05-12-2016, 05:58 PM
(05-12-2016, 11:42 AM)kwliving Wrote:(05-12-2016, 02:51 AM)tomh009 Wrote: If it's only a single step, a ramp is probably not required. (Admittedly I'm too lazy to check at the moment ...)
An electric wheelchair cannot go up one step.
Indeed. My comment would be that if it’s only a single step, it’s hard to see how installing a ramp could be infeasible. If it’s many steps, a lack of accessibility may simply be an unavoidable side-effect of an old building.
This is why I think accessibility should be graded on two scales: roughly speaking, effort, and accomplishment. For example, a business with plenty of space out front and a single 10cm step would get a big fat F for failing to put in an easy accessibility measure, whereas a business on the second floor of a small heritage house (requiring a flight of stairs to get up) would get some sort of designation that basically means “part of our city is heritage and isn’t ever going to be accessible, so it’s not their fault (but we’re never ever going to build anything like that in the future)”.