ADA Sign Depot Blog

In the past few years, something amazing has been quietly happening across the land. Public restrooms in America — long a flash point of exclusion by race, gender, class and ability — have gotten much, much better. Thanks to an increasingly effective campaign by a range of activists, America’s public bathrooms are now cleaner, more plentiful, more private, and more accessible and inclusive than ever. In many places, they’re even great.

After eight and a half years together, a little under four of them as a married couple, my husband decided that he no longer wanted a wife with a disability. Having a partner with a disability is challenging; I get that. I am still the same person at my core, but the disease has changed my ability to walk and slowed my speech. 

...several of the terraces at the Hunters Point Library are inaccessible to people who cannot climb to them. A staircase and bleacher seating in the children’s section, judged too risky for small children, has been closed off. And the five-story, vertically designed building only has one elevator, creating bottlenecks at times.

The fight against taxation without representation

More than 700,000 residents live in DC, which is more than the population of Wyoming and Vermont, yet its residents still lack voting members in the U.S. House and Senate. Without these voting members, residents of DC are denied a voice in Congress to defend them from attacks on their own locally passed laws and citizen backed initiatives.

In recent decades, students at the historically black Prairie View A&M University were required to complete a “residency questionnaire” to prove their eligibility to vote. They saw their power at the ballot box diluted when their campus was carved into separate districts. Some were arrested when they tried to cast ballots, accused of improper voting.

Then came the 2018 midterm elections, when county leaders scheduled fewer early-voting hours on the university campus than in whiter communities nearby.