Accessability fail, university medical centre edition

[sami]

So, I went to the doctor's today. Same office as I went to last week, where there was a sign saying the lift (elevator) was broken and to use the stairs.

Well, first bit of fail is right there: that lift is used to get to Disability Services AND the medical centre - and, I found out today, the problem with the lift is that the rear doors aren't working... which means you need to use a different set of stairs, anyway, and you don't need to remove access to Disability Services and the Medical Centre.

Anyway, this very lift always has this:



Apparently, if you have visual or speaking/hearing difficulties, sucks to be you.

Anyway, while I was in the waiting room at the medical centre itself, I saw a woman in a wheelchair come out from the doctor's offices. I had to jump up, because the doors she was approaching look like this:



The door has no automatic opening capacity. The one on the right (in this picture) opens with the handle, and opens inwards; I'm not sure how one would handle this from a wheelchair. In any case, this wouldn't help very much, because that door on its own is too narrow for a wheelchair to go through. (Which the woman in the wheelchair pointed out as I was opening the first door, in a semi-apologetic tone; I assured her I was on it.)

So I went to open the other door, but it was sticking, because the locks had re-engaged slightly. I worked it free, opened the other door, and the woman left. (Thanking me for my assistance, and encouraging me to keep taking nice pictures - I'd been passing the time taking photos of the fish in the aquarium.)

Then, when I'd closed the doors and sat down again, one of the receptionists got up from behind the desk to make a point of putting the locking bars back in completely.



I took that after she did it. For the record, I'm 5'9" and that lock is a full upwards reach for me. It is not physically possible for a person in a wheelchair to exit the medical centre without assistance, nor to enter without banging on the door to get someone to come and let them in.

Comments

[amadi]

Can you put this in an e-mail, with the pictures, to the head of the medical centre and the facilities manager/owner? This is some serious fail.

[sami]

Might as well. I'm not sure who's in charge of facilities for that building, but if I contact the wrong person, they'll be able to tell me who the right person is - this place is on campus at my university.

[amadi]

Oh, wow, yeah. Do you have an office of disability services? They should see this too. (I'd personally also send it to my university president, but I think our systems over here are slightly different than in the UK, so you may not go that high up the chain in your first contact.)

[sami]

I'm in Australia, not the UK. :) The ultimate Dude In Charge of the university is the Vice-Chancellor, but no, this is seriously not something with which one would involve the VC as a first step. The VC's job is to deal with Serious Things that aren't Someone Else's Job, and there's quite a large number of people whose job this would be to deal with before him.

Disability Services is StudentAccess, and yeah, I'll be copying them. They're nice people.

[amadi]

Sorry for the assumption. I forget other countries say "centre" too.

I went to a very small school (1,500 students) so taking things right to the president when they were very egregious (and I think that this is) was actually common. But that is hardly a universal.

[sami]

FYI: E-mail, with photographs, sent to several relevant-looking-job-titled people at Facilities Management. :)