2013 was pretty interesting on the work front.

Since my last round-up, I’ve been writing much more – a welcome change to the editorial work that is the bulk of my workload at present. I had a nice commission from Best, for example, to puncture the sacred cow known as Great British Bake Off. I also wrote for Big Issue in the North about a crowdfunded venture to make designer handbags in Manchester. Rae Jones, the designer behind the stylish Buckitt tote, wanted to save skilled jobs in the city but this fell through for reasons beyond her control.

I’ve been contributing assorted bits and pieces for Manchester site Creative Tourist for the past year and a half. My feature on Manchester’s most interesting film and TV locations – all of which you can visit – went live late last year, almost a year after I first wrote it. I also wrote a series of short pieces on some of the city’s more interesting markets, away from the city centre – if you like shopping, check out Longsight flea market, Ramsbottom artisan market, the Vintage Village in Stockport and the artisan food market at MediaCityUK, right outside the BBC. On the music front, I previewed Massive Attack v Adam Curtis at the Manchester International Festival – an incredible show mixing soundscapes and imagery in an exciting venue. I also went boozing with Manchester’s legendary Liquorists – I’m not sure my liver has recovered yet.

Probably the most interesting site I’ve written for is Contributoria, a brand new platform for journalism that aims to crowdfund quality writing in an open community. It’s backed by the Guardian and also won a financial prize in a competition for news innovation – you can read an interview with the founders about their ideas. It finally launched on New Year’s Day (although I understand the intention had been to go live in the autumn). I wrote a feature on the rising market for erotica for women and I’m currently working on a second article for the site.

I’ve been busy on the radio too. I worked at BBC Radio Manchester for a while a few years ago, mainly on the news desk, so I was delighted to join the roster of journalists who review the weekend papers in 2012. Every six weeks or so, I appeared on Gordon Burns’ Sunday show to talk about the big stories of the week. Now in semi-retirement, Gordon withdrew from weekend work last August and his show wasn’t handed to anyone else (how do you step into the shoes of such a broadcasting legend, anyway?). Not long after, though, I popped up on Andy Crane’s Saturday show – the paper review with Andy is light-hearted in tone and a very enjoyable gig. And before you ask, no it’s not broadcast from the broom cupboard… If you want to tune in to catch me, I usually announce it a day or so ahead on my Twitter or Facebook page. If you’re up early this coming Saturday (the 11th), I’ll be on air from around 7.50am.

Manchester is rightly famous for its music scene and has also produced many renowned authors, journalists and poets. Which makes you wonder why no one thought to put the two together in a festival until November 2013. Louder than Words is the brainchild of Jill Adam, who runs the annual crime-writing festival in Harrogate.  She and her team pulled together a very exciting line-up of esteemed music journalists and musicians in a wide-ranging programme over three days. I was asked to join a panel on women in rock to discuss my experiences in what I think is often a brutal industry for women – my career in music journalism was relatively short-lived because of the relentless sexism I encountered. I found it very emotional recalling some of those experiences, especially in public, as I’d rarely talked about it before. A big thank you to Jill for inviting me (and extending that to next year too).

A couple of last things. Firstly, after years of paying in my subs every month and occasionally remembering to turn up to branch meetings, I decided I really ought to be more active in the National Union of Journalists. Last year, I became an elected representative on the NUJ’s Freelance Industrial Council and have been getting stuck in – the FIC works on a huge range of issues affecting freelance journalists and since I joined, we’ve been actively working to protect copyrights, looking at boosting training options so members can update their skills and disseminating better information on rights, legal issues and practical knowledge.

Secondly, I also became a trustee of the Friends of London Road Fire Station. The fire station has long been my favourite building in Manchester and I’ve previously written a number of news stories on it, during my tenure at Inside the M60 in 2010-11. When I heard a proper campaign was starting up to save it, I joined in and then when the trust formed took on some real responsibility. I now run the press and PR for LRFS – all pro bono and all very worthwhile. Please take a look and if you can help in any way – even if it’s just to sign the petition – please do.

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The story of influential Manchester band Joy Division has been told to the point of exhaustion, right? So many books, including Hooky’s, two films in the shape of the excellent Control and Steve Coogan’s 24 Hour Party People, not to mention the myriad press coverage.

But a play?

Well, yes. Why not? The big question is, what could it bring that was new to the story? Quite a bit, it seems.

Last night found me sitting in a tiny, sweaty upstairs room, clutching a rapidly overheating pint of beer and squeezed into a corner, at the Lass O’Gowrie in Manchester watching New Dawn Fades, the play in question. As theatres go, at around 30 seats it was indeed cramped and the “stage” space was even smaller – no wings, no curtains, the actors entering and exiting through the sole door: the same one the audience came in through.

But no mind. Packed into 90 minutes was an imaginative retelling of the well-known tale but with some splendid Mancunian twists chucked in. This was not just about the band, but the band as a product of Manchester and therefore it seemed entirely logical to explore some of the city’s history in the script too.

The narrator of New Dawn Fades was Tony Wilson, the journalist who founded Factory, and many scenes played out as if Wilson was on the job at Granada Reports. So we saw him interviewing Agricola, who founded the original Roman settlement of Mamucium that eventually grew into the industrial metropolis it is today, Dr John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I and warden of Manchester’s Christ’s College, and Friedrich Engels, who studied the Victorian industrial slums of the city and wrote about it in The Condition of the Working Class in England.

(c) Brian Gorman

New Dawn Fades’ playwright Brian Gorman originally conceived the idea as a graphic novel. Several years down the line, it is still not published and Gorman decided to rework it in the interim.

This is where I depart from a traditional review for I must disclose my connections to the show. I’ve known Brian Gorman – actor, writer, artist, director – for close to 10 years, meeting him soon after I moved back to the UK after years abroad. Some four years ago, I had a book of my own published – Epilepsy the Essential Guide – and Brian, once he was deep into drawing the graphic novel, asked if he could borrow some of it. That was fine by me. Then Brian asked me for a photo of me so he could actually put me in the book.

(c) Brian Gorman

I said yes to that too. He used a very old photo of me and I’m seen here with some ancient philosopher in the throes of a seizure (or possibly St Paul on the road to Damascus – I never asked which), for back in the day people thought that someone who hallucinated during a temporal lobe fit was having visions from god.

And then came New Dawn Fades. Brian asked again for clearance to use my text. And then I sat in on one of the auditions, which was exciting enough in itself, but the epilepsy scene was included during the castings so I got to advise a little on the script.

Later, Michael Whittaker, who played Ian Curtis in New Dawn Fades (rather brilliantly, as it happens and he did a very convincing epileptic seizure on stage), came to me for info on epilepsy, throwing some rather tough questions at me such as what did it feel like coming round from a seizure? That was pretty hard to describe.

I’d also planned to drop in on one of the final rehearsals to see how Michael was acting a seizure but in the end, irony of ironies, I had a whopping great fit that morning and wasn’t going anywhere.

Hearing my words spoken on stage by “Tony Wilson” and “Debbie Curtis” was pretty weird. I had goosebumps. One of the reasons I wrote my book in the first place was to help others with easy to digest information as I was given no advice when diagnosed with epilepsy and learned a lot of stuff the hard way. I hope that short scene gave at least a nugget of understanding to the audience.

There have been only six, completely sold out performances of New Dawn Fades and there are already some good reviews up on the internet at Louder than War and Northern Soul. At the moment there are no plans to stage it again but if it does be sure to catch it – you will not be disappointed. The cast were all excellent, the direction was skilful, imaginative and laced with humour, and Brian’s inclusion in the script of some of Manchester’s history gives some great context.

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Unlike other cities that have enjoyed a thriving street food scene for some time, Manchester lacked one until late last year. Guerrilla Eats sought to rectify that, as I wrote last November, and so far their popup strategy is thriving. Every couple of months, the traders licence a pitch for a few days, the carts and wagons roll in and Manchester’s foodies flock there to eat and well cheaply in a buzzy atmosphere. They have six popups under their belt now and plans afoot.

And now there’s a new player on the block – of sorts – a regular street food market at Piccadilly Gardens run by Manchester Markets, the council’s dedicated markets department. By strict definition, it’s not a proper street food market because the traders aren’t selling out of their own vehicles but under the branded Manchester Markets gazebos.

However, if you’re defining street food as food made from scratch, on the street, by local traders using quality local ingredients and with a home-cooked ethos, that box is well and truly ticked.

The market used to be the so-called real food market, mainly selling ingredients to take home and cook with although always with a couple of stalls selling the ubiquitous hog roast barms or proper butcher’s sausages in a bun. Now it’s been given over totally to upmarket takeaways.

So, what’s on offer? Well, naturally the hog roast and fancy sausages, but also a surprisingly good choice of ethnic cuisines – goat curries with rice and peas or jerk chicken, ostrich burgers served with onions in a rich sauce made with Jack Daniels (I kid you not), Indian curries, Turkish grilled meats, customised pasta (you get to mix and match sauces and meats or veg) and bread and cakes. I could smell the Turkish grill from at least 5 metres away, the smoke luring me in.

It was the grill I succumbed to in the end, despite dithering in the face of so much attractive food all seemingly shouting “pick me!” Stallholder Eddie made me a wrap of grilled lemon and herb chicken in flat pide bread with salad and yoghurt sauce. It tasted as good as it looked and smelled, and filled me up nicely (confession: I’d had no breakfast). Later I also tried one of the samosas from the Indian stall, then bought a loaf of rye bread to take home from the baker there.

Chatting with the traders, I quickly learned that the footfall here is rather different to the sort of customers Guerrilla Eats caters to. At Piccadilly Gardens, on Thursdays and Fridays the core customers are local workers and shoppers while on Saturdays the mix is more tourists and out-of-towners coming into Manchester to shop or do things. All the traders I spoke to report good sales. It was pretty busy on the Thursday lunchtime I dropped by, with queues forming in front of at least half the stalls.

This street food market might not have quite the hip cachet of Guerrilla Eats but, like it, everything is local in one form or another and, importantly, money spent by customers stays in the local economy. That’s another reason to give it the thumbs up. Buy yourself a McDonalds or KFC for lunch and not only will it not taste anything like as good, produced as they are to a corporate uniformity, but the money ends up far away. I’d certainly pick up lunch on the hoof here if in town. And the market also runs a loyalty card scheme, a bit like the coffee shop cards – nine stamps gets you a free meal next time.

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Disclosure: I lunched courtesy of Manchester Markets.

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Crowdfunding for new projects is quite the thing these days and it makes a lot of sense to raise money from the very customers you want to buy your product because those customers already have some kind of emotional investment. Look at the success of crowdfunding the Pebble, for example. Raising capital this way has until very recently been confined to the tech sector, which by definition is full of early adopters searching for the next must-have product. So it’s interesting to see non-tech projects elsewhere start to use crowdfunding to support their ventures.

Last week, the Kindling Trust invited me to take a closer look at one of the projects they are backing. Manchester Veg People is a small collective of small organic growers in and around Manchester who are pooling resources to share facilities and widen their customer base. In these austere times, farmers everywhere are finding it difficult and small producers, organic or not, can find themselves particularly squeezed because they don’t have scale. Joining forces seems logical. Manchester Veg People don’t sell veg boxes to retail customers, which may be just as well because I and a fair few other people I know have stopped buying them for reasons of cost and food miles (because when times are tough, such companies tend to centralise operations to save money).

What they do provide is fresh produce to around a dozen restaurants, bars and canteens around Manchester. Their client base includes the University of Manchester, John Rylands Library and the prestigious fine dining restaurant Aumbry. For the past 18 months the growers, who are all within a 50-mile radius of Manchester, have collectively sold assorted vegetables, shared transportation and borrowed storage.

Now they are crowdfunding their expansion, so they can buy a van and a cold store. Raising £16,000 in 6 weeks will be no mean achievement. Manchester’s impressive foodie scene contains many bloggers who write about eating out – even if only a few of them put their money where their mouth is, excuse the pun, that sum could be easily raised (and yes, I’m going to pledge too).

To raise awareness, the Veg People asked me and others to lunch at Common in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, which is one of their customers.  All the produce had been plucked from the soil only the day before, so it was superfresh, and then bicycled into town from nearby Sale in a little trailer and dropped off at a few places before arriving at Common. We had a bit of a wait for lunch because it had to be cooked, but the time was easily filled with beer and conversation, plus a chance to learn more about the project. And the food, when it arrived, was superb.

The tempura of cavolo nero with salad leaves and chilli was light, crispy and with a good depth of flavour, although the accompanying wasabi mayo could have had more fire in its belly. Despite the chef describing it as a side dish it was filling and I slightly regretted ordering two dishes.

However, the huevos rancheros were also really delicious. It’s too early in the season for local tomatoes but the free range, organic egg came from the collective, as did the chillis and salad leaves, and the dish was accompanied with a decent dollop of sour cream and some flatbreads.

There was no room for the potato soup although I tried half a spoonful. Its rounded, nutty flavour was very pleasing to my palate. My stomach, however, was already full to bursting from the other two dishes.

I also had huge satisfaction from knowing the ingredients were really fresh and local, because I’m a bit of a stickler for avoiding unnecessary food miles. You won’t find me buying Chilean strawberries for Christmas. So the Veg People get a massive thumbs up from me, as well as from the eateries they supply to.

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*Disclosure: I was a guest of Manchester Veg People and the Kindling Trust.

UPDATE: (18 July 2013) I’m really delighted to announce that Manchester Veg People passed their £16,000 target yesterday, with just under 2 days to spare. There was some serious tweeting going on the couple of days before that, which clearly had a beneficial effect. As I write, there’s still just over 24 hours to go before the deadline and the total is *still* rising! Well done, all round.

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Back in the 80s, as an impoverished Leeds student, eating out in the city invariably meant a cheap curry at the legendary (original) Corner Café on Buslingthorpe Lane. Twenty-five years after I moved away, I still revisit friends there but know almost nothing of its current restaurant scene. As I now write a food blog, I signed up for Blog North’s Food Glorious Food event in Leeds – a day of hanging out with other food bloggers and eating cake.

But before that, there was the opening night of The Beast and the Swine, a pop-up restaurant from a four-strong collective known as We the Animals. With two of the chefs based at the Reliance, which the Loiners at my table later reassured me is one of the go-to places to dine, and a menu that intrigued and tempted, I set out for the secret venue. The Holy Trinity church is an oasis of calm in the bustling city centre – inside a medieval-length banqueting table was laid out for the feast ahead while fairy lights twinkled down the aisles.

Somewhat bizarrely, our welcoming cocktail was presented in a baby’s feeding bottle. The Earl Grey infused gin mixed with something peachy slipped down nicely but I’d have preferred it in a martini glass to sucking on a rubber nipple.

Never mind. The food made up for it. The salmagundi of rabbit rillette, mustardy firm sausage, wafer-thin pressed ham, pickled heritage beetroot cubes and julienned carrots, and a very garlicky broad bean hummus was the opening shot across the bows. There was plenty of salty focaccia to accompany. Then a plate of meaty, creamy Bridlington crab, dressed with pea shoots and a tangy pink grapefruit dressing sharp enough to cut through the crab’s richness. I could have happily had a second helping and left sated.

The bolito misto was a hearty plate of Yorkshire chicken, a spicy homemade cotechino sausage deep with notes of cinnamon and cloves, and a slice of veal tongue. Wedges of steamed savoy cabbage and dark lentils offset the meats. The portions were generous and the wait staff brought extra cotechino for those who wanted it. I did.

The cheese course – a firm Wensleydale with a sweet onion and sultana relish and crumbly spelt crackers – arrived at the same time as the dessert. Crocquembouche towers were piled onto giant paella pans and there were gasps of delight but I was disappointed. The choux pastry was doughy, dry and bland, and the cream, which should have been chantilly, was unsweetened.

I liked the informality at table of mismatched crockery, stoneware mugs to drink from and the wine being served in teapots. However, the menu’s emphasis on provenance, local and seasonal didn’t extend to the red or white on offer and I’d have liked to have known what I was drinking. It was also too plonky for such good food. It was a very reasonable £40 a head for seven courses – upping the price by a tenner and serving more suitable wine would have clinched it.

For a first outing, though, it was pretty good. I was too full to manage the petit four, but they’d even thought of that. They were thoughtfully wrapped and offered as a takeway treat.  A few tweaks, chiefly with the drinks, and they’ll have cracked it, so keep your ear to the ground for the next outings from We the Animals.

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I dined as a guest of Leeds Loves Food Festival  and Visit Leeds. Thanks to Visit Leeds for the stay at the New Ellington Hotel.

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I’m a bit embarrassed that these days I don’t get around to updating this blog much. It’s mainly because I’m preoccupied elsewhere, so I though it was time to share where you can read some of the other stuff I’ve written of late.

Firstly, there’s the other blog – I started The Lone Gourmet in September 2011 to share my recipes and cooking interests. If you love food, enjoy cooking and live on your own why not head over for a look? Also, a lot of the recipes will double up easily if you share your abode.

There’s also my regular TV column over at Screenjabber if you want to know what the top picks are for the week ahead’s viewing. The column is usually pinned to the front page but if it’s not, pull down the Blogs menu and select “latest blogs” to find it.

The bulk of my work these days is actually book editing rather than journalism. My colleague Louise Harnby writes a splendid blog on editing and proofreading over at The Proofreader’s Parlour for anyone with an interest in the subject. Earlier this year, I wrote a couple of guest posts for her on two of the subject areas I’m most likely to be editing for my clients. Editing Financial Material explores the issues and intricacies of editing what is often quite technical copy. I also work fairly regularly on texts that are usually described as “adult”. My piece on Editing Adult Material discusses the finer points of working with copy that is sexually explicit, blasphemous or graphic and why it needs editing as carefully as any other kind of work.

Lastly, I must mention the equally brilliant blog, The Kraken Wakes, a wonderfully ranty and foul-mouthed blog by another colleague in which she has a daily rail at all manner of things but mostly sexism in all its guises. She was kind enough to let me borrow her blog recently so I could have a much-needed pop at something that really winds me up – the pinkification of women’s cancer. I should warn you that Light the Pink Touchpaper and Stand Well Back is as swearily NSFW as the rest of The Kraken Wakes…

Right, I’m promising myself now to be less neglectful of this blog in future! Stay tuned as this whole site, plus my other work one, will shortly be having a major facelift – in time for the new year, I hope.

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Today it’s Blogging Against Disablism Day, an annual blog carnival in which we take stock of our crip status and our lives. To my shame it’s been three years since I last participated in BADD, and almost two years since I last blogged about how living with epilepsy affects me.

Not much has changed, politically, since I last wrote about my fear of losing my Disability Living Allowance. Back then, Cameron’s government was barely three months in power but his government had already struck fear into the heart of the disabled community by announcing a wholesale overhaul of disability benefits.

We were right to be afraid. Terrible changes have been wreaked on Employment Support Allowance, with thousands too ill to work having their benefit withdrawn. Horrific evidence has emerged of how the tick-box assessments have been carried out (not by qualified doctors), failing to take into account of people’s fluctuating conditions and frequently held in buildings with no disabled access.

I work, so I don’t claim ESA. Nevertheless, there’s no grounds for complacency. DLA is on the threshold of being transformed into something called Personal Independent Payment and it too will be based on a tick-box questionnaire that tots up the points – reach the threshold of 15 and you’ll get some money. If not, tough.

Having ticked the boxes on the draft PIP assessment form, I will not now or ever reach 15 points. At best, I might rack up 9 points and still qualify for the mobility component but I daren’t hope that far ahead. I’m not able to drive so, despite having a concessionary bus pass for local travel, I spend a lot of money on taxis and trains. My DLA goes a small way to offsetting those costs. I am certain to lose my care allowance, the bit that covers the extra costs I incur after a seizure and need to pay for assistance or delivered meals because I’m too poorly to cook. Technically, I shouldn’t ever be cooking by myself despite living alone because I could have a seizure without warning at any moment. However, my DLA is too meagre at £67 a week to pay for a carer to oversee me every day.

What has changed for me since I last blogged? A lot on the personal front. Even before that blog post, the medication I was taking to control my seizures was failing me, and increasingly so. Over a period of around 18 months, my condition deteriorated badly. I developed new seizure types, I had seizures more frequently and, worst of all, my medication had a terrible effect on my mental health, a known side effect of it, culminating in me almost having a total breakdown a year ago.

Last August, with the support of my consultant, I changed medication. It took three months to make the switch, gradually increasing the new drug while slowly coming off the old one. This process is not without risk – changing drugs in itself can trigger seizures and there’s no guarantee on completion that things will be any better on the new medication. It’s a chance you have to take.

Fortunately for me, I have seen some improvement. My mental state improved almost immediately, the black fog of depression lifting overnight. I’m still having seizures, but fewer of them. None of them has gone away completely and I’ve developed yet another new seizure type but it’s one I can live with, for now at least. In context, while things have improved over the last 9 months, overall I am still in a worse position medically than I was 7 years ago when I first claimed DLA.

Yet I will no longer be considered disabled enough under the new PIP assessments to qualify for assistance. I, along with 500,000 other disabled people will have my DLA arbitrarily stripped away. I’ll have to go to be tested for my epilepsy, which is ridiculous given I was diagnosed in 1996 after a number of neurological tests in a hospital. If I do qualify for the mobility component of PIP I’ll still have to be reassessed regularly even though epilepsy is incurable.

Since I last blogged, I’ve been involved in the Spartacus campaign which has seen thousands of disabled people all over the UK fight from their beds against this government’s cruel maligning of us. We haven’t achieved all that we wanted to, but we also achieved far more than we ever believed possible. The Spartacus Report, published in February, was our clinical dismantling of the lies the government was telling about the changes to welfare.

Yesterday, the campaign published its response to the government’s consultation on PIP.

Please read it. And join Spartacus. For at the end of the day, we are all Spartacus. If you’re reading this and you are fortunate enough not to be chronically sick or disabled, please remember that you are only an accident or an illness away from being one of “us”.

We are all Spartacus.

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Unlocking the secrets of open data journalism in Manchester

As more and more public bodies free their data to the public, and with interpretation of that data set to be increasingly important in journalism, it was only a matter of time before someone had the idea of bringing journalists and computer geeks together to learn from each other how best to crunch the data.

Over in the US, the Hacks and Hackers Hack Days have been established a little while and they recently held one in London. Here in the UK, the people at Scraperwiki have been building tools to help people clean up raw data before working it to produce the meaningful stories nestling within. I attended the News Rewired event in London in June – Scraperwiki were there too but with such a packed scheduled I had no chance to attend one of their mini intro sessions.

So when I heard that Scraperwiki was busy organising Hacks and Hackers Hack Days in the UK, I was very excited. More so when I heard they planned to hold one in Manchester. It would save me travelling to either Liverpool or Birmingham. But more importantly, it was an opportunity for my publication – Inside the M60 – to show that the new breed of digital journalists are more than willing to support such important collaborative ventures.

I’ll be the first to admit that my numeracy is patchy. From years of working in the arena of finance and banking I can spot flaws in a profit and loss account at 50 paces and tell when percentage changes don’t match the actual figures. But I’m hopeless with spreadsheets. I don’t know how to deal with data, but I’m very keen to learn as I can see plenty of opportunities for Inside the M60 to uncover important stories lurking inside Manchester’s own data sets.

This is why I and my colleague Nigel Barlow have been very busy behind the scenes, working with Scraperwiki for nearly two months to help make the Manchester Hacks and Hackers Hack Day a success.

Tickets go on sale today, for a special workshop on 15 October, with an equal number of places available for journalists/bloggers and coders/hackers. What’s going to happen? We’ll be working in small groups, learning from each other to produce stories from data and present some small projects at the end of the session to show what can be done. The previous sessions were a great success so we’ll be aiming to equal that here in Manchester.

Lots of exciting things are already happening in Manchester with data – the Open Data Manchester group persuaded GMPTE to release data sets on public transport recently and a number of interesting projects have already emerged, including phone apps of local bus timetables. Manchester’s thriving digital community will ensure that much more will happen, we local journalists just need to start working with them.

So, if you’re a coder or a journalist, do sign up – it promises to be a really useful and fun day.

And you know what? Even before this event got off the ground, news emerged that some of Preston’s enterprising journalism students and hyperlocal bloggers are already planning to form a hacks and hackers group that will meet regularly in Manchester to further whatever comes out of the workshop day on 15 October.

We are still looking for some sponsorship, so if you can support this valuable project do please get in touch! We are also still looking for someone to come and film the workshop for posterity.

If you can’t make the event, follow us on Twitter on the day. The hashtag will be #hhhmcr.

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The BBC rolled out its new-look BBC News website redesign today amid much fanfare. It’s attracted a lot of comment, not just on the site itself but also across the media-reporting media. Taking out all the “if it ain’t broke, why fix it” remarks, of which there were very many, there still seemed to be an overwhelming thumbs down for the use of white space, the disliked Helvetica Neue typeface and problems with display and rendering in various browsers.

Steve Herrman, the editor of BBC News Online, gave a lengthy explanation to readers of all the changes brought in by the redesign but you have to dig a bit deeper to discover why the new look news service will be completely unusable for many people.

The old version of BBC News offered a low-graphics option to readers – this was not only ideal for users still using dial-up or accessing the site with a mobile phone, it was also perfect for people with visual impairments. The simple format meant it could be easily read not just by people living with near blindness but also those with other visual problems such as dyslexia.

Not any more.

To find out why, you have to follow a link in Herrman’s editorial to the FAQs on the redesign. The fifth question explains why the low-graphics version was turned off in April:

The low-graphics version was designed as a low-bandwidth alternative to the full website at a time when most users of the site were using slow dial-up connections. We are now making improvements to the site which will meet most of the needs of the people who used the low-graphics version.

Fair enough, for the most part. But the next FAQ reveals that disabled people with visual impairments have been excluded from the accessibility of the new site:

How will you ensure the site is still user-friendly for those with disabilities?

We know that people used the low-graphics version because it was simpler to read and we now offer the mobile version of the site online which provides a similarly simplified presentation.

We are also expecting to roll out a suite of accessibility tools this year. These are designed to provide much better support to a range of users – especially those with lo-vision, asperger syndrome, dyslexia, ADHD, or those who find text hard to read. For those who have been using low graphics as a more accessible version, these new tools will provide a much better service.

You can find out more about it on the Ouch! website.

Quite simply, the BBC is saying “tough” if you can’t read the site anymore, you’ll just have to wait until we fix it. There’s no mention of any deadline they are aiming for to roll out accessibility tools for the visually impaired and they seem to have forgotten that many of those now excluded will have at least as much trouble reading the site on a mobile device. They also seem to have forgotten that disabled users of the BBC are licence-fee payers and just as entitled to full access to our public-service broadcaster as all other licence-fee payers.

What I find really shocking is that accessibility was not built into the redesign from the beginning. There are globally agreed standards – WCAG 2.0 – for website accessibility that cover a huge range of issues such as “blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these” (source: WCAG 2.0). The standards enable disabled users to render web pages in their browser according to need, allowing for text size adjustment, customisation of contrast and so on.

The WCAG standards have been around for a long time, which rather begs the question why the BBC hasn’t applied them this time – it’s not as if they hadn’t heard of them, given they have used them in previous versions of BBC News Online.

The Disability Discrimination Act requires all businesses and services to make “reasonable adjustments” for disabled people. That’s absolutely fine when it comes to figuring out how to build a ramp for a shop that is sited in a listed building, for example. But there’s no excuse when it comes to building something from scratch. It’s sad that many companies building new premises still don’t consider physical access issues when drawing up architect plans.

It’s even sadder in a virtual environment where the rules are clear and straightforward, especially when you consider the virtual environment is one where disabled people often find it far easier to participate fully in society than they do in the built environment. And when it’s a publicly funded service that is doing the excluding, it makes me want to weep with frustration.

The BBC didn’t need to make “reasonable adjustments” – they could have been incorporated from the start. It has breached the Disability Discrimination Act in a two-fingered gesture to a significant minority of its licence-fee payers. And it expects them to just wait it out until its web team gets round to making the necessary tweaks to provide full disabled access to our national news service.

Shame on you, Aunty.

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Tuesday’s Budget contained the not-entirely-unexpected announcement of cuts to benefits. There was a general expectation that Incapacity Benefit (IB) and its new incarnation, Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), both of which are claimed by many disabled people, would be targeted. IB is frequently in the news for its renown as a benefit that is relatively easy to make a fraudulent claim for and there has been much governmental chatter over the last couple of years about getting people off IB and back into work. So it was a surprise to hear that Disability Living Allowance (DLA) was to be targeted.

I’m not going to cover the issues around the last government’s proposed “fitness to work” scheme, which was to be aimed at IB claimants. Much has already been written about the problems with the proposed medicals, for example.

DLA, though, is non-means-tested and can be claimed by disabled people who work, as well as those who don’t. It’s a benefit that recognises that disabled people have higher living costs just because they are disabled and is meant to help counterbalance that. Indeed, many people with disabilities find their living costs rise when they work simply because when they get home they may be more tired to deal with household chores and so they need to buy in additional help. DLA, paltry as it is, helps disabled people maintain independence, freeing up council care services and residential services for those who really need them. It’s also really difficult to claim.

The Arbitrary Constant blog by Rich Watts (who is the director of the Essex Coalition of Disabled People) has made some excellent points about the motives behind the government’s decision to target DLA claimants, while Bendy Girl, on her brilliant disability blog, Benefit Scrounging Scum, has pointed to some interesting figures about benefit fraud that show DLA is the least likely benefit to be claimed by those intent on defrauding the welfare system.

But enough of the stats and the speculation. I’ve spent much of the last 48 hours wondering how I personally will be affected and I’ve concluded that I may be forced to give up work.

As a worker with a disability, I generate wealth for the state in the form of the taxes and national insurance I pay. I put vastly more into the pot every month than I take out in DLA. And I’m self-employed so I sometimes end up paying national insurance twice over (for example, if a client puts me on their PAYE scheme temporarily), which I can’t claim back so the state does quite well out of me. If my DLA is withdrawn, the effect on my ability to earn and stay independent would be catastrophic for me.

Here’s how.

It’s hard to quantify but about a year ago I worked out that my monthly cab spend is £250-300. Some of that obviously is personal travel, such as getting home safely in the evening after going out with friends, but I often work evenings attending events, even if I’m just there to network and make contacts. On those nights I still need to get a cab home because my walk home from the bus stop at night is lengthier and less safe than the walk I’d take in daylight.

In the daytime, I’m out and about almost every day for at least some of the time in my job as a freelance journalist. I use my concessionary bus pass as much as possible (which also means I can use the trams and local trains in Greater Manchester for nothing) but I still have to pay before 9.30am, which is quite often. And the public transport routes in Manchester are largely designed to get people in and out of the centre from afar – getting *around* from neighbourhood to neighbourhood is a lot more complicated. So often it’s simply quicker and easier for me to use taxis.

Some examples. A couple of evenings ago, I attended a meeting in Hulme, about 3 miles from my home. It took 3 buses and an hour to get there and I still had to walk half a mile. The cab home at 11pm was a tenner. The week before, I went to the police authority AGM, right on the other side of Manchester. That took a bus and two trains to get there, all of which I had to pay for as it was pre-9.30am. It took 75 minutes. By car, I could have done it in 20-25 minutes but I’m not allowed to drive. It took me more than 90 minutes to get home again. That was nearly 3 hours of travelling for 20 minutes of GMPA meeting. By car, I’d have spent less than an hour travelling.

To look at it another way, I spent an extra almost two hours travelling that I could have spent earning money like any other freelance able-bodied person. I have calculated that I lose 5-8 hours a week every week in extra travel time – that’s the loss of a commercial day rate that’s roughly double my monthly DLA. That’s also 5-8 hours of earnings I would have paid taxes on too, so the state also loses out in a way, but not as much as I do.

DLA is basically a recognition that being disabled carries extra costs just to put you on a par with the able-bodied, as I have shown. I have to plan every trip I make with military precision and choose whether I can wing it by bus or order a minicab. I wish I could just jump in a car and go but I’m not allowed to hold a driving licence because I have epilepsy.

I live alone. When I lived with my former partner, I had care on tap. Just over half my monthly DLA is awarded for personal care assistance but I can’t actually afford to buy in care on a daily basis on the amount I receive for it. Even something as simple as cooking a meal on the hob is a risk that I take daily. The rest of my DLA is for lower-rate mobility costs. In practice I spend pretty much all my DLA on taxis so I can get around and actually work. The terms of DLA allow me to do this.

So what would happen if I failed the proposed medical test in 2013? Tuesday’s Budget statement said DLA would be targeted at those in most medical need, in an effort to slash the benefits bill. By most standards, I’m not severely disabled because my seizures are fairly infrequent. But I pass all the current critical tests for DLA because my seizures come with no warning and I’m at constant risk of injury as a result. That amount of risk doesn’t change according to how often I have a fit. It’s always the same.

If the bar is raised so DLA is only targeted at those the government considers to be in most “medical need”, I would almost certainly no longer qualify for DLA. Without it, I’d probably have to stop working as a self-employed journalist because I’d no longer be able to afford to get around, or afford to go to only a very small number of meetings and sources because it would take so much longer to travel around purely on the buses. And if I had to reduce the amount of work I can take on, I wouldn’t be able to support myself any more. Then I wouldn’t be able to afford to pay my rent on the private tenancy where I live, or the bills.

The result would be me making a claim for at least Income Support and Housing Benefit. I’d end up taking far more out of the benefits pot than I do at present. Probably at least triple. Maybe more. And of course, I’d no longer be creating wealth for the state in the form of taxes. Is forcing the disabled out of work really a good way to help plug the public deficit?

I can’t begin to describe the freedom that my DLA gives me. Or the amount I save the state overall by being able to keep working as a result of receiving it.

Yet not even three years ago, I had my DLA withdrawn. It took me 14 weeks to get the decision overturned – 14 weeks in which I first made a telephone enquiry as to why I had lost my benefit, then applied for a formal review (which I lost), then applied for a formal appeal at a tribunal, at which point the DLA office realised they’d lose the case seeing as they broke their own rules when they cut my money off so decided to reinstate my award. It was 14 weeks of constant stress and worry for me. I was given a lifetime award when my DLA was reinstated. That seems fair, given I can’t be cured of this particular disability and it’s unlikely to improve. Indeed, my epilepsy has worsened since then.

So I worry about what will happen if I have to undergo a medical test in 2013. I still won’t be any less disabled than I am now, but the government’s stated aim is to target DLA to those in highest need and to get the rest back to work. Except I’m already in work and paying more into the pot than I take out. DLA is not like IB – many people on DLA do already work. Many, like me, will now be wondering if they’ll be able to continue working, and by definition contributing to the welfare state, if they lose their DLA after being compulsorily reassessed.

So I ask again, just how will such a move help plug the public deficit?

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