For Maria Lada: Accessibility in Greece cannot remain a promise

The loss of Maria Lada, a compatriot who was connected with the active community of people with disabilities in Kefalonia, and a founding member of the HYPERION association, has once again brought to the surface an issue that in Greece is often discussed with intensity and almost always ends up fading away in everyday life. Accessibility. The word sounds like a technical term, like something that concerns plans, specifications, projects. In reality, it is something much simpler and harsher. It is whether a person can live their life without asking permission from the sidewalk, without making dangerous maneuvers on the road, without depending on the goodwill of others to enter a service, travel, work, participate. This is also why, when news touches a person in the community, it never just remains an emotion. It becomes a mirror, it becomes a question, it becomes a demand for things that as a society we avoid to be said.

In Kefalonia, disability is not an abstract concept, nor a statistic that remains on a board. It has names, faces, families, daily battles. It also has structures that did not appear on their own. They were built by people who persevered. The most characteristic example is HYPERION, the Union for the Protection of Equality and Rights of People with Disabilities based in Lixouri, founded in 2013 as a non-profit association by parents, guardians and people with disabilities, with the aim not just to claim rights, but to translate them into real care, services and equal presence in social life. The existence of HYPERION on the island is important for another reason. It shows what happens when a community does not expect everything from the state, but organizes, pressures, plans and eventually creates. It also shows how easily the discussion about accessibility becomes rhetorical, when it is not connected with specific structures, people, services and daily operation.

HYPERION is not just an association that appears on anniversaries. It is an organization that has developed structures and actions in Kefalonia, in an area where geography and distances make support even more crucial. Its public footprint clearly shows that its operation is not limited to representation. There is a Day Care and Daily Care Center, the KDIF, with facilities that have been reported in Longo, and around it daily care, program, support, a steady rhythm for people who would otherwise remain marginalized, is organized. There is also the Supported Living Home, the SYD, a model that in Greece is still struggling to acquire the scale it needs, but where it is properly applied it provides what is most lacking. A life with autonomy, in a real home, not in isolation. The fact that HYPERION's SYD was included as an act in a European program in the Ionian Islands Region is not a detail. It is an indication that the island has experience in claiming resources and converting them into services. Finally, there is also a public presence in events and collaborations, such as thematic actions for access to work and dialogue with agencies, not as a communication wrapper, but as an attempt to bring disability into the discussion of real life.

Precisely here lies the great contradiction that haunts Greece. There are islands of progress, there are organizations like HYPERION that keep people standing, there are people who claim and create. But there is also a general environment that makes disability constantly seem like a race on a route full of obstacles. This is not an exaggeration. It is the experience of thousands of citizens and families. And it is also something that is evident in the large European figures, when disability is depicted as a long-term limitation in usual activities. According to the most recent consolidated Eurostat data for 2024, 23.9% of the European Union population aged 16 and over reported some or severe long-term activity limitation, with 6.7% reporting severe limitation. In other words, this is a population size that reaches a quarter of adults. It is not a small special category that concerns a few. It is a large social segment, which in every country grows as the age composition of the population also grows.

So why is it so difficult in Greece? The answer is not one. It is a combination of institutional, technical and deeply cultural factors that work together and produce the same result. A country with rules, but with limited application. A country with projects, but often without continuity. A country with good intentions, but with a public space that is treated as a field of services and not as a right for all.

The first level is what is seen everywhere and what everyone recognizes, but few seriously address. Public space, and especially the sidewalk. That's where accessibility is judged in its most everyday form. And there Greece systematically fails, because the sidewalk is treated as a space that can be occupied, cut, narrowed, interrupted, transformed into an extension of parking, commercial use or arbitrary arrangement. Even the institutional discussion itself about who is responsible for maintenance and what is allowed, shows how complex and often unclear reality becomes, with the result that the citizen loses the result in bureaucracy. Accessibility does not always collapse at a large, spectacular point. It collapses in small, everyday breaks in the chain. At the point where the ramp ends in a broken tile. At the point where the crossing leads to a sidewalk without continuity. At the point where a public building door is technically open, but practically closed for anyone who does not climb stairs.

The second level is transport. Here the discussion often takes place with the illusion that, since there are European rules, the issue has been resolved. In reality, the rules set obligations, but do not guarantee the experience. In air transport, for example, the framework of rights for people with disabilities and reduced mobility has existed for years at European Union level, with obligations to provide assistance by airports and air carriers. However, this does not mean that every airport, every procedure and every infrastructure operates with the same consistency, nor that the travel experience is free from dangers or inconvenience. The news itself that prompted this article shows how critical this area is. HYPERION's announcement states that Maria Lada was injured at Athens airport, before her sudden death, under circumstances that are being investigated. The investigation belongs to the competent authorities, but the conclusion for policy does not change. Transport for people with disabilities cannot operate with an approximate logic. It requires infrastructures without gaps, staff training, clear procedures, real control and accountability, because here a failure does not only mean difficulty. It can mean a serious incident.

The third level is digital accessibility, which could be a great equalizer, but often evolves into a new filter of exclusion. The European Union has established a specific directive on the accessibility of public sector websites and applications, Directive 2016/2102, and the requirements are not theoretical. At the same time, the European Accessibility Act, Directive 2019/882, opens a new chapter, because it extends accessibility obligations to market products and services, with an implementation date that has already passed, on June 28, 2025, and with incorporation in Greece through law 4994/2022, as has been pointed out by ESAΕA. This means that accessibility is no longer just a matter of public buildings or a municipal technical service. It is a matter of daily transactions, services, technology. And yet, anyone who lives the reality of digital bureaucracy knows that the lack of accessible documents, forms that are not completed with assistive technologies, services designed without testing by real users, continue to produce exclusion, simply in another form.

However, there is also a fourth level that is rarely stated clearly, although it is the most crucial. Disability in Greece is not just an infrastructure issue. It is also a matter of social standing. When society and the labor market treat disability as a disadvantage that needs to be hidden, then even the most correct sidewalk is not enough. Eurostat consistently records large employment gaps between people with and without disabilities, and at the Greek level, ESAΕA has highlighted, based on Eurostat data for 2024, that the employment gap in Greece was estimated at 28.5 percentage points, one of the worst performances in the EU. This is not just an economic problem. It is a problem of equality, dignity, independence. And it is directly linked to accessibility, because when movement, access to buildings, access to information and services are difficult, work becomes even more difficult. Exclusion feeds exclusion.

This vicious circle is also evident in the data on poverty and social exclusion. The Disability Issues Observatory of ESAΕA has highlighted with bulletins and analyses that people with disabilities and their families experience the pressures of poverty and exclusion more intensely, in a country that went through a prolonged crisis and continues to have high inequalities. So, when society talks about accessibility as if it were a luxury of projects, it ignores that in reality it is talking about access to work, health, education, social life, and therefore about life chances.

In this context, the role of local structures acquires double importance. HYPERION is not just a point of reference for people with disabilities in Paliki. It is an example of what it means for a community to organize itself. It is a structure that offers services, hosts daily life, creates visibility. It is also a kind of institutional witness. It shows what is needed for a support system to function, how difficult it is to keep such structures alive, how much administrative work, funding, staff and consistency are required, how easily society takes for granted what is in reality the result of a struggle. Even the existence of public calls for staffing supported living structures, within the framework of funded actions, shows that support is not theory. It is daily operation, with responsibility, people and needs.

Accessibility, when described only in terms of technical specifications, loses its core content. It is the time, effort and dependence that are added to everyday life. It is the constant need to design life around obstacles that for most do not exist. It is the wear and tear that is not visible in project photos, but is reflected in every route that is not made simply and safely. Behind the terms and guidelines lies the experience of the person who gets tired, not because they have a disability, but because they live in an environment that multiplies it. There is the family member who organizes the day around routes and procedures that for others are taken for granted. There is the young person who wants to work, move, go out, live, and finds before them a system that shows them, without saying it, that they are not a priority. There is also the person who dedicates time to advocacy, collective work, organizing a community, as Maria Lada did, and their loss becomes a collective shock precisely because the community knows how difficult every step of progress is built.

The crucial question, therefore, is not whether Greece has laws. It does. It is not whether it has strategies. It does, with national action plans and digital portals that show that the state recognizes the issue as a policy. The crucial question is whether the state, local government and society treat accessibility as a result that must be produced consistently, with control and maintenance, or as an announcement that closes an obligation. In Greece, the great difficulty is that projects are often carried out in fragments, without a unified route design, without testing real operation, without a culture of maintenance. A sidewalk can be built correctly at one point and invalidated five meters later. A ramp can be installed, but lead to an obstacle. A public building can have a provision, but remain practically inaccessible. The chain breaks at small points and the system behaves as if nothing happened, because no one has the obligation to account for the result of the chain, only for their part.

This is precisely where the cultural dimension, which is crucial in Greece, comes in. The dominance of the car, the tolerance for the occupation of public space, the belief that the road and the sidewalk are a field of personal arrangement, are not just annoying habits. They are mechanisms of exclusion. As long as a country considers it normal for pedestrian traffic to be practically abolished, accessibility will remain impossible. And as long as the issue is treated as a matter of sensitivity, not as a matter of rules that are applied, good people will replace infrastructure with services. This is the most insidious form of failure. When society gets used to admiring solidarity, instead of demanding functionality.

A country changes when the way it rewards and the way it controls changes. In accessibility, change will not come from a big project that will be presented as a breakthrough. It will come from something more humble and more demanding. From building and adhering to the concept of the route. From measuring success not by whether a project was done, but by whether a person can make their journey safely. From having accountability not only for construction, but also for maintenance. From systematically hearing the voices of people with disabilities and their organizations themselves, not as decorative participation, but as institutional evaluators of real operation. Structures like HYPERION know this well, because they have learned to operate in the field, not in theory.

Kefalonia has one more reason to take this seriously. In the islands, exclusion is not just social. It is also geographical. Movement is already more difficult, services are fewer, choices are more limited. This means that accessibility is not one of many issues. It is a basic prerequisite for disability not to become doubly and triply burdensome. When there is an organization on the island like HYPERION, which connects advocacy, care, supported living, public presence, this should not be treated as a good story of local interest. It should be treated as a model for how a local community can keep the road open where the state often leaves gaps.

This article is written on the occasion of a loss and must respect it. But it can do something substantial. To transform emotion into clear thought and clear demand. Accessibility in Greece is not difficult because it is technically impossible. It is difficult because the country carries a mixture of fragmented planning, lax control, lack of maintenance and social tolerance for practices that negate the result. The data show that disability concerns a huge part of society, the data show large employment gaps and increased risk of poverty and exclusion, European tools are pushing for compliance in the market, not only in the public sector. What remains is to prove that Greece can transform obligations into daily operation and that communities can stand by their people not with wishes, but with space, road, service, dignity.

Maria Lada was one of those presences who do not let disability become invisible. Kefalonia has HYPERION, it has people who know how to build structures, it has experience of collective advocacy. The question is not whether there is a way. There is. The question is whether society will make it everyone's business, so that accessibility ceases to be news and becomes normality. This is the only kind of honor that has real weight, when a community bids farewell to one of its own.

Kefalonian Globe expresses its sincere condolences to the family and people of Maria Lada, as well as to the community of HYPERION who knew and walked with her. Her memory remains bound by a struggle that cannot be postponed, the struggle for equal access, safety and dignity for people with disabilities.