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The Struggle to Go for a Swim

This is part of a 5-part series on evolution of ADA and the disability experience from the perspective of a woman in the first generation of recognized disability rights. Click here to read the previous segment.

When I was a child the only place I could go swimming was at MDA Camp, where the disability school that hosted us had lifts and a ramped pool entrance. Outside the campus of the Massachusetts Hospital School, accessible aquatic facilities were a fantasy; someone would have to bodily carry me down the stairs into the water, and then struggle to carry me back out. As you can imagine this got progressively more difficult as I got older.

Then, in 2010, new guidelines were passed requiring a lift or other accessible means of entry into public pools. Now 23 years old, I was too heavy to carry into a pool and it had been several years since I’d gotten in the water. I was excited at the prospect of going for a swim, but the three-year deadline came and went with few opportunities to do so. Tourism and hospitality lobbies got the deadlines extended, and then the Department of Justice under the Trump administration ceased actively pursuing accessibility enforcement. Pool lifts continued to be added, but progress was slow.

The pandemic finally changed things. While shut down, a lot of hotels used American Rescue Plan (ARPA) money to make needed renovations to their facilities. A decade after the regulations were published, many hotels that still lacked pool access used this money and the lack of guests to install lifts and renovate their pool decks. Since people started travelling again, I’ve generally found that public pools have a lift or zero-entry (ramp). It’s great to be able to swim again!

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