Word: wheelchairs
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...often the small gesture that can make an inhospitable world seem welcoming. After a sunglasses vendor in Palatine, Illinois, advertised her sign-language skills, people with hearing impairments flocked to her stand to discuss frame shapes and lens tints. At the Chicago Botanic Garden, shelves and pulley systems enable wheelchair users to inspect a special exhibit. In the rest rooms there, a cheap innovation safeguards the disabled from the nasty scaldings their legs routinely endure in public places: the hot-water pipes beneath the sinks are wrapped with insulation. When a business takes the time to consider such obstacles, says...
...hand, the law's mandate requiring universal access to public buildings, transit systems and communications networks has made a once daunting world more navigable. Curb ramps, lift-equipped buses and extrawide rest-room stalls for wheelchair users are now as common a feature of the American landscape as are closed-captioned TV titles. A phone relay system called Text Telephone enables the deaf to order pizza. "There's a guy in Georgia who has a job for the first time because his bus has a lift, and a woman in Kentucky who's seen her brother play baseball...
...precisely 1:25 p.m. on Hayes Street near Franklin in San Francisco, Mary Lou Breslin's motorized wheelchair spat out a shower of sparks and died. Breslin, 50, disabled by polio since childhood, had been shopping with her friend, Kathy Martinez, 36, who is blind. "I haven't been dead in the water for years," Breslin muttered angrily. With that, she and Martinez began to "strategize," their term for improvising in the face of emergencies. As able-bodied pedestrians moved past in a hurried blur, Breslin pulled out her cellular phone and started making calls...
...disabled. Breslin and Martinez not only live daily with such obstacles, they evaluate them as well. Breslin helped establish the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, while Martinez has traveled worldwide as a consultant on blindness (and she water-skis when she gets the chance). Despite Breslin's wheelchair breakdown, a day with them on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area shows that commonplace life has improved dramatically for them since the advent of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Several years ago, for example, Breslin stopped at a drugstore near her home in Berkeley. The tight turnstiles...
...when the train pulled into the San Francisco Shopping Centre, a mall on Market Street admired for its accessibility, the wheelchair lift refused to work. Breslin tinkered and finally made it move by asking a bystander to hold the bottom gate tightly shut while she pushed buttons inside. Later she spoke of the frustrations of "the Blanche DuBois life," a reference to the lonely, high-strung character in A Streetcar Named Desire who relies on "the kindness of strangers...