Disabled History Month 2012

Hi Fran .. Interesting link.

well, thought there might be some other disabled GoYers, or GoYers who know people who know people who are - if it helps to raise our profile ... all disabled, I mean, not just us - durr, stop now, before I tie myself into a complete knot :-}

Interesting to see the lack of geographical spread though - so many in London, Herefordshire in second place, and not all that many others - so way to go!

nods, it's irritating that London is roo often considred the centre of everything and nowhere else matters. There might be some sort of "excuse" for the countryside, but none at all for other cities and towns - and as for small towns and villages ... verily, we have a long way to go yet

However, by and large its only Londoners who think nowhere else matters. (Many people are happy to forego all the facilities of London in order to live somewhere else!)
I was surprised to see that the only event listed for Wales was in Cardiff, which is relatively near the edge of Wales and well out of reach for people from most places in the country to get there and back the same day. Way to go, as you say.

lol correction, only *some* Londoners think that nowhere else matters! .lol maybe it's "capital-itis" - bet Edinburgh's a bit the same.

I'm tyring to get out of London, already applied in five other counties and more to follow. Last week I actually got offered a place in a village near the Lake District, but had to decline as no disabled access - sigh, to live in a village, one shop, post office, chruch and pub, buses every 2-3 hours (and me with no car) - that's certainly the other end of the spectrum to London!

and as for "still some way to go" - The Department for Work and Pensions and Jocentre are still claiming that "We can't do large print" for visually-impaired people on benefits or a pension. 21st Century and "we can't do large print"!!!

You would think some large print leaflets or booklets via an application code could be made available to visually impaired persons to obtain forms and info in large print via the internet. Surely, in this computer era, it is not too difficult to do this. The most helpless get their services cut or curtailed first, knowing they are likely to make the least fuss. Printed runs of forms are done in large numbers and no account taken of various minorities of the disabled. Many very helpful government booklets were withdrawn a long time ago in favour of the internet.

nods and sighs, a lot offer downloadable forms, but most are in PDF format, which is basically the same font size as a standard letter or form, equally nbg to me.

I think the difficult part of doing large print is for someone at the organisation to *think* - it can be done, once they're forced to do it, just a shame that one has to threaten legal action for disabled discrimination.

And the trouble with pdf is that you can't write on it to fill in the forms unless you buy the expensive software. I hope you manage to find somewhere out of London that suits you Fran.

I have PDF converter software - most want to convert to PDF, converting from is something else! I sometimes convert PDFs to Word, though it comes out mangled because the OCR isn't brilliant; I type in my answers, convert it back to PDF and send it to them, saying, Now YOU work it out!

Prob with housing is I'm starting on a high - I've got a 1-bed ground floor flat with garden, which most people could only wish for, but of course I want something equal to or better. I could move tomorrow if I were willing to accept 1st floor bedsit (sorry, "studio flat") in sheltered block with no garden - well, communal garden, but that's no garden to me!