James, I hope you know that your fantastic post is being shared far and wide by people with disabilities.

In my forthcoming book I describe the experience of being “forgotten” by the makers of our built environment by telling a short, fictional tale. “Imagine for a moment that the world is full of people who can shape shift between being square, round, or triangular. To amuse themselves, they build the world around them using these three shapes for doors, corridors, trains, planes. But for roughly 15% of these people, they are only one shape-triangular. In fact, anyone could get stuck in triangular, either temporarily, or permanently. The problem, or course was that triangular people couldn’t go through square or round doors, or use square buses, or round planes. They simply didn’t fit. As you may imagine, life was difficult for the triangular. Sometimes, they would be acknowledged, with a special door on the back or a building, or a special space on a train. But more often than not, they were limited to only using the triangular shaped infrastructure. In fact, though everyone was at some point triangular, their very existence seemed to bother the others. This, for me, describes the experience of living in a build environment which does not acknowledge my existence. ”