Making accessibility accessible to children

My name is Ben Andrews, I'm 30-year old, from Salford, Greater Manchester, and I have a degenerative visual impairment, Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP).

It’s a hereditary condition, something I share with my mum and my grandad and involves the rapid deterioration of my eyesight, with people usually having very little vision beyond the age of 40. For now, it means I’ve got general poor sight, struggle with differentiating between colours and have night blindness - so loads of fun in cinemas, restaurants and anywhere not particularly well lit.

Growing up with and around a condition like RP, you become very aware of how many barriers the world poses to you. For me, these look like streets with posts, signs, and trees in the middle of walkways, buses with no auditory notifications and venue signs with small text, to name a few.

For the past 13-years, I’ve used this experience as a driver to work to make places more accessible to disabled people, working with the the NHS, local authorities, sport and leisure, infrastructure and design,helping them make what they do work better for disabled people.

As much as I enjoy this work, it did get me thinking that I may be leaving it a little late to talk to people on issues around access and inclusion. Does it make sense for the majority of adults to go all those years not having to think about access and inclusion until it’s prompted by the likes of me? Or, would it make more sense to start this conversation at a much younger age, so access and inclusion for disabled people is something children grow up with? It would then be part of who they are and how they operate. Well, this certainly made sense to me.

So, since 2018, I’ve been exploring ways to make the topic of accessibility more accessible to children and young people which has led me to write a series of picture books, Better Places, to help children think about how places can be made better for disabled people.

The first book in the series is Better Places Nicky and Candy’s Street which explores the barriers those with visual impairments may experience in street settings, offering the reader the opportunity to put them right.

Future books will focus on people with different access needs, such as wheelchair users, Autistic people, Deaf people and people with physical disability.

As well as the books, I’ve also developed some wraparound resources for schools to extend the impact of the books beyond the read itself.

My hope for the books is that they’ll help make the topic of accessibility more accessible to children to support a more aware, understanding, and inclusive world in the future.

And hopefully help a few adults along the way too.

Better Places Nicky and Candy’s Street is available for pre-order here – https://www.tinytreebooks. co.uk/shop/p/better-places-nickycandys-street-ben-andrews - and you can keep updated on all things Better Places via the better places website at www.betterplaces.uk