91Èȱ¬

I'm happy to be able to buck the and report some good news about the 91Èȱ¬.

The latest version of the iPlayer has had an accessibility upgrade. It is now fully tabbable for keyboard users. This includes all the controls in the streaming player, even the volume control and the time bar. Screenreader users will also notice that the controls are now all correctly labelled, so no more hit and hope on strangely named buttons.

You can rest assured we won't stop there, the 91Èȱ¬ is like subtitles in the streaming player, which are still to come, so watch this space.

In writing this post, I should first confess that I'm not a fan of Matt Lucas' and David Walliams' comedy series Little Britain. Not at all. Humour is a very personal thing, and I just don't find it funny. The few times I watched it, I ended up wondering what all the fuss and critical acclaim was about.

However, I was interested when I read an article on the UK comedy site Chortle, entitled . It reports on a new study by an academic at the London School of Economics, which criticises the show's grotesque characters such as teenage mum Vicky Pollard and Daffyd, 'the only gay in the village', for the way in which their stereotypes "promote a sense of disgust at people of a different class, sexuality, race and gender ... Little Britain does far more to promote racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism and classism than it does to satirise them".

There a lot of terrible 'isms' in there, but it struck me that there's one notable omission. What about disablism? After all, aren't wheelchair user Andy Pipkin and his carer Lou two of the most instantly recognisable faces from the series? And in the years that Little Britain has been part of the nation's TV viewing, there have been frequent debates about them on Ouch, and whether or not the portrayals are disablist or, indeed, whether they themselves highlight the subject of disablism.

But what do you think? Taking the findings of the research mentioned in the article, and extending it to disability, did Lou and Andy did far more to promote disablism than to satirise it? Tell us in the comments.

Reform of the blue badge parking system, in a bid to crack down on fraud, has been all over the news recently. Even Ouch's own Disability Bitch was moved to stop eating cake, get off the sofa and write about it last week.

But for a moment, I don't want to talk about fraud. I want to talk about what sort of non-disabled people park in our parking bays. Why oh why oh why (and yes, I know I sound like I'm writing a letter to a local newspaper) does it always seem to be the people who should know better who break this particular rule? Police officers, mayors, government ministers. And now, who is - oh, feel the irony! - actually the person responsible for parking in the area. Oops.

Geoffrey Theobald, in his role as the cabinet member for transport, has led a series of campaigns against the abuse of disabled parking badges, recently parked his very posh and shiny blue Jaguar in a disabled bay at Brighton and Hove City Council's head office when attending a meeting there.

When asked about the incident, Councillor Theobald said: "Every single space in the car park is a very short distance from the door and there is a guy who keeps a constant watch on it and if I needed to move the car I would have come straight down. I could have been 30 minutes late trying to find a space. What more am I expected to do?"

Earlier this year, however, Mr Theobald said that it was important to "make sure disabled parking is available for those who really need it". Hmm.

If you looked at the news last week - especially the showbiz sections that no one ever admits to reading (including me) - you won't have failed to notice the widespread coverage of an appearance on ITV's This Morning by former Atomic Kitten singer and I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! winner . The programme denied talk of an "ambush" of the star, after presenter Phillip Schofield interrupted the interview to question her about her slurred speech, which she said was due to the medication she has been prescribed - including an anti-psychotic drug called Chlorpromazine. Kerry Katona has made the headlines a great deal in the past year or so because of her well-documented drug addiction and mental health problems, and has received treatment for both.

Responding to the story, mental health charity has now released a strongly-worded statement with the title . (Personally, I have a suspicion that Rethink meant to say "wheelchair user", since a wheelchair ia an inanimate object that wouldn't particularly mind having fun poked at it - but maybe I'm splitting hairs.)

In the statement, Rethink agrees with Kerry's assertion that "medication for mental illnesses [can] often cause side-effects like slurred speech and drowsiness", and goes on to say:

We wouldn't dream of making fun of someone with a physical disability who uses a wheelchair , so why is it still socially acceptable to have a good laugh at someone who is being treated for a mental health problem? Thousands of people are affected by mental illness and receive treatment that can cause side-effects. And like Kerry they are often stigmatised because of it.

The press release concludes: "If you wouldn't poke fun at someone with a physical disability for using a wheelchair, don't do it to someone with a mental illness for merely taking their medication".

Some people have suggested that Katona was badly advised when she decided to appear on such a high profile show whilst experiencing the effects of her medication, but an opposing argument would be that she had every right to go on the show, especially if she is talking frankly about her mental health? But what do you think? Does the outcry over her interview on This Morning show a lack of understanding about mental health problems and the medication used to treat them?

It's Monday morning, and there's a long week ahead of us. So let's talk about sex.

Ahem. Maybe I should rephrase that. I'm not just being salacious, I'm actually referring to the results, published over the weekend, of The Observer's , which includes some very interesting statistics about attitudes to sex and disability.

A sample of 1,044 UK adults aged 16-plus were interviewed in September 2008. Of these, 70%. One of the questions they were asked was: Have you ever had sex with someone with a physical disability?

- 70% said No, and I don't think I would.
- 26% said No, but I would not rule it out.
- 4% said Yes

Oh, and men are slightly more likely than women to rule out the possibility.

The question is, Ouchers: do these figures seem to reflect your own personal experiences?

No, not a film about the sweet, sugary stuff. Even better than that. (warning: Flash-intensive site with pop-ups) is a new Thai martial arts movie, out in cinemas now, So why are we on Ouch! interested in it? Well, because the central female character has autism - and her disability is very much part of the reason why she's a particularly genius fighter.

Oh, and as if that wasn't enough, mentions: "a simply extraordinary sequence in which she has to fight a boy-warrior who appears to have some sort of neurological convulsive disorder akin to cerebral palsy, and she must intuit and imitate his tics in order to pre-empt his moves". Genius.

I'm getting tempted to take up martial arts now, too ...

A-ha. Toilets and apportioning blame. That got your attention, didn't it?

Well, it's more or less true. There are some alarming stories going around at the moment about the state of - most particularly that more and more local councils are using the Disability Discrimination Act as an excuse to close old and costly public conveniences. Why? Because they're inaccessible. What they seemingly forget, however, is that most of them could be easily adapted.

in The Guardian puts it even more succinctly: "If the disabled cannot relieve themselves, then neither can anyone else".

So the next time you're wobbling, wheeling or walking through your local town centre and get caught short, but are unable to find a functioning public loo, just cross your legs and remember that it's all your fault. Except it isn't. Obviously.

At Ouch, we hate inaccessible websites. Especially ones all your friends are chatting on and that let you know about that party you've been invited to tonight. I talk of course of the website that knows all your friends, even those you'd rather forget.

Unfortunately, the fancy dynamic design and lazy coding of the site, means it's a nightmare for blind people who use screen readers. Whilst the wide reams of text make it a pain for some users of zoom magnification software.

A revelation came when a member of the Ouch! team logged onto the mobile version of the site on her phone.

The mobile version is designed to be much simpler and includes all the main features of Facebook in an easy, accessible format which works much better with technologies like screenreaders and magnifiers. This is because it is designed for small mobile phone screens and the less advanced web browsers they use.

You can try it by browsing to m.facebook.com on your phone. It works a treat with mobile speech and magnification packages like Talks, Zooms and MobileSpeak.

But even better for those of you without access to mobile technology! I also discovered you can access the same easy interface from your desktop. Here's how:

- First, you will need an alternative web browser such as .
- Then go to .
- You should then see the mobile version of the site and you can log-in as normal.

A few caveats, unfortunately, the mobile site doesn't work in Internet Explorer so you will need an alternative browser like or , if you can find a solution to make it work in Internet Explorer, we'd love to hear it - let us know in the Comments.

Also, the mobile version doesn't include all the fancy features like live chat and extra applications. If you use those, stick to the regular site.

Note that earlier versions of Jaws screenreader will not work with Firefox. You'll need Jaws 8 or above. But if you have it, don't worry, Firefox works in a very similar way to Internet Explorer so it's not a massive learning curve.

Enjoy!

Update: The mobile site has been updated to work in Internet Explorer 6 and 7. There's also a shiny new with more info.

I suppose it was only me who was hoping for a disability angle on the credit crunch, when I saw this headline on a newspaper sandwich board the other day?

In fact, it's a situation I encounter all the time, when searching for news stories to go on the Ouch news page. Whether it's a council being branded for putting its money in an Icelandic bank account, or a warning that the leavers .
All goes to make me wonder if journalists will ever get past the idea of disability as a cheap negative metaphor ...

It's been an exceptionally busy time up here in fully accessible Ouch! Towers over the past few months. Apart from continuing to update your favourite disability website (that's us, just to clarify), we've been working hard on building the all-new Ouch! We've been dropping hints about it and promising big changes - not least in many threads on our messageboard - but next Tuesday, 21 October, Version 2.Ouch is finally hitting the interwebs.

This is just phase one of a planned series of changes and upgrades to Ouch! On Tuesday, the redesigned magazine part of the site - the bit that you get to via the homepage at bbc.co.uk/ouch/ - is being unveiled. The messageboard, which is powered by different technology, will get its long-awaited upgrade in the new year. We'll also be adding another community feature to the site that we're very excited about.

But what can you expect from the new site? Well, we don't want to give everything away, as that would spoil the surprise, but there's going to be a fantastic refreshed look and feel to our pages. Yes, it's true - fans of the old deep red Ouch! background should prepare to wave it goodye. Sniff, sigh, whimper. It's served us well, but it's time to break out the paint pots!

Prominent accessibility features are going to be built into the new Ouch!, allowing you in just a couple of clicks to change the font size and colour scheme to suit your needs. Commenting on articles becomes live and realtime, too - no more posting your thoughts and waiting for them You'll need to be signed up to use the messageboard in order to comment, but in doing so you'll be able to spread the debate throughout Ouch! And we'll also have social bookmarking at the bottom of every article - if you like what you read and want to share it, you can easily put it on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious and other sites. Tell your friends, and tell the world.

So all this happens on Tuesday morning - and because our hard-working technical team are going to be slaving away over hot computers doing very complicated things with even longer and more complicated names, the site is going to be offline for a few hours. Not all of it, though. The messageboard will still be available for chat and debate, and the blog you're reading now will also stay online. In fact, members of the Ouch! team are hoping to post a couple of little updates here during what we're calling the 'Big Bang' to let you know how it's all going, so do keep a look out for that.

Bid farewell to Ouch 1.0, because Version 2.Ouch is just around the corner. We'll see you on the other side.

So we've got Lord Nelson on top of his column, but since the sculpture of artist Alison Lapper finished its spell atop the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square, we've been rather short of statues of renowned disabled people.

But now news has emerged that egghead physicist Professor Stephen Hawking is to have a 10ft tall of himself created by artist Eve Shepherd, which will be erected near his office in the Cambridge University Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (whatever that is).

Hmm, I'm not sure about that. Would you want to see a huge statue of yourself every morning on your way to work? No, me neither.

The planned statue was all sounding like a great idea, until I read the artist's rather cringeworthy statement that the statue would show the:

"power of Professor Hawking's mind and the fragility of his body."

Oh no, not the "fragile body" line! Here at Ouch Towers, we think that it can be only be a matter of time before our very own Disability Bitch is immortalised in some prominent civic location, though we would advise any artist attempting that task to avoid describing her as "fragile". Not with her temper, anyway.

One thing universal to almost all disabilities/impairments are the biological issues, which need accommodation; and rarely get it. Let me speak of farts. If you have sleep apnea, and have to use a c-pap machine, or need a b-pap to breathe during the night, a common side effect is forced air, ergo, gas and belches. I have a malfunctioning diaphragm and seizures, add the two together and during seizures, while I may get my memory wiped, I will be gasping for air of which SOME may make it into my lungs.

The next day, with a nose bleed and a severe case of the farts, I ask, "Did I have a seizure last night?" I'm told I had three. Ah, well, that explains it. But how do I explain it while in line at the supermarket or while renting a DVD? A ripping sound emerges from the wheelchair, do I look around with a smile going, "Had a seizure yesterday!" Let's try not to remember the MRI tube episode.

So yeah, disability is never just one thing but a whole bag of surprises. And you get used to it. It is amazing what can be gotten used to: leaning over the side of a bed to drain out aspirated liquid and food, having your drool/spittle wiped after a seizure, and flying out of a wheelchair at a bad kerb cut. The days when you're too weak to use the hair dryer, look in the mirror and decide, "I'll live with it!" Then there is having an impacted colon, having a colostomy bag, having a catheter, having to use a cane and having to sit down more often while your friends keep walking. Migraines, seizures and ASD give extreme sensitivity to light or noise while many others give muscle tremors: having the shakes and dropping things with your hands, and biting your lip or side of your mouth when you are tired and trying to eat. Then there are the spontaneous nosebleeds, the nausea from blood pressure, the sensitivity to cold for quads needing blankets and to heat for MS patients needing cooling vests.

But we get used to it.

The general public has no idea, "Oh, MS means you shake or something, or is that Parkinson's, which one does (insert famous person here) have?" As a person with minimal nerves, I have bruises over most of my right side; but my regular spills and smashing into walls would dislocate elbows, shoulders, fingers and ankles of my EDS friends.

Yes, I know these are the things I am NOT supposed to talk about, but this is the reality of disability. For example, here they love to shove baby changing tables inside wheelchair accessible toilets. Okay, I may be a newbie wheelie but it takes a while to get my clothes down, my underwear down and transfer onto the toilet only to hear a mother try the handle of the door and say to her baby, "Oh, you'll have to wait, it will only be a minute." Yeah. No pressure. Also, while there are grab bars to slide OVER to the toilet, often there aren't ones to slide BACK. Which makes getting into the wheelchair a sort of 'climbing Everest with your arms while your underwear is around your ankles' event.

Things just take longer. But for some reason people think that once inside a disabled toilet, you gain the speed of an able bodied person. Well, no, not if you have muscle weakness on one side, or Parkinson's muscle slowing, then a quick toilet trip is 45 minutes. And when you have bladder retention instead of loss, then I sometimes want to scream to the people trying the handle every 30 seconds to see if I have teleported out, "Disabilities are MORE than skin deep!" Meaning, it takes TIME.

Okay... hair... don't know what happens to guys but if you are a female with a chronic illness there is a good chance your nice hair goes bye-bye, either from medical treatment or from auto-immune diseases. But hey, some will start showing up on your face! Fun, fun, fun. And if you are like me, with assisted showering, I don't have the time or energy for leg shaving. It's 40-60 minutes just to shower.

I literally did not know how much head hair I had until I started losing it, and then it goes, and goes, and goes and eventually, no matter how creative your hairdresser, it shows. A friend told me that due to her auto-immune disease she has lost and had her hair come back three times. I was not comforted, I only wanted to know one thing, "How did you make it come back?!"

So we are biological beings living against a standard made for people who have no condition except aging. So it is amazing what can and often MUST be endured. The amount of times I have had to pee to a collective medical audience is not worth remembering. Yet in a future seizure, I will pee: myself, the wheelchair and all near by things ("fountain McClung" they call me). I've opened the apartment door with my teeth because both arms and hands are so shaky I have given up yet STILL need to get inside! Sometimes painful, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes both (try going to the ER with an impacted bowel, woo hoo!), but still, the things that 'must be done.'

Now that I have left you with the image of hairy legged, balding, farting, belching, bruised and slurry speeched woman (oh wait, I hadn't mentioned the slurry speech, darn!). Please come on, give up the stories. I know I am not the only woman with a sudden medical gift of hair (steroids: helps tumors AND gives facial hair!), and I am sure guys have just as many issues. For one thing, wheelchairs are not known for their leaving a person thin, svelte and sleek looking. And the "doing what must be done." Please, I have not done it all, but I have heard a lot. So here I am, interested, wanting to know, what is it about you or your condition that I don't get, what story of that day and thing which "must be done" (how about this horrid phrase, "Needs to be re-broken"), that is endured, that isn't understood. And if you can't talk on that, surely you have a comment on disabled toilets!

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Darnell brought his trademark energy and attitude into the Ouch podcast studio to discuss his time in Big Brother, but we also got more than we bargained for...

He arrived just in time to bump into our news hound Rob Crossan, two people with Albinism in one room and they took the opportunity to compare who has paler skin. You can judge for yourself:

In the gaps between the recording, the banter turned in my direction, with Matt probing as to my relationship status. Darnell offered to 'hook me up' with the ladies. This being dating advice, as Damon pointed out, from the man who tried and failed to woo house mate . Although he has found more success with his romantic ode to biscuits, You can hear what did make it on the record with our interview with Mikey and Darnell on the next podcast.