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	TX: 1.10.04 - DISABILITY GO PRESENTER: LIZ BARCLAY

	Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 91热爆 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. 听 TX: 01.10.04 - Disability Go 听 PRESENTER: LIZ BARCLAY 听听 BARCLAY The final part of the Disability Discrimination Act comes into force today which means that people with disabilities must have access to high street shops and services. To help businesses and disabled people work together wheelchair user Gregory Burke has set up an internet service called Disabled Go, that allows anyone to easily check access to amenities such as shops, pubs, cinemas and civic buildings. He told us why he set up and how it works. 听 BURKE When I was 16 I had an inflammation of the stem of my brain which meant that I was in hospital and rehabilitation over a four year period. It was only when I tried to access my community upon discharge that I realised I was disabled because doing very simple things like catching a train or going to a hairdresser or even trying to attend college was fraught with difficulty and frustration about trying to find out what I could access. In the early stages of Disabled Go I went up and down the country to listen to community groups and far from my experiences being unique they were shared by the mass of disabled people. And what came back overwhelmingly from the consultation was that disabled people face two main problems - one, society in general inaccessible, two, in a generally inaccessible society there are venues and services that could be accessible to an individual disabled person's particular needs if only there was a standardised access guide that they could confer and consult that was applicable to their own requirements. 听 This is the website now. On the website you can select a town or city that you would like to look at. At the moment we have 10 areas on the line but we have another 20 in production, we have already 30 local authorities who have signed up with us. And in each area we survey over a thousand venues, we'll tell you whether the car park surface is smooth or has tarmac or has cobbles, we'll tell you about how many steps there are, if they're well lit, where the banister is, how heavy doors are, which way do they swing. We consult with local disability groups before we even start because it's their guide, it's very much grass roots up. Local disabled people know their area much better than we do. And then we'll do the guide and we'll personally assess every venue that's on there because you cannot trust venues to self-confess their state of access, it's a bit like phoning up a restaurant and saying is your food a. excellent, b. okay, or c. poor - they're all going to say it's a. excellent. It's the same with access and non-disabled people or people who aren't experienced in disability miss very important aspects of accessibility. And we disabled people in the end suffer as a result of it because we find out that it's wrong only when we're there. 听 Let's have a look at Edinburgh. Let's have a look at retail and shopping so that we can make an effective choice about where we'd like to go and shop today. So if we look under general retailers we can see for example that House of Fraser is very accessible - it's got an accessible toilet, it's got accessible changing rooms, they'll also take orders by fax and minicom and e-mail, for example if you have a hearing impairment. 听 Disabled Go is growing really quickly, this time last year we had 80,000 hits a month, now we have half a million hits a month. This year - calendar year - alone we have helped over a 160,000 disabled people to participate in the community. 听 BARCLAY Gregory Burke. Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The 91热爆 is not responsible for external websites

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