BBC Ouch Blog

Goodbye - Ouch is on the move

Damon Rose — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:34:08 +0000

This is the last entry on our page here. As of Thursday our blog will move to a new home, with a fresh format. Visit our new page to keep up with our stories and podcasts all in one place.

While this version of Ouch will no longer be updated, it will stay here for reference. Thanks for reading, and we look forward to keeping the conversation going in our new home.

We may have moved but the address bbc.co.uk/ouch will still take you to our latest stuff, now part of the News site.

See you in the new place.

Ouch Team

PS: Before 2011, Ouch had yet another home and a slightly different remit at the BBC. You can see even older archive dating back to 2002 which includes comedy, cartoons, video and columns.

Ouch's new channel on Audioboo

Damon Rose — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:12:34 +0000

We're making it easier for you to delve into Ouch

As well as the blog, we do a monthly internet radio programme. And now we're posting clips of the programme to a new channel we've got on Audioboo.

Here are three items taken from the talk show that you can click and listen to right now:

• See my "bed life", see the whole me - an interview with artist Liz Crow who was about to spend two days and nights exhibiting herself in bed, being the disabled person she is when she's not putting a brave face on things out in public. She also talks about standing on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square dressed as a Nazi to highlight the disability holocaust in World War II.

• Winter Paralympics: What do you know about the Games? Anything? (fact burst) - Just as it says on the tin. Rob and Liz fire questions at Tony Garrett about the colder non-London games ahead of us in 2014. If you know nothing about them, this'll bring you up to speed - quickly.

• "Disabled people don't exist in a vacuum." DLA changes could have knock on effects for others - Broadening-out the benefit change debate, blogger Emma Round (Pseudo Deviant) and stickman cartoonist Hannah Ensor discuss how they spend their benefits and who it will affect if their money is reduced or taken away, includes taxi drivers and local businesses.

We're regularly adding new clips from the programme and will bring you more audio in the future.

Click, listen and share. Audioboo is a social networking site for playing and sharing audio, and having discussions around it.

You can follow Ouch! on Twitter and on Facebook.

Katherine Kowalski: Life with Lawrence, whose syndrome has no name

Guest — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:49:16 +0000

No-one knows why two-year-old Lawrence lives with multiple disabilities.

To mark the inaugural Undiagnosed Children's Awareness Day on 13 April, mum Katherine Kowalski writes about her son's SWAN (syndrome without a name).

For most parents, life with a two-year-old involves hours of chasing a small person around, kicking balls, building towers, man-handling temper tantrums, breezily ignoring food fads and running the gauntlet of potty training. But even if you don't love your toddler's terrible twos, you can rest easy, pretty sure that they are on their way to becoming an independent little being.

Life with Lawrence is different. We don't know whether he will ever learn to crawl or feed himself, let alone walk, talk or live independently. We don't even know whether he will see adulthood. And we don't know why.

Lawrence was born healthy but is now what doctors call "complex". It became clear early on that he wasn't developing at the same rate as his peers and before we knew it we were on a roller coaster of investigative medical assessments and tests to find a cause.

His brain, heart and kidneys have been scanned. He's endured chest x-rays, chromosome testing, repeated and inconclusive eye and hearing tests and invasive surgery. And he's also spent time in the High Dependency Unit for seizures that caused him to stop breathing.

But despite the medical profession's best efforts, Lawrence's genetic syndrome remains nameless, categorised only by a very long (and expanding) list of symptoms.

Without a label for his disability, it is impossible to know what Lawrence's future holds. This uncertainty is frightening but it has also taught us to make hay while the sun shines.

Instead of dreaming of retiring to Cornwall, we recently upped sticks and moved there to a house by the sea. Lawrence likes to copy the sound of the seagulls and on sunny days, he enjoys nothing more than a good splash about in a rock pool.

His presence in our lives has brought those little family moments that can so easily go unnoticed into glorious technicolour. Lawrence managing to sit unaided after a year of daily practice, or his four-year-old sister Beatrice writing her name for the first time are our jump-for-joy moments.

Parenting a child with an undiagnosed syndrome can be tough. There are resources available for children with well-known disabilities like Down's syndrome or cerebral palsy, and guides for accessing services specific to them. But it is very hard to know where to fit in, when there is no well-trodden path to follow.

With no answers on the horizon, I searched online for families in the same situation. There are rather a lot of us as it happens. In fact, between 30 and 40% of children with additional needs have a SWAN - syndrome without a name.

I'm now a proud member of SWAN UK, the organisation supporting families with undiagnosed children here in Britain.

While our sons and daughters are all different, there is true strength in numbers and we celebrate the good times as well as supporting each other through the bad. Because we all understand that life is unpredictable with an undiagnosed child.

I am often asked how I manage to remain calm and positive while dealing with such huge uncertainty. The truth is that Lawrence makes it easy. His disabilities may affect every area of his development but his sense of humour button is firmly switched on. He has a divine sense of the ridiculous, he laughs when his sister is getting told off, he likes to "sing" along to 80s power ballads in the car and has a penchant for country music while being a budding percussionist himself. A curry lover and telly addict, in many ways he's growing up to be a pretty typical bloke.

In spite of his difficulties, top priority for Lawrence is getting on with the business of being a loud, messy, funny, two-year-old boy.

• Katherine Kowalski writes about life with Lawrence on her blog, Orange This Way.

You can follow Ouch! on Twitter and on Facebook.

Sledge hockey: The crash bang of wheelchair rugby, with ice

Emma Tracey — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:49:36 +0000

listen to ‘Winter Paralympics: If you like wheelchair rugby, you'll like sledge hockey’ on Audioboo

What is sledge hockey? And why should we be rooting for Team GB to qualify for the 2014 Winter Paralympics?

"It's the disabled version of ice hockey," says GB sledge hockey goalie Rob Gaze. "Most of the rules are the same, except obviously most of us can't move our legs."

He started playing the rough and ready disability sport after a spinal injury eight years ago. Click the above play button and you can hear in his voice how much he loves it. Gaze was speaking on the Ouch! talk show for April.

The goalie says: "We sit in a little chair, which is strapped to a frame, which has skates on the bottom. And we use two sticks rather than one. They're about a quarter of the length of normal hockey sticks but have the same shooting head on. They have [ice] picks on the bottom so we can push around the ice."

Gaze plays wheelchair basketball too but earlier, in a poetic moment off air, he told us: "There's something about being on that ice. It's cold but it's hot ... there's the mental game of psyching out opponents like in wheelchair basketball, but it's also very physical.

"[It's] one of the best sports in the world."

Comparisons are made between sledge hockey and wheelchair rugby. People were shocked and delighted during the London Paralympics on the hitherto unlikely sight of disabled people being turfed out of their chairs onto the court. Sledge hockey is similar because of the speed, the contact and the number of injuries received during play.

"You can't start fights otherwise you're going to get sent to the sin bin and you can't punch people," says Gaze. "But there's nothing wrong with you going in with your shoulder into somebody and knocking them flat off their sled.

"If they've got the puck, rather than going for the puck, you try to take the man away."

The GB sledge hockey team describe themselves as "underdogs". According to Gaze, this is a status they like. They surprised everyone recently by winning bronze at the world championships in Japan and it has earned them a place at the final tournament later this year. Winning a bronze there will mean they qualify for the 2014 Winter Paralympics in Sochi, Russia.

So, will they make it? Gaze says: "I'm a bit nervous but yeah we can do it. We push ourselves harder every time we go out, and people have started taking notice. So there's not much more you could want."

Rob Gaze was interviewed on the April episode of the BBC Ouch! talk show.

You can follow Ouch! on Twitter and on Facebook.

Ouch! disability talk show 96: Sledge hockey, stick men and welfare

Damon Rose — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:15:40 +0000

Never heard of Sledge Hockey? Find out more about the Winter Paralympic sport on the show

This month: We discuss how benefit cuts could affect the economy, how campaigning on social media can be unhealthy as well as positive and how to communicate by message cards if you fall over or don't want to talk.

Also, what is Sledge Hockey?? Our basic guide to the Winter Paralympics now one year away - featuring Tony Garrett, sledge hockey goalie Rob Gaze and visually impaired skier Kelly Gallagher.

Liz Carr and Rob Crossan present.

How do I listen? Stream it on the web, download episodes or subscribe as a podcast with iTunes and other services. Details below.

RELATED LINKS

You heard the show, now find out more about the people and subjects featured.

Hannah Ensor's blog - On the show, Hannah the stickman cartoonist tells Liz and Rob about the cards she has made which she shows the public if she has lost her voice, fallen over, or other disability mishap. They're designed to communicate friendly reassurance in those who might otherwise panic or do the wrong thing.

Pseudo-Living - a blog by Emma Round - Emma took part in the discussion about welfare, social media and the economy on the show. Read her blog and follow her observations and pragmatic positive campaigning efforts.

What is Sledge Hockey - Listen to the show to hear GB's goalie Rob Gaze explain it with love for the sport in his heart ... or click to read this explanation on Wikipedia.

Winter Paralympics: Estonia win keeps GB on course for Sochi - Good news for the GB team via the BBC Disability Sport site.

Northern Ireland skier Kelly Gallagher GB's best hope for Winter Paralympic gold (BBC) - Kelly is our only gold medal hope at the Winter Para Games, the pundits say ... and you can hear her on the show.

Paralympics GB - Read the latest winter and summer Paralympic updates for Great Britain and find out more about disability sport and the people involved.

• The Ouch! talk show is a BBC News programme made exclusively for the internet and produced monthly by a team of disabled journalists and presenters.

• Go to the downloads page where you can grab single shows or subscribe as a podcast via iTunes and other podcast apps. Play it on your computer, phone or other devices.

• Read a transcript of the show

Is it hard to work out which class you belong to if you're disabled?

Damon Rose — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:14:34 +0000

The BBC has published the results of a survey on the nation's class. Its basis is that the old class system - lower, middle and upper - is no longer relevant.

Previously class was strictly determined by occupation, wealth and education, but this new method suggests it's more relevant to categorise people by economic, social and "cultural capital" indicators.

Particularly relevant to the disability experience is that you may be a different kind of person to what your income, education, occupation or housing suggests.

You could be unemployed, you may consider yourself unemployable, but you may have a masters degree, enjoy opera and hang out with CEOs and surgeons. if that's you, then what defines your class?

Disability campaigner Kaliya Franklin tweeted earlier that she is not sure what class she belongs to. She says she is: "Middle class by upbringing & education but underclass due to benefit receipt?".

After taking the new class calculator test on the BBC website, Spoonydoc Tweeted that she ended up in the lowest class grouping: "I was precariat. Test very skewed by being housebound. Changed to emergent service worker otherwise."

What is class anyway?

Well, it's all about your essence and standing, your station in life, your status, your regardability, your power. It gives clues as to what kind of consumer you are, what your politics might be, and all sorts of other unsumuppable traits. If you can be pigeonholed, you can be broadly understood as a person or householder, and targeted accordingly by those who need to know: advertisers, political canvassers, statisticians, town planners, who knows what.

Many disabled people take a non-standard route through life. It's recognised that opportunities in education or employment are harder to achieve due to physical accessibility or barriers that are attitudinal. Disabled people are likely to have less money as a result of having fewer opportunities.

If you don't generate your own economic capital due to not having a regular job, the influences around you are perhaps more important in turning you into the person you are. This survey recognises that and it calculates your "cultural capital" i.e. what TV, newspapers, arts and events you are a consumer of.

Could you, or should you, be summed up by what you like? Rather than what you're like? Should we define disabled people by what's going on in their head rather than their bank balance? And is that power?

There are, of course, plenty of disabled people for whom disability has been no barrier to socio economic progress ... but it's not clear quite how many that is.

What class are you and why? What can you add to this discussion? Leave a comment or contact us via Twitter and on Facebook.

Who knew? Cartoon advises disabled should take tights off before a "bum shuffle"

Emma Tracey — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:32:19 +0000

Tanni Grey-Thompson's tweets about a recent accessibility fail, inspired disabled cartoonist Hannah Ensor to create the above image.

On arriving home late and discovering the lift in her building was broken, the disabled Baroness had to crawl up ten flights of stairs to her London flat, dragging her chair up too. The retired Paralympian tweeted during the ordeal that she would be removing her tights beforehand, so as not to ladder them.

The cartoonist liked the disability detail: "Take your tights off before you bum shuffle. That's Something," Hannah says, "that's so real to my world but alien to other people's worlds. Noone tells you that as a wheelchair using woman."

Tanni was so impressed with Hannah's image of her on the stairs, that she asked permission to link to it from her own website.

The 31 year-old from Oxfordshire hopes that this, and her other cartoons which all have insights into disabled life, will encourage everyone to view disability as "normal".

"I keep them simple," Hannah says about her cartoons, in which people are always drawn as stick figures, "and I use them to say what's in my head."

one cartoon that she now sells as a sticker, depicts Hannah on the floor after attempting to get up a kerb that proved too high.

"[Non-disabled people] will see my sticker and understand why I like little kerbs," Hannah says, "and a wheelchair user can say yes, this is my life, I've done that, and I've also done the cobblestone backflip."

Hannah's first series of stickman creations, the surprisingly named You Know You Have Hypermobility Syndrome When ..., helped her communicate at a time when she was too ill to speak. They reflect her life with the painful condition which makes her joints dislocate easily and often. Her other disability, POTS, causes her heart rate to rise too high when she stands up.

In 2010, she stopped working as an environmental health officer when an independent advisor confirmed she was unlikely to be fit for work again before retirement age. Since then, she's been devoted to drawing when she is well.

The cartoons started life on disability forums and on Hannah's blog. She sells disability awareness stickers and communication cards and has also published seven stickman books, including two for small children. Money raised from these goes to her favourite charities, the Hypermobility Syndrome Association and Whiz-Kidz.

The cartoon above is Hannah's response to changes to disability benefits. She was keen to take a gentler approach than other protests she'd seen online.

"On Twitter and Facebook, I'd noticed not only fear but a lot of hatred. Some of the arguments being put out against welfare reform came across as very bitter and very angry," says Hannah. "I know that if someone comes at me sounding bitter and angry, I automatically shut up and don't get the point they are making, even if they have a valid point. So I just wanted to say look, the Disability Living Allowance is important - without any anger and bitterness."

Hannah worries that the lives of some of the disabled people she sees online have been "swallowed up by the politics".

"I see people becoming so scared about [welfare reform] that for some it has become their whole world. That's sad because there are so many things to be enjoyed.

"I'm sitting looking out of my window here, and I can see a bird in a tree ... and that's nice."

• Hannah regularly posts new cartoons on her blog.

You can follow Ouch! on Twitter and on Facebook.

Limbless Irish teen doesn't wish to inspire, she wants to be famous

Emma Tracey — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:31:39 +0000

As St. Patrick's Day approaches, Emma Tracey speaks to Joanne O'Riordan, a disabled 16 year-old who is a household name back in Emma's home country, Ireland.

I first saw Joanne on Irish television 16 years ago. She was just a baby and her parents did the talking but it knocked my teenage socks off. Bursting with pride for their little girl with no limbs, the O'Riordans left chat show host Pat Kenny in no doubt of their high expectations for her future. Now she's well into her teens and has minor celebrity status with the nation seeing her regularly speak about disability matters.

Her image is relentlessly positive so I ask about what she finds difficult. "It's the fact I can't do things for myself. Now that I'm getting older, I want my hair and makeup done. The other night, before going to a party, I had to wait for my sister Gillian to come over and do it.

"It is frustrating that it causes problems for me if I'm left alone for even five minutes. I can't just do my own thing. I can't just throw myself on the couch and get the remote myself."

These negatives don't colour who she is though and what she wants to achieve.

After that early television appearance I didn't hear of Joanne O'Riordan again until she hit the headlines in Ireland just over a year ago. I remembered her parents determination and wasn't surprised when I saw that she had turned into a rather feisty individual.

The country's leader, Enda Kenny (no relation to the TV presenter), broke a promise he had personally made to Joanne on the election trail. Anxious about her future independence, she had actively sought reassurance from him and He told her that he wouldn't cut disability benefits to young people if he won. But in his very first budget after winning the election, that's exactly what he did cut.

Joanne's subsequent open letter of disappointment in the Irish Examiner newspaper gained a lot of attention and a video of that broken promise to her emerged and went viral. The government did a U-turn.

"I thought it would be just one more protest that would be swept under the carpet", Joanne tells me, "a one day thing, a one hit wonder". But her public dismay had made waves. Visually striking and a good talker, Joanne had captured the hearts of the Irish people, creating a real buzz on social media.

Just days after her letter was printed, Joanne was invited to be a guest on one of Ireland's most watched programmes, The Late Late Show. It was this appearance that made her a household name in Ireland. Displaying a great sense of humour she told host Ryan Tubridy about taking the unlikely role of nurse in her school play even though she has no arms or legs before then asking for his job - she said she could do it better than him.

Joanne loves to meet famous people

She currently attends a small secondary school where she is well respected but next year Joanne plans to enter the far bigger world of university to study journalism. Her mum is her primary carer currently but Joanne says she wouldn't want her there all the time: "There has to be a bit of craic... but I will probably live at home."

In April 2012, she spoke at a Girls in ICT event at the UN Headquarters in New York about the role technology plays in her life. At the end of her speech, she asked the boffins in the audience to create her a robot to give her full independence. Technologists at MIT and Apple took this seriously and have visited Joanne in Ireland to better understand her needs.

Joanne uses technology every day. She has a laptop for school and homework but tells me that she's addicted to her iPhone. "Depending on my mood that day, I'll work the phone using my top lip, nose, bottom lip, chin or my little left arm, what the doctors call a tree stump.

"To type on a keyboard, I clench a pen between my teeth and I stab the keys."

Joanne says she can type 36 words a minute and admits it "probably looks hilarious, my head bopping up and down at a hundred miles per hour".

She won the 2012 Irish Young Person of the Year award and her public profile will likely rise when a documentary about her is released later this year though it's fair to say she's probably already Ireland's most famous disabled person.

Her brother Steven has made the film; he is a successful documentary maker in his own right but is still mostly referred to as Joanne O'Riordan's brother.

Joanne enjoys her celebrity and admits she and Steven want different things from the film. "It is an uplifting documentary," says Joanne. "People are supposed to come out of it feeling like they can go and climb Everest. Steven has brilliant ideas of winning Oscars... but I just want to be the next Kim Kardashian."

You can follow Ouch! on Twitter and on Facebook.

Sex will cure your stutter

Damon Rose — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:40:41 +0000

Comedians with Disabilities Act

Disabled children should be "put down" to save money, went the unfortunate dark joke from a councillor in Cornwall.

Much reported at the end of February, we brought it it up in our monthly talk show and it sparked a lively discussion about the most awful things people have ever said to you about your disability. A classic pub conversation if I've ever heard one -well, either that or the stuff of a tribunal.

On the line from Memphis, and taking part in the chat, were Nina, Eric and Steve from San Francisco Bay comedy troop the Comedians with Disabilities Act.

Presenters Rob Crossan and Liz Carr had already discovered that people often ask Steve, a person of restricted growth, if they can take photos of him. You can imagine it would be a tad frustrating and bad for the self esteem that someone wants to keep a record of your non-standard looks so they can show it to their pals later.

Then it was Nina's turn: "I've gotten men, especially after some of my shows, saying, "You know I think I could help you with that stuttering."

Rob asks what therapies they might be thinking of as an unspoken realisation dawns on where this may be leading. "Have you taken them up on their offers?" enquires Liz.

"No!" says Nina. "Well the guys who have asked me haven't been ones that I would want that from,"

Mmm. Readers, can you guess which direction this is headed?

"Do their suggestions involve dragging you back to a cheap motel?" presenter Rob puts into words what everyone is now thinking.

"Yeah," confirms Nina, and I'm not quite sure how to say this in a clean way ... they have implied that somehow sexually they have the power to cure my speech."

• The Ouch! disability talk show is available monthly and full of surprising conversations. It's available as a podcast, a download or to stream on your computer, your phone and other devices.

You can follow Ouch! on Twitter and on Facebook.

Artist goes to bed in public to raise disability awareness

Emma Tracey — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:51:44 +0000

Making invisible lives, visible

When Liz Crow is out and about, she adopts a strong public image. But when at home, she has to lie down, cave-in and totally relax. She calls this her "bed life".

"I go out there and try and be all energetic and busy and doing things", says Crow. "But then I come back and have this kind of hidden self where I switch off, spend a lot of time lying down, a lot of time in bed recovering."

She is not alone. Many disabled people have fluctuating conditions which are painful or energy-zapping. Lots hide the bed recovery aspect of their lives from others for fear that they won't be understood.

Previously, Crow hid her most-disabled self from others in case they saw it as "not socially acceptable". But in April, this part of her is set to become very public.

Liz Crow speaks on the latest Ouch! talk show, available to stream now or download.

She will lie in bed for 48 hours as a human exhibit at Salisbury Arts Centre in mid April. Crow thinks the time is right to have an open conversation about the hidden life she and others have.

"There's a pressure", she says, "particularly after last summer and the Paralympics, to be a kind of super human when you're in public. And if you're not that, if you're a [benefits] claimant, then you're often cast as a scrounger.

"What I'm trying to do is to find that space in the middle where we just acknowledge that life is more complicated."

During the two day sleep over, Crow will invite visitors to join her for five scheduled bedside chats about disabled life. One of the discussions will be held on Twitter and via SMS text.

"Last time I did it," she says recalling a performance in Ipswich in November, "I was contacted by quite a few people who said 'this is great, thank you for making me visible. I'd really like to be there and visit but I have my own bed life and so I can't'."

The original version of Liz Crow's performance was only for those who walked in off the street; the new Salisbury performance will have a much wider audience as it will be streamed live on the web. A #beddingout hashtag has also been running for two weeks on Twitter and already there's a community of people with bed lives of their own springing up around the project.

The artist admits she has been surprised by the amount of feedback she's had and is keen to connect people with one another: "I had no idea that there are actually thousands upon thousands of us out there living this kind of life, because we are really isolated and we are really invisible in public life."

• The Bedding Out installation is at Salisbury Arts Centre. Liz Crow will be bedding down 'live' between 10-12 April.

You can follow Ouch! on Twitter and on Facebook.

Ouch! show 95: Things that make you go ouch!

Damon Rose — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:44:54 +0000

Hear the Comedians with Disabilities Act on the March show

Available monthly

This month: Chat ranges from Nazi anti-disability propaganda to benefit reform and the recent "disabled children should be put down" comments from a councillor. Features The Comedians with Disabilities Act, artist Liz Crow and Glasgow mum Laura Miller.

Liz Carr and Rob Crossan present.

How do I listen? Stream it on the web, download episodes or subscribe via iTunes and other services. Details below.

RELATED LINKS

You heard the show, now find out more about the people and subjects featured.

The Comedians with Disabilities Act - Find out more about Nina, Steve, Eric and Michael on their Facebook page.

Bedding out - Read about artist Liz Crow's 48-hour live sleepover in a Salisbury arts centre. As she tells Rob and Liz, it's about bringing invisible disabled 'bed life' people into the open and highlighting changes to benefits. It'll be streamed on the web with BSL and captions, and you can take part via Twitter using #beddingout which people are already using. Follow the link for more details.

Disabled Parents Network - On the show, Laura Miller talks about how valuable she finds support from fellow parents who have similar challenges.

Dan the Rapperman - Listen to this epic track from the cerebral palsy rapper from Hull on his "wheels of steel". You'll be singing it to yourself all month.

• The Ouch! talk show is a BBC News programme made exclusively for the internet and produced monthly by a team of disabled journalists and presenters.

• Go to the downloads page where you can grab single shows or subscribe via iTunes and other podcast apps. Play it on your computer, phone or other devices.

• Read a transcript of the show

"I'm a crawling mummy": how one disabled mum looks after her son

Emma Tracey — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:30:44 +0000

Laura got alternative parenting ideas from a support network

Laura Miller lives in Glasgow with her husband and 13 month old Jonathan. As Mother's Day approaches, the wheelchair-using mum explains how she cares for her little boy who she cannot carry.

"I do most of my parenting sitting down," says Laura. She can transfer from her chair to the floor and move around after her son on her hands and knees. But because she can't pick him up while standing, she's had to find other ways of getting Jonathan to where she wants him to be in the house.

At bedtime, Laura lures Jonathan to where his cot is by switching off all lights in places she doesn't want him to be, leaving on only the light in his room. Sometimes she crawls through the house with him, squeaking a noisy toy to grab his attention and make him follow.

The self-declared "crawling mummy" is in no doubt who is faster on four limbs and has the bruises to prove it. She is confident Jonathan's not upset that he's not carried because she makes it fun getting from place to place.

Laura can pick her child up and hold him while sitting down.

When outside, she obviously wouldn't want her son to crawl behind her in the street. So when getting ready, she coaxes him over with her voice and, when he's close to her powerchair, she can reach him and put him on her lap; he then sits nicely protected in a baby carrier strapped to Laura's middle while they're away from home.

"Children do tune in to what you're doing," she says. "He'll run to his dad to get him to lift him up ... but he won't do it with me."

Laura makes sure she is "super ready" for every possible situation and believes she has become an amazing problem-solver. "That is the unique property of a disabled parent," she says. "We have to do it at a higher level and that's why we need encouragement from other parents because, obviously, that can get exhausting. You need people to keep cheering you on and feeding you ideas."

In Laura's case, the support came from the Disabled Parents Network, for mums and dads with a disability or health condition. She credits DPN with teaching her the strategies she uses, and other examples of what she calls "alternative parenting".

The Glasgow mum is now a volunteer for the organisation, helping other disabled parents herself. She says: "I think it's really important to let parents know that they're not on their own."

• Laura Miller was speaking with Liz Carr and Rob Crossan on the latest disability talk show from Ouch!

Listen to the interview in full on the latest show which you can download to your MP3 player or hear online.

You can follow Ouch! on Twitter and on Facebook.

"Cold, getting warmer, hot": New app helps blind people find each other

Emma Tracey — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 12:00:47 +0000

Emma tests a new prototype app that lets blind people find other blind people.

"We'd arranged to meet at a shopping mall but, as time went by, I began to wonder why my wife was so late," says Doug Wakefield, one half of a married blind couple visiting the CSUN accessible technology conference in San Diego last week.

His wife Judy picks up the story: "Eventually, someone came up to me and said, are you waiting for a man with a guide dog?

"We were to meet at the main entrance but I was to the left of the door and Doug was standing to the right, only ten feet away."

Lots of blind people have blind friends, so This game of cat and mouse takes place regularly. It can be funny but it's certainly a little frustrating.

As smart phones are fast becoming a basic part of a blind person's toolkit, it's perhaps not surprising that someone has now created "an app for that".

People Finder has a very basic but accessible interface. Like mainstream products with similar aims, such as Grindr for the gay community and Spotme for networking at conferences, you have to have the app running if you want to meet up with people in your circle.

It alerts a user, via a vibration and a noise, when someone else with the app comes within 50 feet. It uses Bluetooth to detect people.

As you search for your friend, the app will let you know how close you are, by saying "near" or "cold" as you walk around.

To aid social niceties, There's the option to message the person through the app to say you've clocked them, before descending on them.

Mike May is The brains behind People Finder, which is being developed by his company Sendero Group. They have 13 years experience of making accessible satnav solutions for blind pedestrians but Mike says he has wanted to make a people finding app for a long time.

"As a blind person I'd love to be made aware of when somebody I know is near by, so that I can meet with them," he says. "As a bonus, you will also be careful not to talk about someone if you know they might be in hearing distance."

Another attendee of the CSUN conference is Julian Vargas from California. He hopes to test out the app on a local bus route to see if he can spot the bus his friend is already on, so they can travel together. His friend can't see to wave to him through the window and so it's very easy to get on the wrong one, alone.

"The way we tend to do it now," says Julian, "is by sending text messages. This app would be nice because if my friends are running it, when their bus pulls up, theoretically, all of a sudden my phone should ding and say that it sees their phone."

Blind people already have a range of strategies for letting a sightless friend know they are nearby. The best way is to use your voice so your friend can hear you but, socially speaking, it looks a little odd just talking to yourself so blind people might pretend to be having a phone conversation or pet their guide dogs saying "good boy Buttons" a little more loudly than usual.

It may have crossed your mind that there might be a big security risk with having already vulnerable people announcing themselves digitally over the air so others can find them. Some apps of the people-finding variety have caused concern but the dynamics seem a bit different here. Potential sighted stalkers can already see blind people at 50 feet, and are likely to know they can't see if they're using a dog, a white cane or that they're not negotiating obstacles very elegantly, so the app isn't going to betray them any more than normal in most circumstances. Blind users may consider this an acceptable risk if it means that they too can spot their pals.

One hundred people are currently testing the prototype app, which can be used indoors or outdoors wherever you are in the world. Mike May is having trouble getting funders to see why blind people would need it and wants all current testers to form a "fan club" to raise its profile.

Now for a blind access app that keeps track of your children in crowded shopping malls, a GPS app which is accurate to within 1 CM and perhaps, one that
can plot a direct route into the arms of a soulmate.

Voices Found: Stammerers collaborate on new mini album

Guest — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:55:22 +0000

"I'm fluent when I sing" says Matt

Twenty year-old music student Matt Bond has produced an EP, featuring himself and four fellow artists who all have a stammer. He doesn't like using phones, so explains his project in an interview conducted by email.

I had to come up with an idea for a project as part of my popular music course at Falmouth.

Music and stammering have been two hugely influential and defining factors in my life and so I wanted to merge them somehow.

I'm always fluent when singing. No one knows for certain why this is but I've often heard that of the brain, which is why some people with other disabilities such as Tourette's also find they can sing without their disability interrupting them.

My inspiration for an EP came when I read the story of Kyle Coleman in the Cornishman newspaper. He also finds it difficult to communicate, he had rarely spoken aloud, but found out he could sing and made a charity album in aid of autism, the condition he has.

I've found that there's a lack of understanding about stammering and what it's like to have one, so I decided to make my own awareness-raising recording.

The British Stammering Association kindly sent a call out via their social media pages, asking for interested musicians who stammer to contact me.

Adam Lovell, Brandon Marchant, Oli Cheadle and Ben James came forward. They each wrote, performed and produced their songs about stammering and then sent them for inclusion on the EP that we named Voices Found. Their songs are: Tell Me If You See This, Normal, Shaking the Rafters and Pathways, respectively.

Lyrics from the Voices Found EP

And oh, time moves so slow in the moments when you wish the ground would open up and swallow you whole. It's more than just dumb luck how my words get stuck when I try to say my name...
(chorus)
Well the phone's got teeth and the sound of the ring gives me constant grief, but I don't care.
Could I squash that fear? Pick it up - let 'em know that I'm still here?
I'll sew a patchwork quilt from my shame and guilt and the fit can more than make do.
Tell me how it feels to be normal. I want to be normal too - and only normal will do.

(Normal by Brandon Marchant)

The song that I contributed to the project, Part of Me, expresses the problems stammering causes me in day to day life but is also an acceptance that stammering is part of who I am, hence the title.

I had speech therapy sessions at school and took a two week intensive speech therapy course at the Michael Palin Centre in London when I was around 16. I tried many fluency techniques which they suggest, such as slow speech and sliding in and out of words, but nothing really seemed to stick.

The course was still a life changing experience , because for the first time I met other people my age who stammered. This made me realise I was not alone and I gained a lot of confidence.

Stammering can be extremely frustrating at times, causing feelings of isolation, depression and anxiety. Things that other people take for granted become a real problem, like talking on the phone and introducing yourself to new people.

I hope the album will show there's more to someone who stammers than what comes from their mouths, and I hope it will inspire others in the same situation, giving music they can relate to.

(As told to Emma Tracey)

All proceeds from Matt's EP are to be donated to the British Stammering Association.

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Lying on a sound box: deaf children listen to music

Guest — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:02:07 +0000

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The National Orchestra of Wales has been staging unique workshops and concerts for deaf people. Radio 4 reporter Andrew Bomford discovers children listening to music in a very physical way and speaks to those behind it. Here he blogs about his emotional day.

I'll admit that I am a bit weepy sometimes. I cried at the end of Les Miserables, so the moment that the Welsh National Orchestra string section got started, and Katherine Mount stood there, signing and singing to her profoundly deaf - but clearly enraptured - ten year old son Ethan, I wasn't surprised to feel myself choking up again.

Watch Katherine Mount singing Ethan's Song on YouTube

It was towards the end of a long, joyful, but emotionally draining day with the orchestra and children from The Ysgol Maes Dyfan special school in Barry near Cardiff. Some of them are almost completely deaf and others have serious hearing problems, but the joy and enthusiasm shown by the children in their appreciation of the music they were experiencing was wonderful to see.

This was part of an outreach programme by the National Orchestra of Wales which has seen members of the orchestra regularly working with school children on musical improvisations, as well as the simple joy of making music. It was all culminating in a series of five free concerts for schools and the general public, taking part in Cardiff over the last couple of days.

So how does that work then, you might wonder? Music for deaf people? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

"Music can just affect people - there is an emotional connection," said Andy Everton, an Outreach Officer for the national orchestra, and himself a trumpet player, "I really don't think you have to hear it in order to appreciate it. There is an emotional connection which just happens."

Andy tells a story about going into a school and seeing a severely disabled deaf child who seemed to be incapable of any contact at all with anyone. He stood behind her playing the trumpet (with the sound dampened) and to everyone's amazement saw her reaction as she moved her eyes to follow the music wherever he went. It was the first time anyone had seen her make any kind of connection to the outside world.

Other children from the school just jumped at the opportunity to simply bang a drum, hold the bass clarinet or the harp as it was played, and to feel the curious sensation of the sound waves moving through their bodies via their sense of touch.

The orchestra has also come up with an ingenious solution to the question of how deaf children can experience music.

They've built sound boxes - large wooden platforms, with heavy speakers inside them, which play the music, and are especially effective with the low frequency sounds, in a way that resonates sound through whatever part of the body is in contact with the box.

I saw deaf children sitting on the boxes, touching them with their hands, and even lying fully prone on them, with huge grins on their faces as they felt the vibrations of the music (You can see an explanation of this in the above video). Two deaf boys, Ethan (a different Ethan) and Ashley from Maes Dyfan school stood on the sound boxes and belted out a rap tune they'd improvised with the accompaniment of the orchestra.

"When they use the microphone they can feel their voices from the box and through their feet," explained Andy Pidcock, a keyboard player who's done a lot of work with deaf children, "They can feel everything they're doing and they can feel the beat." I tried it out myself - it was a fascinating sensation; somewhat similar to the thud of loud bass you can sometimes feel in your chest at a very loud concert.

The orchestra's work has been championed by the charity Music and the Deaf, run by Paul Whittaker. "This is the only occasion when an orchestra has done a fully integrated project for deaf people," Paul said, "Normally an orchestra might go into a deaf school or work with a group of deaf children. They might go to a concert where they sit and watch what goes on. Here it's fully participatory. They come and sit with the orchestra and take part."

But, as mentioned earlier, the tear-jerker of the night was certainly Katherine Mount's beautiful performance of "Ethan's Song". With a gorgeous show-tune style melody, it was written by Katherine's friend Helen Goldwyn, who was inspired after watching Ethan experiencing a music concert.

The song asks lots of fundamental questions about what the 10-year-old deaf boy is thinking and feeling as he connects to his mother through music:

What do you hear inside your head? Music, your music. I know I feel joy when sound connects to feeling, When the vibration meets the air.

"She was able to write the words of the song," recounted Katherine, "And when I heard them for the first time I was absolutely blown away that she'd managed to hit the nail on the head and express exactly what I'd been thinking for all those years."

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