I’m getting really sick and tired of every event that is put on defaulting to use these online ticketing systems for bookings and none of them catering for disabled access to be booked online like the rest of the community. Instead, we are ostracised once again, being forced to submit a form and wait for a call to be able to arrange our bookings.
Why should this be so?
It’s 2023 – it’s at least 30 years since the opening up of the Internet to the public was meant to transform our lives. There’s no valid reason why online systems cannot include us.
Categories for concession cards and other forms of benefits can be included on online forms. Accessible seating can be allocated and marked, and able to be chosen online the same as any other seating.
Excuses of having to verify cards, such as companion cards, are ludicrous in this day and age where digitised scans of everything are ready at an instant due to the mobile phone. And why even go to that extreme. Why not issue digital Companion Cards?
Why? Because none of this is a technology problem. It’s a policy problem. A glaring example of existing apathetic, legacy attitudes.
Almost everywhere I turn I encounter it. Systems and procedures that come from a mindset stuck – not bothering to look at how to solve a problem that sits just outside their normal purview. Not willing to cater for all people, and instead, too readily lumping a hurdle in the too hard basket – along with those it effects. Instead, out of step and out of date providers revert to their old ways of forcing us to jump through hoops to suit their ineptitude.
It’s more than about time inclusion was taken to be more than just lipservice. More than some means of societal, surface level, one-upmanship designed to give a flashy, up-with-it facade, whilst, where the rubber hits the road, people get pushed backed into marginalised reality..
life tools 