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* H4 From Page 1 24-inch doors." The average adult wheelchair is 27 inches wide. But Corbett said he believes the average wheelchair student would not have much trouble at USC. Rita Addy, a 21-year-old elementary education major, has had her share of problems, though. She has been in a wheelchair for 15 years. Addy is required to com plete courses in music and art for her degree, but McMaster and Sloan, the buildings which house the music and art departments, are inaccessible to persons in wheelchairs. (See special feature about Rita on Page 15). Mobility may be the han dicapped student's biggest problem. Long steps, the lack of elevators and narrow doors present obstacles that most other students surmount with ease. W.S. Turbeville, director of physical facilities and planning at USC, said officials are aware of the problem. "We try to do everything we can," he said. It has been only in the past few years, Turbeville said, that the problem has come to the University's attention because very few handicapped persons attended college previously. He said the University has built ramps for wheelchairs, cut curbs to make them accessible and renovated toilets so they were accessible for the handicapped. Blind & "I accept that blindness is n the worst di done BY ELLEN BILES Of The Gamecock staff Bill Deas is a tall, thin senior majoring in broadcast journalism at USC. He is a part-time disc jockey for WCOS-AM and a ham radio operator. Bill thinks there's nothing extraordinary about that, but others tend to disagree because Bill Deas has been blind since infancy. "I accept that blindness is not the worst disability," Bill said recently. "I've done everything I wanted to do." Of course, there are times, he admitted, when things get frustrating. "But overall, I haven't lacked," he said. When he was a child, even though he was blind, he was in Cub Scouts, climbed trees and learned to ride a bike. "I never used training wheels. But the first time alone I fell on my head," he said. Me first rode only in his yard. he advanced to street bike g. "On the street I would w someone that I knew, and andica I n the construction of new buildings the University has been following the American Standards Association's guidelines which were adopted by the state in 1963, he said. There are still ap proximately 20 buildings on campus which are inaccessible to persons in wheelchairs, according to Turbeville. "To a large degree the number of steps up to a building determined what my professional life was going to be." --Bill East These are generally' the older buildings such as those on the Horseshoe, he said. If a building is renovated, attention is given to freeing it of barriers to the han dicapped, he said. Turbeville cited as an example the McCutchen House renovation which includes a special elevator easily used by persons in wheelchairs. That elevator will cost more than $30,000, he said. Turbeville said the cost of renovating old buildings to make them accessible was prohibitive, although the cost of installing ramps and making curb cuts is not so great. East said according to research figures he has seen, the cost of modifying existing struc tures is usually less than % of 1 per cent of the tqal construction cost. itudent O't sability. I've everything I wanted to do." they would tell me if a car was coming," he said. Bill thinks his family's attitude helped him learn to accept his world. He remembers how his sister Ginger got a spanking for misbehaving on a shopping trip. A couple of days later Bill went shopping with his mother and insisted on opening and closing the glass sliding windows on a display case. "Mother was scared to death I was going to break them and she would have to pay for them," Bill said. "She told me if I didn't stop I'd get a whipping when I got home." Like a typical boy, Bill didn't stop, and like a typical mother, his mother kept her promise. That was the day Bill greeted his father at the door with, "Daddy, Daddy, guess what? I got a whipping just like Ginger."~ Bill said it wasn't until he was in junior high that he was told he couldn't do something hecause he )ped St] The notable exceptions, he said, are special elevators. "The vroblem with the problem," Corbett said, "is that it's hard to justify spending a great amount of money on a few people." Planning ahead, as the University is doing now, will minimize the expense, he said. Part of the problem now, ac cording to Turbeville and staff engineer G.T. Perry is that there is no state law in effect to use as a guideline, but all building plans must be approved by the state engineer's office, they said. L.P. Hamilton, chief engineer for the State Budget and Control Board, said, "We are in an interim period. There is no legally ap plicable law in existence in South Carolina." This interim period is the result of a law signed July 9, 1974, by Gov. John West establishing the South Carolina Board for Barrier Free Design. Bill East was made chairman of that board which has been meeting since January to set building standards for public buildings both publicly and privately owned. The board's purpose, East said, is to see that there is no inherent discrimination against the han dicapped. According to East, the board, will probably closely follow the handicapped section of the North Carolina building code. "North Carolina has the jump on everybody in developing stan dards," Hamilton said. They have not only set rigid standards, but have printed an illustrated hand book which was developed by a handicapped architect, he said. Overco was blind. "That's when everybody was beginning to learn to drive and all the guys were going out for football," he said. "The world put it on me in junior high." In high school Bill joined the broadcast club. "I got my first break in radio in '71," he said. That year he won a statewide award for the best individual performance in radio broad casting. The award was for a short feature series called "Rock 'n' Roll, Then and Now" which he broadcast over WDXY in Sumter. "That gave me the confidence to be able to go on," Bill said. Now he's the disc jockey for the 12-6 Sunday and Monday morning show on WCOS. Bill is alone in the station during that time. He goes to work 45 minutes ahead of time, types his log in braille and gets his commercials lined up. The staff has devised a tagging method for records so Bill can distinguish which category the record fits. Bill said the job has worked out because of "a little ingenuity on my part and a little cooperation from the staff." His newscasts require a little cooperation from the outside world also. "The guy ahead of me tapes the newscast," Bill said. "I run them throughout the night and hope there's no emergency."~ Soon, though, he will have a braille teletype machine which hooks up to the regular teletype machine and prints the news out in braille. It's being furnished by the South Carolina Commission for the Blind. idents Hamilton said his office was approving building plans now on the basis of the North Carolina guidelines because he was reasonably sure the guidelines approved by the Board for Barrier Free Design of which he is an ex officio member would be equally rigid. Turbeville said his office was fc!lowing the North Carolina standards also. In the case of existing buildings, Turbeville said as renovation became necessary, provision was made for han dicapped accessibility when possible. According to East, the main problem with architectural barriers for the handicapped centers around buildings built "Handicapped people typically can't work with their bodies and have to use their minds. So it's ironic to have an institution of higher learning not accessible to them." --Bill East before laws were in effect. Both he and Hamilton agreed that the board's guidelines when completed would contain some provision for bringing older buildings into compliance if they undergo a major renovation. "The University has put forth special effort to accomodate the handicapped as the need arose," Turbeville said. mes Dis The commission has also fur nished him with an optacon, a device which enables him to read print by touch. The optacon is made up of a camera about the size of a mike, Bill said. When the camera is placed on the printed page, it causes a little bar to vibrate in the shapes of the letters. His training on the optacon began in September 1974. "1 haven't been reading print but that long," he said. "It's like somebody else learning in the first grade." The training has side benefits for Bill. "Before, I would read in a story that someone skated in a "I view the campus as part build the world I "The world put it on: figure eight and I didn't un derstand what it meant," he said. Now lhe can feel the shape of an eight. Some textbooks are available on recordings and some are available in braille, but occasionally they're the wrong edition, and Bill must find alternate ways to study. He can use the optacon some, but his reading speed is only about 33 words a minute so friends read to him or record his texts. His mother also records text books sometimes. "She's reor East agre nat the University has reacted well to the needs of handicapped students. "But I would like to see more affirmative action rather than just reaction," he said. "What I would like to see the University do is take more positive effort to become the mecca in the state for handicapped students." One way of doing this would be to start an outreach program to encourage handicapped high school students to attend the University, he said. Another method he endorses would be the development of a program for the severely disabled, those who need assistance in mobility and housing or semi-skilled nursing care. He also said he believes a program to renovate old buildings and make them accessible is needed. "Handicapped people typically can't work with their bodies and have to use their minds," East said. "So it's ironic to have an institution of higher learning not accessible to them." Ed. Note: This ends part I of a series looking into problems of handicap students at USC. Next week, a report from the University Advisory Committee on Aid to the Handicapped Student. ability ding my Human Sexuality book this session," he said smiling. "I didn't think she was going to do it at first, but she finally agreed to." University life has presented Bill with no insurmountable problems. "I view the campus as part of the world -and they don't build the world for blindness," he said. Friends, roommates and professors have been helpful, but like any senior, Bill is looking forward to graduation. "I love the social life," he said, "but I'm just sick of taking tests." Bill's hope for the future is that "people will look at blindness as I of the world, and they don't or blindness." me in junior high." do and accept blind people as humans rather than individuals with a disability. "I've been a ham operator siflce August 1970," he said. "One day a guy asked me a question that would require sight to answer so I told him I was blind and couldn't. He said, 'God, man, you don't sound like you're blind.' I asked him what blind sounded like," Bill said. Whatever that ham operator's stereotype of blind is; it certainly isn't Rill l)e