The Cost of Almost Accessible
I’ve had work selected by PH21 Gallery in Budapest over five times since 2022, including four shows in a row in 2024. By then, it seemed right to go see it in person.
Getting me to Budapest from Arizona is not a casual undertaking. There are flights, a power wheelchair, the particular logistics that come with both, and the planning that has to happen before any of it can move. But the work had been on those walls four times running, and Paul said we should go. So we went.
PH21 is in an old building on a side street — the kind of building that has been standing long enough that the question of what happens when someone arrives in a 450-pound power wheelchair simply never came up in the original design. We had come from the Abilities Expo in Miami, where I’d just given a talk on photographing the unseen. Budapest was the next stop. When we got to the gallery, I could see the steps clearly from the sidewalk. Anita, the art manager, was already at the door. Her face told me she hadn’t been expecting the wheelchair and had no idea how to get me inside.
There were two steps up into the gallery.
Two steps and a flight of stairs are the same thing, functionally. The destination exists. The path to it does not.
What happened next is worth describing, because it matters to this series. Anita apologized — for the stairs, for Budapest not being particularly wheelchair-friendly, for not having a ramp, for not knowing in advance. And I started grinning, which confused my husband considerably. He asked why I wasn’t more upset. I told him: they didn’t know about the wheelchair. They had accepted my work on its merit. Not as a kindness to the disabled photographer. Just because they wanted it on their walls.
That was worth figuring out how to get up those two steps.
I saw a stackable plastic chair inside the gallery. I slid from my wheelchair onto it, and Paul used my shawl to secure me to the backrest. Anita found two men — one from next door, another from across the street. When they returned, I told them what I needed and how it needed to happen, and waited while Anita translated my words into Hungarian. I looked at them, and waited for them to nod their understanding and agreement before we moved — one on each side, Paul in front to keep my knees together — and in a coordinated effort that was both completely improvised and exactly right, three people carried me up two steps and slid me across the parquet floor to the back of the room where my photographs hung on the wall.
I asked them to give me fifteen minutes.
Anita and I talked about the work. She described how she thinks about layout, what draws her to certain images, how a show needs to feel cohesive. I sat in front of photographs I had made and listened to someone who had chosen them talk about why. When the men came back, they carried me out almost the same way — except this time I asked them to take me down the steps backwards, so gravity would keep me against the backrest instead of pitching me forward. It was only a little scary, the way these things always are.
Outside, I asked the two men to pick me up and place me back onto my wheelchair — I can transfer only when the surface I’m sliding onto is lower than where I’m starting, and my wheelchair seat was considerably higher than the gallery chair. We stood in front of the gallery for a photo with Anita, her arm around my shoulder, both of us smiling.
The gallery had done nothing wrong. The building was old. No one had been unkind. If you reviewed what happened that afternoon, you would find evidence of genuine effort and good will — an art manager who was sorry, two strangers who helped without hesitation, a door held as wide as it would go. And I still needed three people to carry me up two steps to see my own work.
That’s the pattern this series is about.
I’ve been paying attention to it for a long time — long enough to have language for it now. It fits inside my larger throughline of “seeing the unseen,” but this one has a sharper edge. It has to do with systems that are almost accessible.
What I’ve noticed is that exclusion rarely arrives dramatically. It doesn’t announce itself as bias or hostility. More often it arrives wrapped in good intentions and polite language — a space that technically meets requirements but only works if you’re willing to ask for help, an accommodation that was approved, confirmed, and documented and still didn’t work when the moment arrived.
None of those systems failed dramatically. They simply functioned the way an able-bodied user built them to function — for someone who looked like them. The irony is that many of them were supposed to be built in compliance with rules specifically designed to accommodate people with disabilities. And yet. Everyone who didn’t fit the original assumption either adapted to those systems by working out something around the edges, like I strive to do, or they didn’t come back.
I bring a particular lens to this. I’m an engineer. I’ve evaluated spaces professionally as a RESNA-certified Assistive Technology Professional and ICC-certified ADA architectural barriers specialist. I’ve also spent more than three decades living inside a progressive muscle-wasting disease, moving through spaces that technically work and practically don’t. Those two perspectives aren’t separate — they inform each other. I see the design logic and the lived consequence at the same time, and what I keep finding is that the gap between them is rarely dramatic. It’s almost always something that looks minor until it isn’t.
Small gaps, repeated consistently, add up to something larger than any single incident would suggest. When access is unreliable enough that you have to calculate whether it’s worth the effort, the calculus changes. Some people push through it. Some quietly stop showing up. That quiet attrition doesn’t register in the data. It just shapes who remains in the room.
This series isn’t an audit. It isn’t a collection of complaints. It’s an attempt to name a pattern that many disabled people recognize immediately — and that most operators genuinely don’t see, not because they don’t care, but because they’ve never had to notice it.
Almost accessible doesn’t look broken. It works exactly as it was designed to work. That’s what makes it worth examining.
The Almost Accessible series looks at the gap between accessibility that exists on paper and access that works in practice — across hospitality, events, digital platforms, and the built environment. New pieces are added regularly to the Writing page.