Disability: Separate but Equal?

By Cody Boisclair

The University of Georgia campus is home to an impressive collection of political memorabilia and documents in the Richard B. Russell Library, the only such collection in the entire state. To get there, one need only take a right turn upon approaching the front entrance to the Main Library and climb a short flight of stairs to find the entrance.

Easier said than done, of course, for a fair number of famous Georgians — individuals such as former Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee; Darius Weems, a teenager with muscular dystrophy profiled in the documentary “Darius Goes West”; and Kyle Maynard, a wrestler born with no arms or legs — all of whom are unable to negotiate this entrance because they use wheelchairs.

As it turns out, there is a wheelchair-accessible entrance to the Russell Library, but finding it is no easy task. Despite the fact that able-bodied individuals can simply walk straight in, there is not even a sign outside the door to indicate the existence of any accessible entrance. According to directions on the library’s web site, finding the accessible entrance requires going into the main library and inquiring at the security desk for access to an elevator that’s normally hidden from the public.

Yet as inconvenient as that is, that’s not the worst case of inaccessibility on UGA’s campus. Take, for instance, the Holmes-Hunter building: only one level of that building is accessible, and there is literally no way to get to the building’s upper levels, in which a number of important administrative offices are located, in a wheelchair.

These examples serve to highlight a problem that, despite many advances, still remains quite significant: In spite of the passage of laws which require public places to be made accessible to those with disabilities, this accessibility is often provided in a manner that’s hardly convenient or even equitable. The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in July 1990, was intended to put a halt to disability discrimination on a number of levels. Aside from provisions regarding the employment of disabled individuals, an entire section of the act, Title III, was dedicated to the accessibility of “public accommodations.” This term encompasses everything from transportation systems and schools to privately-owned hotels, restaurants and stores. More specifically, Title III requires not only that all “new construction” be built with certain accessibility guidelines in mind, but also that barriers mentioned in these guidelines be removed in existing buildings if “readily achievable.”

It’s a completely reasonable idea. For wheelchair users, wheelchairs are hardly “confining,” as the rhetoric by non-disabled individuals often states; rather, wheelchairs are freeing, in that they confer an ability to get around independently. But of course, that independence is hampered whenever buildings are not made wheelchair-accessible. As Darius Weems himself puts it in a rap featured in “Darius Goes West”: “Only buildings can give me opposition / But the problem’s with the buildings, not my condition.”

In fact, there’s a growing attitude toward disability known as the social model, which echoes the sentiment expressed by Weems in that quotation. In the social model, disability isn’t determined by the condition of one’s body; it’s determined by the environment one’s in. An advertisement for French electric company EDF and a short film by the British Disability Rights Commission both demonstrate this concept by turning it on its head: they illustrate how inconvenient it might be for an able-bodied individual to live in a world in which the majority of people have disabilities.

Prior to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it was quite a wilderness for individuals with disabilities. For just one example of the absurd accessibility barriers that existed at that time, one again needs to look no further than UGA. Remember the Holmes-Hunter building mentioned previously, in which only the bottom floor is accessible? In 1988, just two years before the ADA was signed into law, UGA’s Disability Services department was located on an upper floor of that very building. nobody, it seems, realized the utter ridiculousness of having a department dedicated to disability issues located on a wheelchair-inaccessible floor — at least, not until a student literally climbed out of his wheelchair and crawled up the stairs to enter the office. Soon afterward, the office was quickly moved to the first floor. The ADA has significantly decreased the number of egregious accessibility barriers such as that one; yet even then, some planners simply try to flout the law hoping they don’t get caught. One scene in “Darius Goes West”, which was filmed in 2005, shows the crew stopping for a bathroom break at a gas station, the entrance to which is located on a step with no ramp or other wheelchair-accessible approach. In this case, a ramp would have been a relatively inexpensive accommodation — it only needs to go up a single step — so there seems to be little excuse for its absence.

Or for that matter, planners may simply assume that people with disabilities aren’t interested in certain locations. The filmmakers of “Darius Goes West” learned that to get to the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, one needs to climb a flight of about fifty steps — quite a disappointment for Darius Weems, who was quite enthusiastic about going into the arch.

Even today, some locations on UGA’s campus are completely inaccessible, as I learned while talking to some students with disabilities — and not just the aforementioned Holmes-Hunter Building. There is also the Fine Arts building, which has four floors, only the bottom three of which are accessible; if one is in a wheelchair and needs to attend a show in the Balcony Theatre, located on the top floor, one’s simply out of luck. The same goes for any philosophy classes held on the second floor of peabody hall: there is simply no way to get beyond the building’s first floor in a wheelchair. The same goes for the upper three floors of Baldwin hall; despite numerous renovations to the building, all but the lowest two floors are inaccessible.

Even when individuals do plan for accessibility, issues of a more minor nature may still remain, as planners follow the letter of the law without considering the convenience, or lack thereof, involved. Numerous buildings and services may be accessible in a technical sense, but could hardly be considered practically accessible. Again, the Fine Arts building at UGA serves as an excellent example: even among the three floors that are accessible, there is no easy way to go between them in a wheelchair. One must instead exit the building, wheel around the building to another parking lot, and enter through a separate entrance — in contrast to simply being able to climb a flight of stairs between floors. A similar situation holds for the accessible floor of Baldwin hall; the first floor is split into two mutually inaccessible parts, with entrances across the building from one another, while entering the ground floor requires the use of yet another entrance. LeConte Hall, home to the History and Philosophy departments, is even worse: the second floor is ostensibly accessible, but only by means of a wheelchair lift that, as I learned, is not always operational even when the building is fully open.

Yet wheelchair accessibility at least tends to be considered in ADA planning, even when that planning is far from ideal. More troublesome barriers continue to exist for individuals with disabilities that are less frequently considered.

Another section of the ADA, Title IV, led to the creation of a telephone relay service for the deaf and hard of hearing. A deaf individual can, in theory, make a call using a teletype terminal to any hearing individual by way of a publicly-funded operator. Yet many businesses simply refuse to take relay calls at all precisely because a middleman is listening in — or, worse yet, hang up after mistaking the relay operator for a telemarketer.

For that matter, if one is deaf, good luck enjoying the same first-run movies that hearing audiences enjoy. Movie theaters do, in fact, exist with captioning; however, the nearest one to Athens is about an hour away in Gwinnett County. Even in captioned theaters, typically only one movie is presented with captioning every week, in contrast to the dozens of choices available to hearing audiences.

Ironically enough, I myself ran into a related hurdle while tracking down a copy of “Darius Goes West” in my research for this article. I have a condition known as auditory processing disorder which makes it quite difficult to understand speech in the midst of a lot of background noise, and of course, the documentary genre quite frequently includes audio recorded under less-than-ideal conditions. As “Darius Goes West” was an independent release made on a relatively low budget, not only the initial theatrical release, but even the initial DVD release, included no closed-captioning. A transcript was made available to UGA, which put together a closed-captioned version from which I was able to benefit — but it was not the easiest task to obtain a copy of this version, as the version that was actually in wide circulation was the original un-captioned one.

Accessibility for the blind is similarly ill-considered. As mentioned above, public transportation systems are one of the areas covered by the ADA. For obvious reasons, blind people tend not to drive and take advantage of alternative transportation instead. Yet it’s quite common for bus drivers not to announce bus stops, which is something that I’ve experienced quite frequently on UGA’s campus buses. Even information about the routes themselves can be inaccessible. Several years ago, the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Agency was sued by a blind rider for failing to provide their online bus schedules in an accessible format, forcing blind users to find clumsy Braille schedules or make phone calls for schedule information instead.

For that matter, many buildings completely lack Braille signage, a necessity for way-finding for those who are completely blind. Imagine having to navigate a building where none of the doors have signs above them; that’s precisely the experience many blind individuals have of navigating a building with no Braille cues. And it’s more of a rarity than one might think. For one example, up until the summer of 2008, Creswell Hall, one of the main residence halls at UGA, was completely lacking in any sort of Braille cues.

What few people seem to consider, in all of the above cases, is that accessibility enhancements can benefit a much larger population than the accommodations may originally have been designed for. Anyone who has ever watched a TV show in a noisy restaurant, following along by reading the captioning on screen, has benefited from an accommodation originally designed for the deaf. And curb cuts at crosswalks, originally designed to benefit individuals in wheelchairs, have the side effect of making it easier to carry a stroller or suitcase across the street.

Further, disability can happen to anyone at any time. One popular term used amongst the disability community is “temporarily able-bodied,” indicating, in other words, that any of us might eventually acquire a disability. If one has broken one’s leg and has to use crutches, automatic doors and elevators make getting around much easier.

Thus, it only makes sense to design new facilities with as many accessibility features as possible, and to retrofit older ones to a sensible degree as quickly as possible; after all, even those who think themselves invulnerable may very well need those very accommodations at some point in the future.