On his first day at Harvard, William J. Booker '01 couldn't get into Annenberg Hall.

Booker, who has been using a wheelchair all his life, could not use the elevator designed to make the first-year dining hall accessible to students with mobility impairment. Due to an administrative oversight, his ID card hadn't been programmed into system.

"I was so intimidated and didn't want to [be] a pest," Booker says.

So he resigned himself to eating chocolate bars for over a week, until his proctor finally confronted him about his absence from Annenberg and helped rectify the problem.

Although Booker calls Harvard and its accommodations for disabled students a "land of milk and honey" compared to his hometown in rural Virginia, 10 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Harvard--like other public venues across the country--is still struggling to make buildings accessible to all its students.

The law's strict demands are often difficult to meet when operating with tight spaces, tight budgets, and, in the case of America's oldest university, 363 years of architectural history.

As a result, although most of Harvard's buildings are partially accessible, few are 100 percent open to people with mobility impairments--a problem which University officials say they would love to rectify, in theory, were it not so difficult to do in reality.

"It's a reality of coming to Harvard and one that people need to think about when deciding to come here," says Dean of Freshmen Elizabeth Studley Nathans. "It's not ideal."