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დასაწყისი / გალერეა / საძიებო სიტყვები wheelchair
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ADAPT (684)
The Orlando Sentinel, Thursday October 10, 1991 the best newspaper in Florida PHOTO by Phelan M Ebenhack/Sentinel: Three people (left to right: Frank Lozano, Bunnie Andrews? and Sue Davis) are standing in front of a wall. On the wall a cross with "Nursing Homes Kill" written on it is partially visable, as is the ADAPT flag (an American Flag with the stars arranged to form the wheelchair/access logo). The three are lifting up an old fashioned folding E & J manual wheelchair to hang it on the cross. Frank, who is blind and wears a headband and T-shirt with ADAPT on them, has his hand raised. Caption reads: Frank Lozano and Bunnie Andrews, both of Colorado Springs, and Sue Davis of Louisville, Ky., chain a wheelchair to a cross marked ‘Nursing Homes Kill.‘ Title: Disabled saw their message on many faces by Sharon McBreen of the Sentinel Staff Protesters say they made their message clear this week after 250 activists in wheelchairs converged on Orlando. “It’s almost as though they never felt it before we've gotten in their faces,” Diane Coleman said. “You can feel the impact of that. You can see it in their eyes." The members of ADAPT — Americans Disabled for Attendant Programs Today — carried a message to the American Health Care Association, which attracted 3,500 delegates to a convention this week at the Peabody Hotel. ADAPT membels want an alternative to nursing home care. And they want to live at home. During the convention, which ends today, ADAPT members tried to block the Peabody’s doors with their bodies and wheelchairs. Police arrested 75 protesters on trespassing charges. The group wants a fourth of the $23 billion Medicaid spends on nursing homes and other institutions transferred to at-home care. “We need to reach the `rank`-and-file members of AHCA and the American public," Coleman of Tennessee said at a Wednesday news conference. At least one convention delegate said he wanted to hear more, she said. Nursing home association representatives have asked ADAPT members to meet with them. But what the activists really want is a national policy giving the disabled a choice, said Mark Johnson of Atlanta. Johnson said the nursing home industry doesn't want to allow the disabled to live at home, because it would lose out on the Medicaid money they receive. Wednesday night's news conference had to be moved from the front of the Orange County Convention and Civic Center to a room in the Clarion Plaza Hotel because police threatened to arrest them, one of the organizers said. Orange County sheriff's spokesman Doug Sarubbi denied that. He said an agreement reached with the judge who released the protesters from jail prohibited them from trespassing on Peabody Hotel property. Sarubbi said the Sheriff's Office was tabulating the time and money — estimated at least $100,000 —- it spent on the protest.
ADAPT (250)
Cincy orders protesters out A May bus protest in Cincinnati has been described “as the most effective, courageous and fun action ever accomplished in the movement for disabled rights," according to literature mailed out by the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT). Some 85 members of ADAPT were in Cincinnati in mid-May to picket a regional convention of its arch-enemy, the American Public Transit Association (APTA) and to dramatize what a lack of accessible buses means to the disabled population of that Ohio city. The action began with the customary march on the convention hotel on Sunday, May 18. No arrests were made but marchers were greeted at the Westin Hotel by police and double barricades. None of the protestors was allowed into the hotel. Pointing out that other people were passed through the barricades, Bob Kafka of Austin, Texas, said the wheelchair protestors were being discriminated against. However, Cincinnati police captain Dale Menkhaus said that such actions, were proper when taken to protect private property from any group seeking to disrupt other lawful gatherings. The following day Kafka and fellow Texan George Cooper of Dallas dragged themselves onto a City Metro bus, paid their fares, and were arrested. They were reportedly told that “it’s not safe for disabled people to be on the regular bus.” The two were later released on $3,000 bond and ordered out of town, an action that ADAPT leaders described as blatantly unconstitutional. A third protestor, Mike Auberger of Denver, who is a former resident of Cincinnati, was arrested when he attempted to block the bus on which Cooper and Kafka were riding. Auberger said he originally left Cincinnati because of that city's “nineteenth century” attitude toward persons with disabilities. None of the Queen City Metro buses are accessible to the disabled, although 87 of the buses do have lifts which have been bolted down. Metro officials estimate it would cost them $350,000 to return those lifts to operational status. A local Cincinnati disabled activist said that's why she agrees with ADAPT’s goals, even if she can't go along with their methods. Dixie Harmon, co-chairperson of the Specialized Transportation Advisory Committee to Queen City Metro and a member of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition of Persons with Disabilities, said that the city’s service for disabled riders was inadequate. A disabled person must request space 24 hours in advance from Access, the paratransit system, but even then there's not always a space. “They dictate our lives to us because we have to go and come as there's space available.” ADAPT members said that's why they were willing to go to jail to publicize their cause. Police, however, made no arrests when 15 wheelchair protestors rolled onto a highway where vehicles were traveling at 40 miles per hour and blocked seven buses that were carrying APTA delegates and their spouses to a dinner at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in nearby Canton. Police were caught by surprise, as they had barricades to turn back protestors at the entrance to the Hall of Fame. Two local disabled leaders who were accompanying the APTA delegation to the dinner were taunted as “Uncle Toms” in front of TV cameras. Early the next day ADAPT members were back in front of the Weston Hotel where they erected a huge cross and hung a wheelchair from it in a mock crucifixion. On the final day of the convention, 17 protestors were arrested when they blocked the hotel driveway and refused police orders to move. Many of those arrested were ordered to jail unless they agreed to leave town. Three protestors, Auberger, Cooper and Kafka, decided the time had come for disabled protestors to do “hard time” and ended up serving 10 days. Five other protestors were turned out of jail because they had special medical problems or speech impairments. Others were released after pleading “no contest” to the charges in hastily organized trials. “Even the story we had left town and the protest was over made TV news," an ADAPT spokesperson said.
ADAPT (246)
THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER Wednesday, May 21, 1986 [This article continues in ADAPT 245, but the entire text is included here for easier reading.] [Headline] Handicapped bus protests to continue [Subheading] Judge offers three protesters choice of jail or leaving city BY DAVID WELLS and JAMES F. McCARTY The Cincinnati Enquirer and ENQUIRER WIRE SERVICES The issue of handicapped people and their accessibility to mass transit reached a peak Tuesday locally and nationally, sparking protests that were expected to go on today. In Cincinnati, a judge ordered three handicapped protesters who had been arrested to leave the city or go to jail. One of the men, a native Cincinnatian, chose to ignore the edict, and his bail of $3,000 was revoked late Tuesday. In Washington, D.C., the Department of Transportation issued long-awaited criteria for making the nation's public transportation systems more accessible to 20 million handicapped people. Neither decision was well received by the handicapped community. The Rev. Wade Blank of ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation) said late Tuesday that a dozen or more of its members were planning an act of civil disobedience in Cincinnati today that he expected would get them all arrested. “We decided that to leave Cincinnati under the present atmosphere of basic human rights violations, would be to ignore our moral obligations," Blank said. George Cooper, who was arrested Monday said, “I thought my hometown of Dallas was conservative, but Cincinnati is more conservative." Cooper arrested Monday with two other members of ADAPT on charges of disorderly conduct during a demonstration at Government Square. Hamilton County Municipal Judge David Albanese imposed the sentence on the the ADAPT protesters. Late Tuesday, police spotted ADAPT member Mike Auburger, a former Cincinnatian who lives in Denver, driving a car through the -- city—an apparent violation of Albanese's order to leave the city. Cooper and Robert Kafka, Austin, Texas, were arrested after they crawled up the steps of a Queen City Metro bus, paid their fares and demanded the right to ride. Auburger was arrested when he tried to grab a wheel of the same bus as it pulled away from the stop. Metro's Assistant General Manager Murray Bond said disabled persons were not permitted on regular coaches because the company does not think it is safe. Metro provides wheelchair lifts on Special Access buses. but Bond said the cost of installing wheelchair lifts on regular buses would be prohibitive. Defense attorney Joanie Wilkens said after Tuesday’s hearing that she considered Albanese's order unusual but that ADAPT did not have the time or resources to fight it in court. ADAPT members were in Cincinnati to protest policies of Queen City Metro and the American Public Transit Association, which is having a convention at the Westin Hotel. In Washington, DOT's issuance of a final regulation requiring transit systems to provide reasonable alternative transportation for the handicapped contained no surprises. Many transit systems have been moving for several years toward providing alternatives such as van service or a taxi voucher system for handicapped passengers. But ADAPT and other national disability rights groups, dismayed by the new rule, almost immediately filed federal lawsuits against DOT to block the move. Handicapped representatives said the new rule fell far short of carrying out the law. A federal court in 1981 ruled that a federal requirement that all transit systems be accessible to the handicapped was too much of a financial burden. It told the Urban Mass Transportation Administration to develop new requirements that would assure that the handicapped are provided service. Under the final rule announced Tuesday, a transit authority must establish some alternative services for the handicapped if the regular bus or rail service can not be made accessible. Other members of ADAPT continued to picket in their wheelchairs in front of the Westin Hotel on Tuesday. The group suspended a wheelchair from a wooden cross. It symbolizes how the disabled are being crucified," said Bill Bolte, who helped to hoist the chair. PHOTO -- The Cincinnati Enquirer/Fred Strau: Two protesters hang a wheelchair on a large wooden cross. One man in a cowboy hat and plaid shirt (Joe Carle) steadies the cross and the chair from below, while a second man (Jim Parker) stands and pulls the manual wheelchair higher. Behind them several other protesters (including Joanne ____) watch and stand by extensive police barricades in front of the APTA convention hotel. Caption reads: Joe Carle, left, and Jim Parker chain a wheelchair to a cross Tuesday outside the Westin Hotel. The two were among several members of the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit demonstrating against City Metro and the American Public Transit Association which is meeting at the Westin.
ADAPT (241)
The Cincinnati Post, Wednesday, June 11, 1986 11A Opinion Small photo of the head of a white man with short hair and black rimmed eye glasses. James L. Adams Crosscurrents Title: Pretenders to the Civil Rights movement The attempts of minorities of all stripes to identify with the black experience in America to gain even legitimate goals strike me as being a deception and a fraud. It also trivializes the dehumanization the blacks suffered at the hands of the white majority for 350 years. Only one group was brought to this country in chains, treated like animals, sold on the block like livestock, forced to live in shanties and valued only for the labor they could produce. And even after being freed from the shackles of slavery, blacks were denied their civil rights for another 100 years. No other group in this country has had to suffer those indignities. Yet minorities as diverse as militant feminists, homosexuals and the handicapped hoist the banner of oppression and try to do a black face routine as farcical as the old showboat acts on the Mississippi of the last century. The wheelchair protests staged by the Denver-based American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) here last month are only the latest examples of groups with gripes trying to piggyback on the black civil rights struggle. Let us all agree that more needs to be done to make sure the disabled among us can get where they want to go. And there obviously are cities doing more than Cincinnati to make public transportation accessible. Denver is one. But that is begging the question. Cincinnati is not Denver. Queen City Metro is strapped for funds. It cannot provide all the service it would like for the handicapped—or even the able-bodied. But the issue is money, not civil rights. Determined to get arrested, the wheelchair protesters blocked the Westin hotel entrances, grabbed onto the wheel well of buses to keep them from moving, and one wacko with a death wish even rolled into the path of a bus going 40 mph. Bob Kafka, one of the 14 arrested—and given special treatment at the Hamilton County Justice Center—wrote a letter to The Post that began: “I am writing this letter from the Hamilton County Jail, in which I am spending Memorial Day, for the crime of trying to ride public transportation." Kafka's emotional appeal falls flat. (He obviously was trying to imitate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail" stirred the conscience of a nation.) Kafka's crime was not that of trying to ride public transportation. He was charged with disorderly conduct for crawling aboard a bus, dragging his wheelchair, dropping 50 cents in the fare box and then demanding to ride - knowing full well the bus could not move with him on it. But Kafka, in his letter, attempts to equate the problems of the handicapped with those of blacks who were forced to ride in the back of the bus: “Those in power have decided to oppress us and make sure disabled people do not ‘step out of line’ and assert their rights," Kafka wrote. “Queen City Metro decided they were going to keep disabled people in their place.” By couching his complaint in vintage 1960s language, Kafka confuses the issue. The disabled should be heard. But they should give rational reasons for their demands for equal access to public transportation and not try posing as an oppressed minority that dares not “step out of line." I didn't see any cattle prods or police dogs used to quell the demonstrations. After the protesters had left town, Council Member David Mann had pangs of conscience that caused him to make some of the silliest statements in the annals of Mann. “It seems to me that every human being in Cincinnati — visitors, handicapped or otherwise — had the absolute right to enter the Fountain Square South complex on equal terms," Mann wrote, as if he had been living in a cave during the four-day wheelchair protests. “If you and I were free to move unfettered into the public areas of the Westin, then those who happen to move by wheelchair should have been treated precisely the same." I know philosophers have struggled for centuries to define reality. After reading Mann’s views on what took place in front of the Westin, I can understand why. His perceptions are unreal. Those who happened to “move by wheelchair” were not treated precisely the same as others because they were intentionally trying to block the entrances and disrupt bus service. That's called breaking the law. It seems to me that even a council member from Clifton, who happens to be a lawyer, should be able to make that distinction. The restrictions were not based on class discrimination. Rather, they were triggered by those misguided handicapped persons who believe they can gain greater access to public places by denying that right to others. The wheelchair protesters would have scored more points with the public by shunning crazy antics and making their appeal in a sane manner. I think it revealing that the Greater Cincinnati Coalition of People With Disabilities refused to participate in the public demonstrations. The coalition leaders believe they can accomplish more by talking with local city and bus officials than by trying to disrupt traffic. They certainly will gain more public sympathy. James L Adams is associate editor of The Post. PHOTO by the Associated Press: Two men in wheelchairs, one with dark curly hair and a beard in a manual wheelchair (Bob Kafka), and the other with long braids, a headband and a dark beard (Mike Auberger), block a narrow hallway. Both are wearing light colored shirts with the ADAPT no steps logo in black. Behind them at least seven men -- two appear to be police officers -- stand, looking somewhat exasperated. caption reads: Bob Kafka. left, and Mike Auberger chained themselves together to block the entrance to Queen City Metro offices.
ADAPT (595)
US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT Sept. 18, 1989 [This story appears in ADAPT 595, 590 and 602. It is included in its entirety here for ease of reading.] [Headline] Liberation day for the disabled by Joseph P. Shapiro Forty-three million will soon win basic civil-rights protections. Their growing movement has brushed aside the opposition and is changing America The day before the Senate passed historic legislation to protect the civil rights of disabled people, Mary Jane Owen got another rude reminder of the daily discrimination that faces people like her. Owen, a writer who is blind and uses a wheelchair, was lobbying senators for the disability-rights bill. But when she moved onto Constitution Avenue to go home, a taxi driver at curbside sped away rather than pick up a woman in a wheelchair. It is similar acts, repeated hundreds of thousands of times a day to the nation's 43 million disabled, that fueled an angry political movement that has brought the nation to a path-breaking moment. In a few weeks President Bush is expected to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act, a broad statement that will extend to the disabled the same protections against discrimination that were given to blacks and women in the 1960s and 1970s. The Senate passed the measure 76 to 8 last week, and the House is likely to approve it next month. The bill is a profound rethinking of how this country views disabled people, defined as anyone with a physical or mental impairment that "substantially limits" everyday living. For the first time, America is saying the biggest problem facing disabled people is not their own blindness, deafness or other physical condition but discrimination. The bill, says Senate sponsor Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), is "an emancipation proclamation for people with handicaps" that will fundamentally change their lives, getting more of them out of their homes and institutions and into full participation in society. Under the new law, restaurants, stores, hotels and theaters can no longer turn away a person with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, AIDS or any other disability. Employers would be prohibited from rejecting qualified workers just because they are disabled, and they would be required to fashion generally inexpensive modifications to the workplace to make it accessible to the disabled, such as putting a desk on blocks to raise it for a wheelchair user. It would also require that new buses be equipped with lifts so that wheelchair users could get on public transit. New buildings, or those undergoing major reconstruction, would have to be made accessible to disabled people, with elevators installed in shopping malls and new structures higher than two stories. Telephone companies would have to hire operators who could take a message typed by a deaf person on a Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) and then relay it orally to a hearing person on another phone. [Subheading] Cost of Access. Businesses, particularly small ones, are wary of the changes. John Sloan, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, complained that the bill will impose costly requirements on businesses" and is "so broadly written" that it is unclear how far, and to what expense, a business will have to go to avoid being open to a lawsuit. Sponsors of the bill said estimates that its implementation might cost billions of dollars were wildly exaggerated. Past experience shows they may be correct. When Congress in 1973 protected disabled people from discrimination by institutions that receive federal funding, North Carolina education officials estimated it would cost them $15 billion to make state university buildings accessible, says architect Ronald Mace of Barrier Free Environments. Instead, many changes were simple and cheap. To accommodate students in wheelchairs, classes were moved to ground floors rather than installing elevators to carry them to top floors. The cost so far has totaled $l5 million, says Mace. Similarly, a 1982 study for the Labor Department found that half the accommodations made in the workplace cost little or nothing. For example, it was easy for companies to change a wheelchair user's work hours to conform with the schedule of lift-equipped buses. Another 30 percent of the accommodations were achieved for between $100 and $500. That included such changes as giving a telephone head-set to a quadriplegic telephone operator. Despite the concerns of business groups, their opposition to a bill that would open them up to a new spate of lawsuits was surprisingly muted and not nearly as vociferous as their fight against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For one thing, no one wanted to look like a bigot fighting a civil-rights bill, particularly one that was rushing through Congress. More important, businesses in the last few years have seen disabled people as a new source of labor and customers. “If they can get to the stores, business is going to increase" says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce‘s Nancy Fulco, who nonetheless lobbied to limit the rights bill's impact on business. [Subheading] Hidden Army. The mixed feelings of business groups underscored how disability rights is a civil-rights movement different from any other. Unlike the black and women's movements, disability-rights groups have never filled the streets with hundreds of thousands of marchers. Instead, the disability movement boasts “a hidden army,“ says former Representative Tony Coelho, who has epilepsy. Since a fifth of the nation's population has some form of disability, ranging from mental retardation to severe arthritis, Coelho argues, “disability impacts practically every family.“ Nowhere was that clearer than in Congress and the White House. where key supporters of the rights bill felt a particular need to win the bill‘s passage because they personally know about disabilities. Most important was President Bush, who has two sons with disabilities. Bush's strong statements in support of the bill during the 1988 campaign won him important support in the usually Democratic disability community. Nevertheless, the rights bill was in trouble until mid-June because of business fears about its cost. Then, on the day he left Congress, Coelho called Bush to ask him to renew his commitment to the bill. Within a few weeks, White House Chief of Staff John Sununu convened a strategy session with key senators to negotiate a compromise. That was easy to achieve once sponsors agreed to the White House request they drop the provision that would have allowed the disabled to sue for punitive damages if they were discriminated against. a provision that was the most opposed by business lobbies. From that moment, the compromise bill has been on a fast track. The success of the disability movement is extraordinary because it sprang up with little noise and little notice. One essential ingredient has been the growth of a new class consciousness among the disabled. Seventy-four percent of them feel they share a “common identity” with other disabled people, and 45 percent argue that they are “a minority in the same sense as are blacks and Hispanics,” according to a 1985 poll by Louis Harris & Associates. “All disabled people share one common experience—discrimination,” says Pat Wright of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund. Often it is crude bigotry. In January, an airline employee in New York who resented having to help a 66-year-old double amputee board a plane instead threw him on a baggage dolly. A New Jersey private-zoo owner a few summers ago refused to admit children with Down syndrome to the monkey house because, he claimed, they upset his chimpanzees. It is that kind of outrage and countless more subtle discriminations that fueled the movement that now wants to change the image of the disabled. Many now reject the traditional attitudes of society that suggested their lives were tragic and pitiful. Many now loathe charitable appeals such as the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon that raised $42 million for the Muscular Dystrophy Association over Labor Day weekend. Such extravaganzas seek funds by emphasizing the most desperate cases. That kind of approach, activists say, suggests that disabled people are to be cared for and cannot be contributing members of society. “We don’t want to be dependent any more,” says Lex Friedan of the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research Foundation in Houston, who is a quadriplegic wheelchair user, the result of an automobile accident. “We want to be part of society in every way.” Such new attitudes reflect fundamental changes in the lives of disabled people. Since 1975, when federal law first ensured all disabled children access to schools, hundreds of thousands of disabled students have gotten a better education alongside nondisabled peers. Many grew frustrated after college, when they found there were few such protections to help once they tried to find jobs. A recent Census Bureau study concluded that the gap between the earnings of disabled and their nondisabled co-workers is growing. A disabled worker in 1987 made only 64 percent of what his nondisabled colleagues earned. In 1980, it was 77 percent. The 1985 Harris survey found that 70 percent of working-age disabled people were unemployed. Of those, two thirds said they wanted to work but were prevented from doing so because, among other reasons, they faced discrimination in hiring or lacked transportation. Those who do not work now collect federal disability and welfare checks, costing nearly $60 billion a year. “It doesn’t make sense to maintain people in a dependency state when those people want to be productive, tax-paying citizens,” argues Jay Rochlin of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. Although no one knows precisely how many millions of dollars could be saved by bringing the disabled fully into the work force, Sylvia Piper, an Ankeny, Iowa, mother, says she saved taxpayers $4.8 million by ignoring physicians who urged her to institutionalize her retarded son, Dan, when he was born. Instead, she kept him at home and sent him to public school with non-disabled children, the kind of role models who inspired him to get a job this summer. Dan, now 18, saved $800 from his pay as a drugstore stockroom worker. His first purchase was a gray bedroom rug, upon which he slept the night it arrived. The next morning he was ready for work early and announced, “I've got to work harder and make more money." Once again, says his delighted mother, Dan grew when faced with a challenge. The nation’s changing demographics have added to the urgency of meeting the needs of the disabled. By 1990, there will be 6.2 million elderly Americans with one or more basic disabilities, up from almost 5 million in 1984, according to estimates by the Urban Institute, a research organization. And the explosive growth of the number of those with AIDS and HIV infection has already added hundreds of thousands more disabled to the population. That is why AIDS-policy advocates teamed up with disability groups to make sure civil-rights guarantees under the bill also applied to those with AIDS. People with AIDS had won federal court rulings protecting them under existing disability-rights laws, which apply only to federally funded programs. The new bill will expand that protection to the private sector, so that people with AIDS and HIV infection cannot be fired from jobs or denied service in restaurants. [Subheading] Galvanizing Issue. Along with being better educated and more independent, the new generation of disabled people has become more politically sophisticated. Some 200 independent-living centers, which have sprung up since the 1970s to provide a mix of counseling and support services to severely disabled people, became bases of advocacy. One galvanizing issue came in the early 19805, when a Reagan administration anti-regulation effort tried to eliminate key federal protections that prohibit discrimination by any program or contractor receiving federal funds. Negotiating sessions over the regulation first brought then Vice President Bush face-to-face with Evan Kemp, who headed Ralph Nader’s Disability Rights Center. The regulation was never changed, in part because of Kemp’s advocacy and growing friendship with Bush. Last week, the President named Kemp, a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since 1987, to chair the civil-rights agency, which will handle job-discrimination cases brought under the new law. The disability-rights movement is distinctive, too, because it has never had a Martin Luther King or a Betty Friedan to lead it. Part of the reason is that there are hundreds of different disabilities. Nonetheless, disabled people, such as student protesters who last year gave Gallaudet University its first deaf president, I. King Jordan, are now adopting on a small scale the protest tactics of the civil-rights movement. Thirty members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, which uses tactics of civil disobedience, on Labor Day backed their wheelchairs against buses at the Los Angeles Greyhound terminal and disrupted busy holiday traffic in a protest for wheelchair lifts on buses. As the historic legislation was being debated, there was a curious twist. Watching with interest was a paraplegic visitor from Moscow, Ilya Zaslavski. He made history earlier this year when he won election to the new Soviet national legislature, the first person anywhere in the world to run as a disability candidate. Zaslavski watched the work of Congress and announced plans to introduce SDA—-a Soviets with Disabilities Act. INSERTED TEXT BOX: THE COST FACTOR Businesses are concerned about the costs imposed by the civil-rights bill: BUILDINGS: The cost of making accessible new buildings and those existing structures that are undergoing major renovations runs between 0 and 1 percent of building costs. TRANSIT: Changes required of bus and transit systems to help the disabled over the next 20 years might cost several hundred million dollars. PHONES: It will cost $250 million to $300 million a year to hire operators to work relay systems so deaf people can communicate with those who can hear, according to federal and AT&T estimates. INSERT: PHOTO (Roberta Barnes -- San Antonio Light): A line of people in wheelchairs diagonally crosses the picture. In the front Lonnie Smith Archuleta with his buff physique, in a T-Shirt with a medal-like imprint on the front, wheels his sports chair. Behind him a slight woman (Diane Coleman) with very thin arms and leg braces on her extended legs, rolls her power chair with a flag attached. She wears a straw hat, red ADAPT no steps T-shirt and long red skirt, across which she wears a sign reading "Gentler -n- kinder nation??" Behind her another woman in a power wheelchair (Linda Johnstone) wears a different red ADAPT T-shirt and a sign across her knees reads "We Need a Ride To Work." Behind her is another large woman in a wheelchair (Mary Kay Sanders) in dark sunglasses and a white dress; she carries a white parasol and appears to be chanting. Over the top of the parasol another sign (held by someone walking but obscured from view) written in calligraphy can be seen: "Access is a Civil Right." The line bends back and around out of view. Caption reads: Countless Frustrations. Angry protesters in San Antonio wheel through the streets to protest the lack of accessible public transportation.