News

When you see lifts in commercial, residential or public buildings, you may not have ever thought about the careful process in which the access points are designed and installed.

Craig Merry, company director at Invalifts, talks us through the details and considerations involved in their type of work.

 

• First, we think about the use case.  That lets people work out the size and power needed. The lift for a hospital might be very different to a school.
• Where we place the lift call buttons is key. In some cases it appears easier for users if the buttons are placed away from the lift doors. An elbow push pad may be a better choice for those people that do not have full use of upper limbs.
• A smaller factor is door colour. In some cases, it can help to fit a lift door that contrasts in colour to things around it – so that partially sighted people can find it easily
• People take platform lifts for many reasons – a flip down seat in the lift can be useful for older people.
• The lift call and console buttons should always be large, tactile with Braille. The buttons in the lift should be on a console around 90cm high and at an angle suitable for a wheelchair user.
• Lifts should always make a sound (often a gong/chime) when they arrive at a floor. Sometimes it’s useful to have a electronic voice state the correct floor number.   This might also include a hearing loop.
• An auto-dialer allows people in the lift to contact a set of pre-programmed numbers, in the case of an emergency.
• Think about the amount of manoeuvring that it takes wheelchair user to enter the platform. Sometimes it’s best to have the door on the wide, rather than narrow, side of the platform.
• Some lifts are programmed so that in the event of a fire, the lift goes to a given floor and parks. This  ‘fire park’ is so that the user is not accidentally part during a fire situation.

 

 

 

 

Invalifts are a UK based company who specialise in the provision and installation of inclined and vertical platform lifts in both public and domestic environments.

 

This past week eQuality Time has been at Bath Spa University – launching our first artistic project!

Early in the year we responded to this call to produce an artwork for Bath Spa’s Media Wall.  They were looking for a data-driven visualisation that involved creative writing from young people in secondary school.  Thanks to the White Water Writers project – we have the most detailed data on how young people write novels in the world, and it was nice to think up a way of using it.

Our installation was in two parts: so that conference goers could see the potential of young people’s writing live, we held a live writing event during the conference with pupils from Bath Community Academy which generated great interest.  Our second part got just as much comment – we used Bath Spa’s giant Media Wall to show a writer’s eye view of a novel in progress – from blank page to publication.

The order a reader reads a story is different to the order that a writer writes it, and a writer writes words than the reader sees.  Bath Spa’s media wall lets us make the writer’s journey explicit to the viewer.   You will see the starting point of the blank cursor and then watch as the narrative grows and rearranges itself. You will see some scenes arrive fully formed in a moment of inspiration and others come together from rewrite after rewrite as the mound of deleted text below grows.

 

 

 

A celebration is in order here at eQuality Time! Our very own Francesca Baker  has been published in the prestigious NAWE magazine!

 

Francesca has contributed a fantastic piece to the magazine that explains all about White Water Writers. She describes the writing camp where students of all abilities come together to produce a novel in five days and then goes on to highlight the academic research done into the scheme as well as the numerous benefits that participants reap from the camps.

It’s a great piece of writing and we couldn’t be happier to see Francesca achieve even more success with her work.

If you would like to purchase the magazine, you can find the details here 

https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/wie-editions/editions/nawe-conference-collection-2016-2.html

And you can find out more about Francesca here @andsoshethinks and https://www.andsoshethinks.co.uk

It’s that time of year again…

Alan Turing’s Birthday is on the 23rd of June. We’re going to make it special.

Every year, people (mostly from reddit, it turns out) pledge bunches of flowers to be placed at Alan Turing’s statue in Manchester for his birthday. In the process we raise money for the amazing charity Special Effect, which helps people with disabilities access computer games.

In 2013 we raised under £100, but had an incredible reaction on social media. (You can read more about the project and the reaction we got here.

In 2014, with the help of reddit, we raised almost £500 for Special Effect. In 2015, almost £700, and in 2016: £1,850.

We’re doing it again this year and would like to get 105 bunches of flowers for his 105th Birthday. We’re asking for a donation of £16.50 (£3.50 of which covers the cost of the flowers; everything else goes to Special Effect).

If you’d like a bunch of flowers placed at the statue in your name on the 23rd of June, then you can donate at PayPal here.

Manchester city council have confirmed they are fine with it, and we have people in Manchester who will help handle the set up and clean up.

Small movement happening here. I’ve stood down from the board of eQuality Time.

You might think this is an odd thing to do as I founded it and I’m the main driver of it. Actually it’s part of a sensible process. eQuality Time is currently a social enterprise, and we believe that it would be better structured as a registered charity. We always knew this might be a direction we would want to take in the future so the legal structure of the company was set up in such a way as to make it as easy as possible to transition to charity when we felt it was the right time.

When we convert to a charity our directors will become trustees, and as I’m paid by eQuality Time it’s inappropriate for me to be Trustee therefore I’m stepping down to become solely an employee. I’m looking forward to how we move forward as a charity rather than a social enterprise. I think it is going to be fun and I’ll be excited to share our happenings with you all as we move forward and continue to grow as a charity.

eQuality Time is pleased to announce that it’s carrying out it’s first arts commission!

We won this call to provide a display for Bath Spa university that promotes creative writing for students ages 8-14.

Our canvas for the month of July is this magnificent video wall:

Looking forward to day 2 of Welcome Wall project @BathSpaUni #wearebathspa pic.twitter.com/o3LgWIcPws

— MediaWall Bath Spa (@MediaWallBSU) September 25, 2016

…and we’re hoping to show some of the process as we go thought it 🙂

 

We’ve  added ICE cards to the CommuniKate website.

In case of emergency (ICE) cards fold up nicely to fit in a pocket and are used, as the name suggests for emergency situations like a medical problem. The normal CK20 content has been altered to put medical matters first.   You can access them either at the Github repository or at the CommuniKate website (which looks nicer, but links to the files that are hosted on Github)

While were putting these up, we did a bit of tidying up on the website itself and put all of the low-tech approaches in one place.  Enjoy!

eQuality Time is a modern, forward thinking organisation and we’re aware that we do do some unusual things as a social enterprise. This means that quite often we run into questions on funding application forms that are hard to answer because the question assumes a certain way of working which we don’t adhere to.

If I come across a question were every possible answer seems wrong, I write a small note on the website to state our case, why I felt the question was difficult to answer, and what I ended up putting.  This is for two reasons:

• Because transparency is a Good Thing in general:  if someone challenges me on something I’ve written in a funding proposal I want to be able to say “Yes, I know that can be taken in a different way, here’s how I interpreted it and you can be pretty sure I wasn’t trying to pull a fast one because we even wrote a blog post about it.
• Because other people have to deal with the problem as well and it would be nice if we all shared our approaches.

For example, recently I sent off an form asking for funding for our new creative writing project. One of the questions on the form was ‘Give three postcodes of your usual delivery locations’. This is an interesting one for us. The writers of the form were clearly thinking of a very clear type of social enterprise – the second-hand shop, the local youth club; places that are part of ‘a community’. I was given the understanding that more weight would be given to groups that work in more disadvantaged areas.

Of course, for our sort of project, this is a very strange question – The Open Voice Factory has NO delivery location – it’s an online project. And the project I was applying with, White Water Writers, has produced over 65 novels all around the country, am I expected to write a complete list of all 40 locations we’ve held camps in?
In this case – I put in the postcodes of some of the most recent schools we had worked in. All of them were in what are registered as ‘deprived’ postcodes, but it feels a little bit like cheating.

 

I feel like it might be useful for the people whose job it is to produce these forms to stop for a second and perhaps complete some of the forms themselves then they might see how difficult it is to answer some of the questions.

What about if they had to do an exercise where they asked themselves “How would JustGiving fill out this form?”. JustGiving clearly does an amazing amount of good – but the people who use it aren’t the people it helps, the people it helps aren’t chosen by it (JustGiving doesn’t force you to help a particular cause), and it has NO geographic preference. But it’s done £1 billion worth of good since it started. Is this a crazy idea?

 

The CommuniKate project now has a translation page – helped considerably by people like Jaroslav Ryní who patiently asked lots of questions that really should have already been on the website. We’ve strengthened the support and mechanism for anyone who wants to translate the CK20 pageset. If you fancy getting involved, or know someone who could help with the translation efforts, then please head over. 

 

Avid eQuality Time blog readers may remember in March last year, we posted an interesting article written by Shulamit Lando , about EMDR and her memoir, HOPE BEYOND ILLNESS – A Guide to Living WELL with a Chronic Condition.

EMDR: How and Why?

HOPE BEYOND ILLNESS – A Guide to Living WELL with a Chronic Condition is now launching its revised and expanded 2nd edition and is now INTERACTIVE – You read, you watch videos and you listen to audios of the author and other experts explaining and teaching you tips to better deal with the cards you’re dealt. This reading experience is so much more dynamic and fun!

You can buy the book direct from the author at the link below!

http://hope.shulamitlando.com/

What others have said

“Once I started reading this book I could not put it down. I felt this was the kind of book I was desperately looking for when I was diagnosed with a chronic illness. Shulamit Lando’s honesty, authenticity and bravery make you feel as if you are not alone, and her simple but smart and powerful tips give you a brilliant toolkit to begin designing the healing journey you feel you need in order to create the life you want.”

~Shiri Ben-Arzi, medical coach, co-founder & CEO of MCI—The Medical Coaching Institute.

“Shulamit Lando’s book is a testimonial of a personal process in which she shares what I consider a real Healing Journey, because it’s not just about the physical body, but a growing and transformation path involving the mind, body and soul. She shares practical and down-to-earth tools that worked for her and may be useful for others with physical and emotional challenges.”

~Margarita Soberon CST-D, Founder and Director of Upledger Institute Mexico