Disability access: Quit making excuses and just get it done, Wichita | Opinion
It kind of says something when a person in a wheelchair goes to a county commission meeting with complaints about disability access in this town, and has to testify from the back row because the public podium is only accessible by stairs.
That’s the situation that Lisa Vayda, a pharmacist and small business owner, faced Wednesday when she went before the commission representing the Wichita/Sedgwick County Access Advisory Board, the joint body requesting accessibility improvements from the commission and the City Council.
Vayda can walk some, with a cane, but decided not to try to negotiate the stairs to the podium. “I thought about it,” she told me after addressing the commission. “But if I fell, it’s not going to be a good situation for anyone.”
“Am I the first person in a wheelchair to come here to speak?” she asked me. I couldn’t answer that intelligently because I attend far fewer commission meetings than I did when they met at the county courthouse, instead of the small auditorium in the basement of the Ruffin Building.
It would be hard to come up with a better illustration of why our local governments need to get off the stick and finally get serious about access improvements for residents with mobility, vision and hearing impairments.
As Vayda told the commission: “We hope you understand, while probably not intentional, limiting safe access conveys the sense that certain groups of citizens are not wanted, needed or valued in our community.”
It’d be wrong to say the access board’s recommendations often fall on deaf ears. If they did, maybe we’d see a little more action and a lot less lip service.
No sign language, closed captions
Another thing Vayda pointed out to me was that the commission meetings are not particularly accessible for the deaf either, because there’s no sign language interpreter, and the screens inside the meeting chamber don’t have closed captions like you’d see if you watched from home on TV or livestream.
Later in the meeting, during the presentation of next year’s budget, Sedgwick County Manager Tom Stolz said the county will be ending its longtime practice of buying airtime on public television station KPTS to broadcast commission meetings, further reducing access.
But I digress.
What Vayda came to talk about was a letter sent by the access board addressing missed opportunities to make things better for people with disabilities when the city recently reconfigured one-way streets into two-way streets downtown.
The stated purpose of the project was walkability and enhancing safety for pedestrians. Best practice would have been to install audible traffic signals for the blind and vision impaired so they’d know when it was safe to cross the street, and to rebuild inconsistent curb cuts that are difficult to navigate in a wheelchair.
It’s an issue I raised in a long column back in April.
What it boiled down to was that the city’s law department ruled that the project — at $4.9 million — wasn’t big enough to trigger federal requirements for audible signals, and that updated Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines haven’t been officially finalized.
The federal Department of Justice has back-burnered those guidelines, which were approved by the Department of Transportation in January.
In fact, the DOJ and other federal agencies are actively rolling back accessibility requirements as part of the Donald Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion. On multiple occasions, Trump has mocked and expressed disdain for people with disabilities, so there will be no relief from that quarter anytime soon.
City officials also cited an undocumented and outdated (if it ever really existed) recommendation by the access board not to put in audible signals downtown, which has been passed down as gospel through generations of municipal projects.
Vayda has presented the commissioners and City Council members with a letter from the access board urging them to do the right thing and make the improvements that should have been baked into the downtown street project all along. She’s scheduled to speak about it again at Tuesday’s council meeting.
It’s a good letter and you can read it here or in Wednesday’s Eagle.
‘We’re grandfathered in’
City officials have now instituted a policy to install audible signals when future light-controlled intersections are built or rebuilt.
That’s good, but not good enough.
Yes, it would cost more to retrofit the improvements to the recently rebuilt intersections than it would have if they’d been included in the first place.
But it’s the right thing to do — because it will probably be at least another 20 years until those intersections need rebuilding again.
As Vayda put it to the commissioners Wednesday, “Remember that any one of us can join this wonderful group of people with disabilities at any time in our lives.”
That may be the most important point of all.
When we make improvements for “the disabled,” we’re not doing it for “them” — we’re doing it for “us.”
Because people with disabilities are already a part of us, and if you live long enough, your time will come.
The Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990 and turns 35 this year.
The time has passed for excuses: “We’re grandfathered in,” or “It’s too much trouble,” or “Why do we need a ramp? Disabled people don’t come here anyway.”
The time has arrived — a quarter of the way through the 21st century — for Wichita and Sedgwick County to catch up with the 20th.
This story was originally published July 10, 2025 at 5:31 AM.
