While the closest I’ve personally been to disability has been minor surgery on a heel, we have quite a few posters who are permanently disabled and many more who’ve been temporarily disabled. For some reason, disabled accesibility has been very much in my mind these last few years.
I’ve noticed quite often buildings which were designed with accesibility in mind but which failed. Maybe they had ramps everywhere - except at the only gate. Maybe they had wide-door, disabled-designated bathrooms, with the path to them barred by a narrower-than-usual door. Maybe there were hallways where going around a corner in a chair involved a manoeuver so complicated that people watching someone perform it successfully applauded. Maybe the automatic gates (the ones whose opening mechanism doubled as the clocking-in system) were wide enough for a chair, but not for someone on crutches. Don’t get me started on signage - the lift’s buttons are in Braille, but for anything else your name better be Matt Murdock.
Perhaps “spending one day going around with your eyes blindfolded, another one in a wheelchair and a third on crutches” should be a part of any architect’s training.
Please share your stories of good, bad and ugly Disabled Accesible Design. Thanks!
Don’t get me started!
I’ve seen strip malls with handicap parking spots but no curb cuts on the sidewalk.
At one supermarket, the spaces opposite the entrance (and by default opposite the curb cut) were marked “Reserved for Families with Small Children” and the handicap spots were way at the end of the bank of parking spaces.
I’ve been in restaurants in which the restrooms have been retrofitted to be accessible, but the entrance to the restaurant is up a flight of stairs
I’ve been in a rheumatologist’s office with no handicap parking and no accesible bathroom.
In my office there is an accessible stall in each restroom, but it does not have the symbol on the door so everyone uses it even when the regular stalls are available, leaving me to wait and risk an “accident”.
I often wonder what goes through the mind of architects who design parking lots. Do they think that all handicapped people are in wheelchairs and therefore do not need to be right next to the door?
The hotel at which we have regional competition had sufficient accesible restroom facilities on the public/meeting/event floors, until it was taken over by another chain in 2007, who decided to replace the large stalls with two standard ones, leaving the only accessible restroom in the lobby as far away from the elevators as possible.
I brought this to the attention of the ADA Commission, and when we were there in March, the hotel had already begun reinstalling the accessible stalls.
We were going out as a family for Fathers’ Day last week. Booked the taxi which turned up with a ‘cut price conversions’ sticker on it. Dead giveaway that it was NOT going to be accessible after all.
There goes the family day out for Fathers Day. What’s the point of wheelchair accessible taxis if they’re not?
Last building I worked in [the company has since moved to a new building] had a ramp going from the driveway to the front doors. I had to tell them several times to get building maintenance out there prior to 7 am to clear the ramp when it snowed. You can not safely go up a ramp in ice and slush on crutches, and barely in a chair. The front doors are not button operated, the only button operated doors in the building other than elevators [heh] are the 2 bathrooms on the ground floor. All the offices no matter who the occupant was [the building had 4 floors of my company and 2 floors of various other people’s offices] had their main entrances or any 'public access points] locked with swipe cards that takes a juggling act to swipe the card and get to the door and open it for people on crutches, in a wheelchair impossible.
Literally, they would have had to spend a fair amount of money adding swipe auto-open doors everywhere. Easily half a million or more.
Business buildings are not designed to be easily accessed by people in wheelchairs now the security paranoids have managed to lock down every damned door in the building. I say put pushbuttons everywhere and issue everybody tasers for security.
When my sister had hip surgery last year and was on crutches for a few months she noticed that the handicapped ramp at her college had a big sewer grate at the bottom. Maneuvering the crutches around that was always quite the feat, or so I’m told. Of course, being Miss Shy, she absolutely refused to go and ask if there might be another handicapped accessible exit somewhere else that she could use.
The building where I work has one stall in each washroom that is adapted for disabled people - it’s wider, door opens outward, handrails fitted, etc.
The washrooms are situated on the alternate landings between flights of stairs in the stairwell. Only accessible via a narrow, heavy door into the stairwell, then a flight of ten steps.
Our front and back doors have automatic buttons (they seem too quick to me, but what do I know) but the bathrooms do not. We don’t have anyone normally in our offices with a wheelchair, but we do have a bank that is open to the public, and one day I came across a wheelchair-bound woman struggling to get the door open, wheel out of the way, and go through it. Two doors, no less. I helped her, but I realized I had never even noticed how difficult that must be.
This. My father uses a walker, but even with this, he can’t walk long distances. Often the handicapped parking space is so far away from the destination (restaurant, restroom on interstate rest stop, etc) he just can’t make it. The architects seem to think that all disabled people use scooters or motorized wheelchairs – but it just isn’t so.
Just a poster that seems to be a little bit preoccupied with his disability. My opinion is that it’s more the responses to him that wind up hijacking threads.
Plus, I haven’t seen him in a while. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was also tired of those responses.
Anyways:
I hate non-labeled handicapped stuff, too. In fact, I’m one of those who was guilty of using a handicapped bathroom and not realizing why the guy in the wheelchair was upset. It just didn’t dawn on me he couldn’t use the other stall, as it looked big enough.
I also remember my sister having a wheelchair after knee surgery. There was this school with this really steep ramp. But at leas that was better than going uphill in the parking lot, which is what we’d have had to do at her next school. Fortunately, she got to crutches by the time of her second surgery.
My office building, after resisting for decades finally put in button-operated doors and a small ramp up the one very low step. There is also a ramp from the parking area to the entrance, but that is blocked off all winter. There is a parking area in the subbasement of the building, but the elevator goes only to the first basement. And there appear to be no accessible toilets. The entry is down a narrow corridor and you have to open the door out. The stalls are too narrow anyway. Even an ordinary person has trouble getting into the stall and closing the door.
Last week I witnessed a woman on crutches trying to enter a Starbucks. She looked very experienced using the crutches, but the door nearly defeated her. She would open it as far as she could and then try to prevent it from closing with one crutch while getting inside. I was about to help her when she succeeded, but I knew there was a second door inside (all buildings in Montreal have this sort of airlock for the winter). Now I have seen doors that close very slowly until they are nearly closed and only then snap shut, but obviously Starbucks couldn’t be bothered to use them.
On the train I use to go home, the door at the bottom of the stairs from the station is so tightly sprung that I find it very difficult to open them and I have held it open for people who seem to be feeble. I see no reason it has to be like this.
The only “inevitable” I see here your preemptive attack on someone who has every right to post in this thread due to his experience. Take it elsewhere.
A few years ago, we had to play the service dog card to allow 70 pound Tux to stay at the Warren PA Holiday Inn. We were given a handicap room. I didn’t see any problems with it, but may not know what to look for. It was conveniently located just inside a door. Nice for us to take him out to relieve himself. We had no problem with the 8’’ step up to the door.
I asked my friend if her guide dog was trained to find the buttons that activate doors. She just grimaced.
Those of us who depend on handicap-accessibility in order to function in the world know all too well of the many pitfalls and just plain nonsensical realities that this world offers. I could go on for pages about the various situations I’ve found myself in where, for one reason or another, I was prevented (or forced to go to extreme lengths to enter/use) from visiting an establishment.
The most common issue is unusable bathrooms. Alot of restaurants/businesses were built before ADA regulations were in place and they are allowed to forgo compliance due to what is known as a “Grandfather clause”. But even some that claim to be “handicap accessible” have stall doors that are much too narrow for a wheelchair to clear through.
Or the parking lot/cut curb situations at some businesses are crazy. I was at a bowling alley a few months ago and I parked in the handicap parking space. This space had no cut curb allowing me to go from my parking car directly to the entrance of the bowling alley. I was met by a three foot high brick wall instead. So, I had to wheel WAY out into this huge parking lot, all the way around to the back side (in front of all the traffic) just to get to the cut curb so I could get to the door.
My point is that it is too huge a fight to get caught up in every single business that doesn’t comply with accessibility issues. It really is. If I made an issue out of every establishment/business that didn’t have an accessible bathroom/parking lot (or whatever), I’d never even have time to breath (much less anything else). It’s sad but true. I try to talk to management when I can, and let them know what they can do but that is it, I just go elsewhere when I can.
The cut curb thing is really strange and thoughtless to me. My fiancee and I were just discussing this yesterday as we were walking through the streets of downtown LA. Most of the corners here have cutouts, but they primarily face one direction.
So, for example, say a person in a wheelchair wants to cross the street going south. The light turns green for traffic heading north and south. However, the cutout faces primarily (or entirely) toward the east. This forces the individual to have to wheel out into the intersection in front of traffic in order to get over and into the crosswalk. I’m not sure how anybody considers that acceptable.