The feature of my day has been catching up with our international informative, Diana Palmers. She has been regularly sending her blog posts my way and it is again interesting to see that she is finding alot of similarities and also differences between Australia's disability services and services from overseas.
I am looking forward to recieving the feedback and information she has about how disability information can grow in Australia. The places she has visited are plentiful and fabulous (and yes I am very jealous). So far she has visited:
- San Francisco
- New York
- Texas
- Phoenix
- Montreal
Check out one of her recent blog posts:
Keroul - Wednesday 28th April
Back to work....I spent the day with Andre leCLerc and his team at Keroul in Montreal today. What a great day. This organisation is doing a number of the things that we can see IDEAS doing....we can learn a lot from them. Keroul have specialised in supporting accessible tourism for people with disability in Quebec for 30 years and have a wealth of experience and knowledge. I spent time with the executive team, Research and Development team as well as peopel working on their Äccessible Road project. The dedicated staff of 8 people were wonderful hosts and I can't thank them enough for their time. I came away from the day armed with a mountain of papers, reports and tools to research and review as well as a genuine hockey puck. Great ambassadors for Quebec; it was so nice to connect with colleagues in our field.I will meet again with people from Keroul at the Transed Conference in Hong Kong. If you would like to see what they do visit either http://www.keroul.qc.ca/ if you would like to see what they do or http://www.larouteaccessible.com/ which is another of their websites.
I am looking forward to finding out more about her travels and will keep you informed of her movements. There are a lot of nice photos up on her blog, so check them out!
I have been watching the movements of our keen disability information traveller, Diana Palmer, on her recent expedition to
- USA,
- Canada,
- the UK,
- Blegium,
- Czech Republic,
- Sweden and
- China.
The aim of the tremendous journey: to investigate provision of accessible and relevant information enabling people with disability to make informed travel choices.
I invite you to explore and discover along her journeys by reading it here on the DisCo blog. Diana does have her own blog and you can follow her findings there. Here's an introduction to what she has discovered:
San Francisco- tuesday April 13th
Yesterday I had a conversation with Scott Rains which was very informative. He is a fellow to keep in touch with and one who has a good understanding of what is happening at the moment in the accessible travel field. He is a very good networker and has names at the tip of his tongue, which has been of great assistance for me in planning the UK leg of this trip. His experience and knowledge of the different operators, experts and opportunities in the field are very valuable. The time spent with him was worthwhile indeed. I hope to be in touch with him again in the near future.
Today I met with Bonnie Lewkowicz from Access Northern California to discuss her experiences. Bonnie is leading activist and a great advocate for people with disability. Bonnie leads a small no profit which has developed access guides for the Northern California region as well as the San Francisco access guide. This was a nice introduction into the workings of the disability advocacy sector in the USA. Bonnie has a good handle on how things work and where things are at. We discussed the issues of maintaining information, its accuracy and reliability. My conversation with Bonnie was the first to see how similar the issues are in the US to those we have at home. The problems of collecting accurate information and maintaining it – the resources needed and the funding for it I don’t think are any different to our experiences in Australia.
For those after some travelogue information – the weather ahs been cold and wet, the tourist sites being visited are the iconic sites and information is being collected on the accessibility of these sites for future use by IDEAS NSW.
Now on to New York…
