appreciation of difference can be captured in a brief and graphic way?

Universal Design and the ICF

A note from Rick Miner: 'Get It Together' was Produced, Directed and Edited by Rick Miner. This real life documentary went on to win multipule national and international awards. 'Get It Together' gave Rick the priviledge in 1976 of becoming a voting member in the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences. This film is a remarkable true story of a disabled young man who became a recreational therapist in the rehab center where he recovered from an auto accident that paralized him from the waist down. Jeff Minnebraker started the era of wheel chair sports, building his own wheel chairs, teaching himself and other to play tennis, basketball and football. 'Get it Together' became Rick's showcase film launching his film & television career. Produced with personal funds, it was distributed through out the world inspiring other people. Filmed in 16mm on a very small budget, this film still inspires people to overcome their shortcomings.

Human beings. 

 wrapped in nothing much at all.

We would be surprised to look in a mirror and not see a human being. In fact, the fear of such unrecognizability of our own identity is part of many horror films.

Human beings. 

Animals that make tools. Animals that radically change their environment. Animals that strive for a certain "something" beyond. You can call it perfection, success, holiness, happiness, beauty, or justice.

We make tools for ourselves to help us reach our goals. We select our goals based on what we value.

Yet, there is something of the horror film if we look in the mirror of our built environments, if we 

examine our stock of tools, and critically examine the policies we establish. Certain human beings are not reflected or are reflected in a distorted way. Certain human beings are not valued. Undervalued they are excluded in the "normal" course of things. Our buildings, products, policies and underlying values systematically exclude similar groups across cultures. 

Sociologists talk about these traditionally marginalized groups as having a "spoiled identity." They are stigmatized.

In 2006 the authors Campbell and Deacon identified three universal and historical forms of stigma in the book Unraveling the Contexts of Stigma

• Tribal stigma - affiliation with a specific nationality, religion, or race that is considered outside the norm.
• Known Deviations in Personal Traits - being perceived rightly or wrongly, as weak willed, domineering or having unnatural passions, treacherous or rigid beliefs, and being dishonest
• Overt or External Deformities - having a visible disability.

The concept Universal Design is an act of moral jiu-jitsu by one subset of the historically stigmatized with their "spoiled identities" - the community of persons with visible disabilities. 

Universal Design (also known as Inclusive Design or Design for All) is at once a radical and utter rejection of the stigma and false understanding projected upon people with disabilities. It is a powerful glance from the periphery of society toward the poverty of mainstream aversion to normal human difference and diversity. 

Universal Design is a blueprint for inclusion that exposes unwaveringly the injustice of "exclusion by design." It demands that human difference be accounted for in real concrete acts. It requires that those traditionally excluded precisely for their difference be given voice at every stage of tool, environment, and policy creation.

What is remarkable about Universal Design is that it has from the outset emphasized that it is a path to the humanization of those who are not yet disabled and, as such, wield a certain degree of privilege (until the natural processes of accident or aging strip them of their tenuous hold on privilege.) 

Contrary to the stereotype of the "angry disabled" Universal Design is an affirmation of the

 value of interdependence. It is a recognition of the limits on all human beings and a pragmatic approach toward that "something beyond."

As the Institute for Human Centered Design reminds us:

Universal Design is a framework for the design of places, things, information, communication and policy to be usable by the widest range of people operating in the widest range of situations without special or separate design. Most simply, Universal Design is human-centered design of everything with everyone in mind...It is not a design style but an orientation to any design process that starts with a responsibility to the experience of the user. 

As Edward Steinfeld and Jordana Maisel amplify in Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments, Universal Design is "a process that enables and empowers a diverse population by improving human performance, health and wellness and social participation."

The goal of universal design extends beyond eliminating discrimination toward people with disabilities. A universal design benefits everyone or, at least, a large majority. Moreover, to avoid stigma, it engages the aesthetic realm as well as the pragmatic because it has to appeal to everyone. Universal design is about dealing with barriers as artists or scientists would. It demands creative thinking and change in perspective...

There is a typical trajectory in architecture as societies develop more advanced perspectives on disability. The first stage is the architecture of exclusion, usually by neglect. The second is one of dependence through development of a legal framework and physical environment that eliminates discrimination and removes barriers to independence. We are now moving toward a new stage in many societies: the architecture of social participation, with the goal of equality in opportunity through universal design.

Why use a travel agent?

Tripology offers an exhaustive answer in 101 Reasons to Use A Travel Agent the first five reasons listed being:

1. Convenient One-Stop Shopping

2. Consumer Advocate 

3. Expert Guidance 

4. Save Time

5. Choice

Source: http://www.tripology.com/101-reasons-to-use-a-travel-agent-a/

In Forbes Larry Olmsted suggests in Why You Need A Travel Agent, Part 1:

 .the bottom line is that they know more than you do, they are better connected than you, they have access to benefits you can't get otherwise, they can often beat any other prices available (even online, yes), and after you have planned everything, they provide a safety net during your trip that you simply won't get by booking yourself or buying insurance. 

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2012/01/20/why-you-need-a-travel-agent-part-1/

I want to propose a different approach. It borrows an idea from the GLBT community as interpreted by the sociologist, Erving Gofman.

Gofman wrote on the concept of stigmatization. A stigma is a way of marking an individual or 

group with an wanted set of characteristics that serves to isolate that group from opportunity and establish barriers to their full participation in society. Gofman assigned individuals to one of two categories - the stigmatized and normals. He then identified a subset within the normals:

1. the stigmatized are those who bear the stigma;
2. the normals are those who do not bear the stigma; and
3. the wise are those among the normals who are accepted by the stigmatized as "wise" to their condition (borrowing the term from the homosexual community).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stigma

The entry on Social Stigma at Wikipedia goes on the elaborate:

The wise normals are not merely those who are in some sense accepting of the stigma; they are, rather, "those whose special situation has made them intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized individual and sympathetic with it, and who find themselves accorded a measure of acceptance, a measure of courtesy membership in the clan." That is, they are accepted by the stigmatized as "honorary members" of the stigmatized group. "Wise persons are the marginal men before whom the individual with a fault need feel no shame nor exert self-control, knowing that in spite of his failing he will be seen as an ordinary other." Goffman notes that the wise may in certain social situations also bear the stigma with respect to other normals: that is, they may also be stigmatized for being wise.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stigma

While it is true that the wise may share in the stigma they are also much more likely to be immune to it when working as an expert and advocate on the behalf of travelers with

 disabilities - one of the three groups universally considered to be stigmatized.

Operating like a "secret shopper" a travel agent can help limit the challenges that one tackles while traveling to those one chooses for the thrill or personal fulfillment involved instead of making the very act of travel planning an exhausting endurance test.

On a more personal level the relationship one allows a wise travel agent to have with you can facilitate the unique needs of some travelers with disabilities. These can sometimes include sensitive information such as medical, stamina, personal care, communication, or assistive equipment needs.

Unknown to some travelers, travel agents are trained to ensure a high quality of satisfaction for their clients through the practice of qualification interviews when a customer first contacts them. Companies such as RoadID have developed innovative combinations of stylish medical alert accessories that provide access to medical and emergency contact data for first responders and can be a part of that process. Agencies such as Italy's Carlo Besta National Neurological Institute are engaged in ongoing research on how best to improve collection and communication of the needs of travelers with disabilities to travel professionals.

It is also the case that a travel agent may become passionately engaged as an ally for travelers with disabilities. In fact, that is rather likely. Numerous studies show that the one significant predictor of significant attitude change toward persons with disabilities is personal contact with them.

In that case, it is helpful for a traveler with a disability too be not only an articulate self-advocate but what amounts to a mentor in the travel agent's professional development.

I suggest some attitudes for self-advocatcy in the New Mobility article reprinted below, Disability Pride and World Travel as well as in the piece, Accessibility is Not Inclusion. 

The second element, becoming a living resource for the professional development of your travel agent requires all the skill and dedication of a consultant, teacher, and friend.  A good foundation would be to orient the travel agent to the various Models of Disability as explained by Deborah Kaplan in Definition of Disability 

Also helpful is familiarity with the concept of stigma and thinking about how to combat it.

Bruce Link and Jo Phelan^[12] propose that stigma exists when four specific components converge:

1.      Individuals differentiate and label human variations.

2.      Prevailing cultural beliefs tie those labeled to adverse attributes.

3.      Labeled individuals are placed in distinguished groups that serve to establish a sense of disconnection between "us" and "them".

4.      Labeled individuals experience "status loss and discrimination" that leads to unequal circumstances.

In this model stigmatization is also contingent on "access to social, economic, and political power that allows the identification of differences, construction of stereotypes, the separation of labeled persons into distinct groups, and the full execution of disapproval, rejection, exclusion, and discrimination." Subsequently, in this model the term stigma is applied when labeling, stereotyping, disconnection, status loss, and discrimination all exist within a power situation that facilitates stigma to occur...

 Stigma, though powerful and enduring, is not inevitable, and can be challenged. There

 are two important aspects to challenging stigma: challenging the stigmatisation on the part of stigmatizers, and challenging the internalized stigma of the stigmatized. To challenge stigmatization, Campbell et al.^[16] summarise three main approaches.

1.     There are efforts to educate individuals about the non-stigmatising facts and why they should not stigmatise.

2.     There are efforts to legislate against discrimination.

3.     There are efforts to mobilize the participation of community members in anti-stigma efforts, to maximize the likelihood that the anti-stigma messages have relevance and effectiveness, according to local contexts.

In the end, the very act of you getting out to travel is educational for the industry. How much more valuable as you are able to recruit allies and identify the wise among travel professionals along the way.

Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner. Frames operate in four key ways: they define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. Frames are often found within a narrative account of an issue or event, and are generally the central organizing idea." ^[4

Frame bridging

 is the "linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem" (Snow et al., 1986, p. 467). It involves the linkage of a movement to "unmobilized [sic] sentiment pools or public opinion preference clusters" (p. 467) of people who share similar views or grievances but who lack an organizational base.

Frame amplification

 refers to "the clarification and invigoration of an interpretive frame that bears on a particular issue, problem, or set of events" (Snow et al., 1986, p. 469). This interpretive frame usually involves the invigorating of values or beliefs.

Frame extensions

 are a movement's effort to incorporate participants by extending the boundaries of the proposed frame to include or encompass the views, interests, or sentiments of targeted groups.

Frame transformation

 is a process required when the proposed frames "may not resonate with, and on occasion may even appear antithetical to, conventional lifestyles or rituals and extant interpretive frames" (Snow et al., 1986, p. 473).

When this happens, new values, new meanings and understandings are required in order to secure participants and support. Goffman (1974, p. 43-44) calls this "keying" where "activities, events, and biographies that are already meaningful from the standpoint of some primary framework transpose in terms of another framework" (Snow et al., 1986, p. 474) such that they are seen differently. There are two types of frame transformation:

Domain-specific transformations such as the attempt to alter the status of groups of people, and

Global interpretive frame transformation where the scope of change is quite radical as in a change of world views, total conversions of thought, or uprooting of all that is familiar (e.g. moving from communism to market capitalism; religious conversion, etc.).

The Age-friendly products competition invites design professionals and students to rethink domestic objects for today's senior citizens, which for the most part are in good health, are familiar with technology and have high product-quality standards. 

The competition aspires to the prospective creation of new collections of beautiful, practical and functional objects, while promoting a design culture focused on the specific needs of an increasingly important population segment. 

The deadline for submissions is 3 July 2012. 

AGE-FRIENDLY PRODUCTS
A call for ideas promoted by: Domus - architectural, design and art monthly published by Editoriale Domus
Under the Sponsorship of: LN-A, a foundation fighting against the lack of self-sufficiency

Framework
This competition promotes the design of a new generation of products with a high aesthetic worth and performance to meet the needs of seniors. 
The longer life expectations and changed social and economic conditions of the elderly in advanced economies have turned retirement into a second life that brings independent living and, often, fresh enterprise. 
The quality of this new life must feature products and services that embrace and sustain this new independence and enterprise with an elegant, discreet, comfortable and eco-friendly approach to the changed physical and cognitive capabilities.

This 2012 International Day of Persons with Disabilities will be observed on 3 December 2012. The theme will be "Removing barriers to create an inclusive and accessible society for all". The United Nations has invited communities to focus on aspects of society and development, including, but not limited to, removing barriers to education, employment, transportation, travel and tourism or sport, across all societal groups.

For more information, go to:
http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=1597 

After decades of discussion the Seven Principles of Universal Design were codified in 1997. As early as the 1970's Universal Design was being proposed to the US government by the disability community as the appropriate foundation for civil rights. Promoters of Universal Design quickly honed in on physical accessibility of public buildings.

A community found its voice in a built environment that had enforced exclusion for generations. Indeed, there was never a Golden Era of inclusive design to look back to with nostalgia. There was no treasure trove of design solutions waiting to be found and applied. The failure to imagine people with disabilities as fully equal participants was pandemic.

The first item of business was to rebuild the old while imagining the new. Accessibility, understood as independent access by persons with mobility impairments, was required. Architectural barriers removal was the order of the day. Small victories - a municipal order that all damaged sidewalks or curbs that occurred at a street corner must be replaced by a wheelchair ramp for example or all busses in a transit fleet will have wheelchair lifts.

Yes, Josh Sundquist has a few unique ways to make you laugh. In this video he illustrates the phrase, "As busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest." It's ok to laugh. Just Don't Fall.