Jaunted

Disability Travel / TSA / Airport Security / Full-Body Scanning / Accessible Travel / Enhanced Pat-Downs / Airports / Airport News / Technology / Naked Travel / Travel News / → All Tags

How Do Full-Body Scanners and Pat-Downs Work if You're Disabled?

Steel yourself for a dose of indignity if you have a disability and the audacity to travel by airplane.

The new TSA regulations for disabled travelers—exposure to radiation and ridicule, or a public groping and in-depth interrogation on exactly how your catheter works—are almost as ludicrous as US Airways throwing a frequent flier off the plane for being too disabled to fly.

Most people with spinal cord injuries have been blasted with enough radiation to last a lifetime, thank you very much. In any case, if you can’t walk unaided and raise your hands above your head for seven seconds you’ve no choice; it’s a groping session or you stay at home, thanks to TSA regulations.

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Sporting Events / Wheelchair Races / Paralympics / Accessible Travel / → All Tags

Crowds Cheer On South Africa's Outeniqua Wheelchair Challenge

If you happened to be in the historic town of George in South Africa’s Western Cape last weekend, you’d have seen an extraordinary sight. At 8.15am on Valentine’s Day, 625 competitors were lined up at the start of the world’s biggest, brightest wheelchair race: the Outeniqua Wheelchair Challenge.

Buggies, tricycles, adapted bicycles mingled with sleek racing wheelchairs and hand cycles. South African Paralympic hero and world record holder Ernst van Dyk prepared himself for the marathon alongside athletes who had traveled from France, Namibia and Zimbabwe and all over the country to attend.

On the other side of the partition were a motley collection of participants in the fun race – from disabled 2-year-old babies to a 95-year-old granny in a buggy. It was both bizarre and wonderful.

Bizarre because South Africa is not generally known as a pioneer in promoting disability rights. That may be changing.

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Beijing Olympics / 2008 Olympics / Beijing Olympics 2008 / Beijinging / Beijing Field Trip / Accessible Travel / → All Tags

Beijinging: Accessibility Is a Pipe Dream

Our own femme fatale, Monica Guy, has the pre-Olympics buzz from Beijing for us this week.

How many people with disabilities are there in China? It's a tricky question. The China Disabled Persons' Federation say it's 60 million, a recent BBC report says 83 million and estimates based on the World Health Organization's population model are upwards of 125 million. But discrepancies of few million make little difference in a country of 1.3 billion people, and until now at least, nobody has much cared about the actual number.

In fact, when Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain's Paralympic athlete who's earned 11 gold medals, first went to Beijing, locals would to poke her to determine whether or not she was real.

The expected visit of just 4,000 more disabled people to Beijing this September seems, bizarrely, to have galvanized the Chinese authorities into action over accessibility. In terms of numbers, it's like a pinprick on an elephant's rump. But these disabled visitors are special: They're the Paralympic athletes, and they'll be trailed by 6,000 journalists.

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