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Tanni Grey-Thompson's tweets about a recent accessibility fail, inspired disabled cartoonist Hannah Ensor to create the above image.

On arriving home late and discovering the lift in her building was broken, the disabled Baroness had to crawl up ten flights of stairs to her London flat, dragging her chair up too. The retired Paralympian tweeted during the ordeal that she would be removing her tights beforehand, so as not to ladder them.

The cartoonist liked the disability detail: "Take your tights off before you bum shuffle. That's Something," Hannah says, "that's so real to my world but alien to other people's worlds. Noone tells you that as a wheelchair using woman."

Tanni was so impressed with Hannah's image of her on the stairs, that she asked permission to link to it from her own website.

The 31 year-old from Oxfordshire hopes that this, and her other cartoons which all have insights into disabled life, will encourage everyone to view disability as "normal".

"I keep them simple," Hannah says about her cartoons, in which people are always drawn as stick figures, "and I use them to say what's in my head."

one cartoon that she now sells as a sticker, depicts Hannah on the floor after attempting to get up a kerb that proved too high.

"[Non-disabled people] will see my sticker and understand why I like little kerbs," Hannah says, "and a wheelchair user can say yes, this is my life, I've done that, and I've also done the cobblestone backflip."

In 2010, she stopped working as an environmental health officer when an independent advisor confirmed she was unlikely to be fit for work again before retirement age. Since then, she's been devoted to drawing when she is well.

The cartoons started life on disability forums and on Hannah's blog. She sells disability awareness stickers and communication cards and has also published seven stickman books, including two for small children. Money raised from these goes to her favourite charities, the Hypermobility Syndrome Association and Whiz-Kidz.

"On Twitter and Facebook, I'd noticed not only fear but a lot of hatred. Some of the arguments being put out against welfare reform came across as very bitter and very angry," says Hannah. "I know that if someone comes at me sounding bitter and angry, I automatically shut up and don't get the point they are making, even if they have a valid point. So I just wanted to say look, the Disability Living Allowance is important - without any anger and bitterness."

Hannah worries that the lives of some of the disabled people she sees online have been "swallowed up by the politics".

"I see people becoming so scared about [welfare reform] that for some it has become their whole world. That's sad because there are so many things to be enjoyed.

"I'm sitting looking out of my window here, and I can see a bird in a tree ... and that's nice."

• Hannah regularly posts new cartoons .

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As St. Patrick's Day approaches, Emma Tracey speaks to Joanne O'Riordan, a disabled 16 year-old who is a household name back in Emma's home country, Ireland.

I first saw Joanne on Irish television 16 years ago. She was just a baby and her parents did the talking but it knocked my teenage socks off. Bursting with pride for their little girl with no limbs, the O'Riordans left chat show host Pat Kenny in no doubt of their high expectations for her future. Now she's well into her teens and has minor celebrity status with the nation seeing her regularly speak about disability matters.

Her image is relentlessly positive so I ask about what she finds difficult. "It's the fact I can't do things for myself. Now that I'm getting older, I want my hair and makeup done. The other night, before going to a party, I had to wait for my sister Gillian to come over and do it.

"It is frustrating that it causes problems for me if I'm left alone for even five minutes. I can't just do my own thing. I can't just throw myself on the couch and get the remote myself."

These negatives don't colour who she is though and what she wants to achieve.

After that early television appearance I didn't hear of Joanne O'Riordan again until she hit the headlines in Ireland just over a year ago. I remembered her parents determination and wasn't surprised when I saw that she had turned into a rather feisty individual.

The country's leader, Enda Kenny (no relation to the TV presenter), broke a promise he had personally made to Joanne on the election trail. Anxious about her future independence, she had actively sought reassurance from him and He told her that he wouldn't cut disability benefits to young people if he won. But in his very first budget after winning the election, that's exactly what he did cut.

Joanne's subsequent in the Irish Examiner newspaper gained a lot of attention and a video of that broken promise to her emerged and went viral. The government did a U-turn.

"I thought it would be just one more protest that would be swept under the carpet", Joanne tells me, "a one day thing, a one hit wonder". But her public dismay had made waves. Visually striking and a good talker, Joanne had captured the hearts of the Irish people, creating a real buzz on social media.

Just days after her letter was printed, Joanne was invited to be a guest on one of Ireland's most watched programmes, The Late Late Show. It was this appearance that made her a household name in Ireland. Displaying a great sense of humour she told host Ryan Tubridy about taking the unlikely role of nurse in her school play even though she has no arms or legs before then asking for his job - she said she could do it better than him.

Joanne loves to meet famous people

She currently attends a small secondary school where she is well respected but next year Joanne plans to enter the far bigger world of university to study journalism. Her mum is her primary carer currently but Joanne says she wouldn't want her there all the time: "There has to be a bit of craic... but I will probably live at home."

In April 2012, she spoke at a Girls in ICT event at the UN Headquarters in New York about the role technology plays in her life. At the end of her speech, she asked the boffins in the audience to create her a robot to give her full independence. Technologists at MIT and Apple took this seriously and have visited Joanne in Ireland to better understand her needs.

Joanne uses technology every day. She has a laptop for school and homework but tells me that she's addicted to her iPhone. "Depending on my mood that day, I'll work the phone using my top lip, nose, bottom lip, chin or my little left arm, what the doctors call a tree stump.

"To type on a keyboard, I clench a pen between my teeth and I stab the keys."

Joanne says she can type 36 words a minute and admits it "probably looks hilarious, my head bopping up and down at a hundred miles per hour".

She won the 2012 Irish Young Person of the Year award and her public profile will likely rise when a documentary about her is released later this year though it's fair to say she's probably already Ireland's most famous disabled person.

Her brother Steven has made the film; he is a successful documentary maker in his own right but is still mostly referred to as Joanne O'Riordan's brother.

Joanne enjoys her celebrity and admits she and Steven want different things from the film. "It is an uplifting documentary," says Joanne. "People are supposed to come out of it feeling like they can go and climb Everest. Steven has brilliant ideas of winning Oscars... but I just want to be the next Kim Kardashian."

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Comedians with Disabilities Act

Much reported at the end of February, we brought it it up in our monthly talk show and it sparked a lively discussion about the most awful things people have ever said to you about your disability. A classic pub conversation if I've ever heard one -well, either that or the stuff of a tribunal.

On the line from Memphis, and taking part in the chat, were Nina, Eric and Steve from San Francisco Bay comedy troop the Comedians with Disabilities Act.

Presenters Rob Crossan and Liz Carr had already discovered that people often ask Steve, a person of restricted growth, if they can take photos of him. You can imagine it would be a tad frustrating and bad for the self esteem that someone wants to keep a record of your non-standard looks so they can show it to their pals later.

Then it was Nina's turn: "I've gotten men, especially after some of my shows, saying, "You know I think I could help you with that stuttering."

Rob asks what therapies they might be thinking of as an unspoken realisation dawns on where this may be leading. "Have you taken them up on their offers?" enquires Liz.

"No!" says Nina. "Well the guys who have asked me haven't been ones that I would want that from,"

Mmm. Readers, can you guess which direction this is headed?

"Do their suggestions involve dragging you back to a cheap motel?" presenter Rob puts into words what everyone is now thinking.

"Yeah," confirms Nina, and I'm not quite sure how to say this in a clean way ... they have implied that somehow sexually they have the power to cure my speech."

• The Ouch! disability talk show is available monthly and full of surprising conversations. It's available as a podcast, a download or to stream on your computer, your phone and other devices.

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Making invisible lives, visible

"I go out there and try and be all energetic and busy and doing things", says Crow. "But then I come back and have this kind of hidden self where I switch off, spend a lot of time lying down, a lot of time in bed recovering."

She is not alone. Many disabled people have fluctuating conditions which are painful or energy-zapping. Lots hide the bed recovery aspect of their lives from others for fear that they won't be understood.

Previously, Crow hid her most-disabled self from others in case they saw it as "not socially acceptable". But in April, this part of her is set to become very public.

Liz Crow speaks on the latest Ouch! talk show, available to stream now or download.

"There's a pressure", she says, "particularly after last summer and the Paralympics, to be a kind of super human when you're in public. And if you're not that, if you're a [benefits] claimant, then you're often cast as a scrounger.

"What I'm trying to do is to find that space in the middle where we just acknowledge that life is more complicated."

During the two day sleep over, Crow will invite visitors to join her for five scheduled bedside chats about disabled life. One of the discussions will be held on Twitter and via SMS text.

"Last time I did it," she says recalling a performance in Ipswich in November, "I was contacted by quite a few people who said 'this is great, thank you for making me visible. I'd really like to be there and visit but I have my own bed life and so I can't'."

The original version of Liz Crow's performance was only for those who walked in off the street; the new Salisbury performance will have a much wider audience as it will be streamed live on the web. A hashtag has also been running for two weeks on Twitter and already there's a community of people with bed lives of their own springing up around the project.

The artist admits she has been surprised by the amount of feedback she's had and is keen to connect people with one another: "I had no idea that there are actually thousands upon thousands of us out there living this kind of life, because we are really isolated and we are really invisible in public life."

• The installation is at Salisbury Arts Centre. Liz Crow will be bedding down 'live' between 10-12 April.

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Hear the Comedians with Disabilities Act on the March show

This month: Chat ranges from Nazi anti-disability propaganda to benefit reform and the recent "disabled children should be put down" comments from a councillor. Features The Comedians with Disabilities Act, artist Liz Crow and Glasgow mum Laura Miller.

Liz Carr and Rob Crossan present.

How do I listen? Stream it on the web, download episodes or subscribe via iTunes and other services. Details below.

RELATED LINKS

You heard the show, now find out more about the people and subjects featured.

- Find out more about Nina, Steve, Eric and Michael on their Facebook page.

- Read about artist Liz Crow's 48-hour live sleepover in a Salisbury arts centre. As she tells Rob and Liz, it's about bringing invisible disabled 'bed life' people into the open and highlighting changes to benefits. It'll be streamed on the web with BSL and captions, and you can take part via Twitter using which people are already using. Follow the link for more details.

- On the show, Laura Miller talks about how valuable she finds support from fellow parents who have similar challenges.

- Listen to this epic track from the cerebral palsy rapper from Hull on his "wheels of steel". You'll be singing it to yourself all month.

• The Ouch! talk show is a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News programme made exclusively for the internet and produced monthly by a team of disabled journalists and presenters.

• Go to the downloads page where you can grab single shows or subscribe via iTunes and other podcast apps. Play it on your computer, phone or other devices.

• Read a transcript of the show

Laura got alternative parenting ideas from a support network

"I do most of my parenting sitting down," says Laura. She can transfer from her chair to the floor and move around after her son on her hands and knees. But because she can't pick him up while standing, she's had to find other ways of getting Jonathan to where she wants him to be in the house.

At bedtime, Laura lures Jonathan to where his cot is by switching off all lights in places she doesn't want him to be, leaving on only the light in his room. Sometimes she crawls through the house with him, squeaking a noisy toy to grab his attention and make him follow.

The self-declared "crawling mummy" is in no doubt who is faster on four limbs and has the bruises to prove it. She is confident Jonathan's not upset that he's not carried because she makes it fun getting from place to place.

Laura can pick her child up and hold him while sitting down.

When outside, she obviously wouldn't want her son to crawl behind her in the street. So when getting ready, she coaxes him over with her voice and, when he's close to her powerchair, she can reach him and put him on her lap; he then sits nicely protected in a baby carrier strapped to Laura's middle while they're away from home.

"Children do tune in to what you're doing," she says. "He'll run to his dad to get him to lift him up ... but he won't do it with me."

Laura makes sure she is "super ready" for every possible situation and believes she has become an amazing problem-solver. "That is the unique property of a disabled parent," she says. "We have to do it at a higher level and that's why we need encouragement from other parents because, obviously, that can get exhausting. You need people to keep cheering you on and feeding you ideas."

In Laura's case, the support came from the , for mums and dads with a disability or health condition. She credits DPN with teaching her the strategies she uses, and other examples of what she calls "alternative parenting".

The Glasgow mum is now a volunteer for the organisation, helping other disabled parents herself. She says: "I think it's really important to let parents know that they're not on their own."

• Laura Miller was speaking with Liz Carr and Rob Crossan on the latest disability talk show from Ouch!

Listen to the interview in full on the latest show which you can download to your MP3 player or hear online.

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"We'd arranged to meet at a shopping mall but, as time went by, I began to wonder why my wife was so late," says Doug Wakefield, one half of a married blind couple visiting the CSUN accessible technology conference in San Diego last week.

His wife Judy picks up the story: "Eventually, someone came up to me and said, are you waiting for a man with a guide dog?

"We were to meet at the main entrance but I was to the left of the door and Doug was standing to the right, only ten feet away."

Lots of blind people have blind friends, so This game of cat and mouse takes place regularly. It can be funny but it's certainly a little frustrating.

As smart phones are fast becoming a basic part of a blind person's toolkit, it's perhaps not surprising that someone has now created "an app for that".

People Finder has a very basic but accessible interface. Like mainstream products with similar aims, such as Grindr for the gay community and Spotme for networking at conferences, you have to have the app running if you want to meet up with people in your circle.

It alerts a user, via a vibration and a noise, when someone else with the app comes within 50 feet. It uses Bluetooth to detect people.

As you search for your friend, the app will let you know how close you are, by saying "near" or "cold" as you walk around.

To aid social niceties, There's the option to message the person through the app to say you've clocked them, before descending on them.

Mike May is The brains behind People Finder, which is being developed by his company Sendero Group. They have 13 years experience of making accessible satnav solutions for blind pedestrians but Mike says he has wanted to make a people finding app for a long time.

"As a blind person I'd love to be made aware of when somebody I know is near by, so that I can meet with them," he says. "As a bonus, you will also be careful not to talk about someone if you know they might be in hearing distance."

Another attendee of the CSUN conference is Julian Vargas from California. He hopes to test out the app on a local bus route to see if he can spot the bus his friend is already on, so they can travel together. His friend can't see to wave to him through the window and so it's very easy to get on the wrong one, alone.

"The way we tend to do it now," says Julian, "is by sending text messages. This app would be nice because if my friends are running it, when their bus pulls up, theoretically, all of a sudden my phone should ding and say that it sees their phone."

Blind people already have a range of strategies for letting a sightless friend know they are nearby. The best way is to use your voice so your friend can hear you but, socially speaking, it looks a little odd just talking to yourself so blind people might pretend to be having a phone conversation or pet their guide dogs saying "good boy Buttons" a little more loudly than usual.

It may have crossed your mind that there might be a big security risk with having already vulnerable people announcing themselves digitally over the air so others can find them. Some apps of the people-finding variety have caused concern but the dynamics seem a bit different here. Potential sighted stalkers can already see blind people at 50 feet, and are likely to know they can't see if they're using a dog, a white cane or that they're not negotiating obstacles very elegantly, so the app isn't going to betray them any more than normal in most circumstances. Blind users may consider this an acceptable risk if it means that they too can spot their pals.

One hundred people are currently testing the prototype app, which can be used indoors or outdoors wherever you are in the world. Mike May is having trouble getting funders to see why blind people would need it and wants all current testers to form a "fan club" to raise its profile.

Now for a blind access app that keeps track of your children in crowded shopping malls, a GPS app which is accurate to within 1 CM and perhaps, one that
can plot a direct route into the arms of a soulmate.

"I'm fluent when I sing" says Matt

Music and stammering have been two hugely influential and defining factors in my life and so I wanted to merge them somehow.

I'm always fluent when singing. No one knows for certain why this is but I've often heard that of the brain, which is why some people with other disabilities such as Tourette's also find they can sing without their disability interrupting them.

My inspiration for an EP came when I read the story of Kyle Coleman in the Cornishman newspaper. He also finds it difficult to communicate, he had rarely spoken aloud, but found out he could sing and made a charity album in aid of autism, the condition he has.

I've found that there's a lack of understanding about stammering and what it's like to have one, so I decided to make my own awareness-raising recording.

The British Stammering Association kindly sent a call out via their social media pages, asking for interested musicians who stammer to contact me.

Adam Lovell, Brandon Marchant, Oli Cheadle and Ben James came forward. They each wrote, performed and produced their songs about stammering and then sent them for inclusion on the EP that we named Voices Found. Their songs are: Tell Me If You See This, Normal, Shaking the Rafters and Pathways, respectively.

Lyrics from the Voices Found EP

And oh, time moves so slow in the moments when you wish the ground would open up and swallow you whole. It's more than just dumb luck how my words get stuck when I try to say my name...

(chorus)
Well the phone's got teeth and the sound of the ring gives me constant grief, but I don't care.
Could I squash that fear? Pick it up - let 'em know that I'm still here?
I'll sew a patchwork quilt from my shame and guilt and the fit can more than make do.
Tell me how it feels to be normal. I want to be normal too - and only normal will do.

(Normal by Brandon Marchant)

I had speech therapy sessions at school and took a two week intensive speech therapy course at the Michael Palin Centre in London when I was around 16. I tried many fluency techniques which they suggest, such as slow speech and sliding in and out of words, but nothing really seemed to stick.

The course was still a life changing experience , because for the first time I met other people my age who stammered. This made me realise I was not alone and I gained a lot of confidence.

Stammering can be extremely frustrating at times, causing feelings of isolation, depression and anxiety. Things that other people take for granted become a real problem, like talking on the phone and introducing yourself to new people.

I hope the album will show there's more to someone who stammers than what comes from their mouths, and I hope it will inspire others in the same situation, giving music they can relate to.

(As told to Emma Tracey)

• and .

All proceeds from Matt's EP are to be donated to the British Stammering Association.

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