Even though most buildings and facilities provide dedicated bathrooms for disabled people there’s also often a cubicle in the main bathrooms that are larger, equipped with handrails and open outwards instead of inwards.
Firstly, I don’t think referring to such cubicles as “disabled” is the most appropriate label because such cubicles are useful to plus-size people who aren’t comfortable using a standard-size cubicle and obesity or largeness isn’t generally regarded as a disability. Then again I don’t see why we need to use the label “disabled” anyway, but that’s another issue.
I often have to use a disabled toilet cubicle when other cubicles are in use and the first issue with their design is the lack of a door handle. With normal inward-opening doors you can push them open from outside and push them closed from inside – you don’t need any special affordances on the door to push. However with the outwards opening doors on disabled cubicles often all you have is the edge of the door and the latch which requires a decent grip with just a finger and thumb to prevent the door opening again when closed once it hits the jam. Not easy.
The next thing I don’t understand (and I believe this isn’t as common an issue) is that the disabled toilet cubicles in our building don’t have toilet paper roll holders! They’ve been replaced by hand rails for elderly people and Zimmer frame or crutch users and clearly they couldn’t decide where to relocate the holder to so simply omitted it. Glaring design flaw.
Put handles on the doors and don’t forget the toilet roll holder!
