2019 was a bit of a rollercoaster year for me, but it worked out well overall. I was very busy and active for the first half, then there was a dip during the summer with various things that came up all at once, before the final few months that gave me a chance to recharge and get back to normal, while also throwing in one or two surprises.
So as is traditional, I thought I’d quickly go back over the year, to recap on the many things that happened. Click on the headings for each month to see the Favourites post in each case, while there are links to more detailed review posts throughout the text as well. I hope you enjoy looking back at it all with me.
Welcome to the final part of my Christmas Favourites trilogy for 2019, following on from my Out & About and Food posts, this time looking at the TV, movies and audio entertainment that caught my attention during December. I’ve now published a video to go with all three posts too. As before, I’ve not been paid or gifted by anybody, so these are all my own opinions. Hope you enjoy!
Welcome to the second part of my Favourites trilogy for December 2019, following on from my Out & About post. This time I’m going to quickly show you some of the food my mother and I treated ourselves to over the festive period, as I don’t post about that kind of thing very often. Again I’ve not been sponsored or gifted by anybody mentioned here, and all opinions are my own. And don’t forget there’s a video to go with all of these posts too. So I hope you enjoy!
Happy New Year! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas, and have a wonderful and prosperous 2020 ahead. 🙂
December was good for me all in all, and I was happily occupied over Christmas as usual. So I’m splitting this month’s recap over 3 posts as there’s a lot to mention. I’ve also posted a video to go with them all.
So in this first post, I’m going to talk about my adventures out and about, including museum visits and Christmas displays. I didn’t go out a lot over Christmas and New Year itself, as I had a bad cold for much of it, so it was best to just relax and recharge. But in the lead up to Christmas I still went out quite a bit. And as always, I’ve not been sponsored or gifted by anybody in order to mention them here. So I hope you enjoy!
Rather than finish the year with a dull post about a scam email, I actually wanted to do a quick post to tie up a couple of loose ends, before I get on to doing my Christmas Favourites and a general look back at the year gone by to kickstart 2020.
As many of you know, people in the blogging community often nominate each other for “awards”, which is an opportunity to promote other bloggers that you like and ask them questions. And I was very kindly nominated for two of these awards back in October, but didn’t get around to responding at the time. So I wanted to acknowledge them and answer the questions that were put to me.
If you want to answer these questions yourself, then please feel free to do so. I always nominate everyone on my lists of sight loss bloggers and disability bloggers by default, as I always find it difficult to narrow it down to a select few!
I seem to have gone from one extreme to another lately. After a relatively relaxed October, November has been really busy, and in a good way. I appeared on TV and radio to raise awareness of digital accessibility, promoted audio description at a trade exhibition, learnt a great deal about Ancient Greece, explored London’s illuminated bridges, highlighted more scam emails, bought some new Blu-rays and music, and enjoyed various things on TV.
So there’s plenty to cover this month, and I hope you enjoy this post and video summary of it all. As always, I haven’t received any gifts or payments by anyone mentioned in this post, and all opinions are my own.
The internet is an amazing resource, enabling people to instantly access products, services, information, communication, entertainment, etc, anywhere and at any time. And it’s especially useful and important for disabled people, for whom such a direct connection with the world around them plays a vital role.
However, there are still many websites, social media feeds and apps, and other technologies such as self-service checkouts and kiosks, that are partly or wholly unusable by disabled people, due to poor accessibility. This means they cannot access information and purchase products from many retailers and service providers, as they are unjustly hindered or prevented from doing so. As a result, they either don’t buy anything at all, or find accessible competitors instead. Which means many businesses are missing out on the benefits of a huge market worth £274 billion a year!
The same logic also applies when disabled people are prevented from gaining physical access to buildings, facilities, transport, etc, which is a vitally important and huge issue in itself. But for this post I’m focusing on the digital side.
Disability charity Scope have therefore released the findings of their survey on inclusive design, which illustrates the impact of poor digital access. This is to help them publicise The Big Hack, a comprehensive online resource advising businesses on best practice for digital accessibility and inclusion. And to help with the promotion, Scope invited me to take part in some media coverage, which included my first ever TV appearance! Check out my little bits of stardom here:
Newspaper – The Independent, 2 December – I was given a mention in this article. Registration is required, but doing so allows you to read 1 free article per month, or you can pay a small subscription to read more.
So in this long post, which I’ve divided into sections to break it up a bit, I want to:
For clarity, I have not been paid or gifted for my interviews or this post. This is just a topic I feel strongly about, so I was happy to take part in the media coverage, and all opinions here are my own. I also encourage you to research the subject of accessibility further, including the resources on The Big Hack, as there is no way I can cover everything, and no single person is a complete authority on the subject. I’m just talking about things from my own personal perspective, so I hope my thoughts and experiences are useful.
Hannah; northern, live music fan, crazy cat lady, disability campaigner, maximising life with health conditions, blogging my adventures and banging on about anything that matters to me.
