Disability- are we so blind ?

Last week I had a crazy morning, in an hour I interacted with three disabled people and I was ill equipped to engage with it. As a person who spends most of the day at a desk surrounded by 'perfect' architects and evenings at sports facilities (gym/swimming pool) I rarely meet people with disabilities and I blame the environment that we live in. In Indian cities and I am sure in many cities across the world the urban environment does not allow for equal access for disability. This causes people like me to 'forget' that they live in the same space as us but are subjected to a life of isolation and invisibility.

Equal access is a very loaded word. You may have a ramp going into the building but if your toilets do not allow for a wheel chair that ramp is only good for healthy children to run on.

As architects we are trained to think of physical disability as the only parameter to consider while designing a space - providing ramps and choreographing movement so that they can get to most places in a building by following the yellow brick lane. They are not permitted experiences but rather are treated like vehicles - given a route and destinations.

Blindness or single eye vision is a subject that is often neglected completely in spaces - I cannot imagine many of the malls in Indian cities allowing a guide dog through their doors.... Another inherent flaw in architectural design of disability in India is the assumption that disabled people are always accompanied by a caregiver - I would think that, that assumption is flawed - this thinking is what keeps them at home because no body wants to be a caregiver all the time and no one wants to feel disabled all the time.

What is appalling to me is my lack of knowledge on the other forms of disability -  not purely physical that impede movement in space but that do not allow for experience in the spaces that we design - the inability to sense colour, inability to hear well, or read signs, cognitive disabilities, old age and all the problems that we experience with them - lessening of vision, arthritis.

We are not used to considering children as disabled - but the way that we design spaces in cities we could almost put them into that bracket - children are unable to function in our spaces - how many spaces have toilets that allow for someone shorter than 4' high to use them ? We design our spaces for healthy people between the ages of 14 and 50 or when we make an effort to be all inclusive we are blatantly banal and uninspired.

Architecturally, how are we to deal with the myriad possibilities of human disabilities? The article in the image shows the design of a cutlery set for specifically one kind of disability but how are we to think about this in the design of spaces? By creating multiple scenarios and not generic standards can we expand our spaces to be more inclusive?