THE NEED FOR AN ACCESS CHAMPION. THE NEED FOR WHEELEASY.
The number of people with increased mobility needs is so much greater than you at first think.
When people think about needing greater accessibility, they immediately think about wheelchair users who face issues getting most places.
It is always overlooked that mobility issues affect so many more than just the roughly 200,000 wheelchair users. They are the most visually obvious manifestation of the issue. There are also people who have less extreme or only occasional challenges getting around.
Millions have a mobility need
Over 3 million Australians have some form of mobility impairment at any one time; ranging from permanent wheelchair use, to people with walkers, to people with dodgy hips or bad knees, to the temporary disabled with broken legs. All these people will have a problem getting around somewhere, either occasionally or all the time (and while many of them may be claiming a disability benefit, they may not consider themselves “disabled”).
Many of those people aren’t able to go out and have the life that lots of us take for granted — going for a swim at the beach, for a bushwalk, to a barbecue, on a night out, or to see a film etc.
Equally affected is everyone with them
But, they aren’t the only ones affected by their inability to get somewhere. It’s not only them, but everyone who spends time with them who is equally affected. Many people know of or have a relative or friend who has an issue with some form of mobility impairment. It invariably means that a trip out with them becomes limited in choice.
When you add all those with increased mobility needs to all the people who live with them, you get to over 1/3 of all Australians. Either every day, or from time to time, this large group of people needs better access.
And that number becomes even bigger when you add in all the parents of young children, buying the 750,000 prams sold every year!
The land of the ‘fair go’
In our land of the ‘fair go’, you would think that everyone would have a basic right of access. But at the moment, many are still isolated and excluded. They often get stuck, they give up and they stay in.
For many, the biggest problem is not just physical access, but a lack of access information. Right now, 9 in 10 people with mobility needs find access info hard to find. It’s scattered over the web, it’s buried on different sites, it’s often not up-to-date, it can be inaccurate, or sometimes it’s not available at all.
Mobility impaired people and their families and friends can spend hours searching for the information they need, making many phone calls; just to go for a simple day or evening out together.
At present there’s no one place where all this information is gathered together, or where people can share what they know with others.
WheelEasy exists to fill this void, for many thousands of people.
