Bathroom accessibility

Just because you put up a sign doesn’t mean your bathroom stall is accessible.

When we’re out and about, Jessica or I accompany Namine into the bathroom. She doesn’t always need help transferring to (and from) the toilet, but the need still sometimes arises due to strange bathroom geometry. Still, we can often depend on a bathroom stall’s “accessibility” labeling. Often, but not always: that was definitely the case this time.

I no longer remember where we were, but Namine needed to use the restroom. Business as usual, as they say. She and I headed into the men’s room, because I am the adult and a man. (I long for universal unisex bathrooms, but that’s a post for another day.) As is typical for smaller bathrooms, there was one smaller stall and one larger, the larger one being labeled as accessible. That’s not an assumption: there was a sign with a wheelchair on it, indicating it as such.

The stall may have been larger than the smaller one, but it was still nowhere near large enough for Namine to enter in her wheelchair and close the door. We tried a couple different approaches, including backing in. If there wasn’t enough room for Namine, whose wheelchair is still small enough to be considered a “child’s wheelchair,” what hope would an actual, fully grown adult have?

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