Niles: Disneyland faces new obstacle to its disability access program ...Middle East

Disneyland is bringing to life the cliché that no good deed goes unpunished.

Last year, Disney changed its disability access systems at Disneyland and Florida’s Walt Disney World. The idea was to eliminate a one-size-fits-all approach to providing access to guests with disabilities. That might seem to make sense. People should get the accommodation that meets their specific needs.

But the accommodation that Disney provided allowed a lot of people to skip a lot of lines in the park. Since federal law does not allow a company to insist on medical proof of a disability, it does not take much imagination to see how some people might abuse this system.

So Disney changed it. Now, a Disney visitor has filed a class-action lawsuit in response.

More from Robert Niles

In an ideal theme park, every queue would be accessible to wheelchairs and electric conveyance vehicles. Queues would include no sensory triggers that were not also present in the attraction itself. Park employees would staff exit points in the middle of especially long queues, so guests who need to use the bathroom could do so easily without having to start over in the line. Long queues also would offer abundant places to sit for people whose backs or legs cannot tolerate long periods of standing.

Even then, a park might need the flexibility of offering a queue bypass to certain guests. For that, I always imagine Benjy Compson in the final scene of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” a person whose developmental disability makes it impossible for them to navigate something like a theme park queue without the potential for an outburst.

As designed attractions, theme parks’ ability to accommodate a wide variety of disabilities makes them such popular destinations for people who need accommodation. I believe that the vast majority of people who request accommodation at Disney and other theme parks do so honestly and in good faith. But good faith does not always prevent conflict.

The lawsuit cites California’s civil rights law that demands “full and equal access” for people with disabilities. Yet “equal” treatment too often serves just to preserve existing inequalities. I am not a lawyer, but I do not think you have to be a lawyer to understand justice.

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You don’t get justice by giving everyone the same thing when people have different needs. Justice demands meeting people where they’re at, then helping them with whatever they need, so that they can get to wherever they have the potential to go if we stopped putting barriers in their way.

A lot of Disney fans with disabilities got used to the old system and do not see the need to change. Some persons with disabilities lack an advocate who can navigate Disney’s new application process. Disney needs to do better by them.

If a person with disabilities were forced to wait longer or more uncomfortably in a Disneyland queue than others without disabilities, that would not be just. Yet I do not believe that Disneyland’s new system is inherently unjust because it provides different accommodations to people with different needs and disabilities.

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