Claiming that caring about disabled people means they can’t be disablist
Organisations or business owners will often claim to care passionately about disabled people and say things like:
- Staff members have close personal relationships with disabled people.
- Sharing examples of ‘good deeds’, such as raising money or volunteering for a cause related to disabled people.
- Bragging about some completely unrelated or irrelevant accessibility feature that they have invested in. Often showing how little they understand different access needs.
- Quoting another disabled person giving testimony that the organisation or individual staff provided good access to them.
- Quoting policies which state good intentions towards disabled people.
We recommend ignoring these statements as they are legally irrelevant to your complaint, and are mostly a distraction and ‘virtue signalling’. A person or organisation can be good in one way and bad in others, have good and less-good staff, or be good on one day and less good on another.
If the feature(s) bragged about are for the wrong access need, or provided unsuitably, explain this politely and as briefly in your response. You may have to keep doing this.