What height is the right height?
This month’s What Would You Do is taken from Brittany DeJean’s post on LinkedIn.
Q: You are at a conference and are about to have a conversation with someone in a wheelchair who is half your height. What do you do?
This is the scenario that a woman posed to me. She asked, “Should you get down like they are a child and talk to them face to face or do you treat them like anyone else who’s not your height?”
This second-guessing is enough to make some determine that it feels easier (and safer) to avoid the conversation at all. But avoiding disability is not a strategy (not to mention how awful it feels), and this woman wanted to know the “protocol”.
A: The answer is…it depends.
It’s not about getting it “right”, but assessing the situation to see how you can achieve your goal of having an actual conversation with someone.
Consider things like:
🔸 How long is the conversation?
🔸 How loud is the room?
🔸 Is there a chair for you nearby?
There have been times when I’ve bent down to speak to someone in a wheelchair because the room is too loud to hear otherwise. I’ve also proposed moving to a quieter location where we could be heard more easily.
There have been times when I stand at my normal height and converse just fine. I have also proposed finding a place where I could take a seat and get us at eye level. Sometimes I’ve been able to just pull up a chair in the vicinity.
If you get too fixated on following a “rule” (that in actuality, doesn’t exist the way you may assume it does), you risk losing the opportunity to have an authentic interaction with someone. No two wheelchair-users are the same, nor can you expect them to have the same norms, preferences or personalities.
So rather than go for a rule, go for your goal of a conversation, and remove any barriers that could keep that from happening.
Other comments included the importance of asking what the person feels most comfortable with. Being disabled doesn’t automatically make any one thing true or consistent about a person. It’s important to consider a person’s personal preference.
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