From the legislature to sports arenas to websites, NC weighs accessibility upgrades

By Rose Hoban

Two decades ago, lobbyist Julia Adams started out at the North Carolina General Assembly as an advocate for people with disabilities. 

Adams, herself, alternates between using a wheelchair and crutches to get to lawmakers’ offices and committee meetings. In those days, it was a real challenge in the legislative building, which was completed in 1963.

“Really, that building was built before any of the [Americans with Disabilities Act] standards, and it can be very complex to navigate,” said Adams, who remembered only a few people with disabilities trying to access the building back then. “I think it was just me, and one staffer and one liaison” from a state agency.

Things have improved, but it can still be a challenge. 

“There is an accessible entrance to the legislative office building,” she said. “I knock on the door, and they let me in. But, you know, it’s that perception that you are knocking on a door to get into that space.”

Awareness about accommodating people with disabilities is different now, about two generations after President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1991. 

An analysis from the 2024 U.S. Census indicates that 13.6 percent of people in the country have some form of disability, a statistic that spans gender, race and ethnicity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts that estimate higher — at about one in four people in the U.S. living with a disability. This includes visible conditions like mobility and vision issues, as well as less discernable challenges such as hearing loss, cognitive and developmental disabilities and limits to independent functioning and living. 

Governments have been slow to catch up to the increasing participation of people with disabilities in public life. Old government buildings not only are difficult to get in and out of, but also pose challenges for something as common as using a restroom. 

That was a problem in the legislative building, Adams said, before renovations were done to make some bathrooms accessible. 

“And when I talk about accessible bathrooms, I’m talking about one where a person using a wheelchair can pull all the way through the doors and into a stall and have privacy,” she recounted. 

Another aspect of accessibility involves online resources; government websites need updating to accommodate people with visual, cognitive and hearing difficulties. 

According to Gabriel Esparza, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Administration, government infrastructure should not just be accessible, but should be “actually convenient.”  

“The way in which people interact with government now is not just the old thinking of somebody physically walking into a building,” Esparza said. “People make phone calls, people read stuff, people see stuff and, of course, now interact online. So all of those mediums of interaction need to be appropriately efficient and convenient, not just compliant with whatever the law is.”

This desire to make government more accessible is the driving force behind a governmental commission created by Gov. Josh Stein this spring when he signed Executive Order 35. Its goal is to make sure that government is accessible for all people, “regardless of ability, background or circumstance.” 

Reducing government jargon

At the first meeting of the Commission on Accessibility in May, 32 volunteers from across the state who were chosen for their experiences living with disabilities and other expertise on the topic gathered in a cramped room on the NC State campus. Once Esparza swore in all of the commission members and the big group photo was taken, they got down to work in teams to tackle physical obstacles, as well as language, digital and communication access hurdles.

“The Commission on Accessibility’s role is to think broadly about all the barriers that keep people from being able to access state government, and then to help us in state government figure out ways in which we can remove those barriers,” Esparza told the gathering. 

A big barrier when working with government agencies is often jargon — the bureaucratic language that can keep people from understanding what they can get access to in the first place. 

One of four “teams” of newly minted commissioners will be tasked with developing a statewide best practice guide for using plain language with the public. 

“Identify the tools that will simplify bureaucratic speak, minimize mysterious acronyms and eliminate jargon,” Esparza told them. “Even the best policies can fail if the public can’t understand them. Even the best programs won’t help if people don’t know what they do.”

Making online access comprehensible

Now that most government functions have been moved online, one of the key needs will be creating websites that are accessible — not just understandable, but also accessible to people who have older computers or live in parts of the state with limited internet bandwidth and have limited web navigation abilities.

Esparza said that the digital team will look at programs that currently exist only online and identify ways to make them more accessible for everyone, including people with visual and cognitive issues. 

“Make state government websites and other digital content more accessible and user-friendly for all North Carolinians,” he said. 

They’re thinking broader than websites too. In an age where many meetings are conducted through video conferencing services, people hosting the meetings should remember that not everyone will be able to see who is speaking or understand them without aids like closed captioning. 

Jordan Wright, dean of education at the NC School for the Deaf, said speakers should start with a description of themselves.

“I’m a white male in my 40s with a black shirt, a black suit and a button down blue shirt,” Wright said through an American Sign Language interpreter. “Brief description, don’t overthink it.”

“It’s not only for people who are deaf-blind, or people who are hearing-blind, there may be a senior in the room who struggles with visual clarity. They won’t want to admit it, they don’t want to talk about it, so it’s hidden,” Wright said, noting that it took him six years to convince his own father to get a hearing aid. 

Wright also pointed out that people talking might need to speak slower than they are accustomed to so ASL and language interpreters can keep up.

“I get way ahead,” Wright said. “I go 100 miles an hour. I’m a New Yorker, born and raised, so I can’t slow down. I can’t help it… so I have to pace myself a little better.” 

About those buildings

The North Carolina government owns thousands of buildings across the state, from the legislative complex to sports arenas like the Dean Smith Center on UNC Chapel Hill’s campus. The good news is that getting them compliant with mandates in the Americans with Disabilities Act does not mean a complete overhaul. 

“When I was an undergrad, I went to every game at the Dean Dome,” said Kathryn Sorenson, an associate professor of occupational therapy at UNC.

Sorenson has a bone disease that impairs her ability to walk. When she was an undergraduate at UNC, she was able to navigate the sports complex on crutches. By the time she returned to campus as faculty, she was using a wheelchair. 

“When I went to go to a game and out of 21,000 seats — I’m a Tar Heel. I’m not throwing shade — but only eight were wheelchair accessible,” she said.

“To get fully ADA compliant, the Dean Dome had to have gotten to, like, 122 ADA seats, but that would require them to put elevators in to go to the top,” she explained. But allowances for older buildings in the law mean that the university doesn’t have to do that. 

“They could have made every seat on the concourse level an ADA-compliant seat and gotten to 90, and that means that they can be okay and fully compliant getting to 90, because that’s readily achievable,” she explained. 

Sorenson is part of the work group on physical accessibility. The co-chair for that group is Tunya Smith from the state Department of Transportation’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Compliance.

She said there are a host of issues that the workgroup will have to slog through, beginning with how to make all those state buildings physically accessible. That goes for more modern structures, like the legislative building in Raleigh, as well as the state’s many historic sites.

“The brick building look and feel, a lot of those rehabbing of those spaces, they have the narrow doorways, and so just that conundrum of creating public, accessible spaces, but then preserving historic spaces,” she said. “This whole idea of historic preservation, versus accessibility, the reality is that most historic sites are not accessible.”

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