No Wheelchair Allowed? Apparently Some People Still Haven't Heard of the ADA.

This whole wedding experience has been a bit of a surprise for me. I expected to come across a few more challenges as I progressed in planning my wedding. Does that make me cynical? As it turns out though, I have been pleasantly surprised by everyone’s excitement and willingness to help however they can and have had nothing but positive experiences, especially with my dress. I became even more grateful for this when I saw a post made by one of my friends on facebook. She had been shopping for her best friend’s wedding dress when she was told that she could not enter the store because of her wheelchair. The story was picked up quickly by the local television station.



Here is the full story.


I can’t believe it. I mean, first of all you can see from the photo that the front of Kim Kriner's Bridal Boutique  is barrier free, which means that a person in a wheelchair can, in fact, enter the store. But someone has set it up so that the aisles are narrow making it hard for people in wheelchairs to get around. Does this person make an attempt to fix this, since you know, it’s the law? No, he or she puts a sign on the door and has staff tell people in wheelchairs to leave when they try to enter.


The girls entered anyway, only to be told that Stephanie could not enter the dressing room because her wheels might dirty the dresses. The staff that told them this was actually surprised when the girls got angry. See they have a policy about no shoes in the dressing room and wheels and shoes are the same thing, right?


My question is this. What if Stephanie had been the bride?


Clearly this store has never even considered the fact that someone with a disability might need to use their services. Cleary, they had no intentions of even trying to make accommodations for this before today.
All I can say is thank you Stephanie for going in anyway, for making this story public and for not letting this happen to someone else; someone like me, whose biggest fear was being told that she could not try on dresses because of her wheelchair.


And thank you to Mimi's Bridal Boutique and David's Bridal in Ann Arbor for seeing a bride and not a wheelchair, for making me feel comfortable and for helping me find my dress.