git ssb

title: "The wheelchair symbol" date: 2007-08-04 13:34 series: Walking Dataloss

tags: blindness, conflation, deafblindness, deafness, disability, signage, web, wheelchair symbol

<p>The wheelchair symbol—a stick-person sitting in a stick-wheelchair (well, on a stick-<em>wheel</em> at least)—is a common, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/map/?map_type=hyb&q=wheelchair%20symbol" title="Flickr photos of it, on an atlas">internationally-recognised</a> symbol.</p>
<h2 id="ramps">Ramps</h2>
<p>I suppose it <em>originally</em> meant something like “mainly for people using wheelchairs”. For example, in cases where a building's main entrance involves steps, but there's a secondary entrance that uses a ramp instead, this symbol is often used with an arrow to point towards that ramp. But it's a bit of a <em>dodgy</em> symbol for this purpose.</p>
<p>Perhaps the <em>main</em> intention behind the ramp <em>is</em> to allow access for people who use wheelchairs; but others are quite likely to use it as well—people with pushchairs, for example; or on bikes (if it's an outdoor ramp). Maybe you're a small dog (or with one) and don't fancy climbing up steps half your height. Maybe you <em>can</em> walk, but can't easily lift your feet to the height of a step. Maybe you're a skater.</p>
<p>I suspect that many ramps that use the wheelchair symbol were only installed in the <em>first</em> place in order to comply with anti-discrimination legislation, which (in addition to having a poetically rhythmic name) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_Discrimination_Act_1995" title="Disability Discrimination Act, 1995 - Wikipedia">has come into force in the United Kingdom recently</a>. In this frame of mind, someone thought, “OK, chaps. We're putting this ramp in for the <em>disabled</em> people, so we're gonna put up a <em>big sign</em> saying ‘This is for disabled people.’ That makes sense.”.</p>
<p>And it sort-of does, but they're thinking about it <em>far</em> too hard. They should use a symbol of a <em>ramp</em> instead—something like <a href="http://www.highwaycode.gov.uk/sign104.htm" title="The Highway Code">the UK road sign for an incline</a>, but without any gradient. This would show what's there, factually and simply, without making assumptions about who's going to be using it. Analogously, a simple pictorial of some stairs is often used to represent a <em>staircase</em>, and quite sensibly.</p>
<h2 id="sound">Sound</h2>
<p>That example of the wheelchair symbol's use is relatively innocuous—the ramp <em>is</em> intended mainly for wheelchair users. But there are other cases of its use where it's <em>wholly</em> inappropriate, mainly on the web.</p>
<p>A lot of websites use simple tests to distinguish real (presumably) human users from automated spamming machines. These tests usually involve reading a picture of a string of letters and numbers, that's been made <em>intentionally difficult</em> for a computer to read. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Accessibility" title="Accessibility of “Captchas” - Wikipedia">This also makes them virtually impossible for people with poor sight to read.</a> In order to provide access for these people, most websites that use such tests provide an alternative one that involves recognising <em>sound</em> instead.</p>
<p>(Both of these are useless for deafblind people. There have been attempts at devising more sensible tests that don't assume that real people can either see or hear, such as <a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/01/24/wp-gatekeeper/">Eric Meyer's WP-Gatekeeper</a>.)</p>
<p>These audio tests are often indicated by the wheelchair symbol. —which makes <em>no</em> sense whatsoever.</p>
<p>The rationale behind this is presumably that the wheelchair symbol has become a general symbol for disability. That's a shame, as it lumps everyone with anything that's considered a disability into one category. And using a wheelchair needn't be a disability in every situation, and <em>certainly</em> isn't on the <em>web</em> (which is incongruous, because that's where its image is being used as a symbol for disability).</p>
<p>There <em>is</em> <a href="http://www.disability.uci.edu/disability_handbook/symbols_description.html" title="The Disability Handbook">a symbol for blindness</a>, which would be more appropriate for this purpose than the wheelchair symbol; it's a person walking with a cane to the ground in front of them. Unfortunately, it assumes that all people walking with canes in front of them are blind, which is reasonably fair; and that all blind people can walk, which is not.</p>
<p>A better symbol for blindness would be an eye with a slash through it; the UK's <a href="http://www.rnib.org.uk/">Royal National Institute of Blind People</a> uses such a symbol as their site's icon. Analogously, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:International_Symbol_for_Deafness.svg">symbol for deafness</a> is an ear with a slash through it. (This is a very <em>sensible</em> symbol.) The symbol for deafblindness could then, logically, be an eye and an ear, with a slash through each (so, the deafness and blindness symbols combined).</p>
<p>But even the <em>blindness</em> symbol would only be as appropriate for indicating an <em>audio</em>-based test as the <em>wheelchair</em> symbol is for indicating <em>ramps</em>. It's a sound-based test; it should be represented by a symbol for <em>sound</em>; a speaker with “sound waves” emanating from it would be perfect.</p>
<h2 id="parking">Parking</h2>
<p>There are some uses of the wheelchair symbol that are a bit more awkward. The wheelchair symbol is often used to mark disabled people's parking spaces<a href="#note-parkingspaces" id="ref-parkingspaces"></a>—those reserved for drivers and passengers who are “registered disabled”, with extra room and in the most convenient positions. “Registered disabled” means that the person in question uses a wheelchair, uses crutches, has poor or no sight, or has another condition that makes a better parking space a practical necessity. (I'm not sure whether having poor or no <em>hearing</em> gets you a disabled-badge<a href="#note-badge" id="ref-badge">**</a>, but I don't see why it would mean you'd need a space nearer to the building.)</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="#ref-parkingspaces" id="note-parkingspaces"></a> (I say “disabled people's parking spaces” rather than “disabled parking spaces” because the latter seems to imply that the parking spaces themselves are disabled.)</p>
<p><a href="#ref-badge" id="note-badge">**</a>: (Similarly, “disabled badge” seems to imply that the badge itself is disabled.)</p>
<hr>
<p>The wheelchair symbol isn't <em>really</em> appropriate here. Like with the ramp, these parking spaces aren't <em>only</em> for people who use wheelchairs; they're also specifically for people who fall into other groups. Unlike the ramp, this is an <em>artificial</em> distinction: the spaces are explicitly <em>for</em> certain groups of people and—more importantly—specifically <em>not</em> for everyone else. The ramp was just “probably less convenient” for people who can use steps.</p>
<p>In this case, I can't think of a better symbol to use. I think it would be counter-productive to invent a new symbol to generally represent “disability”, because using <em>any</em> symbol like this arbitrarily lumps a lot of disparate groups of people together. However, it <em>might</em> remove the implication that, in <em>any</em> case where a certain biological or medical condition would cause problems, wheelchair users are always “disabled”—or literally, incapable.</p>