The Oatmeal Incident

[@emmaplunkett4711]

Great to hear about moments like this and how people around you at work are learning, or not learning, to adapt their behaviour to ensure they’re making the environment accessible for you so that you can all work to the best of your ability and bring all of your skills to the classroom without hindrance. It would have been great to have heard a bit of an explanation of what happened after the oatmeal ended up on the floor, perhaps some explanation of how the conversation went afterwards regarding how future communication might need to change and how that was received around that incident; whether it was awkward at the time, whether you felt a little uncomfortable in the moment, whether they were totally receptive or there was some pushback, etc. Of course, I totally respect your privacy and your need to protect and respect the privacy and rights to anonymity of your place of work, but if you do feel able to elaborate a little more on this area I think it would be a really valuable addition to this story and to others you might tell in the future to help people gain a greater understanding of the overall picture and how they might give support to others they meet in the future. Thanks for sharing and advocating, as a disabled community we very much need to speak out to help others understand how they can support and advocate for us and see just how inaccessible and discriminatory society and systems still are across the world including where you are in the US and here in the UK. I’m not visually impaired but have chronic health conditions that cause severe pain, physical weakness & joint instability, cognition & concentration issues, and many others so use crutches or a wheelchair most of the time and spend most of my days at home and in bed at the moment. Your videos are great, so do keep sharing your stories, I’ve really enjoyed seeing museums through your eyes and other places I might never see myself but have experience through your commentaries and videos whilst also learning lots about how you access things and how they’ve adapted to become more accessible for the people who have visual impairments at the same time. I used to teach children with severe and complex learning difficulties before my health led me to take ill-health retirement so I have a passion for advocacy for all people, especially those with a sensory, learning or other physical impairment/challenge or disability as it will always be my vocation, even though I can no longer work in the classroom. If you’ve made it to the end of my very long ramble then thank you for having the patience to read to the end of this comment. As you may or may not have picked up on, I’m also autistic (and I suspect possibly also ADHD) and have a tendency to ramble, especially on subjects that I care about or am interested in; hence this epic comment 🙄🫣🤣. But I will just say thanks again for your great content and do keep it up because it’s so so valuable and really worth sharing. One platform you might be interested in if you haven’t already found them over on Instagram is a group from the UK called @Open_Future_Learning which works with adults with learning difficulties/intellectual disabilities and makes content around how they have the right to live their lives as independently and with the same autonomy as any other adult and how their support workers should respect them and treat them as adults and not be treating them as children or dictating what they should or shouldn’t be doing. They make lots of videos and short films as well as written content, much of which is brilliantly funny and made by the service users themselves and their support workers who are very obliging in being the fall guys as the butt if the humour to prove the points they’re making. Very good and important messaging presented brilliantly and something that perhaps isn’t shared so widely over there because they’re a UK organisation but is definitely worthy of a wider audience. I will stop rambling now, thanks for reading if you’re still here! Emma 🙂

[@blindovermatter3054]

I have a reason that I haven’t really followed up on this or given a lot of other backstory and honestly most of it is because there’s a lot more to this whole situation that I’m going to be outlining in future videos, this was just an incident indicative of the experience to come, I just didn’t know it at the time. I’m going to be speaking more on specific anecdotes from this job specifically and others I’ve had But to me this was the canary in the coal mine so to speak, I just didn’t know it yet. Thank you so much for your perspective and taking the time to write your comment. Feel free to ramble here, my channel ideally is a place for community and perspective from everybody, and that most certainly includes you. I find that often the best obstacle faced in accessibility as people not knowing what to do. Following that though, there’s people who aren’t willing to learn and that’s something that I’ve struggled with across several jobs and a good handful of coworkers, supervisors and others. I’m hoping that by sharing my experiences and bringing attention to some of the things that have worked and some of those that have not, I can bring about change or at least spark a good conversation which you have also contributed to here, so thank you again :-)

[@MadamoiselleSkarp]

😂 if you know, you know.