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SAWHORSE
Disabled to get improved access
By Stephanie Porter-Nichols
Published: June 15, 2010
http://www.swvatoday.com/news/article/disabled_to_get_improved_access/7685/
By DAN KEGLEY/Staff
Smyth County and the U.S. Department of Justice have reached a manageable agreement for improving accessibility for the disabled in public buildings.
After two conference calls since the county was first notified in December of DOJ requirements for better access under the terms of the Americans With Disabilities Act, county officials, DOJ announced last week “will take several important steps to improve access for individuals with disabilities.”
The county will modify facilities “so that parking, routes into the buildings, entrances, service areas and counters, restrooms, public telephones and drinking fountains are accessible to people with disabilities,” DOJ said.
County buildings built or modified in the future will comply with the ADA’s architectural requirements, under the agreement.
The county will recognize “Virginia’s telephone relay service as a key means of communicating with individuals who are deaf, are hard-of-hearing, or have speech impairments and training staff in using the relay service for telephone communications.”
According to the December notice that included detailed specifications for ADA compliance, staff such as dispatchers should be trained to recognize delays in communication by callers to the emergency call center could be the result of disabled persons using special equipment.
The county will “ensure equal, integrated access to emergency management for individuals with disabilities, including emergency preparedness, notification, evacuation, sheltering, response, clean up and recovery,” DOJ said. It will use signs directing the disabled to accessible entrances “or to information about accessing programs and services at other accessible facilities,” DOJ said.
The county will provide information “for interested persons with disabilities concerning the existence and location of the county’s accessible services, activities and programs,” DOJ said, and adopt “a grievance procedure to deal with complaints of disability discrimination relating to county programs and services.”
The agreement comes just shy of six months after the county received an inches-thick report from DOJ detailing the findings of a federal study group that toured the county’s buildings in September 2008.
Recommendations related to the ADA Standards for Accessible Design that prescribes, for example, sink faucet levers instead of knobs or the Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards that ensures wheelchairs can pass through doorways.
The cost of tasks as small as installing Braille signs to as large as regarding steep parking lots was undetermined but presumed quite high, at least until county leaders learned in a follow-up conference call with DOJ officials that not every presumed complaint in the agreement belongs on a to-do list as they first thought.
Broken down into 75 issues, many of them were in fact not citations “but only needed statement verifying what is in place,” Supervisor Regina Davidson said in February.
The agreement was a kind of one-size-fits-all federal document that could not reflect some requirements that, as Davidson said, did not pertain to Virginia or to counties.
Supervisor Roscoe Call said Monday no cost for the work has been established, but that much of it has been done by county employees, generating expenses only for materials.
To Learn More: People interested in finding out more about the ADA, DOJ’s agreement with Smyth County, the Project Civic Access initiative, or the ADA Best Practices Tool Kit for State and Local Governments can access the ADA Web page at http://www.ada.gov
By Stephanie Porter-Nichols
Published: June 15, 2010
http://www.swvatoday.com/news/article/disabled_to_get_improved_access/7685/
By DAN KEGLEY/Staff
Smyth County and the U.S. Department of Justice have reached a manageable agreement for improving accessibility for the disabled in public buildings.
After two conference calls since the county was first notified in December of DOJ requirements for better access under the terms of the Americans With Disabilities Act, county officials, DOJ announced last week “will take several important steps to improve access for individuals with disabilities.”
The county will modify facilities “so that parking, routes into the buildings, entrances, service areas and counters, restrooms, public telephones and drinking fountains are accessible to people with disabilities,” DOJ said.
County buildings built or modified in the future will comply with the ADA’s architectural requirements, under the agreement.
The county will recognize “Virginia’s telephone relay service as a key means of communicating with individuals who are deaf, are hard-of-hearing, or have speech impairments and training staff in using the relay service for telephone communications.”
According to the December notice that included detailed specifications for ADA compliance, staff such as dispatchers should be trained to recognize delays in communication by callers to the emergency call center could be the result of disabled persons using special equipment.
The county will “ensure equal, integrated access to emergency management for individuals with disabilities, including emergency preparedness, notification, evacuation, sheltering, response, clean up and recovery,” DOJ said. It will use signs directing the disabled to accessible entrances “or to information about accessing programs and services at other accessible facilities,” DOJ said.
The county will provide information “for interested persons with disabilities concerning the existence and location of the county’s accessible services, activities and programs,” DOJ said, and adopt “a grievance procedure to deal with complaints of disability discrimination relating to county programs and services.”
The agreement comes just shy of six months after the county received an inches-thick report from DOJ detailing the findings of a federal study group that toured the county’s buildings in September 2008.
Recommendations related to the ADA Standards for Accessible Design that prescribes, for example, sink faucet levers instead of knobs or the Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards that ensures wheelchairs can pass through doorways.
The cost of tasks as small as installing Braille signs to as large as regarding steep parking lots was undetermined but presumed quite high, at least until county leaders learned in a follow-up conference call with DOJ officials that not every presumed complaint in the agreement belongs on a to-do list as they first thought.
Broken down into 75 issues, many of them were in fact not citations “but only needed statement verifying what is in place,” Supervisor Regina Davidson said in February.
The agreement was a kind of one-size-fits-all federal document that could not reflect some requirements that, as Davidson said, did not pertain to Virginia or to counties.
Supervisor Roscoe Call said Monday no cost for the work has been established, but that much of it has been done by county employees, generating expenses only for materials.
To Learn More: People interested in finding out more about the ADA, DOJ’s agreement with Smyth County, the Project Civic Access initiative, or the ADA Best Practices Tool Kit for State and Local Governments can access the ADA Web page at http://www.ada.gov
