A few years ago, Kay Jenkins did an experiment. Waiting at her local bus stop for over an hour, she tried to get on a bus. That might not sound too difficult, but because Kay uses a wheelchair, she never managed it. Ten different buses drove past her and not one of them stopped to let her on.

Still though, not every business can afford to make big changes, and many don’t understand how best to cater for people in wheelchairs, according to Kay, who has Osteogenesis Imperfecta - or brittle bones - and has been in a wheelchair all her life.  

And, in the main, they were. After all, the big chain stores have much more money to invest in automatic doors and new flooring than individual shopowners, and building regulations in the older arcades make it difficult for shops to change anything about their frontage, including doorways and steps.

What quickly became apparent though, is that accessibility isn’t just a question of cash or planning. Smaller obstacles like display cases in the middle of the shop floor or shelves and rails too close together (or too high) can make the difference between a wheelchair user being able to get around a shop, or not.

My audio collage shows the main obstacles. Use the PLAY icon at the bottom left to hear Kay explain briefly what the problems are, and scroll along for more images.

Several of the chain stores, as well as the independents, were guilty of just not having thought about how the layout inside their shops would affect people unable to walk around them.

My map shows the route we took and the shops we found largely accessible (wheelchair icon) or inaccessible (walking person icon) along the way. Click the icons for more information and some pictures of each store.

 Perhaps part of the problem, then, is a lack of understanding and awareness of people who use wheelchairs. 

Wendy Ashton is the Chair of national campaign group Disability Wales and runs the Cardiff Access Group, which gives advice and audits businesses on how accessible they are for disabled people. She says many businesses still aren’t aware of how important it is to make access for people in wheelchairs as easy as they can:

Along with several other disability charities, Disability Wales is now championing a new attitude that promotes the treatment of disabled people as individuals.  The social model of disability  suggests that many problems people with disabilities face are caused by the way society is organised.

Wendy told me that more staff training in the workplace might be one answer to the problem:

None of the staff members I spoke to in shops around Cardiff had received what they considered to be proper training about how to treat people with disabilities, and few of the managers had offered it to their staff.

I asked the shopowners in each of the stores we went to whether they had many disabled customers. Surprisingly, many said they had customers who would wait outside the shop to be served through the doorway.

But should people in wheelchairs be relegated to the outside of a shop?

 Fortunately, disability access in general is improving, and Cardiff in particular has got better since the updating of the Disability Discrimination Act in 2005.

Both Wendy and Kay said accessibility in the city is better than anywhere else across South Wales:

Of course, all this is just the beginning. There may still be a long way to go before wheelchairs can go everywhere that walking people do. But as the law about the accessibility of new buildings was tightened up in 2005 to prevent new structures being put up without disabled access and toilets, eventually  older businesses, too, will begin to feel the need to catch up.

Kay told me she is hopeful situations can change:

In the future I would like to see everything made accessible. I don’t want always to have to think about it before I go out. I don’t think we’re asking for anything unreasonable. I just don’t want to feel different.

An online and mobile journalism project for Cardiff Journalism School. Photos and audio captured with a Nokia N95 mobile phone.