i keep seeing this idea that Real wheelchair users all have custom active chairs, and that transport/standard chairs are just an embarrassing stereotype. “no one really uses those!” “stop drawing disabled characters in standard chairs!!”
well, plenty of us are a stereotype. sorry. custom chairs require MONEY and good medical support. meanwhile active chairs are unusable for some people. i used an uncomfy transport chair (the kind with tiny wheels and no way to self propel) for a year, and a standard chair for 7yrs. until i got my powerchair i was only ever pushed by a carer. a lot of disabled people will never use an active or custom chair. don’t pretend we don’t exist just because we don’t fit some cool independent ideal.
shoutout to people who use transport chairs and adaptive strollers and other chairs that need to be pushed by a carer
shoutout to people who use standard chairs that don’t fit their body
shoutout to people who use secondhand or makeshift wheelchairs
in my teens i literally felt invalid as a disabled person because i didnt have the ‘real actual’ type of wheelchair everyone talks about online. just my garbage transport chair that my mom had to push. but people with shitty wheelchairs exist and are extremely common actually
This! I see this criticism a lot in disability circles, and we really need to move away from it. Lots of real wheelchair users use hospital chairs. We can criticise movie studios/game devs/character artists for not doing proper research without throwing the people who use these chairs irl under the bus and invalidating them.
In my own art tutorial I used 2 active chairs as the first examples, because the point was to demonstrate how to make structurally similar wheelchairs distinct and reflect the characters using them, but I made sure to explain that having the money or living somewhere where the cost of the chair is paid for/subsidised was one of the things to consider when giving a character a chair like that. I’m planning to do a similar tutorial for other styles of wheelchairs (including hosptial/transport wheelchairs) soon too.