Saturday, October 18, 2008

Not accessible



What, you are asking yourself, is that picture? Why, that's the door to the "accessible" women's restroom at the Travis County Expo Center. The other restroom, in the other building we went to, had a large garbage can holding the door open, making it impossible for anyone in a wheelchair to get by. This one, as you can tell, is impossible to open if you use a wheelchair. And once in, while the wheelchair user stall was large enough, the door swung inward, making it difficult to impossible for someone in a manual wheelchair to shut or open the door on her own. But I guess they figured that no one in a manual wheelchair would be there without an assistant, seeing as how every single entry door had a threshold so steep that it required both being pulled in backwards while a third person held the door to get in or out. And then there were the vendor booths and exhibit sites, in the stock barn, placed so that there was a drop off the pavement into sand at each one.

There is a reason why the Texas Civil Rights Project is suing the Expo Center for failure to be accessible despite their recent multimillion dollar face lift. Go get 'em, tigers!

(While the site itself has led Carapace and me to decide we will never again go to an event held there, the Expo staff themselves are decent people working in an impossible place. Thanks, especially to Isaiah. We couldn't have even got away from the car if it wasn't for him going out of his way to fix Carapace's chair.)

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