A library in Huangpi District, Wuhan has installed a very unusual passageway for disabled people, which looks something like a sliding board, a local newspaper reported yesterday.

A library in Huangpi District, Wuhan has installed a very unusual passageway for disabled people, which looks something like a sliding board, a local newspaper reported yesterday.

The passageway for the handicapped, 5 meters long and 40 centimeters wide, is made of wood boards, with no handrail on the wall.

"It is very good that the library has opened a passageway for disabled people," a man surnamed Yu said, as he was in the Huangpi District Library borrowing books.

"However, the slope is too steep, and the surface is very smooth. Even an able-bodied man like me cannot walk on such passageway. How can disabled people use it?" he said.

As the summer holidays have begun, many parents and children have been going to the library. But as the disabled passageway took up half of the stairway, people have to queue in a long line to get up or down the stairs.

Such unusual disabled passageways have not only been seen in the library. In the Huangpi District Museum and Cultural Center office building, there are similar facilities. Residents in the neighborhood told reporters that those passageways were built two years ago, however not a single disabled person has used them.

"We also have to ask our children not to play on them, in case they fall," one resident said.

There used to also be such a passageway in a book store in Huangpi District, but it was later dismantled.

One member of staff at Huangpi District Meseum told the newspaper that the passageway was built to please the leadership and certain government departments before they came to the library for an inspection.

"This passageway is very inconvenient, we don't approve of it," an official of Huangpi District Library said. "In 2012, various government departments ordered that libraries and museums must build special passageways for people with disabilities. We chose to build one on the first floor, but couldn't get approval from the departments after the inspection. They ordered us to change it, we learned from some other office buildings, and built a similar thing."

The official said that no blind had used the facility, and other handicapped people get support from staff to get up or down the building. But "some departments often came here to check, so the passageway is still kept it for that."

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