RU Disabled?

Report by Gabi Zietsman

How does a disabled person experience university? At Rhodes University, an event was held where students and staff could experience what it was like to be disabled for a day….
On 27 September 2012, able-bodied staff and students could experience one of three impairments, namely sight, mobility and hearing. In orange shirts with the bold slogan RU Disabled? The New Apartheid. Separate but equal? printed on the back, the participants went about their day as they faced new types of obstacles. Tim Stones, the disability advisor for Rhodes, is hard of hearing and believes that Rhodes is very much behind in their accessibility for disabled students. Adrian Hubbard, a wheelchair specialist at CE Mobility and paralympian, has been in a wheelchair since his twenties and talks about the importance of an accessible environment for equality. The third interviewee was one of the participants, John Vries, who is a student and experienced being in a wheelchair for the day.
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