The International Symbol of Accessibility (ISA), more widely but less correctly known as the handicapped sign, is evolving. The original symbol (far left), designed by Susanne Koefoed in 1968, was pretty much just a stylized wheelchair. The International Commission on Technology and Accessibility (ICTA), a committee of Rehabilitation International, humanized the it by adding a head (second from left). This is the icon we are most familiar with. Critics complain that its static nature stigmatizes the wheelchairs as instruments of helplessness and passivity.  In 2005, VSA, an international organization on arts and disability, produced a more active icon implying self-propulsion (third from left). At least one store,...

05 September, 2011

Here's a bit of contrarian sporting news that escaped my attention when it happened April 18:  The 20 fastest finishers in the men's 2011 Boston Marathon had one thing in common: All raced in wheelchairs. Our friend Warren Reed highlights this remarkable (but largely unremarked upon) fact in an article for the Journal of Medical Ethics decrying the use of outdated terms about disabilities in scholarly writing by medical researchers. It's a point Reed has gently chided Contrarian about in the past. In an informal search of half a dozen medical journals, Reed found 8,680 articles in which the word "wheelchair" was...

11 August, 2011

Haligonian Warren Reed objects to the thoughtlessly patronizing word choices many journalists apply to wheelchair-users and those who discriminate them. In an email to two Chronicle-Herald reporters who recently wrote about separate cases of discrimination by Metro Transit and the Nova Scotia Justice Department against wheelchair users, he complained about three sentences in their stories: "The driver even called his supervisor, who confirmed that wheelchair-bound passengers are not allowed on [Bus No.] 60." "However, Sunday morning the driver said that he could get in a lot of trouble for letting wheelchair-bound passengers onto non-wheelchair routes." "Amy Paradis, 16, is quadriplegic and...

25 October, 2010