Carrie-Ann Lightley Blueprint for Inclusive Travel

Ready to challenge the status quo in accessible travel? Join us for a candid conversation with  Carrie-Ann Lightley, Head of Marketing at Accessible. Carrie brings a depth of personal and professional insight as we unpack the necessity for a progressive, rather than perfectionist, approach to accessibility. We tap into the significance of bespoke experiences and information, the fallacy of aiming for "fully accessible" destinations, and the promise of inclusive travel.

Moving the dialogue forward, we discuss the need for inclusive design for disability. Carrie underscores the importance of not just consulting, but co-designing with the disability community. We delve into the dangers of tokenism, the benefits of having internal focus groups, and the immense value of compensating disabled contributors for their invaluable input. 

Rounding off our heartfelt exploration, we broach the shifting social model of disability, and the dual impact of technology as a tool and barrier in accessibility. We unpack the biopsychosocial model's recognition of the enduring nature of impairments, even amidst heightened accessibility. We muse over the potential of emerging technologies, and, as always, we extend our deep gratitude to our listeners and encourage continued engagement. So, tune in for this enlightening conversation that champions genuine, considerate, and forward-thinking approaches to accessibility.

Chapters

• 0:01 Accessible Travel and Authentic Voices
• 11:38 Research and Inclusive Design for Disability
• 20:48 Technology, Environment, and Disability Impact
• 31:42 Expressing Gratitude and Future Engagement

Transcript

0:00

AXSCHAT Carrie-Ann Lightley

NEIL: 0:01

Hello and welcome to Axschat. No Antonio again, he's still on holiday. shocking really. But you have got the benefit of me and Debra and also, our guest today Carrie-Ann LIghtley of Access Able. So, Carrie Ann, great to have you with us. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and also your work as you know the head of Marketing Accessible

CARRIE-ANN: 0:28

Absolutely Neil, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here with you today. So, as you say my name Carrie-Ann LIghtley. My day job is Head of at Access Able. We're a leading provider of detailed accessibility information in the UK and I also work in accessible travel. So, my background and history is around specifically accessible travel and tourism, worked in that industry since about 2005. So, I take on opportunities around that to do Podcast interviews like this, to write, I have my own accessible travel blog, carrieannLIghtley.com and I often create content on places like Instagram and LinkedIn about my own travel and trips. And also do things like public speaking.

NEIL: 1:22

Great. So, accessible travel information and detailed accessibility information is something that we have discussed from time to time, on Axschat. You know, we have talked with you know, numerous different platforms providers, like, for example Google and used Google Maps a lot. It leads me astray quite frequently and they started to include more and more information about the accessibility of venues and places and searches and so on. At the same time, you know, there's an element of accessible for whom and for which disability group? So, the work that you do and your work as a travel blogger, what aspects do you concentrate on or do you cover the wide range?

CARRIE-ANN: 2:24

Okay, so I think there's a couple of answers to that wearing each hat really. If I think about the work that we do as Access Able. We try to provide as much detailed information as possible to help as many people as possible. And we try to do that in a way that is nonprescriptive. So, we don't say, right, this is for people with this kind of impairment or this specific measurement will be important for people who have these needs. We don't say that. We say here is all of the detailed information that we have collected and if that's helpful to you then that's wonderful, no matter who you are or what your needs are. And then from a perspective from my own work individually, I try to reflect my own individual experience as a disabled traveller. I try to share content about venues that have met my needs very well and I always include the caveat that just because this venue meets my needs doesn't mean I'm saying that it's going to be perfect for everybody. It is about an individual experience. One of kind of my pet hates is the term fully accessible because, I just think it's a bit nonsense really. What does that actually mean and what does it mean to whom, as you say, it doesn't tell me whether I can get through a door of venue, whether I can park, whether there's a wheelchair accessible toilet. And so, I think really all of the work that I do is probably anti fully accessible and actually trying to go into the fine grain detail.

NEIL: 4:04

Yes, I mean I always treat something that's says it's fully accessible with a very large pinch of salt because to me that says you don't really understand the diversity of disability, you're just saying something is fully accessible. And, yes. I worry, that people buy into the idea of fully accessible as well and that there are certain organisations out there that market, this will make you fully accessible, that then create a whole heap of problems for the people that are well intentioned and want to be fully accessible and fully inclusive, without really understanding that no matter how much work we do, we will still end up excluding someone because it's impossible to meet the needs of the diversity of the entire population all the time. We can design as best we can and we can always take feedback and find ways to improve. But, so far I don't think we've ever built something that's fully accessible for 100% of the population anyway.

CARRIE ANN: 5:22

I agree. I think as you say, it's almost an impossibility. And, I think what it always does is it forces the onus on to perfection, perfect accessibility and that can then take away from progress ultimately and I always like to think of it in those, progress and not perfection because we are always learning. Things are always changing. People's needs are always changing and technology and infrastructure is always developing in a way that can improve accessibility and can improve the experience for disabled people. And so, yes, I think it's about not necessarily having that benchmark of you must reach this point before you can call yourself accessible. I think it's about the desire to do it and the desire to learn and make progress.

DEBRA: 6:18

I agree but at the same time we are holding these brands accountable. I mean, looking from my lens, Carrie Ann, here in the United States, we are suing people over this, we are suing them for a lot of money and we are embarrassing their brands openly, just saying. Now, I am not saying we should stop doing that because by golly we are tired of not being included but at the same time, I agree with what you're saying. I would always say people say in the States that we are fully compliant and I would say don't say that. Please also don't say you're fully accessible because as we are saying, lift is shifting and changing, technology is changing so much and Carrie Ann, I agree with what you just said, when I see that you're making the effort, the hotel to the airlines, I really do appreciate that as a member of society and as a member of this community and all my work but, at the same time, if you do not create policies and programmes that are flexible and shifting, including all of the efforts that you're making to make sure that guests with disabilities or special needs, can you know, have their needs met. I think that you make a mistake doing that but I think sometimes, some of the pressure that our community gives to these brands creates some of that problem. Just being fair at the same time. But I wonder also, Carrie Ann, I'm going to shift it a little bit, the conversation because I appreciate voices like yours. I appreciate the work that you're doing's at Access Able. I appreciate that you're blogging, that you're interviewing others, but something that I right now a lot of people I know are concerned about including me, is how do we make sure we are listening to the authentic voices instead of just people using artificial intelligence just now to mimic the voices. So, I think something that's shifting now, that makes your voice important in accessibility and our voices also important is it seems like there might be confusion in the market and starting to be confusion in the market about who are they really listening to. Are they really, Carrie Ann listening to our community? People that use wheelchairs, people that are blind, that use service animals. I mean how can the brands make sure that they are actually listening to our community when our community is so big and diverse and also, we have so many different needs. And I know that's an unfair question by the way. But I was curious if you knew the answer because we would all appreciate knowing that answer.

CARRIE-ANN: 9:02

I think that's a really interesting question and I think you know, my view and as part of my work at Access Able is supporting our client's and the organisations that we work with to ensure that their marketing and communications is inclusive, in a way that isn't tokenistic and key to that is listening to the voices of the community, reflecting the voices of the community. And I think that is what it comes down to. I think that sometimes and I think this is well meaning but I think that sometimes organisations may fall for listening to one voice. Hiring a consultant that has a view from a single aspect of disability or impairment and there is absolutely value there. There is value to listening to their voice and their experiences and their story but they are one voice in a large community of diverse needs. So, yes, I would always advocate for having your own Focus Groups, having your own user groups and customer groups around disability, paying people for their time to provide these services because that is ultimately consultancy and you know, disabled people's lived experience and lived expertise has huge value and should be seen as such.

NEIL: 10:35

Absolutely. I think that it's really important that we don't go paying consultants to then exploit the disability community by getting them to do all of the unpaid research and do all of the value and it becomes extraction of value from disability rather than you know, the community getting paid what they deserve for contributing to making better more inclusive products and services and so on. So, I think it is always really important to not just engage in the community but when you're doing research. If you're paying for research for market research in general, there should be no difference paying the disabled community for your research. It's not a charitable endeavour.

CARRIE-ANN: 11:28

I completely agree and you know, just to say I'm not trying to say don't use consultants and don't use consultancy, I think there is absolute value in that but do your research into the consultant and consultancy that you're using. Do your research into their links with disabled people, with disabled voices and with lived experience.

NEIL: 11:49

Yes. And I think that not everybody can afford to do loads and loads of market research, so you know, if it's a small project or people are curious and we want to encourage organisations to start on their journey as you are talking about progress versus perfection, we don't want people to start that consultation process and each step along the way is good. Even those steps where you talk to an individual is a starting point. It should not be the end of. But, then you can start building up from there and there are organisations that can help you do this stuff as well. So, they can, they have panels, they can engage with a wide range of different people for you and so on and so forth and that makes it much better research with these better projects because you're getting a diverse range of views and of course you are working with consultants and they can do that for you. What I'd really want to make sure is that those consultants don't engage people and give them free work. Like make, getting people to work for free while they are getting paid because I've seen that happen and that is not the kind of behaviour that I think should be part of our profession or our community and we want to work with the community, co design etc, rather than profit from.

CARRIE-ANN: 13:20

I agree and so, I think it's just you know about doing your due diligence when you're looking to engage somebody in this type of work, doing your due diligence to ensure that, as you say that there are not only links with disabled people but if something like a focus group is going to be used then it's going to be used in a way that shows it's full value.

NEIL: 13:46

Yes. And I think we have lost Debra. She had some Wi-Fi and signal problems. So, hopefully she'll return. But I do think that also the more organisations talk about the benefits of consultation and of disability on design, not just of products but for services as well, then the more we can engage and if we think about product design for a moment, you know, or some of my favourite things in my kitchen are the Oxo range, the good grips range and they were designed primarily the driver was to make sure that the designer's wife who had rheumatoid arthritis could hold things and maintain agency and do the things that she'd always done. But now they are a bestselling range of cook wear products. So, a great example of where disability led design and co design ends up in creating successful mainstream products. So, from a point of view of you know, disabled travel because that's an area where you're passionate about. How can we translate something from like a product design ethos, like you just talked about with Oxo to a sort of service design kind of ethos when it's around travel, accommodation and transport, etc.

CARRIE-ANN: 15:29

I can definitely think of some accommodation examples where ultimately that universal design element has benefited everybody. And I am thinking of a specific example of a holiday lodge that I stayed in, on a working farm and they had three key target markets, three key markets that they wanted to target and serve well and that was disabled people and it was families traveling together with younger children and it was people coming on holiday with animals, with pets, with even with horses because they were a working farm, they had facility.

NEIL: 16:11

Wow, yes okay.

CARRIE-ANN: 16:12

And I remember the owner telling me, when they were doing the tour around, when we first arrived and they were showing us things like the wet room, shower and it had a height adjustable sink, lots of quite high spec equipment and they said, you know when the families come, they love the wet rooms, they love the wet rooms because the kids go out and get muddy on the farm and they can just chuck them in there and hose them down and I think that is you know, a similar example of that's universal design. And that wet room was designed ultimately to enable the disabled guests, to be able to sit with them in a more independent way but it's also benefitted other areas of their customer groups. And, if we think about travel and transit, you know, it's something as simple as ramped access or access with lifts or elevators. You know, lots of people travel with luggage and suitcases. They are not very easy to get up and down the steps for example. So, even just the very basics of having, you know, level access or access via ramps, you need to go in to support all travellers to have a better experience.

NEIL: 17:33

So, sometimes you know, we see a lot of memes of people where they have you know, ramps ending halfway up staircases and/or you know, stuff that's made out of scaffolding tubing and so on. So, there is a lot of old and aging infrastructure. So, you know, you and I, are both in the UK and it's not a new country. We like our old buildings and our old infrastructure here. And maybe a little bit too much. We are quite precious about keeping crusty old buildings. But at the same time there is a tension between preserving culture and creating access and to a certain extent, the legacy of the fact that we built our infrastructure and at a time when people didn't think of designing inclusively for access. So, if you go to countries that are more recently developing and developing faster in the Far East, you'll see you know, a lot of access is built in because it's new infrastructure. Whereas you know, we're going well, you know which decade will the tube line be fully accessible or you see people complaining about New York City transit authority and their timetable for making all of their infrastructure accessible. So, of course it's easier to design it up front. But do you think right that the paradigm we have now of level access and ramps would ever be disrupted by things like you know, changes in mobility technology that enable people with mobility issues that are wheelchair users today to cope with the sort of legacy inaccessible environments differently because sometimes I see people getting really excited sharing these caterpillar tracked wheelchairs that can climb stairs and other people going they should just put in a ramp and there is a sort of never the twain shall meet; what is your view?

CARRIE ANN: 19:58

I think it's such an interesting question and you know; this always brings me back to how I feel about the social model of disability. And I don't think that the social model is you know, a magic bullet to solve all of our problems but I am a firm believer in ethos that we are disabled by our environments and I am also disabled by my medical condition. I believe I'm disabled by both of those things actually but that the environment is a huge disabling factor. And I think, I also think that you know, I've always been disabled. I've got Cerebral Palsy, so I've never known what it's like to not be disabled. But I do remember when I first learned about the social model and I had that real mindset shift internally that okay so, the problem is not with me. I do not need to bend and adapt and fit myself necessarily into unsuitable environments actually, the problem is with the environment and should be adapted to suit me and that is thinking that has really changed in my lifetime. So, you know, I remember going to mainstream school, for example and doing physio sessions to train me to walk up and down the stairs because there wasn't infrastructure to put a lift into the school that I wanted to attend. And that was just normal, as my normal of the everybody around us and I look at that school now and it has been made much more accessible. They have integrated children from the local sort of SEM school etc. And they've made the environment much more physically accessible so, I think there will always be a role for technology and I think that if I just simply look at the different kinds of wheelchairs that I have, so I've a few different types of wheelchair equipment and one of them is kind of a backup old style NHS powerchair and my favourite is my active manual chair with a front wheel power add on and when there's a problem with the power add on, when it needs a repair or a service or something like that and I have to use the big old power chair, I feel more disabled. I feel more disabled because the equipment that I'm using is not as enabling as some of the other equipment that I might use. So, I suppose maybe I'm somewhere in the middle of those two camps.

NEIL: 22:51

Yes, I kind of agree because I think I'm not and within my own organisation we follow the bio psychosocial model because we recognise there are challenges with both the medical and the social model, whilst wanting to take the best bits of both. And you know, recognising that people's impairments don't disappear just because we've put a ramp in and or because we have followed the WIQAD guidelines, right so, yes I like you, you know, my sense of being disabled and I'm dyslexic and ADHD is dependent on context. And that a lot of the time I'm perfectly able to get on with stuff and interact normally and then there are other times where if certain things aren't provided, I find the environment incredible disabling. So, I think that changing, the change in tooling and the change in equipment impacts how the level of disability that you feel. So, it's not wrong for people to want to invent things that reduce your feeling of being disabled via enabling you to do more in a, to use a political, hostile environment for a second because difficult and inaccessible environment, right? So, I think that we can reduce some of the impact of the environment through new technologies. At the same time that should not mean that we have a get out jail free card, you know what, we don't need to put into a ramp or we don't need to design in enough spaces for people with wheelchairs to turn around you know it's fine to wheel yourself in backwards to the toilet and climb over your wheelchair because, we have only [dash] so, those are, we should not use the new technology as an excuse not to think about designing accessibly, but, at the same time, I don't think, I take issue with people that rate the designers of these things that are actually trying to do a good thing because I think people [dash]

CARRIE ANN: 25:22

Yes, I agree I think my question would be, how much contact again, how much contact has that designer had with disabled people? How much contact has that designer had with more than one disabled person, with more than one viewpoint and circumstance.

NEIL: 25:41

Yes, well, I see having worked in assistive tech for two- and a-bit decades, I see that that recuring thing people that people are doing it for personal motivation for friends and family and so, they start solving a problem for one individual. And so, we end up with loads of people reinventing the same wheel.

CARRIE-ANN: 26:07

Mm hmm.

NEIL: 26:08

So, that they are you know, oh, we have just made this thing, well what about those six other things.

CARRIE-ANN: 26:15

That have been around for decades, absolutely.

NEIL: 26:18

Then they say well, you know, it doesn't mean just in the field with disability that you should not do market research.

CARRIE-ANN: 26:26

I completely agree and this is all reminding me of sort of the origin story of Access Able which was really our founder and Chair Gregory Burke, had an illness when he was a teenager, spent a lot of time in hospital and rehab and came out as a wheelchair user and found himself with this problem that he wanted to solve of just being able to find detailed information about whether or not he could access a venue without having to phone them, without having to send somebody to do a rookie run. This was kind of early 2000's. Ver much age of the Internet and very much age of this information suddenly becoming available to everybody. But Gregory knew at that point that he only knew about his own needs. He only knew what he needed and so, you know, he did a national consultation exercise, traveling around the UK, speaking hundreds of different groups of disabled people and from there designed the first kind of templates of what became of Access Able's Access guide and I think the important thing I want to say there is, we haven't ever stopped that consultation and we haven't ever stopped that evolution of searching and of creating information and creating new information and collecting new information that meets the new emerging needs.

NEIL: 27:47

Yes. I think that's important because the needs are changing and the environment is changing and the technology is changing. So, the data that you need to gather and the data you need to share involves too. And we were talking with the Google example again and a personal example, right? So, family members of mine need accessible toilets and that data you know, is something that I would like to be easily searchable, you know, nearest accessible toilet. You know, put it into maps. Take me to the loo, you know quickly, please. Because that is you know, that's an area where people don't necessarily continence issues as a disability but they affect millions of people, you know. You know and it may be, you know and it doesn't necessarily need to be an accessible loo for some of that group but being able to have your preferences and press the, you know, get me, to the facilities as quickly as possible, you know is you know, a hugely enabling and empowering thing. And also frankly, protects people's dignity.

CARRIE ANN: 29:08

I agree. I agree but I think it is only as enabling as the reliability of the data that's powering it.

NEIL: 29:14

Absolutely. And that's why it becomes equally important that you have good quality data and that it's also done consistently, you know, and so that you know that that data is formatted right that it's reliable that it's kept up to date because you know, especially with things like you know, community projects, where there is you know it's voluntary work. Quite often that data is well out of date. You know, if people have been relying, using the toilets example again, on businesses to voluntarily provide access to facilities, those business are quite often closing or changing. So, all of that piece needs to be kept up to date and you know, that's a lot of work. So, who funds it.

CARRIE-ANN: 30:09

Yes, so, I mean I can only speak for Access Able in terms of the work we do. But in terms of who funds the work that we do, that's funded directly by the Commission partner, the client we work with. So, it could be an NHS Trust, in the case of a hospital. It could be a private sector business like Tesco or Marks and Spencer's or towns, for example. It could be a university or it could be a local council to service businesses in the local area. And I think, you know, the other thing that I just wanted to bring out, from your sort of prior point was that I think there is a lot of reliance in the age that we are in on crowd sourced information. And, I think there is a place for that. I think it has its place. But I think that what is not discussed often enough is that crowd sourced information will only ever reflect an individual's experience or lots and lots of different individual experiences and so, if you are basing your decision to go to a venue, from a review that somebody else has done, based on their specific experience and their specific needs, again, there's just a little pinch of salt, I think, that needs to be taken with that because disability is such an individual and multi-faceted experience.

NEIL: 31:37

Yes. I think that he is absolutely spot on. Time has flown.

CARRIE-ANN: 31:41

Yes.

NEIL: 31:43

I've absolutely enjoyed this chat, so thank you very much. Really look forward to continuing discussion on social media. Just need to thank My ClearText for keeping us captioned and accessible as possible for a certain group. And also, Amazon for supporting us to keep us On Air. So, thank you very much, Carrie Ann, look forward to you joining the conversation on Twitter.

CARRIE-ANN: 32:06

Thank you for having me.