Home Accessibility: 300 Tips for Making Life Easier (editie 2012)

I found this book to be very insightful. I thought some of it was common sense. I thought it was great the way the author Shelley Peterman Schwarz gives her personal experience in how to organize your home to make life easier. I thought it was great the she gives you places to go look for help with the expense of it . I think this is a great book for those who have to help with their parents. I wish I would have had it when I was taking care of my father in law. ( )

My initial feeling was that this book would have been better as a series of magazine articles. Then I realized that it's better as a collected group of tips and discussions and resources. Some of the information is stated without attribution -- do people in their 80s really require three times the light of a 20-year-old? who says? -- but much of it seems well-grounded. The author isn't an expert by objective standards, but by living the need for adaptation. As I've gotten older, I've realized that wealthy people can afford to make change easily, but I've worried about what I'll need to do as someone without much money. This book has good ideas. Probably few will use all or even many, but if a few ideas make life easier, it's money well-spent. ( )

I had lost hope that this book was going to come, and last week I discovered that it was between the mailbox and house wall! It was very informative, some of it was simple common sense but there were many things I wouldn't have thought of. I am not disabled, but have friends visit me frequently so I like to have things accessible for them to come over. I'll pass my copy on to one of them to review.

I'm glad I didn't lose hope at this book ever arriving. This is a terrific resource for people buying, building, or even remodeling a home! I knew a lot of the information in it, but wish I'd had some other of what was in it before we built our relatively accessible home, 10 years ago. It would have helped! Even for people who are not now disabled, this information and these resources are, although not comprehensive, very useful . We may not all become disabled, but we all will get old. We all may need a little more accessibility in our lives. This book tells you how and where to accomplish that. Excellent resource. ( )

I had high hopes for this book because I am always looking for ways to make my home easier to navigate for my husband who has had Parkinson's disease for 20 years. The book is organized as a list of things that can be done to make a home more universally accessible. Reviewing chapter by chapter, I realized that accessibility is not a one-size-fits-all proposition and many of the suggestions were not useful in our case. Nonetheless, Shelley Schwartz, who is wheel-chair bound, knows a lot about how to organize kitchens, baths, bedrooms and doorways to make life a bit easier. If you need to know how wide a doorway should be or how high a closet pole can be, this is your book. She includes resources for every chapter where the reader can learn more. For someone who is new to life in a wheelchair, I suspect the book would be very helpful. She also includes many tips on enhancing visibility, a problem shared by many with neurological problems. ( )