I’m pretty sure my carers lied to me again. They told me that I was their last call and wanted to come early because of that and then proceeded to be half an hour late when I said they had to come on time. And while I admit that I have no way of knowing whether the carers were lying in tbis instance. I have caught them in a lie before.

Honesty is important for everyone. But it is especially important when you find yourself relying on others, like I as disabled do. If you lie to me I often have no way to verify what you’re saying. I have to take your word for it. This applies to carers or anyone else. The world can literally be more inaccessible to me if you lie to me about it. This issue extends far beyond my actual carers, though I’m pretty sure it’s in their job description (or it should be) not to lie to their clients.

There’s a long list of places I have investigated the accessibility of, only to get there and find the place itself is not accessible. Sometimes this is very obvious access issues like say a step, which I didn’t think you could misidentify as an access problem but apparently you can. Other times it can be a more complex issue that I wouldn’t expect someone to be aware of, like the size of my wheelchair or the turning circle that it needs.

Back to the step for a second, because that was an interesting story, to say the least. I was told on more than one occasion that a place was accessible to me, despite one place having a step at the door, and the main part of the other place being on a whole other floor, with only steps to access it. On both occasions, they gave the reasons that they thought they would be accessible because the space in the business was big enough for a wheelchair user, once they get over the step. That’s a pretty big barrier to accessibility. To make things worse on both occasions I asked directly about step-free access. On one I only found out once I got the business, on the other I thankfully discovered it after a closer look on Google Maps so didn’t waste as much time.

The point of this post is to say please just be honest. Be honest too everyone, but especially those who rely on that honesty. Even if the truth is annoying it’s less annoying and to be frank less hurtful than a lie.