Wheelchair bags are awful. There aren’t any good ones, I’m convinced of it. I have a friend who designs and makes bags and we have a vague plan to get together – when time and pandemics allow – to come up with some non-terrible designs. If I convince her we can sell some to other disappointed shleppers, she might make some prototypes.

So here’s a discussion of what’s wrong with wheelchair bags, some things I think are OK and what I’m looking for in a product.

I’m aware, to begin with, that my requirements for anything are always slightly different to everyone else’s. I don’t think I’m particularly unusual or especially fussy, but either I evidently am or I’m less inclined to compromise when it seems like an optimal solution should be straightforward. After all, I’m a software developer and we shouldn’t forget the Programmer’s Credo:

The Programmer’s Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.

Anyway, I think my requirements for wheelchair bags are pretty straightforward:

• A small, easily-accessible pouch of some sort for my phone, credit cards, cash… Preferably easily detachable and take-awayable. Needs to be in easy reach of either hand (I’m ambidextrous) and, crucially, easy to open and operate with one hand. When I’m trying to pay for something in a shop, particularly when the counter is very high, fumbling with bag, cards and purchases is annoying and occasionally mortifying. Like that time I dropped all of the above in a busy shop and then couldn’t pick up my credit card. Nobody helped me, presumably because they didn’t want me to feel patronised. Then it lasted too long for anyone to break down and offer to help and it was all, as I said, mortifying.
• A bag big enough for my laptop, kindle, sunglasses, earbuds, various sundry bits and pieces and a small amount of shopping. This must be easy to attach and detach while I’m sitting in the chair (it’s a lot easier to use a bag on my knee in supermarkets than to balance a basket on there). It must be easy to get stuff in and out and to open and close, while I’m sitting in the chair. There should be a couple of separate compartments inside and there should be pouches on the outside I can easily reach (gloves, mask, hand sanitiser, earbuds, sunglasses depending on what I’m doing).

And that’s it, really. I’m willing to compromise on the distribution of items in the bags: I don’t mind too much if my earbuds and sunglasses go in the pouch rather than the bag, for instance. I just need two separate spaces I can organise how I need them at the time, which are both easily accessible and usable when I’m sitting in the chair.

It turns out that latter point is a problem. There are various kinds of bags, but let’s look at the most common first: the backpack type.

These basically come in one design, with slight variations. This one:

It has loops to go over the chair’s push handles and most have straps that reach around under the backrest cushion to secure it in place. These usually have easy release clips.

The only good things about these bags is that they have a decent capacity, some have pouches on the sides to put stuff you need to be at hand and they are are easy to put on and take off the chair providing you are not sitting in it. The bad things about these bags are:

• They rely on the chair having push handles. Many don’t. Mine does, but they are of a type that fold down flat. They are sloped downward even when in the upright position so not very suitable for this type of bag. I’m always worried that it will fall off.
• Having a bag on the back of the chair is not ideal, especially when full of heavy things. It changes the centre of gravity. It can pull the chair over backwards. When I’ve used the toilets in trains with a heavy bag on the chair, the chair has fallen over the moment I got out of it, which was seriously annoying and inconvenient. But perhaps that can’t be helped.
• It’s really difficult to get things in and out of the bag when I’m sitting in the chair. My upper body mobility is pretty good and I can twist around in the chair, but the design of the bag means it’s still very difficult to use, plus
• It’s really difficult even to open and close the bag when I’m sitting in the chair. The zip runs around the top and upper sides of the bag, and it’s virtually impossible to get the leverage to pull the zip around the corner. I think this could be fixed by making the zip a slope, but more of this later.
• The bag doesn’t sit well either over or under the pushbar.
• The straps that fasten the bag to the chair are too long, trail everywhere if you’re not careful and slip easily so the bag is in constant danger of lurching into the wheels.

Currently, I have a slightly different backpack, but along much the same design. It doesn’t have handle straps, but instead velcro straps that reach under the backrest cushion and attach to the velcro there. This seems to work better than I’d expected. There are still problems, though: the straps are attached by quick release catches, but these are so ridiculously over-engineered that they’re really difficult to fasten and unfasten if the bag is heavy. Also, to fit right, the bag has to slot under the push handle. This is fine, it keeps the bag securely fastened to the chair, but it also makes clipping it on even harder if I’m sitting in the chair. It also makes it impossible to get stuff in and out of the bag when it’s clipped to the chair, largely defeating the object of having it in the first place. It doesn’t have pouches on the sides for my gloves etc. I hate it.

I have two other, interchangeable, bags. which fit under the chair. One of these, I bought for my old chair and it fitted onto the strut for the footrest. I liked it. I could fit in my phone, cards and cash as above. It slotted onto a mount so I could take it away with me if I wasn’t near my chair for some reason. It was close to hand and easy to operate with one hand. Exactly per requirements above.

Unfortunately, it does not fit on the strut of my new chair. I’ll work out a scheme to do it eventually, but I haven’t had time to mess around.

The second, which slots onto the same type of mount, is just about large enough for my gloves, sunglasses and earbuds. The only place I can fit it, though, is underneath the chair, on the axle mount. It’s really, really hard and inconvenient to get stuff in and out of it. It really is a nice bag and I can swap it out for the smaller one if I need to, but it’s in the wrong place for me and I need to engineer a new mounting solution when I have chance. I’ll let you know how that goes. It’s also far too small for my laptop. I’d really like to be able to just slot my laptop under the seat.

So currently, I have two main bags and neither of them are really any good. The situation would be intolerable if the chair didn’t have a little velcro-fastening pouch underneath where I can keep my phone and a pouch on the back where I can keep my gloves. Needless to say, the pouch on the back is very hard to access when the backpack is on there.

I’m aware that there are other bags that fit under the chair, but most of these seem small and look as though they’d swing around annoyingly (or look difficult to access).

So I need a better solution. I can’t believe more people aren’t in exactly this position, with similar requirements.

So, hopefully with my friend as mentioned above, I’m going to design some new bags, beginning with a backpack. There’s nothing startlingly innovative about the design I have in mind except that it has two compartments at different levels. The first (at the back as it is mounted on the chair) will be thin and solely a laptop compartment. It will fit snugly under the push handle (that is, pushed up underneath it from below and sticking out the top) and have a sloping opening so I can easily work the zip while sitting in the chair. The second compartment will fit underneath the pushbar, have more volume and open to the top and front. This will be for shopping and will fold as flat as possible when I’m not using it. There will be pouches on the sides for essential stuff. The quick release straps will be actually quick release and properly adjustable so they can be where they need to. There will be a long loop handle on the very top of the laptop compartment so I can easily hold the bag in place while I’m attaching the straps.

I’ll post drawings as I make ones I’m not embarrassed by so you can see what I’m talking about. And I’ll post about ideas for other bags (eg for storing my laptop under my seat) in a later post. I might also tell you about my bandoleer, which I love, but am a bit embarrassed to wear out in the wild.

Let me know what you think about those designs or about any problems you have with wheelchair bags and ideas you’ve come up with to solve them.