A man returning from a meeting about disabled accessibility policies arrived home with a very personal example of the problem.
D'Arcee Neal, who has cerebral palsy, took a five-hour flight from San Francisco to Washington last week. A mix-up at the gate meant there was no wheelchair to help the 29-year-old off the plane, so he was told to wait for one to be found.
The problem was Neal needed to use the restroom. His disability made it too difficult to use the one on the plane. He had already waited more than 15 minutes for the rest of the passengers to disembark, and the wait for an aisle chair -- a narrow, specialized wheelchair to take disabled passengers down the airplane aisle -- had now lasted another 15 minutes.