In today’s issue, we publish a front page story whereby an accessibility ramp for disabled people in Citadella, Gozo, is not up to the established criteria to all people in wheelchairs easy access to the Gozitan capital.

It is one in an endless list of instances where this has happened. On a local level, Malta has particular challenges with accessibility, mostly due to the fact that our old architecture never catered for disabled people, because wheelchairs and other aids were not even invented at the time that our streets and villages began to grow.

This is no excuse. There are many other historical cities which have managed to incorporate wheelchair friendly access to all aspects of cities, villages, transport and more. But in Malta, we seem to lag way behind. For example, only last week, a photograph was doing the rounds on the social media. It was of a government billboard promoting equality for disabled people, only for the billboard to block off the entire high pavement, meaning that anyone who has problems with high steps or pavements (or a wheelchair user) could not get past it. It really is a contradiction in terms.

But the problem is more than a local one, it exists on a national and international level. For example, if the Kardashians could not stoop any lower, Kylie Jenner, in yet another attempt to seek any form of attention without thinking of the consequences or the effect that actions can have on other people.

In this instance, Jenner posed for a vanity shoot in a gold wheelchair, drawing anger from disabled people the world over. But while instances such as this one cause fits of anger, it is the daily things which need to be sorted out in order to give disabled people a decent quality of life. Disabled people do not want special treatment, in fact, quite the opposite, they wanted to be treated as equals. But what they also want is the facilities to be allowed to be independent. And that can mean something as simple as a ramp which is not too steep.

It seems that in the flurry of building in the late nineties and noughties, while developers were bound to provide ramps for access, they did them in ways which not even able bodied people could walk up them, let alone have a wheelchair pushed up, or used by an individual.

Things have improved, and they continue to improve. But it always seems that, even with new buildings, accessibility is an afterthought. Things should not be this way. Disabled people should be at the forefront of every design, from conception through to fruition.