Just in time for Blogging Against Disablism Day, I had an interesting conversation about accessibility on campus. I was approached randomly by a woman who told me that we'd met during my freshman year here, and that she was one of the operations people in Stata. After some small talk, she asked me how access had been recently. I didn't particularly want to get into the discussion then, so I was honest but brief - the ground floor was fine, but my occasional trips to other floors suggested that there might be problems.


We were in the basement, just around the corner from a door that now has a power operator, thanks to several months of noisemaking on my part a year or two ago. Debi thanked me for my work on that project, and told me that she and her office had been asking Facilities to look at that door "for a while", but it wasn't until I had gotten involved that anyone had bothered responding to them. Similarly, their complaints about the near-continuous malfunctions of power operators and the overly heavy doors on above-ground floors had been ignored until I started prodding people. I can't claim credit for that yet - nothing has changed - but there is at least awareness, and hopefully progress will be made soon.

Initially, my reaction to this conversation was quite upbeat. Someone outside of Disability Services had noticed my crusade, and supported it! The timing was excellent: I had just recently begun yet another push for compliance, and while I had been assured that the necessary changes would be made, I was (and am) not holding my breath, so positive reinforcement was a good thing.

But something occurred to me. A consistent theme was beginning to appear: I contact Facilities with a specific problem that indicates a problem with the way capital projects are planned (note that all the violations in question occurred in post-1990 buildings). Facilities responds somewhat defensively, assuring me that this is the first they've heard of the problem, and if they'd known it was an issue before, of course they would have taken care of it without my prompting. Time passes; after much prodding and reminding, the specific issue in question is rectified, but the larger issues of procedure and planning remain as they always have been.

And now I'm told that some of the issues I've been raising have been raised before. It is possible that Debi's people and I have been talking to different parts of Facilities, but that seems unlikely, since all ADA and accessibility related projects are supposed to go through one person. Yet I keep hearing the refrain: "this is the first I've heard of it." "We don't ignore access concerns - the law is the law, and we take it very seriously." "You're the only one who mentions these things." "I'm not aware of problems unless you bring them to me." It's hard see an alternative to the conclusion that some of the Facilities people I've been working with are not just inefficient, but insincere and disingenuous.


As a side note, I got an email yesterday saying that the problems I've been having with some newly installed power operators are because they forgot to factor in seasonal pressure changes caused by heating vs. air conditioning. Way to go, guys.)

A friend compared it to a differential equation (Yay engineers! Also, 2nd order diffeqs can describe door closing behavior ... hmm ...): "At first, they ignore you. You poke them about it, they respond nicely but half-assed. You remind them some more. They do nothing. You keep talking. They get pissed off. For a time they ignore you. Then, at some critical point, they can't any more." It's an interesting idea, and I think there's a very good chance it applies here. I'd guess we're in the "nicely but half-assed" stage, moving towards the pissed-off stage. I've been hesitant to push things to that stage of annoyance, fearing repercussions or even a loss of political capital (as if I had any to begin with!) but I wonder if maybe that hesitancy is itself a problem - if only continuous pressure will result in the needed change, and perhaps only continuous pressure to the point of genuine irritation.


Something needs to change; at this point, I'm not sure if I just need to stay on message, trust that I'm talking to the right people about the right things, and wait for people to come around, or if I need to escalate to another set of authority figures - perhaps the ombudspeople. (Ombuds. Hehe!) Perhaps staying on campus this summer will let me keep the conversation going even over the summer - and if I'm really lucky (and persistent), maybe we'll actually see some real changes. Either way, in writing this, I came across an excerpt from a letter written by Martin Luther King Jr. that seems to hit the critical point: that the goal is "to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue ... to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."


And what the heck, one more for the road: