First of all, I’d just like to say that I’m sorry about the lack of updates lately. My life has been a maze of appointments and the like. Ali who writes My (dis)abled Life nominated my blog for another award which I will be passing on next week when I’ve finished compiling my list of nominees.
So, today I’m going to talk (and possibly rant) about a subject close to my heart: disabled toilets. As far as I understand it now though, I think the politically correct term is ‘accessible toilet’ these days. I’ll probably use both during this post. Although. that will have more to do with the fact that I don’t want to use the phrase ‘disabled toilet’ over and over than anything else.
Now, given that I use my walking frame or my wheelchair when I’m out in public, I end up seeing rather a lot of these so-called accessible loos. The thing that I tend to find is that they’re either brilliant with tonnes of space and the sink and the toilet roll holder at the perfect height, or there are a lot that are quite the opposite. Well, with regards to my personal mobility issues anyway.
Often I find that a lot of them aren’t quite big enough and my wheelchair or walking frame take up most of the space inside and don’t give me a lot of room to move around it easily. As I’m sure you can imagine, this isn’t good if you’re trying to go in a hurry and I have to try and step over things. I find this quite hard and sometimes I trip over which really isn’t a good thing on a full bladder, trust me. It was even worse when I had my surgery a few years back and my mother had to come in a help me (I won’t go into details) but there was even less space then which made us both really, really stressed.
If I’m out and about on my own and I don’t have the option to leave Martha outside and just ask someone to help me walk in, I tend to have some loos that I try to avoid using for these reasons and try and remember where the roomiest (and also cleanest) ones are. I know that you’re all probably thinking that I spend way too much time thinking about toilets, and you’re probably right, but given that I don’t personally find many of them user-friendly I don’t really have much of a choice.
Don’t get me wrong I have seen my fair share of clean, spacious ones ( I even saw one with a hoist once, but I really have only seen this once in somewhere other than a hospital). I don’t feel that enough of them are up to scratch. It is because of this that I very rarely feel comfortable using the term ‘accessible’ toilet, when, in my view, many simply aren’t easily accessible to me without help.
viewfromawalkingframe 
First time after I moved to york I went on “toilet hunt” to find the best (and worst) ones in the centre. I find library toilets amazing the ones in york even have hoists and beds
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Really? They sound amazing. Don’t hink I’ve ever seen a public one with a bed before. I’m glad I’m not the only one who goes hunting for them either!
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I can relate! It’s interesting to read about similar issues from someone in another country.
What annoys me even more is able-bodied people who set up camp in the disabled toilets. I wrote a guest blog post about it for my friend Kimmie which you can read here http://www.thatgirlinthewheelchair.com/2013/06/a-guest-blog-from-spashionista-get-out.html .
Incidentally, my blog url has changed to simply http://spashionista.com. I don’t have your email address so I couldn’t notify you privately. You can now only follow via bloglovin or email notices from me.
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Yeah that annoys me too sometimes! Thanks for letting me know about your blog. I’ll set up email updates 🙂
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I really enjoyed reading your blog. I am disabled and use a wheelchair myself so I can feel your pain. I am a fellow blogger on the site and would love for your to read my blog and comment, share or follow if you’d like. Whatever you feel appropriate. Thanks.
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Don’t even get me started on disabled toilets: Those tiny little sinks that are impossible to wash in without splashing water everywhere so the floor is slippy; the fact they always double as baby-changing rooms which always seems to have priority so the toilet arms are folded up against the walls and you have to call for help to put them down if your condition affects your upper body; locks that come open by themselves the moment your pants are round your ankles and you’re too far from the door to do anything about it; cleaning equipment stored in the corner and hospitals (yes hospitals!) that don’t have disabled toilets on some of their wards…
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Yeah I’ve come across several that seem to double as storage cupboards for cleaning things.That gets on my nerves. That and ones that don’t have the emergency pull chords installed…
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I noticed that you have your twitter status right here on your page. How do you do that, and can you do it with Facebook?
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It’s a widget that works within my theme. Think it’s called ‘Twitter Feed’ . I’m not sure if you can do that with Facebook, but I know that you can connect your Facebook to your Twitter account by going to your settings on Twitter. Hope that helps.
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We have plenty of disabled toilets here. They’re usually higher than the other ones and they have grab bars. I guess it makes it easier for people who have sensory problems and the elderly to get on and off the toilet.
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