By: Jaclyn Borowski
The average coffeehouse if far from accessible. The doors rarely have a handicap button to swing them open. The server is often leaning over a case of pastries to take your order. And the tables are so crammed together it’s a wonder more drinks don’t get knocked over as patrons edge by.
The Coffee Bar in the Stamp Student Union is no different.
As Angel Miles wheels in for her iced tea, students’ bags stick out from under chairs, narrowing an already tight path. When she finally makes her way to the end of the line, she maneuvers herself through a multi-point turn to pull up even with the counter.
After calling her order up to cashier, Miles works her way as close as she can to the counter to hand over her debit card. The cashier swipes it through and hands it back to her with a receipt to be signed, at which point Miles squeezes herself even closer to the counter to try and reach the pen.
As Miles scoots down the counter toward the end of the counter where they put out the finished drinks, she originally begins to head for a table. But then, realizing the hassle of getting back and forth through the tables, decides instead to wait.
When her iced tea arrives, the barista places it on the edge of the bar, too high for Miles to reach from her the seat of her motorized wheelchair.
Another student arrives then to collect her own drink and passes Miles her iced tea, but the cup has no lid. The logistics of moving her chair to the bar where the straws and lids are without spilling the drink in her hand is challenging, to say the least.
Fortunately, a Coffee Bar employee is just about to refill the napkin dispenser and hands Miles a lid, straw and napkins.
With her now-covered drink grasped firmly in one hand, Miles begins to maneuver back through the maze of students, chairs, table and backpacks to find a place to sit outside.
And all along, I wait behind her. Unsure of the line between observer and participant, I can associate with the students around us who aren’t sure how to react, whether it’s helpful or insulting to offer assistance.
Miles, a graduate student, has spina bifida, a condition that begins at birth when vertebrae over the spinal cord fail to fully fuse.
Though she’s able to walk short distances, long walks simply aren’t feasible. Because of this condition, Miles has used a wheelchair for most of her life.
“My condition hasn’t gotten worse,” she says, “But my world has gotten bigger.”
Growing up in Philadelphia, Miles attended a school for people with all sorts of disabilities and accessibility was never an issue.
But as an undergraduate at Penn State, a rural campus of rolling hills, Miles began to see just how inaccessible places could be. In her first year at Penn, Miles used a standard wheelchair and pushed herself up and down the hills to get to and from class.
It’s clear from the way she sits perched in her motorized chair with a look of disgust on her face, as if remembering the burden of wheeling up and down the hills, that she’s happy to have that behind her.
“Some people try to be all sporty with it,” she says. “That’s not me!”
After mulling over her upbringing and the accessibility issues she has faced, Miles focuses on the present as her gaze fixes on the bus stop outside the student union.
Though Miles emphasizes how much transportation on campus has improved since she started as a graduate student in women’s studies in 2003, there still seem to be no end to the problems.
With the regular Shuttle UM buses, the main problem is a lack of awareness.
“If people were conscience and aware,” she says, “Then structural barriers would follow. Most people don’t realize that the bus has a ramp, but if people knew the protocol, it would really help.”
Worse than Shuttle UM is the paratransit service. Miles laments the never-ending shortcomings of a program designed specifically to cater to the needs of people with disabilities.
To begin with, the paratransit buses don’t run as regularly and the stops are less accessible. But the larger problem is the number of drivers who don’t know how to work the features of the bus.
Miles recounts one time when a driver didn’t know how to use the lift to get her and her chair onto the bus.
“He asked me to show him how to use the lift,” she says. “And I was like ‘WHAT!’?”
But in terms of campus-wide issues, Miles describes the lack of a campus accessibility map as the university’s biggest shortcoming.
Without a map to use as a reference to plan out routes to campus and through buildings to individual classrooms, students with mobility impairments are left searching for the handicap entrance, searching for the elevator and hoping that the path between the two leaves them with enough time to arrive in class before the professor closes the door, creating one more barrier for them to tackle.
“If anything, the issue is the administration,” she says, “the people in charge of the money and what their priorities are,” as she references the frequent replanting of different colored flowers in the M near the front of campus.
Because she has had spina bifida since birth, Miles has learned to manage and live with her condition, but her lifestyle leaves Miles wishing for a way to be more spontaneous.
“I’ve always got to plan ahead,” she says. “I’ve got to be more organized and more prepared just to actually get to class.”
As an advocate for disability issues on campus, Miles has made her voice heard during her time at Maryland - it was her fighting that extended the paratransit service to the weekends - but Miles would be perfectly content not to have to fight for her basic rights.
“I consider myself a regular student and I just want to go to school,” she says. “If I could figure out a way that I didn’t have to be so vocal, then I wouldn’t… The more time I have to spend writing letters, the less time I have to write papers.”
As Miles relates tale after tale of experiences she’s had as a person in a wheelchair on campus, she frequently emphasizes how much progress she has seen, even though there is still much to be done.
As we part ways outside the Coffee Bar, I head down the stairs and off toward the bus stop while Miles heads to the right, down a series of ramps and along the most round a bout of ways to get where she wants to go.
