It’s kinda wild to watch restaurants, which have broadly spent the 30 years since ADA explaining why they can’t redesign or reimagine their dining rooms to be *actually* accessible (it’s too expensive, they say), redesign & reimagine their dining rooms with the quickness.

The current circumstances obviously demand that they redesign & reimagine their dining rooms. But the circumstances did before too, it’s just that disabled folks have never exactly been top of mind for the restaurant industry, broadly speaking. (Some spots better than others.)

This is not all on restaurants either. The kind of state aid (some) have gotten to do this redesigning & reimagining to stay in business is always there. Federal & state legislatures could spend billions at the drop of a hat to get restaurants to a place of actual accessibility.

It’s definitely as much a question of political will as it is individual business decision. Anyway, it’s clear this could happen, and swiftly, if we wanted it to.

My older brother has CP and I can’t count on six hundred hands the amount of times we’ve gone to a restaurant (in Boston, on the north shore, in D.C., in NYC, in NH, in Maine, in...well, you get it) and didn’t run into one accessibility issue or another.

“Oh, the bathroom is down a dark, windy staircase? And there’s only a hook latch for a lock? And there’s only one stall, with no handrail? Yea, cool, we love it here, don’t we.”