Wheelchair Ramp Quotes

This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese, cheese to die for, cheese to make you happy, cheese to beat the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world, cheese so good it inspired a line every first Saturday of the month: mothers, daughters, fathers, grandparents, disabled in wheelchairs, kids, relatives from out of town, white folks from nearby Brooklyn Heights, and even South American workers from the garbage-processing plant on Concord Avenue, all patiently standing in a line that stretched from the interior of Hot Sausage’s boiler room to Building 17’s outer doorway, up the ramp to the sidewalk, curling around the side of the building and to the plaza near the flagpole.

If society is used to not seeing disabled people in stories, society becomes used to not seeing disabled people in real life. If society is used to not seeing disabled people in real life, society will continue to build a world that makes it exceedingly difficult for disabled people to participate in said world, thus perpetuating the problem. In this world, there is no need for a wheelchair ramp because hardly anyone who wins an award will need one to get onstage. But what if we took it for granted that anyone, regardless of ability, might be able to achieve, and built our stages and our environments accordingly? It is time for us to tell different stories. It is time for a different world.

God entered the yellow church on the disabled ramp. He was in a wheelchair too; He had once lost a woman too. He was silvery. Not the cheap, glittery silver of a banker’s BMW, but a muted, matte silver. Once, as He was gliding among the silvery stars with his silvery beloved, a gang of golden gods attacked them. When they were kids, God had once beaten one of them up, a short, skinny golden god who had now grown up and returned with his friends. The golden gods beat Him with golden clubs of sunlight and didn’t stop until they’d broken every bone in His divine body. It took Him years to recuperate. His beloved never did. She remained a vegetable. She could see and hear everything, but she couldn’t say a word. The silvery God decided to create a species in His own image so she could watch it to pass the time. That species really did resemble Him: battered and victimized like Him. And His silvery beloved stared wide-eyed at the members of that species for hours, stared and didn’t even shed a tear. 'What do you think,' the silvery God asked the yellow priest in frustration, 'that I created all of you like this because it's what I wanted? Because I'm some kind of pervert or sadist who enjoys all this suffering? I created you like this because this is what I know. It's the best I can do.

wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and

At the “Capitol Crawl,” people using wheelchairs, leg braces, and canes made their way to the hundred steps in front of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Then they began to climb those stairs, leaving behind whatever gear couldn’t come with them, using their arms or whatever body parts they had available for mobility. Children as young as ten participated in what became a very public, strategic spectacle. That protest is considered by historians to have been the tipping point; the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, guaranteeing curb cut changes at every city sidewalk corner and ramped entrances at all newly constructed buildings, among other new provisions.

Subject of Thought Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (in descending order) L. 580.0 Family 400.0 Brushing tongue 150.0 Earplugs 100.0 Bill-paying 52.0 Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of 45.0 Sunlight makes you cheerful 40.0 Traffic frustration 38.0 Penguin books, all 35.0 Job, should I quit? 34.0 Friends, don't have any 33.0 Marriage, a possibility? 32.0 Vending machines 31.0 Straws don't unsheath well 28.0 Shine on moving objects 25.0 McCartney more talented than Lennon? 23.0 Friends smarter, more capable than I am 19.0 Paper-towel dispensers 19.0 "What oft was thought, but ne'er" etc. 18.0 People are very dissimilar 16.0 Trees, beauty of 15.0 Sidewalks 15.0 Friends are unworthy of me 15.0 Indentical twins separated at birth, studies of traits 14.0 Intelligence, going fast 14.0 Wheelchair ramps, their insane danger 14.0 Urge to kill 13.0 Escalator invention 12.0 People are very similar 12.0 "Not in my backyard" 11.0 Straws float now 10.0 DJ, would I be happy as one? 9.0 "If you can't get out of it, get into it" 9.0 Pen, felt-tip 9.0 Gasoline, nice smell of 8.0 Pen, ballpoint 8.0 Stereo systems 8.0 Fear of getting mugged again 7.0 Staplers 7.0 "Roaches check in, but they don't check out" 6.0 Dinner roll, image of 6.0 Shoes 6.0 Bags 5.0 Butz, Earl 4.0 Sweeping, brooms 4.0 Whistling, yodel trick 4.0 "You can taste it with your eyes" 4.0 Dry-cleaning fluid, smell of 3.0 Zip-lock tops 2.0 Popcorn 1.0 Birds regurgitate food and feed young with it 0.5 Kant, Immanuel 0.5

Disability is a set of innovative, virtuosic skills. When abled people fuss about how hard it is to make access happen, I laugh and think about the times I’ve stage-managed a show while having a panic attack, or the time the accessible van with three wheelchair-using performers and staff inside broke and we just brainstormed for two hours—Maybe if we pull another van up and lower their ramp onto the busted ramp folks can get out? Who has plywood? If we go to the bike shop, will they have welding tools?—until we figured out a way to fix the ramp so they could get out. If we can do this, why can’t anybody? And this innovation, this persistence, this commitment to not leaving each other behind, the power of a march where you move as slowly as the slowest member and put us in the front, the power of a lockdown of scooter users in front of police headquarters, the power of movements that know how to bring each other food and medicine and organize from tired without apology and with a sense that tired people catch things people moving fast miss—all of these are skills we have. I want us to know that—abled and disabled.

wheelchair users “have impairments that limit mobility, but are not disabled unless they are in environments without ramps, lifts and automatic doors

For example, your tenant in a wheelchair wants to widen the doorways, lower the bathroom and kitchen countertops, and perhaps install a ramp. The ADA pretty much says you must allow your tenant to make these changes at their expense, providing they return your unit to its original condition when they move out.

It was not just the disabled hikers' presence on the trail that garnered criticism, however, but the very idea that a backcountry cabin would be retrofitted with a wheelchair ramp and accessible bathroom. Challenging the need for the ramp, one reporter asked “why people in wheelchairs could drag themselves up the trail and not drag themselves up the steps to the hut?” If the hikers were able to complete such an arduous hike, in other words, surely they were capable of crawling up the steps to the cabin. This challenge to the appropriateness of the Galehead ramp exemplifies the ways in which nondisabled access is made invisible while disabled access is made hypervisible. Steps are themselves an accommodation, just one made for a different kind of body; as Jill Gravink notes, rather than focus on ramps as being out of place, the reporter could have just as easily focused on stairs, demanding of nondisabled hikers, “Why bother putting steps on the hut at all? Why not drag yourself in through a window?

Other news reports told of Canadians facing homelessness or credit card debt, or requesting help with disabilities, only to be offered euthanasia instead by Canada’s national health system. The country’s Department of Veterans Affairs was prolific in this regard, recommending euthanasia to veterans struggling with depression and PTSD, and in one case suggesting euthanasia to a former Paralympian in response to repeated requests for a home wheelchair ramp. “Madam, if you are really so desperate, we can give you medical assistance in dying now,” the caseworker allegedly said.

Being neurodivergent doesn’t mean a person is broken or needs to be fixed. They need support to access the world around them. The solution to helping someone who needs a wheelchair get up steps isn’t to teach them to walk; it is to build a ramp. The solution for someone who has a disability based on their neurological wiring isn’t to tell them to try harder; it is to build (and help them build for themselves) accommodations that allow them to thrive.

I’ve had that happen to me plenty of times,” I say. Who hasn’t? This is the kind of pseudo-problem that would easily succumb to a Sponsor call. And as always, my solution would be: Forget the hell about it. Think about something better—a new apartment with a wheelchair ramp and maybe a Jenn-Air and lots of phone jacks. Your mind’s not the fucking Yellow Pages. You’ve got no business asking it to perform tasks it’s not interested in just so you can show off. To me, it’s a worse signal that anybody would ever worry about these

Another thing about Oscar is that he wasn’t afraid of anyone. And he always made up his own mind, no matter what other people said. They’re two of the best things I remember about him now. He wasn’t just my friend. He was kind of magic. I can’t really explain it better than that. He was honest and he was decent and he was always cheerful. And evem though his brother Stevie had to use a wheelchair, it wasn’t a problem the way people usually think it is, because Oscar always made sure that every door was opened and every stairway had a ramp, and every train station had the right access so he could get it. He used to say that if the world was designed properly, the whole population would be flying around the place in wheelchairs. And when he said that, Stevie used to laugh.

Companies don't want anyone telling them how to deal with their workers  -- they never have; they never will. Stores don't want anyone telling them how to design their entrances; how many steps they can have (or can't have); how heavy their doors can be. Yet they accept their city's building and fire codes, dictating to them how many people they can have in their restaurants, based on square footage, so that the place will not be a fire hazard. They accept that the city can inspect their electrical wiring to ensure that it "meets code" before they open for business. Yet they chafe if an individual wants an accommodation. Because, it seems, it is seen as "special for the handicapped," most of whom likely don't deserve it. Accommodation is fought doubly hard when it is seen to be a way of letting "the disabled" have a part of what we believe is for "normal" people. Although no access code, anywhere, requires them, automatic doors remain the one thing, besides flat or ramped entrances, that one hears about most from people with mobility problems: they need automatic doors as well as flat entrances. Yet no code, anywhere, includes them; mandating them would be "going too far"; giving the disabled more than they have a right to. A ramp is OK. An automatic door? That isn't reasonable. At least that's what the building lobby says. Few disability rights groups, anywhere, have tried to push for that accommodation. Some wheelchair activists are now pressing for "basic, minimal access" in all new single-family housing, so, they say, they can visit friends and attend gatherings in others' homes. This means at least one flat entrance and a bathroom they can get into. De-medicalization No large grocery or hotel firm, no home-and-garden discount supply center would consider designing an entrance that did not include automatic doors. They are standard in hotels and discount warehouses. Not, of course, for the people who literally can not open doors by themselves  -- for such people are "the disabled": them, not us. Firms that operate hotels, groceries and building supply stores fight regulations that require they accommodate "the disabled." Automatic doors that go in uncomplainingly are meant for us, the fit, the nondisabled, to ensure that we will continue to shop at the grocery or building supply center; to make it easy for us to get our grocery carts out, our lumber dollies to our truck loaded with Sheetrock for the weekend project. So the bellhops can get the luggage in and out of the hotel easily. When it is for "them," it is resisted; when it is for "us," however, it is seen as a design improvement. Same item; different purpose

If he was paralyzed, we'd have to put in ramps and have things altered for wheelchair access; you can get kitchens refitted; bathrooms altered ... I'd get him a really fast wheelchair. It'd be OK. If he couldn't talk, I'd get him a great computer. Anything can be dealt with, everything can be overcome. Just be alive. Just, please God, I beg you, please, please keep him alive for me.

MY ADVICE IS NOT putting off too long to do something, because there certainly are things to do at certain times in your life that you can’t do at others. There are no wheelchair ramps to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, so if you want to get down there, you have to go when you’ve still got two little feet.