I know when I tried to talk to the management at that bowling alley about the cut-curb (or lack-thereof) situation, they told me that the local township ordinances prohibited them from putting cut curbs anywhere other than where they currently were. This made absolutely no sense to me. However, too many other obstacles are my life right now, so I just plan on never frequenting this place again (I’m not a bowler anyway, I was just meeting a couple people there).
Do you think they’re lying? I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that some city ordinances were quite wacky.
agreed - it’s not the alley’s fault. I’ve run in to municipal red tape in many instances.
eta - If the alley owns the land, lot, sidewalk, and building, then it’s their fault.
So…you fraudulently labeled Tux as a service dog so he could stay in the room with you?
Slightly different, but our local council came up with this gem lately- a textured pavement, designed as a marker for blind people to indicate pedestrian crossings, which instead leads straight into 4 lanes of busy traffic, with no crossing. :smack:
It’s quite common here to see an accessible toilet (as a seperate room), built perfectly to proper standards, but full of junk and used as a store room.
When my parents opened their visitor centre, we actually spend a day pushing each other round in a spare wheelchair, checking how good the access was, and how readable signs were and things like that. It really should be standard practice in designing places, it’s amazing how much difference there is between what you think is fine and what’s actually fine.
Hate to point fingers, but that is what it sounds like. And every person who kites a pet in as a service dog makes it harder for people to take real service dogs seriously. Especially the nasty little lap rats … because pwecious snukumz just has to go everywhere with their inane owner.:rolleyes:
I just thought of this - last Sunday, I was out with a friend. On the way home, we stopped at Arby’s (classy, I know). I was driving, she is disabled but had forgotten to bring her placard. Was no big deal, the few places we stopped I could get close enough that she could hobble with parking in regular spaces. (Cane/walker, no wheelchair.)
The Arby’s at Great Lakes Crossing in Aubrn Hills, MI has their disabled parking slots across the lot from the front door, instead of right up close.
anecdote: I know someone with a real service dog who is sometimes questioned and very often annoyed by people who want proof that her dog is legit.
No, Tux had a service dog tag and we were completely honest about his status as a puppy being raised for a service dog school. The laws covering them vary from state to state and may not have been meant to cover them. Usually we select hotels that allow pets and avoid discussion of our dog’s status. There aren’t that many places to stay in Warren and none of them allowed 70 pound pet dogs.
Several years ago I broke a leg bone (well disintegrated it really) and ended up in a wheelchair for about 5 weeks. I also used crutches a bit, but my upper body strength wasn’t really up to par enough for me to get around very well with them.
At any rate, at the time I taught PE classes at a university in Anchorage. The way to the pool (for those wheelchair bound) went something like this. Up a looooooooong wheelchair ramp to an elevator —> up one floor —> through a set of double doors —> down a long hallway to another elevator —> down one floor into the locker room.
Ridiculous!
I think this is gonna be the thread winner, here.
I am trying very hard to stay OUT of a power chair/wheelchair/whatever. I’ve lost about a third of my total body weight, I exercise every day, and my stamina has improved…but I still have balance and mobility issues. I can’t walk for long distances, and I can’t walk for a long time. I need to sit down now and then. I mean, I’ve improved a lot, but I just can’t go out walking for 8 hours like I used to do. And sometimes I fall over for no visible reason. There are times when I want to go somewhere, but I don’t feel up to walking in 100+ heat for 20 minutes. And in fact, my doctor has forbidden me to do so.
There’s a medical complex in Fort Worth that has a lot of doctors and medical services in it, but I won’t go to it. The complex is sprawled over several huge buildings, and the directions and maps are pretty much nonexistent, as is the signage. The only real way to find out which building has a particular doctor in it is to go in and ask at the information desk. The buildings aren’t visibly labelled, and by the time I’ve made all those stupid parking lot turns, I can’t tell which way is North any more. So, I don’t go to any doctor or service that’s located in that complex.
It’s not just me, there are a LOT of people with heart or breathing problems that can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be out in extreme weather, or who can’t walk far without resting.
I got married in a church that had a few steps at the front door, but no wheelchair ramp. I was assured that they had a moveable ramp that would be set up before the wedding. My mother, one of my bridesmaids, and another family member were wheelchair users.
I wasn’t there when my mom was helped in, so I didn’t see what the ramp situation was. I’m guessing she somehow didn’t get the full picture on the way in, though I’ve never figured out how that happened. I assume she had a crowd of people around who were helping her and possibly blocking her view.
Anyway, after the wedding, Mom went out without anyone in front of her. Fortunately, my very strong sister was right behind her, because that was when they discovered that the so-called ramp was a fucking piece of plywood propped up on the steps! It was icy out anyway, and Mom’s wheels just pushed the plywood forward. My sister grabbed her as she started to tilt forward, and the chair bumped down the steps.
I actually belonged to a separate small church that used this church building , but didn’t own it, so we could not put in a ramp ourselves. After I was married. I began taking a developmentally disabled teenage boy I knew to church with me most weeks. It took several of us to get him up and down that stupid piece of plywood every week.
I asked the pastor of the church that owned the building about putting up a ramp. He said they didn’t need one because they didn’t have any members in wheelchairs, and it wouldn’t look good on their building. My church offered to pay for it and do the work, but it was not allowed.
Like most people who have had close family or friends with disabilities, I could go on for a while.
Lord, I hate those pavements. I do hope blind people find them useful (when they don’t lead into traffic, of course), but… in many locations, the area which is textured is the same area which slopes down, and those textures are hell on most people’s feet - I’m not really sure the idea works at all.
This is a problem I’m running into often. Pennsylvania statute says that the reserved spaces for people with disabilities should be the spaces “closest to the door.” Stores are, however, interpreting that as “closest to the door without having to cross traffic” because they’re presuming wheelchair/scooter use, presuming that it’s dangerous for people on wheels to cross traffic in a parking lot, and presuming that distance doesn’t matter for people on wheels. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people with placards/plates aren’t on wheels at all.
At my local Costco and my local Aldi, this “no crossing traffic” ideal means that the reserved spots are twice as far as the actual closest spots.
Ah, Christian love in action! Yeah, this is what we hear from businesses all the time, too. “We don’t have any customers who use wheelchairs, so we don’t need to install a ramp/widen the aisles/to kill the clutter.” Yeah, and so long as you don’t have a ramp or navigable aisles, you’ll never have customers (or church members, etc.) who use wheelchairs because you’ve made it blatantly clear that they’re not welcome.
As an aside, can we please kill the phrase “wheelchair bound?” It’s dismissive, and inaccurate. People are wheelchair users. They’re no more “wheelchair bound” than walking folk are shoe bound. Wheelchairs are tools, not life imperatives. (Most wheelchair users aren’t paralyzed and can and do walk in certain circumstances, especially in their own homes.)
I should probably clarify that other washrooms exist in the building that are accessible without traversing stairs, although they’re all at one end of one wing of a very large building - and even those are only nominally accessible, as they’re retrofitted and still have narrow doors and sharp turns to get in them, and around to the cubicles.
I think as long as the client is satisfied and the building meets code they don’t care about any of the people that use the building. Disabled or not.
I was planning for a meeting in a certain hotel, and I knew there were some handicapped people who would be attending. The hotel said they were very very compliant with ADA, which actually doesn’t mean that much. I had a friend who came and checked it out via her wheelchair. She has a couple of issues that she runs into a lot. One is the ramp that’s too steep, and then spills you out into perilous traffic (she calls it “Roller Coaster Ramp”). So this hotel had a couple of those, but also had an adequate entrance.
However, in our conference space there was a so-called handicap-accessible restroom that had its own little set of three stairs to go up. Ding. She had to go up two floors to find an actual handicap-accessible restroom, and then she could get into the stall in her chair but couldn’t shut the door. Ding. She also didn’t trust the support, which she relies on the get out of the chair. Ding.
There were other hotels with more favorable rates, and this wasn’t necessarily the deciding factor, but it really played a big part in moving us to another hotel. (I went to another conference there a few months later and noticed that, on the restroom with its own stairway, the hotel had “complied” by taking the handicap-accessible sign down. I have no clue what possessed them to put it on there in the first place.)
And parking lots. I think they must be designed by one set of people, and then a complete other set paints the lines, with no communication whatsoever. But in an office I used to work in the actual handicapped people (1) avoided the actual handicapped spots, because the curb cut in the parking lot led directly into nice, thick, well-tended grass.
My local Y. It has a great many handicapped parking spots right in front, where the handicapped entrance is not–it’s on the other side of the building. You can’t go anywhere in this Y without going up or down a couple of steps at least. For instance from the women’s locker room, to get to the pool you go through the shower, then down a half flight of steps, then down a corridor, then open a door and go down one step, then there is a really cold little area (if you’re wet) that you walk through, then you go up three steps and into the entrance to the pool. There is an elevator, yes. But to get to the elevator you’d need to come out of the shower, get through the dressing area, go out into the lobby–well, almost into the lobby. And I’m not quite sure how they handle those last three steps, which are right after you get out of the elevator.
However, there is a hoist thing on one side of the pool so that people who aren’t that mobile can get into and out of the pool (I have never seen anyone use it). Likewise there are steps from the lobby down into the basketball court, and again, I don’t think the elevator goes there. Unlike the pool, I have seen people in wheelchairs in the gym area. I just don’t know how they got there.
My friend who did the hotel for us actually got work as a consultant for places that have to be compliant (like hospitals; actually I don’t know if she did anything but hospitals). She said nobody had ever gotten 100% on her surveys. The ramps are usually a problem, which is particularly stupid in hospitals because every single patient has to leave the hospital in a wheelchair pushed by hospital personnel. In one case the ramp was separated from the handicapped parking by a railing, and it was a long way back–not a problem for the patients who, at the end of the ramp, got out of the personnel-pushed chair and went to their car. But really annoying for anyone who had to stay in the chair. But the place still got a good enough rating to pass and be HCFA-certified.
I think a lot of places just assume anyone in a wheelchair is so frail they are always pushed around by someone else. Big, brawny someone elses. So long routes don’t matter, steep ramps don’t matter…
I saw we should sick Jamie McGarry on them.
I work in a high school in a three story-building. There is an elevator. To prevent students from abusing the elevator, it can only be called with a key. The key that does this is the master key that unlocks virtually every other door in the building. This key is of course far too valuable to give to those students who actually need to use the elevator. So they have to stand in front of the elevator and wait for a teacher to come along and help them. :smack:
It is a fight. I am remembering our church installing a family friendly/assessable restroom. We used an old cloak room that was open on one side. The door could have gone anywhere. It ended up next to the wall where the sink was meaning a very tight turn getting in and out. We made the builder move it over some. It was better, but not as good as it could have been. Also the light switch was left in the corner. I suggested to the minister that I move it. He said no. I should have told him I was moving it unless session voted to forbid it.