The guidance counselor, Mr Kirkpatrick, happened to be in the hallway.

Glenda, he asked.

Would you rather be able to walk or to talk the question?

I accepted this genuine interest and benign until I was preparing for this talk.

Then it hit me.

His question pitted the two main disabilities of my diagnosis.

Cerebral palsy against one another, which did I want least, which is more tolerable, which is more acceptable.

I have been struggling with this internal battle my entire life.

My inability to walk and my inability to talk are not created equal.

They are not equally understood, acknowledged or accommodated.

I am puzzled by society's obsession with the ability to walk.

Not being able to move about on my own two feet makes me less of a person less valuable and worse, it needs.

Fixing or curing black of physical access is frustrating and inconvenient, and in 2019 there is no excuse for it.

Other than antiquated attitudes, however, I find the inability to clearly communicate verbally, far more disabling for some baffling reason.

The majority of our society links the ability to speak with the ability to hear and to understand when many people encounter me or anyone who has trouble speaking, they assume I do not understand or cannot hear and begin talking slower and louder, as if speaking loudly increases comprehension.

What's up with that?

Or worse, they totally ignored and dismissed me.

I take a lack of communication access more personally than lack of physical access.

It's more of a personal offense because it cuts deep to the core of who I am.

37 years ago, to Mr Kirkpatrick's question, I immediately responded, Talk in my wobbly Glenda ish and scooted off to class, Unfazed Today, 37 years later, my response would still be talk.

However, this time I am far from unfazed.

Today I am the longer that somewhat naive teenager.

Today I am extremely concerned and frustrated.

I know know how crucial verbal communication is in daily life and how much of life is missed when one is unable to speak clearly.

I now know how systemically ignored, dismissed and overlooked people with speech and language disabilities are in our society, I know know how political visibility really is and how the loudest ones get the attention.

The funding.

The Seat at the Table, a nonprofit organization, Communication Disabilities Access Canada, extrapolates from international research that nearly half a 1,000,000 Canadians are living with significant communication disabilities.

This statistic is only an estimate because data collection tools such as statistics candidates Canadian Survey on disability as recently as 2017 does not include speech and language disabilities.

These steps are used to plan and evaluate service's programs and policies for Canadians living with disabilities to help enable their full participation and society.

It is easy to see how Canadians, living with speech and language disabilities, are not included in federal funding announcements.

After all, you can't include what you don't measure.

Now is the time for people with speech and language disabilities to be acknowledged and included to be among the loudest once to be in the table.

Why speech Important With my bachelors degree from Simon Fraser University in hand, I was unsure how to navigate a job search with my disabilities.

Do you know how many entry level positions required telephone skills and a typing speed of 60 words per minute, neither of which were within my realm impossible.

Reluctantly, I took a pre employment program for people with disabilities.

Once I completed the program, I volunteered as the teaching assistant with the next group on the first day in wheel Darryl.

He knew within days he would marry me.

I took much longer to come to the same realization.

However.

I made the first move one.

I invited him to go to the the new Vancouver Public Library to do job research.

After working on Ireland for a couple of hours, we connected for lunch.

We ate on the cafe patio in the beautiful late spring afternoon, a simple meal of ham bun, which is and Coke back.

We nobody's allowed us to eat whatever we wanted.

We talked for hours, which was easy to do with Darrow, because he is extremely patient, converse in unhindered with such a welcomed experience, something I had missed since moving away from the familiarity and safety of home to attend university.

Even though Darryl also has cerebral palsy and uses a power wheelchair, his speech is fine.

Through the years, I have found it amazing at how people interact differently with him on Lee because he speaks clearly.

Darryl doesn't mind translating for me when needed, but too often people turned to him and expect him to speak for me.

He is not my spokesperson.

He is my husband.

He deserves to be respected.

We celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary in August.

One of our strengths is we still sit and talk a lot back to the topic of employment.

After one part time job, I was left without another option.

I hesitantly opted for the only route left self employment.

Meanwhile, I watched while classmates and friends with somewhat comparable physical disabilities build successful careers.

The main difference between our disabilities is my inability to speak clearly.

Thankfully, online tools have enabled me to meet, communicate and work with people from around the world.

While learning how to run a business, I accepted whatever contracts came my way.

Most of these contracts I undertook for the sole reason of putting food on the table and helping pay the mortgage, which, by the way, will be fully paid off in less than two years.

Eventually, I built a solid reputation in the field of Web accessibility.

I worked my way up until I was charging a respectable fee.

And then, after 14 years of explaining repeatedly why accessible Web sites are necessary, I burned out right before Web accessibility became a thing.

Of course, since then and with the recent advances in technology, I have finally created my own dream career, that of being a keynote speaker.

Those friends I mentioned earlier are now asking me how to land speaking gigs and Ted X talks.

I love the delicious irony in the career choice.

How can we make society more inclusive regardless of communication methods?

Here's one encounter I faced during an unexpected hospital stay last November.

I was sitting in my manual wheelchair watching a video in my room on election reform on my iPad, trying to be productive with my time.

While waiting for the next appointment, a social worker unexpectedly rushed into my room, quickly introduced herself and loudly asked if my husband would be coming in today.

Then she was gone.

Gone before, I could pause the video and open my communication up, which I am currently using to get this fricking amazing talk.

Go on to call Darryl to ask him a Siri's of questions about me questions I'm capable of answering myself.

Had she actually been social while performing her social work in mere seconds, she had made countless assumptions about me hard of hearing, cognitively impaired, unable to speak for myself.

Assumptions exclude me, making my world even less inclusive, less accessible and, in this instance, excluded me from participating in my own health care.

This encounter waas in sharp contrast with the noisy, busy emergency room the previous night, or a doctor, Tober listened patiently and attempted to understand what I was saying.

Given he was new to my unique dialect, he understandably did not understand every word I said, because the emergency room is too fast paced and because I was in too much pain to type on my iPad.

Darryl translated what I had said, rather than turning to speak with Darryl.

As often happens, Doctor Tober continued talking directly to me.

His sincere attempt to understand me made such an important difference.

He truly cared and valued me as a person.

In my 53 years of experience, he was a rare find.

Unlike the social worker doctor, Tober used three simple strategies while communicating with me strategies that can also use to confidently talk with others who might communicate differently.

First, be patient.

Second, speak directly with the person and finally verify you have heard the message correctly.

You carry these strategies within yourself at all times.

You can be capable and confident while communicating with others.

Regardless of how they might communicate, one person can truly make a difference.

You can make a difference.

Take, for example, my friend and colleague from my Web accessibility days.

Ted Drake Ted is now the accessibility leader than tooled, which develops TurboTax among other software.

Last year they launched their Accessibility Champion program to recognize people passionate about accessibility.

This year, to mark the program's success, they have a T shirt design contest, the winning design, an array of nine corgi dogs, each representing a different disability.

To be honest, I teared up when seeing the T shirt because this was the first time in my 53 years both my communication disability and my mobility disability had been recognized and acknowledged together.

Regardless of whether you are working on inclusive hiring practices, planning public forums and events, developing accessibility legislation and much more.

Ask the question.

How would people with communication disabilities be included?

You don't need to know that how you will make a difference by asking this one question, circling back to Mr Kirkpatrick's question.

Would I rather be able to walk or to talk?

I would still respond resoundingly.

Talk, not having clear speech.

I still miss out on daily interactions, which most of you might take for granted in other, more critical situations, such as with the social worker.

It can impact my health care.

However, I am feeling slightly hopeful about the future.

Thanks to the concerted efforts of money, the recently enacted Accessible Canada Act is the first accessibility legislation to explicitly include communication disabilities.

Now is the time for people with speech and language disabilities to be equally acknowledged in accommodated to be among the loudest once to have a seat at the table.

And it starts with asking one question.

How would people with communication disabilities be included?