Part 1: What "Accessible Enough" Actually Means (And Why It Matters)

Part 1 of the Accessible by Choice series

If you own a building, run a church, or rent space to others, you have probably heard the word "accessibility" and landed somewhere on a spectrum of reactions. Maybe you thought "we're not required to do that." Maybe you thought "we can't afford it." Maybe you genuinely want to do better and aren't sure where to start. Maybe you're trying to figure out what the law actually requires of you. Or maybe you already meet the legal requirements and want to go further than that.

All of those are valid starting points. This series is for all of them.

I spent a decade as an NCIDQ certified interior designer, working on the commercial side of the industry with major furniture manufacturers. That means I wasn't just designing individual spaces. I was working with the products and specifications that interior designers across the country were using to build them. Accessibility was not a specialty I chose. It was a baseline expectation of the work.

That meant understanding things like required door clearances, turning radii for wheelchair users, accessible route requirements, counter heights, reach ranges, hardware specifications, and the difference between what a code requires and what actually works for a human body trying to navigate a space. I spent years working with those details, specifying those products, and understanding how they were built and installed in real spaces.

Then I became disabled myself.

I now use a wheelchair daily. I live with a connective tissue disorder, chronic pain, and a nervous system that does not always cooperate. And I can tell you from both sides of that equation: the gap between what buildings are legally required to do and what actually makes a space usable is significant. Compliance on paper does not always translate to a space that a real person with a real body can actually use with dignity.

It is also a lot more bridgeable than most people think.

The legal stuff, briefly

The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990. The 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design are the current technical requirements for new construction and alterations to existing buildings. If you want to read the actual code, you can access it here.

Here is what a lot of building owners do not fully understand: the ADA applies differently depending on what your building is, when it was built, whether it has been altered, and how it is used. Title III of the ADA covers places of public accommodation, which includes most businesses open to the public. But religious organizations, including churches, are explicitly exempt from Title III. That means a church is not legally required to meet ADA standards, even if it is open to the public, even if it receives community members who use wheelchairs, and even if it turns people away because they cannot get through the door.

That exemption exists for First Amendment reasons. It does not exist because disabled people's access to community and worship matters less.

There are also a lot of existing buildings that were built before the ADA existed and have not undergone significant renovations since. Those buildings operate under different rules than new construction. The law requires "readily achievable" barrier removal, which means making changes that are easy to accomplish without much difficulty or expense. What counts as readily achievable depends on the size and resources of the business. It is a sliding scale, not a fixed standard.

What all of this means in practice is that legal compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. And for a significant number of buildings, the floor is very low.

What compliance doesn't always get you

Here is something I learned as a designer that became much more personal after I became disabled: meeting code and being accessible are not always the same thing.

A doorway can meet the minimum clear width requirement and still be nearly impossible to navigate if the door is heavy, swings toward the user, and has a round knob instead of a lever. A bathroom can have a designated accessible stall and still be unusable if the stall door swings inward, leaving no room to maneuver a wheelchair. A parking lot can have the required number of accessible spaces and still fail someone if those spaces are at the far end of the lot, on a slope, or not connected to the building by a safe and level path.

Code sets minimums. Minimums are not always enough.

This is not a criticism of the ADA. It is a recognition that designing for real human bodies requires more than checking boxes. It requires thinking about how people actually move through space, what they need to feel safe and comfortable, and where the friction points are that nobody notices until they are the person experiencing them.

Who this actually affects

Roughly one in four adults in the United States lives with some form of disability. That number goes up significantly when you include people with temporary injuries, older adults, parents with strollers, and people whose disabilities are invisible or fluctuating.

Disability is also not static. People acquire disabilities through illness, injury, aging, and circumstances that nobody plans for. The person who has been attending your church for twenty years may need a grab bar in your bathroom next year. The customer who has shopped at your store for a decade may show up next month with a cane. The tenant who signed a lease with you may develop a condition that changes how they navigate their home.

When your building cannot be entered by someone in a wheelchair, they cannot come in. When your bathroom has no grab bar, someone with chronic illness or a balance condition cannot safely use it. When your entrance has a two-inch threshold and no ramp, a person using a rollator, a cane, or a mobility aid is weighing whether the visit is worth the risk of a fall. When your lighting is inadequate, someone with low vision cannot read your signage. When your seating is all fixed pews or hard chairs with no alternatives, someone with chronic pain may not be able to stay.

These are not edge cases. These are people who want to be in your space and cannot, or who can but only at a cost to their safety, comfort, or dignity.

What this series is actually about

This is not a series about lawsuits or compliance checklists. It is a series about practical, low-cost changes that make your building more usable for more people, without requiring a major renovation or a significant budget.

Some of what I will cover costs under $30 and takes twenty minutes to install. Some requires a handyman for an afternoon. A few things do need a licensed contractor, and I will tell you which ones and roughly what to expect so you are not going in blind.

I will also cover where to find grants, tax incentives, and other resources, because some of this can be offset in ways building owners do not always know about. The Disabled Access Credit, for example, is a federal tax credit available to small businesses that make accessibility improvements. It covers fifty percent of eligible expenses between $250 and $10,250 in a given year. That is real money that a lot of businesses leave on the table simply because they did not know it existed.

Throughout this series I will draw on years of professional design experience and my own lived experience as a disabled person navigating the built environment every day. Both matter. The technical knowledge tells you what to do. The lived experience tells you why it matters and what it actually feels like when it does or does not work.

Why now

If you are reading this because you want your church, your shop, or your rental property to actually be welcoming to everyone who walks or rolls through the door, you are already ahead of where most people start. That matters.

Accessibility is not about perfection. It is about intention and follow-through. It is about looking at your space through a wider lens and asking who might be struggling to use it and what you could do about that. You do not have to fix everything at once. You just have to start somewhere.

The rest of this series will show you where.

Next up: Part 2: The Entrance Problem. Door hardware, threshold ramps, door weight, and the $20 fix that makes a bigger difference than you'd expect.