Busting the Myth of “Accessible Enough”
The invite said the venue was accessible, so Kavya isn’t worried when she rolls up and sees a ramp waiting at the entrance. It’s a good ramp too, gentle slope, sturdy rails. She breathes out and heads in, expecting the hard part to be over. It isn’t. The lift inside is barely wide enough for her chair, and she has to reverse out twice before she finds an angle that works. Upstairs, the seating area is walled off by furniture nobody thought to leave a path around. And when she finally hits a single step near the washroom, someone has to jog off and dig out a portable ramp, so she waits by the door, in full view of the room, for a piece of aluminium to arrive. The building had a ramp. It still wasn’t accessible. Not really.
That’s the gap Episode 2 of Deconstructing Accessibility opens up with. The podcast series from Radio Udaan, in collaboration with Enable Me Access (EMA), pulls apart the assumptions that quietly shape how India builds and designs. Host Danish Mahajan calls this one “The Myth of the Ramp,” and brings on disability rights advocate Kavya Mukhija and architect and universal design consultant Ar. Pooja Talati to take it apart, piece by piece.
“Doesn’t a ramp mean a building is accessible?”
Kavya’s answer is blunt, a ramp gets you through the door. That’s it. She’s lost count of the venues where the ramp was the one thing anyone bothered with and everything past it fell apart. A lift too narrow to enter. Furniture with no clear route around it. A toilet she simply couldn’t use once she got there. “The ramp becomes the thing that gets checked off,” she says, “and then everyone stops thinking.”
Pooja, coming at it from the design side, points out that even the ramp itself is rarely built the way it should be. A proper ramp needs the correct slope, an even surface, handrails at the right height, specifics that get quietly dropped when something makeshift is cheaper or faster to install. Additionally, one detail catches people off guard: raised traction strips, added for grip, that can actually jolt a wheelchair or throw off its balance mid-roll. Meant to help, they end up working against the very users they’re supposed to serve.
Then there’s the portable ramp. The one fetched when a step gets in the way.Kavya doesn’t let this one slide either. A portable ramp, she argues, quietly hands the work of being accessible back to the person with disability. Now you have to ask for it, wait for it, and be watched waiting for it, for something a permanent ramp should have solved before you ever arrived. It’s a workaround wearing the costume of a solution. These practices run straight against a basic principle in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Access shouldn’t hinge on someone else’s goodwill in the moment, arriving late, on a cart.
Pooja describes it this way, a ramp is like salt in a meal. Necessary, sure. Nothing tastes right without it, but nobody sits down to a plate of just salt and calls it dinner. You still need the rest of the elements. The transport that gets someone to the venue, the doors that open without a fight, the toilet that actually works, the seating that doesn’t box a wheelchair into a corner. Getting one part of the journey right and ignoring the rest, and the whole meal still fails, no matter how good that first bite of salt tasted. Real accessibility, she says, means walking the entire route in your head before you draw a single line. Starting from the moment someone steps out of their front door, not from the moment they reach yours.
Danish closes the conversation by pointing back to what EMA is building around exactly this neglected gap. AccessAlly, the cohort program training a new generation of accessibility professionals to think in full journeys, not isolated checklist items. People trained to ask what happens after the ramp, not just whether one exists.
Deconstructing Accessibility is a 10-episode series by Radio Udaan in collaboration with Enable Me Access. New episodes dropevery Sunday evening. A ramp can get someone through the door. Whether they can actually stay for the party — that’s a different question, and it’s the one this episode won’t let you look away from.