One heck of a year, wrapped (accessibly) 💝
Plus: WIN by sharing your thoughts in our community survey
Tēnā koutou katoa!
Welcome to this year’s final delicious edition:
WINZ office cringe, new ACC building an accessibility hit, accessibility patents in the works for video gaming company EA 👾👾👾
A survival guide for upcoming music festivals and a recap on 2024 on The D*List 💫
Another giveaway! 😍 Fill in our D*List Community Survey and be into win a voucher
Our whare was once again warmed last Saturday at our Treaty Bill Submission party. Some pressed submit on theirs, others gathered thoughts on how they might frame their submission. Wherever you are on this - kia kaha te tukunga! ✊🏽🗣️
If you weren’t able to make the submissions party and need a bit of āwhina, there are lots of resources (including on how to make oral submissions) and templates to help; Together for Te Tiriti and Koekoeā are great places to start. Or if you’re a master procrastinator and need other people to hold you accountable, you can host your own submissions party with this handy party pack! 🥳
Áine, who helped facilitate our workshop, suggests that for whānau hauā, it could be a good place to start talking about, “how you’ve been impacted by this government’s attacks on Māori or just what it feels like at the moment to be living in a scenario where Te Tiriti is under attack.”
”And for those of us who are tauiwi or tāngata tiriti, the importance of being in solidarity and recognising that Te Tiriti is what allows us to belong in Aotearoa.”
The key thing is make it yours. Tell them your story, speak how you speak and tell them why this kaupapa matters to you. You can submit here until January 7 2025. Karawhiua!
🗣️ The Press captured some of the voices in the Our Voices Count rally in Ōtautahi last weekend. Disability Leadership Canterbury chairperson Ruth Jones said many of their members did not see the point of leaving their home any more.
“This whole year has felt as if we’re living in 1974 - our whānau and support people are unable to use funding to catch a break, and members of the disabled community feel disempowered, helpless, and anxious… We feel like we’re being deliberately harmed and no longer have any autonomy in our own lives.”
🤦🏻 Graeme Harvey, a Thames citizen who uses a mobility scooter, was unable to access his appointment at Work and Income last month because the ramp access to the temporary office was too steep and there was no space at the top of the ramp to manoeuvre the scooter through the door, he told The Valley. Harvey ended up having the meeting outside on the top of the ramp.
“That’s personal information, everyone can hear… When I went to leave, there was a couple of women standing down [at the bottom of the ramp] and all they were doing was shaking their heads.”
🆕 While the Thames WINZ office might be an accessibility fail, the new ACC building opening in Dunedin next year will be an “exemplar of accessibility”, according to ACC disability lead adviser Ben Lucas. The ODT reports:
”doors with automatic sensors would be on all the main entrances, there would be accessible reception desks with lowered desk heights, and wide corridors and spaces between desks and walls to allow wheelchair users and guide dogs to pass easily.
… A lot of thought had gone into the bathrooms in particular, which were designed with angled mirrors, strip drains in the floors to provide flat access for wheelchair users, grab rails for support and arm and back rests, and sliding hand-held shower units so they could be operated from a sitting position.”
🕹️ EA has pledged more open-sourced accessibility patents to open gaming to more players. Among them is a photosensitivity analysis plug in and technologies to improve speech recognition, generate more personalised speech and simplification of speech recognition technologies in computing and gaming devices.
🏡 Whangārei Accessible Housing Trust has opened six new fully accessible homes in Glenbervie. Newaye Tesfaye told the Northern Advocate he’d been waiting three years for accessible housing and that he’d be living his dream in his new two-bedroom home. The trust opens another three homes in Onerahi next year. Enjoy your new nest, Newaye!
🎉 With festie season coming up, Marlo Schorr-Kon has got your back with a survival guide for music festivals so you can spend more time vibing and less time worrying about the growing predicament that is your bladder 😎. Check out some of these accessibility tips if you’re going to Rhythm & Vines, Homegrown, Soundsplash or Laneway.
🎀 Olivia Shivas reviews the year in The D*List Wrapped, from Clickbait & Crutches, to Deepen*, to all the ways our community has responded to the Government, the final report on Abuse in Care and disability sport.
… In February, we launched Deepen* a series of activations featuring disabled artists from the rainbow community, in partnership with Auckland Pride, led by multidisciplinary artist Pelenekeke Brown and supported by Beth Awatere. The series spotlighted queer disabled creatives including Misty Frequency, Noēll Ratapu, Ari Kerssens and Dr Huhana Hickey. Writer Etta Bollinger and artist Ruby Solly both wrote and produced beautiful visual poems, which were captured by Julie Zhu.
We launched a content series about technology in March, which explored how technology offers us liberation, but also internalised ableism. While it’s made many parts of our lives easier, we should always be wary of inventions that try to fix us. Red Nicholson wrote about his dream gaming room that was CP-reflex-friendly and we listed 10 questionable assistive pieces of tech.
I also travelled to Te-Whanganui-a-Tara to cover the World Wheelchair Rugby Paralympic Qualification Tournament and capture all the action. Although I’ve never really been that sporty myself, I came away realising that it’s so much more than a sport for those athletes - it’s a space to find belonging. Dancer Lusi Faiva also put on AIGA, as part of the Auckland Arts Festival; it was full of disability joy.
And then, “March 18th” happened. Whaikaha announced a change in the rules to disability support funding. The reaction from disabled people and their whānau was a mixture of rage, despair and confusion, and we did our best to interpret the ever-changing rules. Vicki Terrell wrote about how the changes were like going back to the future. Despite the understandable anger, it gave our communities time to reflect on what would improve our disability support funding model. Nicolina Newcombe wrote in an op-ed saying that interrogation about funding and support processes was well overdue.
In response to the funding changes, our communities come together to protest in April. Lorri Mackness said they were there "to uphold the mana of people who are disabled,” while Emma Cooper-Williams said: "I'm here because I have a right to be here and a right to access support, and be here in solidarity for everyone around the country." That month, we also mourned the passing of disability rights advocate Sir Robert Martin KNZM. His friend Alexia Black wrote a beautiful tribute to him and the legacy he leaves for future generations of disabled people…
🥁 And congratulations to Karleigh-Jane Jones who was the lucky winner of last week’s newsletter prize draw for Lucy Foundation gift pack. ☕️
🫵🏼 We are busy planning a range of exciting events and content for next year. Your ideas, opinions and preferences guide our work, so it's really important to us that we hear from you. By completing our community survey, you will be having a direct impact on The D*List's priorities for 2025.
Fill in the 5-minute survey and you’ll go into the draw to win a $25 Kylee & Co voucher 💌 Local and disabled-led, Kylee & Co is a shop for all things accessible.
We’ll be back at the end of January. So while we go to reflect, eat and spend time with loved ones, we hope you’re doing the same and finding something to indulge in and recharge through.
Ngā mihi i ō koutou tautoko i The D*List 🧡
Hei ā tērā tau! Until January!
Eda, Olivia, Ella, Cooper, Will, Kim and Red
