Other Work

There is absolutely no dearth of disabled talent. What the industry lacks is opportunity, accessibility and a reluctance to embrace big change

On meeting someone new, as a disabled person, there will always come a moment when that question is asked. The specifics of the question vary, but in my case, it’s – how far can you see? I’ve been asked this question in countless contexts: at parties, on buses, in cafes, and at airport security. To give credit to the enquirer, it’s often delivered with helpful intention, or at the very least with polite curiosity. I don’t have a problem with the question itself. It’s the answer that presents a difficulty. 

For some reason, vision and its parameters are ludicrously difficult to explain. Despite the frequency with which I’m asked this question I still struggle to give an illuminating response. I tend to reach for numbers first. I say I have 6 48 vision, so what a fully sighted person can see from forty eight metres away, I can see from six. This is a well-rehearsed phrase that rolls off the tongue. It gives brief satisfaction, and only brief, because it quickly becomes apparent that those arbitrary distances don’t comfortably translate to any real life situation. Forty eightmetres is a near impossible measurement for our imaginations to accurately compute. Percentages tend to have the same effect – I cite 12.5, which is just a crude reworking of the initial figures.  

Project 002.5 is an initiative led by Boom Saloon which aims to rewrite the story of dementia through a series of digital creative writing workshops. All profits raised from the sale of Boom Saloon Issue 005 are being used to fund this project.

“I’m a poet and theatre maker. I’ve performed at the Fringe in some capacity for the last four festivals since 2016. Since 2017 I’ve performed as part of a spoken word theatre company called In the Works. This year I was due to be performing my debut solo show. I’m an Edinburgh resident too so I’ve been coming for a while since I was very young, three or four years old. I remember going to the Princes Street Cavalcade and what used to be Fringe Sunday at the Meadows, where there were snippets of different activities, music and theatre.”

Every year, The List’s reviewers visit around a thousand cafés, bars and restaurants across Edinburgh and Glasgow for our Eating & Drinking Guide. Checking disability access is just one of the areas they look at, but it’s a critical issue for many.

Accessibility is complex, and often the conversations we need to have about it are sidestepped for fear of saying the wrong thing. We generally associate ‘access’ with the wheelchair symbol: in the restaurant world that might mean adding a wheelchair ramp or accessible toilet. But, according to Disability Sport, fewer than 8% of people with a disability use a wheelchair – and often even basic physical access needs aren’t met. It’s clear we need to rethink our cultural approach towards accessibility.

The Disability Arts Online ‘Artist Presentations’ series was a strand of their COVID Commissions programme in 2020.

Poetic Vision explored the role of sight in my own writing and the writings of others, touching on subjects including the hierarchy of the senses and the cultural significance of blindness.

I fell into performing by accident. In 2015, I read a poem as part of a writing group showcase in Glasgow. After my reading, a member of the audience asked if I performed often and, if I’m honest, I wasn’t too sure what she meant by it. Poetry had always been something that I’d enjoyed privately but maybe it was time to share my words with more people. I went along to my first open mic at a pub called Broadcast and, from then on, I was hooked.

The feeling of performing my own writing is still unrivalled. I love the sensation of nerves giving way to relief when I reach a poem’s final line. I love the moments when a particular word or phrase elicits a collective reaction from the audience.

Much of my writing is influenced by my experience of being visually impaired. Representations of disability, and the lived disabled experience, are so rarely nuanced and that’s something that needs to shift in order for us to bring about any real change.

With the support of Unlimited and Creative Scotland, I was due to take my one-woman poetry show Within Sight on a tour around theatres in Scotland this Spring. Shortly after we began the tour, however, things were called to a halt by the outbreak of Covid-19.

It’s a show about the Paralympics, running, and ableism, and much like the Paralympics itself, we are now hoping to reschedule the tour for 2021. It’s hard not to wonder what the world might look like in a year’s time in light of the pandemic, particularly in relation to issues of ableism.

This crisis has held up a mirror to societal inequalities of all kinds, and it feels as though the daily outpouring of news has been punctuated with ableist attitudes and callous treatment of the disabled. By the time Within Sight returns to a stage, will its audiences have gained a new perspective on ableism and the social model?