Written by Meghan Overdeep for Southern Living, September 2022
A video of a young girl enjoying a wheelchair-accessible swimming pool for the first time is warming hearts all over the world.
Mom of four, Katrina Placzek recently shared a video of her eight-year-old daughter Dallas using a special pool-friendly wheelchair at Tiff’s Place, a wheelchair-accessible vacation home in Chuluota, Florida.
From Discover With Dallas,
The best wheelchair accessible rental home ever!
We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw this private wheelchair accessible pool! Never have we seen a wheelchair meant for pools or a ramp entry meant for wheelchairs to access the pool!????
Our first day at Tiff’s Place located in near Orlando, Florida. This is the most accessible vacation home we have ever been too! Love it here!
[Video Description: Dallas is sitting in a waterproof wheelchair and her mom is pushing her in the pool while she is sitting in the wheelchair]
“We’d never seen a wheelchair like that before. It was made out of PVC,” Placzek recalled to Good Morning America. “We sat Dallas in there and it just had a ramp and then you go around the ramp area and then it gets deep but there’s a speed bump sort of thing at the bottom so you know not to go where it drops. So if you’re a wheelchair user, you don’t go and drop at the bottom. It was really cool to see the entire house [at Tiff’s Place] was designed with wheelchair users in mind.”
The mom from Illinois told GMA she started Discover with Dallas on Instagram and YouTube after a wheelchair accessible park was installed at a local playground. Thanks to the swing, Dallas could finally enjoy the playground like her siblings, which meant everything to the family.
Ultimately, Placzek hopes the pool video does more than just make people smile. The sweet video also raises awareness.
“I never thought of it, like how important this is, and to see how inclusion makes someone feel in front of your eyes. It was like, ‘I think I need to show the world what this means for kids like her,’ ” Placzek told GMA. “You don’t really think about it until you’re in a wheelchair because we don’t live in that world and when you have a kid that can’t go to a lot of places, you just stop going.”
She said she hopes the buzz around the pool video encourages more people to design places and products with accessibility and inclusivity in mind.
“The most important thing is just for people to think about disabled children and think about disabled adults when they’re making a business, or they’re designing a playground, or if the school is building a new, updated playground,” Placzek said.
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