Re-examining “Accessibility
作者： Benjamin
Use empathy to achieve barrier-free, not sympathy.
From Empathy and Perspective-taking
Since the second half of 2024, we have had some opportunities to start contacting the Institute of Accessibility Development at Tsinghua University. With the help of the institute, we have begun to strive to produce some outputs that can truly help people with disabilities.
Our team has developed a software called Beacon that helps visually impaired people navigate. In the early stages of making this app, in order to ensure that what we do can really help people with disabilities and to decide on a topic that we are capable of completing, we interviewed many people with disabilities, trying to put their difficulties in our shoes and understand their real lives. After these interviews, we finally chose the visually impaired as the target of our project.
After a period of development, the prototype of this app was completed. Through this idea, my team members and I also achieved results in some creative/design competitions (specifically the Conrad Challenge). Based on these experiences, and the fact that we had communicated extensively with researchers at the institute, I believe I developed strong awareness of accessibility and gained a better understanding of the daily lives of people with disabilities.
During a soccer match, I don’t know if it was by chance or fate, but my right ankle was bent to an unnatural angle by an opponent, causing the ligament in my right ankle to be almost completely torn. On the second day, it sounded even ridiculous that I also bent my left foot due to my own recklessness, causing the ligament in my left ankle to be torn and fractured. After talking to the doctor, I was forbidden to walk without assistance and could only complete all actions in a wheelchair for the first three weeks.
I myself also became a disabled person. After becoming a disabled person, I found that everything in life was very different from what I had imagined from a third-person perspective. Perhaps from this incident, I had a real understanding of the concept of “Accessibility” or what disabled people look like.
Understanding the Psychology of People with Disabilities
In the first two days after the injury, my mentality was greatly affected. Even at home, I lost a lot of freedom and could only rely on the wheelchair to complete basic transfers. Jumping high and running around quickly, which I used to do at home, became impossible at this time. This feeling of loss of freedom made me feel extremely depressed. I couldn’t imagine what the feelings of those who had to spend their whole lives in wheelchairs were like, not to mention those who had to stay in bed all year round.
Recalling some interviews before the Beacon project, for example, the visually impaired people are generally closed-minded, and most of the communities they communicate with are visually impaired people of the same kind. In the past, when I had not really experienced the world of the disabled, I could not imagine the torment in their hearts, I just heard them say it. In the past, I did not have a complete understanding of their inner world, because I had never had the opportunity to experience it, and I did not consciously take the initiative to think from their perspective.
Accessibility in Society
This injury actually gave me the opportunity to experience the construction and effects of some barrier-free infrastructure in society from the perspective of a real disabled person.
First, in Beijing’s shopping malls, you can clearly see many facilities with barrier-free signs. It’s good that people are at least beginning to realize “Accessibility”, whether it’s out of empathy or various rigid requirements. But it’s even more obvious that many barrier-free designs seem to exist just for the sake of existence, rather than to truly help people with disabilities.
The most obvious example was the “third toilet” in shopping malls and scenic spots. In China, the third toilets were generally designed with “sliding doors.” From the appearance, one might have thought that the barrier-free design was very good because of the existence of the third toilet. However, when I was actually sitting in a wheelchair and needed to use my hands to turn the wheels to push myself forward, this “sliding door” design made it almost impossible for me to enter the toilet by my own strength.
Similarly, for the third bathroom, when I arrived in Japan, I found that all the doors were sideways, and none of them were “sliding doors”. Such a design may not be difficult to think of, as long as you put yourself in the shoes of a disabled person or experience it yourself in a wheelchair, you can get an improvement, but such a seemingly simple behavior is not done in China. Those so-called designers may not even have imagined the usefulness of their designs as disabled people, but examine their designs with the thinking of a healthy person, thinking that as long as barrier-free facilities exist, the accessibility task has been completed.
Society’s Perception of Accessibility
I think one problem in Chinese society is that the concept of accessibility is extremely lacking and backward.
In the first week after the injury, I looked forward to having dinner outside with my family every night. I love to play, so even if I can only use a wheelchair, I am still willing to accept the outside world. Only going out can make me feel a little better. In the mall, I sat in a wheelchair with thick protective reinforcements on my feet. I looked around and saw all kinds of people, and I also saw the way these people treated me. Indifferent, condescending scrutiny, everyone who passed by me would look at me with this kind of eyes that made me feel uncomfortable (maybe to a certain extent, it was because the wheelchair was relatively short, so they had to use that kind of “contemptuous” eyes to see me). In the eyes of the public in Beijing, I was a different being.
When I arrived in Japan, I was prepared to receive more of these looks when I walked on the streets and took public transportation more often. But in fact, almost no one in Japan looked at me in any way different from normal people. In their eyes, I was no different from healthy people. Or in their hearts, they never cared about the difference between “disabled people” and “healthy people” and regarded disabled people as different.
This gap in concepts can be seen in many places. In China, the basic design of roads in various shopping malls actually lacks some consideration for obstacles. For example, the MixC Shopping Center in Shenzhen, which is one of the largest shopping malls in Asia, has a very large height difference between the sidewalk and the road, and the steepness of the slope connecting the sidewalk and the road is not suitable for wheelchair users. At the same time, some pedestrian roads are very narrow, and the merchants along the road put many tables and chairs outside to attract more customers, so that wheelchairs cannot pass through these roads at all.
I think this basic gap in concepts may stem from the cultural/quality differences between developing and developed countries. In developed countries, people subconsciously consider people with disabilities when making some designs, but this “subconscious” is rare in developing countries. At the same time, the views on people with disabilities in two different social environments are also different. Developing countries seem to lack some empathy, so the starting point for barrier-free accessibility is different, resulting in significant differences in results.
Empathy
Use empathy to achieve barrier-free, not sympathy. Developing countries, especially China, use sympathy to achieve barrier-free, and their social concepts are also very obvious. Barrier-free in China is done only because people with disabilities are weaker than healthy people, and the weak deserve sympathy. Therefore, barrier-free design often lacks consideration, and facilities that can be accessed are made from the perspective of healthy people. On the road, the eyes of others can also reflect that people with disabilities are weak in their eyes.
I don’t deny that China is aware of the slogan of “caring for the disabled”. During a subway trip in Beijing, a total of five staff members who were responsible for guiding wheelchairs provided me with help in different places and between different stations. But this kind of help seemed to be just out of “sympathy”.
In Japan and other developed countries, barrier-free is based on empathy. Empathy means putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and designing and helping people with disabilities. In Japan’s subway platforms, there are not so many staff to guide me, but the empathetic design of the subway platforms allows me to travel very smoothly without encountering any obstacles. There are barrier-free designs in various occasions to facilitate my travel. I think this kind of empathetic barrier-free is the real barrier-free.
I think this injury experience has given me a certain degree of empathy. It seems that only when you become a disabled person for a period of time can you understand what their daily life is like. At the same time, I am reading Satya’s autobiography Hit Refresh, which also emphasizes a lot on empathy.Only if society can solve problems with empathy can truly useful solutions be created.
What is Accessibility
So what exactly does the term “barrier-free” mean?
At first, I thought accessibility was about making things to help people with disabilities and to lend a hand when they need it. Now I realize that I also subconsciously viewed accessibility through the lens of sympathy at first.
After this experience, when I looked at accessibility from an empathetic perspective, I remembered the definition of accessibility that I discussed with researchers from Tsinghua University in a class a long time ago: Accessibility is not about helping people with disabilities all the time, but about designing some things so that people with disabilities can do the same things as healthy people by themselves. It suddenly dawned on me. In Japan, I can rely on myself and my wheelchair to do almost everything I want to do. I can go out to eat and shop by myself, etc. This state is obviously not achievable in Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
Achieve Empathic Accessibility
Although this experience of injury brought me some short-term setbacks and made me lose some freedom for a short time, I think this experience of injury has made me gain more things and ideas that I could not obtain and had never thought of before. Of course, the concept of “Accessibility” has more than one explanation, and everyone has a different interpretation of it. It is undeniable that China’s barrier-free cause is also developing in a positive direction, and people’s accessibility concepts have been improving. In such a social environment, I am determined to bring my understanding of barrier-free and my own empathy to make good accessible products to help people with disabilities who need help, because I can say in the future that I was once a member of the disabled group.
