About me
My name is Helen, married to Robin, mother of 2 wonderful girls, musician & crazy cat lady. To cut a very long story short, I suffered with Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction (SPD) through both pregnancies. This coupled with hypermobility and being overweight was a recipe for disaster. After years of walking with crutches and finding my world got smaller and smaller, I decided to bite the bullet and accept that I really was disabled and needed to think and act accordingly. The purchase of a wheelchair has increased my access to the world only for me to find that the world isn’t ready for me!
Just one step….
At a time when I was still in denial regarding my mobility, we had to visit a house that I had never been to before, but Robin had been there several times. I asked him how many steps there were to get inside the house and he replied with “just one step”. When we arrived, I found that there was one step from the driveway onto a set of 3 steps up to the front door, quickly followed by 2 steps into the porch and a further 2 steps to enter the house proper. And still the steps hadn’t finished; there were another 3 steps down into the sitting room!
I was persuaded to start a blog by my husband because as an able-bodied person he wasn’t aware of how inaccessible the world around us really is, as the situation with “just one step” proves, but accessibility issues don’t just relate to wheelchair users. Those with hearing or sight impairments often face their own access issues, with lack of signage or available interpreters, or just down to people not knowing what issues others face because it isn’t a lived experience for them.
I didn’t want my blog to become a place for rantings and hard-core activism, but instead for it to be a place where I can bring a bit of humour and point out some of the obvious things that are overlooked; making suggestions for improvements or give shout outs to those places and people who just get it right!
I hoped my blog would find its way to those people who make the decisions regarding the accessibility of their environment whether it be for work or play. I want to be able to leave this world a better place than how I found it, not tied up in knots like most red emergency chords that I find in disabled access bathrooms! Then it occurred to me, that just like the steps around in the able-bodied world, those people wouldn’t know to look for something like the blog. Helen’s Wheels suddenly became something bigger than just a blog post with some mildly amusing ramblings of a mad woman on wheels. Helen’s Wheels Disability Access Solutions was born.