“This approach to the speakers platform implies that people in wheelchairs have nothing to say. They do.”
This excerpt comes from a brilliant illustration in Getting There: A Guide to Accessibility for Your Facility by Ray Lifchez and others, funded by the California State Department of Vocational Rehabilitation in 1979. The booklet intended to help managers and designers of existing public facilities consider ways to make their environments more accessible for people visiting museums, attending classes, and engaging wit public spaces. Placing people into the sketches evoked a sense that good, humanistic design meant much more than mechanical diagrams and standards. Creating an inclusive, accessible world meant changing social attitudes to treat people with differences with dignity and respect.
Following the independent living user-led approach to disability, it advocates that people with disabilities have a role in the process of surveying barriers and to help facility management work through stereotypes in the built environment, like assuming that a lecturer or professor wouldn’t have wheelchair or power chair. The barrier-free guide was a collaborative project engaging both Sacramento and Berkeley’s disabled community, where Mary Ann Hiserman and Susan O’Hara were both design consultants.
Twenty-six pages from the guide have been scanned to give the reader a better idea of the guide’s contents. (Click on the link to the right to download the file.) Pay attention to the quirky hand drawn diagrams, the booklet’s introduction and the similarity in thematic language to Design for Independent Living.