A Day in the Life: Sarah's Journey

In 2010 the Equality Act replaced the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The Equality Act is to cover more areas of an individuals life not just employment like the Disability Discrimination Act did previously. One of my main concerns is how a number of different minority legislation's have been lumped into one and that this is meant to be sufficient, wont this make the current Act less flexible? limiting those who are seen as having a disability as not all individuals fit nicely into a category of impairment. So does the Equality Act really work? I have come to recognise that there is a mixed view on whether it really works or not depending on the individuals that are spoken to, especially with regards to reasonable adjustment within the workplace. When speaking to officials (including trade union officials who deal with case work) they can not speak highly enough of the Act and are able to state that as a result of the legislation they have been able to resolve a number of c...

The issue of Access is often a contentious one, if you talk to someone with a disability then there is always problems with not enough being done, yet if you talk to people in authority there are always excuses as to why more can not be done. I appreciate that there are times when it is not possible for there to be access to something be it the physical limitations of the person themselves (e.g. rock climbing) or through buildings being so old that they can't be adjusted enough to be fully accessible. Although this is the case, organisations will often hide behind 'reasonable adjustment', expecting disabled people to just accept that as much is being done as possible. As mentioned above, I appreciate there are some limitations with buildings that are really old and that I will not be able to get everywhere that I may want to, but I still feel that often more can be done than is currently being done so. Companies should want to do as much as they can to include everyone (at ...

Over the past year I have learnt much about myself and other people and so I need to take a moment to reflect on my experiences and in essence how lucky I am to have the life that I do. So many people have to deal with so many more injustices than myself, which I can only begin to imagine the effect that this has. I have made the effort to learn about other sick and disabled peoples lives, to allow me to appreciate what others go through on a daily basis. This learning has made me realise that things are not always clean cut as they seem, leading to me having a greater empathy for people in different situations. I have done my learning through talking to people on social networking sites like Twitter, as well as through listening and taking note of the news and the media as a whole. There have been a number of different items in the media about disabled people which I feel is another reason I have learnt to question what I am told and find out the truth, as unfortunately much of w...