Many blind people have an iPhone.
This is due to a technology called Voiceover that these mobiles have incorporated as standard since 2009 and that can read aloud everything that happens on the screen: messages, battery level, the caller.
We are talking about the first system designed expressly for people with visual disabilities and that is very good.
But of course, it is an iPhone and it costs a lot of money.
So much so that, according to an investigation by the Vodafone Foundation, 46.4% of people with visual disabilities do not have an adapted telephone.
"I would like to buy a mobile phone that will do the same for me for less money. But if you are blind you cannot have a medium-sized Android for one hundred or two hundred euros," acknowledges Nuria del Saz, a journalist with visual impairment.
Nuria cannot buy a cheap mobile phone, nor can she buy any ceramic hob or washing machine.
"Home appliances with integrated voice assistants are always more expensive. You have to go to a very high range to have all these benefits."
The journalist Nuria del Saz.
Rafael Pena
"There is nothing
low cost
for people with disabilities", confirms Daniel Aníbal García, finance secretary at the Spanish Confederation of People with Physical and Organic Disabilities (Cocemfe).
"We have a problem of lack of accessibility of products and those that are accessible tend to be more expensive."
4.6 million people in Spain - 9.9% of the population (according to the Olivenza 2019 report) - pay this kind of disability tax.
To live with a quality of life as reasonable as the rest, they are forced to inevitably choose the
premium
option
.
British writer Frances Ryan refers to this "disability poverty premium" in her recent book
Crippled.
Austerity and demonization of disabled people
(Captain Swing editorial).
This columnist in
The Guardian
mentions research conducted in 2018 that quantified how much life cost a disabled person in the UK more expensive for "all kinds of things, from buying adapted food to paying for taxis because public transport is not accessible ".
Or, for example, go on vacation.
If only the most expensive hotels have rooms with accessible beds, doors and bathrooms, you have no choice but to discard the simpler accommodations.
British author Frances Ryan.
Fabio de Paola (Courtesy of Captain Swing)
In Spain there is also research that shows this extra cost.
For example, the one carried out, with data from 2008, by the Carlos III University of Madrid and according to which people with disabilities spend an average of 2,874 euros per year more than people without disabilities.
When it comes to doing the math, some expenses are more obvious, such as the orthopedic material that users often have to pay for themselves - articulated beds, wheelchairs, ramps, canes, hearing aids - but others go more unnoticed, such as the spending on clothes or energy.
Some people with physical disabilities often need tailored clothing, which also breaks down more.
On the other hand, the energy bill is higher because they often spend more hours at home and make more use of electrical appliances.
More expenses, but also less income
According to the Carlos III University study, in addition, the average income of households where people with disabilities live is usually 25% lower than that of households where there is no disability.
That meant, at the time the study was carried out, about 5,842 euros less per year.
Daniel García, from Cocemfe, explains the reason: "On average we have less training, less job placement, higher unemployment rate and when we work we earn less salary. It is a perfect storm."
The 2019 Olivenza Report also confirms this.
If the unemployment rate in the general population was around 15%, in people with disabilities it rose to 25.2.
While Spaniards earn an average of 23,600 euros per year, the salary of people with disabilities is 19,700.
And that of women with disabilities, at 17,700: the gender gap works the same in both cases.
"I see that companies in general are still afraid of hiring people with disabilities; they do not trust that they can do it just as well," says Mariano Cuesta, a communication professional with physical disabilities and youtuber.
Cuesta says that he works for someone else because there is no way they will hire him.
"When looking for work it seems that we are in a second division. Most of the reserved positions are without qualification. As if due to being disabled, he had to be a driver," he laments.
They too suffer from their own glass ceiling, and in people with intellectual disabilities the difficulty is even greater.
"In intellectual disability there are higher unemployment and inactivity rates and a low professional qualification. That is why they have access to lower quality jobs," says Inés de Araoz, coordinator of the legal area in the Plena Inclusión association.
Only one in four people with intellectual disabilities works.
In his case, unemployment affects 45% and the salary is around 14,000 euros a year.
All that money that is stopped coming in is also added to the disability toll.
According to calculations published in 2019 by the Municipal Institute of People with Disabilities of Barcelona, if the common extra costs are added to the money that both people with disabilities and their carers stop entering - who often have to reduce their working day or leave it from the everything—, the economic gap ranges between 17,700 and 41,200 euros per year.
They are not "heroes"
"If you have a disability, everything costs more time, more effort and above all more money," the writer Raul Gay said in 2017 during a talk at the Naukas scientific popularization congress.
He is the author of the book
Retrón: Wanting is Power (Sometimes)
(Next Door Publishers) in which he tries to dismantle the myths surrounding disability, including the myth of the "hero."
Among other things, because often the inspiring stories of people with disabilities who access higher education, good jobs, family, quality of life or sporting success have been possible because they had a good financial backing behind.
At the beginning of 2020, some media celebrated the story of Alba Buendía, an English student at the Rovira i Virgili University who was going to become the first student with spinal muscular atrophy to participate in an Erasmus program.
What most missed is that this girl had to campaign to ask for money to be able to pay her back.
He needed 30,000 euros to finance his accommodation and hire a personal assistant.
It is a situation that Nuria del Saz also knows.
For blind people, certain obligations like shopping are difficult without support.
Among those obligations is, for example, taking care of children.
"If you have small children there is a very critical stage when they start to walk. You cannot take them to the park by yourself because you have to be vigilant, you need someone to accompany you."
A support that sometimes the family supplies and that other times it is paid.
According to the collective book
Maternity and Disability
(Barclays Collection), the extraordinary cost assumed by blind mothers amounts to 500 euros per month, adding only the costs of personal support and taxi.
"They are things that are adding and that we have internalized", assures Nuria.
One in three
In
Crippled
, Frances Ryan talks about how the consequences of the economic crisis and the cuts affected this group of people: it is estimated that in the United Kingdom the impact of the crisis was nine times greater for those with a disability.
To illustrate this, Ryan exposes cases such as Jimbob, who lived without leaving his bedroom to save money on heating, or Bessi, who, unable to afford household expenses and to buy a washing machine, washed clothes in a bucket with the water drained from a lettuce centrifuge.
In Spain, 32.5% of people with disabilities are at risk of being poor.
The proportion is ten points higher than among people without disabilities.
They are homes where weeks go by without eating meat or fish, where everything falls apart if any unforeseen expense arises and sometimes it is necessary to cut back where it hurts the most.
Homes like Encarna Moreno's, who has had to do without the daily rehabilitation treatments that her daughter received, with spina bifida.
"Each session is at least twenty euros. As soon as you give him a couple of them a week they are already 40 or 50," he explains to
Verne
by phone.
Encarna Moreno and her daughter.
Courtesy of Cocemfe
They charge 380 euros from the Dependency Law.
It is the only income they have because Encarna has been looking for a job compatible with her life for years.
To get through the month, they pull on the family, the food bank and their own wits: they managed to pay for an electric motor for the wheelchair by collecting plastic caps.
"I never know if I will have to buy or pay for gasoline. After paying bills there is just enough to eat. The 380 euros between telephone, water and electricity, as they enter the bank eats them."
This situation may be aggravated by the economic hardships derived from covid-19.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, called for the governments' response to the crisis to be inclusive, underlining how the pandemic had disproportionately affected people with disabilities.
And is that the new normal has brought new challenges, such as the use of masks for people with hearing disabilities.
The affected people complain that neither the financial aid of the Dependency Law, nor the disability pensions, nor the benefits such as the Minimum Living Income take into account the disability tax.
Not only do they not cover the extra cost, but they hardly come close.
"It would be necessary to study where the cost overruns occur and establish prevention policies," claims Inés de Araoz, from Plena Inclusión.
Associations such as Cocemfe also ask that, when granting aid, the comparative grievance be taken into account, that co-payments be eliminated and that access to work be improved.
Above all, when talking about accessibility, we not only take into account physical barriers but also economic barriers.
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