Moving forward

Since passage of the Americans with Disabilities act nearly 10 years ago, great strides have been made for disabled people. Now a new push is on for even better access, surprising many business leaders and giving rise to a debate over whether regulators are going too far.

By JEFF HARRINGTON

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 16, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- From her vantage point, sitting in a wheelchair in a strip center parking lot, Lynda "Angel" Watson sees signs all around that America is still grappling with how much to help its disabled.

There's the new restaurant down the street. Its entrance ramp is so steep she can't let go of her wheelchair to open the front door without rolling down the slope. There's the nearby gas station where an attendant refused to serve her in the middle of the day, pointing to the "self-serve" signs. And there's the movie theater that segregates her in a section for the disabled.

"Theaters are my pet peeve. It drives me absolutely insane," said Watson, who lost the use of her legs in a skiing accident 12 years ago. "If I'm with my 7-year-old daughter, she wants to sit in the front row and I can't . . . If you have a cute date, you want to sit somewhere else and I can't do that either."

It's been nearly 10 years since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a sweeping federal law outlining how businesses and government were to make their buildings, programs and employment ranks accessible to the country's 54-million disabled citizens.

But enactment of the ADA, it turns out, was just a warm-up.

Federal and state regulators are pushing a second wave of rules, and activists such as Watson are pursuing a new round of complaints and lawsuits. That's an unwelcome surprise to many business leaders who thought they had made the changes required by the ADA.

The Access Board, the Washington agency that sets national standards for access to public facilities of all sorts, is in the middle of the first major overhaul of ADA guidelines since they were adopted in 1991. The revamping stretches into areas the original guidelines never touched, such as ordering amusement parks to make their roller coasters handicap-accessible and requiring ATM owners to put audio tapes in their machines for vision-impaired customers.

One proposed guideline governs how playgrounds should be made accessible. Another, still in development, will dictate the layout of picnic and camping areas, trails and beaches.

Then there's the divisive issue of how to apply ADA to the booming world of e-commerce. Regulators in Washington and Tallahassee are preparing rules to require that Internet sites be made accessible to people who are hearing-impaired or vision-impaired or have difficulty typing on a keyboard. At first, only government Web sites would be affected, but activists are pushing for business sites to be subject to similar standards.

The spate of new proposals is prompting the biggest national debate on accessibility in a decade. The core question: Are there that many hurdles left to tear down, or are regulators going too far?

Take, for instance, the new proposal to require "talking" ATM machines for the vision-impaired.

The Consumer Bankers Association and American Bankers Association have railed against the idea, saying it is too costly (an extra $10,000 per machine), technically difficult for users and likely to increase waiting times in line.

The requirements "will not enhance and may even hinder access to ATM services for the visually-impaired" by leading to fewer ATMs and longer lines, said John Ward, an Illinois banker who testified against the plan last month on behalf of the banking industry.

Steve Zeisel, senior counsel at the Consumer Bankers Association, bristles that the ATM rule is another example of government pushing a one-size-fits-all approach, down to dictating the use of a mini-jack into which ATM users could plug a headphone.

Never mind that that technology could well be outdated before the guidelines are approved. "Government operates at 10 miles per hour and technology operates at 100 miles per hour," Zeisel complained.

By not allowing flexibility, he said, the government sometimes triggers conflict among the very groups it is trying to help. Consider an existing guideline on how far ATMs should be from the ground. One faction is lobbying to lower ATMs to help people in wheelchairs reach them; another counters that that would only to make it harder for elderly users who have trouble bending over.

A similar debate is brewing over a proposal to adapt amusement park roller coasters so disabled visitors can ride them.

Like their banking counterparts, amusement park operators object to the rigidity they say is inevitable in government standards. No standard lift chair would work with the diversity of rides, they say, and a proposed requirement that transfer chairs must be at least 17 to 19 inches above the ride's loading platform would inhibit future ride design.

Gerard Hoeppner, spokesman for Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, says safety is his chief concern.

"The coasters move at fast speeds," Hoeppner said. "There are drops of some distance: 120, 130 feet. What if for any reason that ride stopped and a (disabled) guest is not able to get off that car?"

Hoeppner said he could not estimate how much Busch has spent in recent years to make its park more accessible because ADA requirements are now factored into all its designs, down to seating for its new ice show. In addition to making its buildings and bathrooms accessible, the park has taken some steps that were not previously required under the law. Busch received kudos, for instance, after installing a hydraulic lift on its steam train ride, allowing disabled visitors to get a close-up view of wildlife in the park's 65-acre Serengeti Plain.

Even the most ardent ADA activists do not belittle advances made in the past 10 years.

Airports offer telecommunications devices for the deaf and travel schedules on cassette tapes for the blind. Industry trendsetters such as McDonald's and Wal-Mart feature sign-language interpreters in their TV ads.

But if the flow of complaints on a statewide and federal level is any indication, ADA violations still are widespread.

The Department of Justice, which is charged with enforcing the ADA, has filed 53 suits, entered into 371 formal settlements and 52 consent decrees and filed 86 friend-of-the-court briefs on disability issues over the past decade. The department filed or intervened in eight suits and signed four consent decrees in the last quarter of 1999 alone, the most recent data available. Many of the consent decrees with businesses in violation of the ADA were signed in the past few years.

"Over the years it has picked up," department spokeswoman Liz Savage said.

In one high-profile case, the Justice Department recently ended a four-year court battle with Days Inns of America and parent Cendant Corp., with the motel chain promising to change its building designs from the parking lots to room interiors. Wal-Mart, Duke University, Greyhound, Yankee Stadium and the Orlando Science Center recently agreed, under federal pressure, to improve access.

Justice Department attorneys prefer to push for a settlement before a case is filed.

To the extent that more cases are making it to court, Savage said the department has grown less tolerant with an "unfortunate" tendency of many businesses to wait until they are pushed before complying.

"Early on we gave people a lot of time," she said. "Now, we still negotiate but we don't let people drag their feet" before filing a suit.

Disability issues have kept Florida regulators busy as well.

The state panel charged by the governor with overseeing ADA compliance has been fielding 25 to 100 complaints a month. Lately, the tally has been on the high side.

"This office gets busier every week," said Julie Shaw, executive director of the Tallahassee outfit, called the ADA Working Group. The panel is led by Angel Watson, the disabilities activist who works at the Caring & Sharing Center for Independent Living in St. Petersburg.

Shaw's latest assignments include representing a St. Petersburg couple she says is being forced out of a trailer park with a "no dogs" rule for using a dog trained to help the hearing-impaired.

"I don't know what it is about St. Pete," Shaw said. "We tend to get a lot of issues out of that area."

John Humburg isn't surprised. "It wouldn't take long to go around the community and find (ADA) violations," said Humburg, who works for Abilities of Florida, an agency that provides job training and housing placement for people with disabilities.

Wally Dutcher, who heads the Committee to Advocate for Persons with Impairments in St. Petersburg, contends some situations have gotten worse.

A quadriplegic since diving into the shallow end of a pool in 1956, Dutcher has a harder time traveling now than he did 25 years ago. His wife or caregiver used to be able to raise the bed in a hotel room to put a lift underneath. Now most hotel beds are on platforms bolted to the ground, and the pair of double-size beds in a room have been replaced by a king-size bed -- all of which makes going to bed and getting dressed more difficult.

"There is still a general perception in the public that since ADA was passed, everything is magically accessible," Dutcher said.

"Things have improved in terms of public access. Business access is still (so-so). Church access? Forget it."

A frequent point of dispute involves restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, banks and shops whose owners think they don't have to make changes to their buildings if they are not expanding. Some erroneously assume they are covered by a "grandfather" clause if they were in operation before 1990.

The ADA makes no such exception, as disability activists have been quick to point out in litigation.

Not all those lawsuits have gone their way, and some disputes have created as much public ridicule as sympathy.

There was the California case, for example, in which a bankruptcy clerk with bad body odor sued under the ADA, arguing she should be protected from getting fired because her glandular problem qualified her as disabled. After a trial in 1994, jurors deliberated less than two hours before ruling against the woman.

A bigger setback for disabled activists came with a recent Supreme Court ruling that established that people with a treatable disability don't qualify for protection.

Watson, the activist, isn't disheartened by such low points.

For every person like the gas station attendant who refused to serve her, there are others who go out of the way to help. She notices the little things: Retailers that place clothing racks lower so she can reach them. Albertson's employees who routinely ask if they can reach anything for her from higher shelves.

"People are just so much more aware of the limitations and what they can do to create a more equal environment," she said. "Not only are physical barriers coming down, but the attitudinal barriers are as well."

As for those attitudinal obstacles that still exist, Humburg of Abilities of Florida urges patience.

Beyond mandates about brick-and-mortar structures, the law involves changing people's perceptions about policies and procedures they use every day at work and in social settings.

"Look at the civil rights laws in the '60s. This will take some time, too," Humburg said. "It's taken 10 years for some folks to get the message, and some folks still haven't gotten the message."

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