Picture London, England, hundreds of years ago, when the city was half its size and everything was made of cobblestone. Back then, you might hear a wealthy, well-to-do nobleman say something like this: “Forsooth, nary a road nor cartpath existeth ‘twain my manor and yonder market. Verily, I must build it!” With noblemen just building roads left, right, and centre, modern day London is closer to a labyrinth than a navigable grid.
Today, urban planners factor everyone into city construction: from the wealthiest in society to those in need of accessibility considerations. Audio cues for streetlights, curb cuts, crosswalks; after your head injury claim in Toronto, you might be thankful for these infrastructural accessibility technologies. But, as Toronto personal injury lawyers know, these city staples are only the beginning of accessibility for those who’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Accessibility for TBIs
Accessibility is not a term reserved for dealing with people with disabilities. An overly expensive event isn’t accessible, nor is one held in an isolated locale. Generally, accessibility refers to the level of access for any service, technology, location, etc. For our purposes, we’ll consider accessibility as it applies to people who’ve sustained TBIs and are looking to file a head injury claim in Toronto. This means understanding environmental barriers.
Environmental Barriers to TBIs
People with TBIs have unique needs; each sufferer may have a different set of physical, psychological, and cognitive impairments. There are four types of environmental barriers (as they relate to people with TBIs).
- Physical Barriers
- These are the barriers overcome by the accessibility technologies mentioned above. Physical barriers are things that physically limit your ability to function normally in society because of your TBI (e.g. stairs without a wheelchair ramp, websites with very small font, etc.)
- Attitude Barriers
- Living in society means facing other members of that society on a daily basis. While most people are accepting of those with disabilities, Toronto personal injury lawyers have dealt with far too many cases of discrimination. Attitude barriers are those stemming from the ignorance and prejudice of others, preventing you from being as productive and successful as you can be.
- Assistance Barriers
- High levels of accessibility don’t allow someone with a TBI to live exactly as they did before their injury; rather, high accessibility means living your life as productively as before. Often, this means taking assistance. Assistance barriers are such things as ineffective access to medical resources, a lack of transportation, etc.
- Policy Barriers
- Just as the decisions of urban planners have a huge impact on the lives of city-dwellers, government policy decisions equally impact people with TBIs. A government with lax or non-existent policies for education, employment, and service accessibility presents significant policy barriers.
With all these barriers to accessibility scattered throughout your post-TBI life, the difficulty in filing a head injury claim in Toronto can be immense. An experienced lawyer knows the obstacles that head injury sufferers’ face. Consult a Toronto personal injury lawyer to get the assistance you need.
Source:
http://www.brainline.org/landing_pages/categories/accessibility.html
http://www.brainline.org/content/2008/07/environmental-barriers.html