'Visitability' now goal of disabled

The movies, her office, her favorite restaurants: Debra Mair's public world, the one full of ramps and curb cutouts, is within reach. Her private world, too — a house designed with a wheel-in shower and wider doorways — is accessible. But there is an in-between world, the one inhabited by friends and neighbors, that might as well be on another planet.

What Mair lacks is visitability.

Coined in Great Britain and now the buzzword among disability advocates, the term takes accessibility and gives it a more visceral spin. Visitability is about a desire — to visit, make contact, be welcome.

Often what stands between that desire and reality are hurdles that are small yet insurmountable. A single concrete step, maybe, or a bathroom door 2 inches too narrow.

Following the lead of several municipalities and states, Salt Lake City is currently drafting a proposed ordinance aimed at encouraging builders to provide housing that is easy to visit. The Utah Legislature, too, is drafting a model visitability ordinance.

"Being a visitor in an inaccessible house means the dangerous possibility of being dropped down the steps, the worry and embarrassment of being kept from using the bathroom, the social awkwardness of being carried, the frustration of not being able to knock on the door to see if someone's home," notes the Web site for Concrete Change, a Georgia-based nonprofit aimed at making "all homes visitable."

"Sometimes I have to just sit out in the yard," says Mair about her trips to visit neighbors and friends in her motorized wheelchair. "I can't just knock on the door — because I can't get to the door. I have to honk or yell."

Mair is executive director of the Utah Independent Living Center, which is among the groups trying to foster the concept of visitability. At the forefront locally is the Disability Law Center, where director Fraser Nelson is working with both the mayor's office and the Legislature's health and human services committee to draft visitability ordinances.

Currently, federal laws require that publicly funded multiple-family housing provide accessible units. The laws make no provisions for housing with fewer than four units.

Both the city and state's proposed visitability ordinances would mandate very little or nothing at all. Instead, they aim at providing incentives for private builders to construct new housing that provides the cornerstones of visitability: one "zero-step" entrance per house, and one main-floor bathroom accessible to a wheelchair. Or, as Concrete Change succinctly puts the goal: "Get in and pee."