Finding this a bit late, maybe, but just to confirm, yes the JST are made of win. Here, have some pictures of people doing assisted mast climbs:
They're about ten metres up the mast. This may not sound much but I can assure you that when climbing it is a Very Long Way. No pictures of the wheelchair in flight because I was one of the people helping haul it up and down again.
This one was only required to be 'assisted' because Phil has obvious bits missing. He didn't actually need any help to get to the same height as the others.
She has always been totally blind, but she also climbed to the top (not the masthead, but the platform part way up), and took her camera to prove to her family what she'd been doing.
Sailing with the JST changed my life in ways completely unrelated to the fact that nearly half the people I sailed with had some kind of disability. But also, until recently I've been working in a place with frequently horrible accessibility and occasional customers with the whole range of needs in terms of special access requirements, and what I learned on the JST ships was a great help when assessing what I could do to provide the best possible* solution for them.
*But not always really a good solution. My workplace was not legally required to be accessible, and on busy days it was not always comfortable for a reasonably slim able-bodied person to get to some places. There were times when we could get wheelchair users in, then later had to wait for everyone else to go away before we could get them out again (ok, to clarify, this is in a car parking situation; park space-requiring person first, wait for them to get away from the car, then park another car annoyingly close. The other car will be intending to leave at the same time as the first one so that's not really a problem for more than a few minutes, but it's still annoying and distinctly inelegant.)
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They're about ten metres up the mast. This may not sound much but I can assure you that when climbing it is a Very Long Way. No pictures of the wheelchair in flight because I was one of the people helping haul it up and down again.
This one was only required to be 'assisted' because Phil has obvious bits missing. He didn't actually need any help to get to the same height as the others.
She has always been totally blind, but she also climbed to the top (not the masthead, but the platform part way up), and took her camera to prove to her family what she'd been doing.
Sailing with the JST changed my life in ways completely unrelated to the fact that nearly half the people I sailed with had some kind of disability. But also, until recently I've been working in a place with frequently horrible accessibility and occasional customers with the whole range of needs in terms of special access requirements, and what I learned on the JST ships was a great help when assessing what I could do to provide the best possible* solution for them.
*But not always really a good solution. My workplace was not legally required to be accessible, and on busy days it was not always comfortable for a reasonably slim able-bodied person to get to some places. There were times when we could get wheelchair users in, then later had to wait for everyone else to go away before we could get them out again (ok, to clarify, this is in a car parking situation; park space-requiring person first, wait for them to get away from the car, then park another car annoyingly close. The other car will be intending to leave at the same time as the first one so that's not really a problem for more than a few minutes, but it's still annoying and distinctly inelegant.)