Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to todays webinar US Access Board, Status of the ADA rulemaking. At this time all participants will be in a listen only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time if you would like to ask a question you may do so by pressing the 1 on your touch tone phone. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, Tuesday December 12. I would now like to turn the conference over to Robin Jones Director of the Great Lakes ADA Center.
Great. Thank you very much. Welcome everybody and happy December 12th. I know this is a busy time of year for every one and we appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to participate in this session. The ADA audio conference series is a collaboration of the 10 regional Disability Technical Assistance Centers also known as the regional ADA centers or ADA Resource Centers. We are collaborating on these programs on a monthly basis to bring information to people in the community, around the ADA, an update on various topics and issues, and hopefully many of you have joined us in the past and if not, we hope that you will also join us in the future. As I said, the sessions are offered on a monthly basis. Traditionally, that is the third Tuesday of the month, but with November and December, we offer them on the second Tuesday due to the holidays and realizing that as we get closer to the December and November holidays that everyone''s schedules gets crazier so we have moved them up. We will resume in January to the third Tuesday in the month. You can find information about these sessions on the website www.ADA-audio.org. I will talk a little bit more about the other sessions after we are done today. We are going to go ahead and get started. Just to remind people, there are people connected by telephone, individuals that are using real-time captioning, as well as streaming audio on the Internet. We have a variety of different methods for accessing the program. It is audio recorded and the recording is then posted on the web site, again the www.ADA-audio.org for archival purposes as well as a full transcript of the program is edited and posted within 10 business days after the session. You can go back and reference or replace any of these sessions that have been offered in the past at any time. Before we waste too much time and cut into our session programming, I will go ahead and introduce our speaker. And at that point, the speaker will engage in some discussion with us and we will break up the time today and do a little bit of presentations and question and answer and then go back to presentations and question and answer on the various topics. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce David Capozzi. David has been with us in the past for these sessions and has been a popular speaker as well as the other staff of the Access Board on a variety of different topics over the years. David is the Director of Technical and Information Services for the U.S. Access Board. If you are not familiar with the U.S. Access Board, it is the only federal agency whose mission is accessibility for people with disabilities. That is the sole mission and purpose of that agency. David is responsible for the programming expenditures and manages staff of about 15 professionals and support staff who are responsible for developing the accessibility guidelines for the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Architectural Barriers Act, as well as the Telecommunications Act and accessibility standards for electronic and information technology under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. So when we think of accessibility standards, it is beyond just the architectural environment, we are also talking about the telecommunications environment as well as information technology environment that is out there. Dave is also responsible for implementing the boards training technical assistance and research program. So he has a lot of responsibility and a lot of impact on what does happen. He has been in this position for quite a few years now. He graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo, School of Law and has an honors graduate and Phi Beta Kappa recipient at SUNI Buffalo with undergraduate degree in psychology. He also was, I believe, David you can correct me if I am wrong, the first director of Project Action with the U.S. Department of Education, that is the Easter Seals Project on accessible transportation. He has a lot of experience and lots of background. So why dont I go ahead and turn the program over to you, Dave. And we will look forward to your information today.
Thank you. Welcome, everyone. It is good to speak with you all. What I planed on talking about today was, first of all, just a little bit of background about the board, for those of you that are not as familiar as Robin and the others, and then what I call our Mature Rule Making. The rule making that has proceeded along and is a little bit further than some others. And then four pending rule makings that we are just starting on and will be working on for the next few years. And then finally, some other initiatives that do not clearly fall into rule making, but are just as important. About halfway through, I will stop and we will do questions. And then at the end we can follow up with any additional questions. Thank you again for inviting me. The board as Robin described is a very small independent federal agency. We have been around for about 30 years. Our sole mission is accessibility for people with disabilities. We are run by a board of directors, if you will, which is why the name The Access Board. The board consists of 25 members, 13 of whom are public members so you too could be a public member of the Access Board if you know the right people in Washington and contributed to the party and are politically active. You could be a public member. Those are people appointed by the President for a term of years, four year terms. And then we have 12 federal members. They tend to be assistant secretaries or higher at most of the cabinet level agencies, so the Department of Transportation and Justice and Health and Human Services and Education and the large federal agencies that you are familiar with. As I said, we are small. We have about a $6 million budget, which is relatively small in terms of government budget. We have 28 employees, and three offices. I direct one of them. As Robin said, we have four program areas that the board is responsible for. I direct three of them. One is guidelines and standards development, which takes up a lot of our time and sometimes takes a long time to do. As those of you that are familiar with the board''s work, you know that rule making sometimes seems interminably long, and sometimes it is. We develop guidelines and standards under four different laws. One is the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, the oldest law that we write guidelines and standards for. That applies to federal buildings like post offices or VA medical centers or transit facilities, and anything that receives federal funds for the design and construction or alteration or leasing. Then the ADA obviously, we write accessibility guidelines for the built environment, but also for transportation vehicles under the ADA. And then telecommunications products under the Telecom Act of 1996, and finally, standards for electronic and information technology under the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 and the section commonly known as Section 508. So those are the four of laws that we write guidelines and standards under. We also played a supportive role to other agencies that have direct rulemaking responsibility. For example, under the Help America Vote Act, the board sits on two committees, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee and the standards board for the Election Assistance Commission. We assist them in the development of voting system standards development. We do not have rulemaking responsibility there. We also assist the Department of Homeland Security in regulatory work and non regulatory work that they do regarding emergency preparedness. I will get to that a little bit later because we are actually going to undertake some rulemaking in that area. One program area is guidelines and standards development, which as I said, takes up a lot of our time. The second program area that we have is technical assistance and training. The same staff that are writing the guideline standard also spend at least two hours a day on the telephone answering your questions, if you have them on the application of our guidelines and standards. So the people that wrote the rules are actually providing technical assistance, and they are also out in the field providing training. We do about 100 training sessions a year all over the country. If we have not been to your neck of the woods, please let us know. You can go to our web site under training and you will see a schedule of events. There is also a link there to send a note to our training coordinator, Peggy Greenwell, to ask us to come out and do a training which we are happy to do. Our third program area is research. We have a small research program of about $400,000 a year. Most of that is used to either develop hard research that we use then to form a basis for information that we need to develop accessibility guidelines or standards. We also use that money to develop technical assistance materials. We have that number of those on our web site. The third way that we use our research funds is to develop regulatory assessments, cost benefit analysis on our rule making. The budget gets carved up almost a third, a third, a third so the $400,000 does not go very far. The fourth program area is compliance and enforcement, so the board enforces the Architectural Barriers Act. So if you do have problems with accessing federal buildings in your areas, be it the post office or a VA medical center or any federal government office building, you could file a complaint with our office. We would investigate that and resolved it. We have a very successful track record in resolving Architectural Barriers Act complaints. That is another area that we have responsibility for. There is a link on our web site where you can file online an Architectural Barriers Act complaint. Now, the second topic that I wanted to cover was what I described as our mature rule making. By that, I mean rule making where we actually have either issued proposed rules, it drafts of proposed rules, and I will get into why we do these different types of rule making strategies. There are three of them that I want to talk about. But before I get to that, I want to talk about another noteworthy one that is finished. But it is only partially finished. That is our ADA and ABA accessibility guidelines that we issued in July of 2004. Let me just go through those acronyms. It is the Americans with Disabilities Act and Architectural Barriers Act accessibility guidelines. We issued a final rule in July of 2004. For those of you familiar with the structure of those two laws, the ADA and Architectural Barriers Act, you know that our guidelines are only enforceable to the extent that they get adopted by other standard setting agencies. For the purpose of that rule making, there are actually six other agencies in order to make our guidelines fully enforceable. Four under the Architectural Barriers Act, General Services Administration, the Postal Service, the Department of Defense, and Housing and Urban Development. Each of those four have to take an additional step of adopting our guidelines as the new standards. The good news is that two of those agencies, GSA and postal have already adopted the boards guidelines as the new standards for the Architectural Barriers Act. The other two, the Department of Defense and HUD have not yet initiated rulemaking to do that. Our chairman is on the telephone as we speak, putting the pressure on HUD and DOD to move forward. The other part of our rule making is under the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and in that case, as you know that there are two agencies that have to take the second step of adopting our guidelines as standards. That is the Department of Justice and the Department of Transportation. The good news is the DOT, on October 30th, issued a final rule adopting the board''s guidelines as the new standards under the Americans with Disability Act. So that just happened and the Department of Justice, as many of you know, had issued an advance notice of proposed rule making and are working on a proposed rule, along with a regulatory assessment or cost-benefit analysis for that proposed rule. Their time frame is theirs to speak to. The last I heard from DOJ is that they were anticipating late summer of 2007 for notice of proposed rulemaking to adopt the board''s guidelines. So, that was one issue that I wanted to talk about. That is an important thing to remember for all of the things that I am talking about before I get into the pending rule making. But that is an important point to remember for all of the stuff that I am going to be talking about. All of our work really entails a two step process. We issue guidelines and others have to adopt them as standards. The only exception to that is our Section 508 standard. Everything else that I am going to talk about requires a second step by other agencies. The three mature rulemakings that I want to talk about now, and then we will take a break and ask questions, and then we will come back to the rest of the program, are outdoor developed areas, passenger vessel guidelines and public rights of way accessibility guidelines. First, let me talk about outdoor developed areas. Each of these three, outdoor, passenger vessels and public rights of way were the result of advisory committees, or in some cases, of regulatory negotiation committees that the board had previously convened. The rule makings is in each of these areas has a long history. There has been a lot of public input and participation. Sometimes, that is a reason for the delay. Each of these rules have been under development for a while. Outdoor developed areas, which is the first one I wanted to talk about, is the result of a regulatory negotiation committee. The committee actually presented their report to the board about seven years ago. Since then, we have been working on the cost-benefit analysis. I will tell you that the initial cost benefit analysis that we did gave us significant pause because the dollar amount was just astronomical so we had to go back to square one. As a result, when we issue a proposed rule on outdoor developed areas, by that, I mean it trails, camp grounds, picnic areas, and beach access roads, we will be limiting the application of that rule to only federal facilities. So we are only invoking our rulemaking authority under the Architectural Barriers Act, not the ADA. We will do a later round of rulemaking under the Americans with Disabilities Act once we have a final rule for the outdoor developed areas in the federal sector. We plan on submitting a proposed rule to the Office of Management and Budget in about two and a half weeks, the first week in January. And then they have, OMB, has 90 days under executive order to review the rule and then either clear it or send it back with questions, issues that we need to resolve. I do not think that they will take the full 90 days but it is hard to tell. The only reason I say that is because of our only limiting it to only federal facilities so that should take some of the scrutiny out of this rulemaking. That will be the first one that you will see. We plan on submitting the proposed rule to OMB in early January. If they take the full 90 days, that is all of January, February and March. We would be issuing a proposed rule sometime in April of 2007, with a comment period to be determined but it would be at least 90 days. The second mature rulemaking that I wanted to talk about is passenger vessels. This is also the outcome of an advisory committee. The committee submitted its report to the board back in 1999. In this case, we are seven years from the advisory committee. This will apply to cruise ships, ferries, excursion boats, gamming vessels, and other vessels that carry more than 150 passengers or more than 49 overnight passengers. We are limiting this to what we call large vessels. That is how we define large, in this case, 150 or 49. What we have done is we have released two drafts already of a proposed rule. In the second draft, the comment period for that second draft just closed about three weeks ago on November 13th. We received about 175 comments by the end of the comment period. All of the comments are available on our web site, if you want to look at them. We have received many comments from disability organizations and individuals with disabilities. That was the bulk of our comments. The comments centered on two principal areas. One is communication access issues for people that are Deaf or hard of hearing. The other dealt with the number of accessible guest rooms, state rooms that would be required on passenger vessels. Those tended to be the big areas that people commented on. The next step would be a notice of proposed rulemaking. We are doing a series of case studies as part of our cost benefit analysis. We are looking at the different types of vessels, ferries, cruise ships, excursion ships, each sizes of them, to develop case studies of what the incremental cost of our guidelines would be on those vessels as they are newly built. That is part of the process that we have to go through in order to get the Rule cleared through by OMB. So, my guess is that it will be another 6 to 9 months before we submit a proposed rule to OMB because the comment period just closed and we will need to work with our board on making any changes and fishing our case studies and then, if those case studies identified any potential cost issues that we had not previously considered, we might then make changes to the second draft that we had put out based on the case studies. We need to finish those case studies before we finish the text and then we will then submit it to OMB. So that would be the second rule making that you will see coming out of the board. The first is outdoors, the second is passenger vessels and probably third is public''s rights of way. This will deal with issues like on street parking, curb ramps, detectable warnings, audible pedestrian signals, street crossings, issues like that in the public right of way. This also is the outgrowth of a advisory committee. We are in the process of developing a regulatory assessment for this rule. That is the common theme of these mature rules is the regulation assessments take the longest time. We have a lot of scrutiny now from OMB, the small business administration plays a role to the extent of our rules affect small businesses. They weigh in very heavily in the process. It slows things down and takes time, which is one of the other reasons that we do drafts of rules because if we do a draft we do not have to do a reg assessment, so we can at least make some progress. That is part of the reason we do a draft than regular notice of proposed rulemaking. It also helps us narrow down the issues and builds support for the rule. Then, the public rights of way has actually also gone through two drafts. We did a first draft in June of 2002, then a second one in November of 2005. As I said, the next step would be a proposed rule and a regulatory assessment. I do not want to predict a time frame for that because we frankly, have not really begun on the regulatory assessments, other than putting together a matrix of the provisions, and an estimate of the cost, meaning high, low, medium. We need to then flush out the actual cost of each provision. We also need to consult with state and local governments, because this will affect them. And there are executive orders that require us to consult closely with state and local government agencies and elected officials before we issue proposed rules. It just sometimes gets very complicated to do rule making. We will take a break now. Those were the three mature rules that I wanted to talk about. I will talk after the break about some of our pending rule making and some other initiatives. I will stop now and take any questions.
Okay ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question at this time we ask that you please press the one on your touch-tone telephone.
While we are waiting for that that, Dave, I do have some questions that people have given to me in advance of the session today. They are relevant to what you have been talking about here with the outdoor developed areas and public rights of way. Why don''t I just put those in at this point while we are waiting to get people lined up with questions. You spoke a little bit about the status of the adoption of the ADAAG standards by the Department of Justice. An individual has indicated that they obviously have reviewed the guidelines that were issued in 2004 by the Access Board and they noticed specifically that there was no reference to detectable warnings at curb ramps in this version. They have a question as to why that is no longer included. I believe it is related to your public rights of way regulations. Can you give some clarification?
Yes. We did that deliberately. There is no reference to the technical provisions for detectable warnings other than at transit platforms. That has always been a requirement and remains so to this date. What we did, was we removed any provisions for detectable warnings for curb ramps, because the vast majority of issues involving detectable warnings at curb ramps take place on the public right of way so they are on streets and sidewalks and public rights of way locations. We felt the most appropriate way to deal with that is to deal with it in our public rights of way rulemaking which is what we are doing. So you will see provisions for detectable warnings, 24 inches along the bottom edge of the curb ramp in our draft of public rights of way guidelines. That is how we intend to address detectable warning provisions. Now, with that said, there is a great deal of technical assistance that the Federal Highway Administration has provided on detectable warnings. They are significantly, shall I say pushing, the requirements for detectable warnings for new curb ramps at new installations on streets and sidewalks. We have all of that linked up on our web site as well.
And the Department of Transportations adoptions of the regulations specifically has some language in there about curbs?
Yes. The October 30th publication as well.
Right. That is something that people were highlighting as a key thing that people should probably take a look at. If people have not, this is what David had indicated or referenced earlier that the Department of Transportation had already gone forward with some adoption of the revisions to the ADAAG but they do have some additional language that people might want to pay attention to. Okay. Why don''t we take some questions from the audience?
We have a question from Rick.
Hi Robin. Hi Dave. The question I have is in regard to hand rails. In the ADAAG it talks about the measurement being one inch and a quarter to one and a half inch that are acceptable. I am actually sitting here looking at a letter, David from you in 92, that says the industry standard of 2 inches is acceptable for purposes of that section. I have a situation where I have a manufacturer who is saying that two inch hand rails are acceptable and I said not according to my interpretation of the ADA accessibility guidelines, which is what we have to go by. I noticed that in the ADA, it does go up to 2 inches. Can you comment a little bit on that?
Sure, can you hold for just a second?
Sure.
Dave is just pulling some staff in. We want to make sure that we respond to all of your technical questions accurately.
Okay. As I warned Robin before hand, if there are very detailed technical questions, I can send those to Jim Pecht who is here with me and I am just going to summarize. The question was about the difference between, I will say original ADAAG requirements for handrails and the new provisions and the new ADA and ABA guidelines. Does that summarize your question?
The bottom line is that we have to adhere to the ADA accessibility guidelines right now.
Make sure that we are talking about the standards. You are talking about the standards that are currently enforceable under Title III and adopted under Title II of the ADA that currently is in force right, is that correct?
Right. And what the ADAAG says is that the measurement is 1.25 inches to 1.5 inches. I have a manufacturer who is saying that the new ABA says two inches but the guideline or standard that we have to go by says an inch and a half. The question is, I have a letter here that is dated 1992 that says the two inch standard pipe size as designated by the industry as an inch and a quarter or an inch and a half is acceptable, although those standard pipe sizes may go up to 2 inches.
Okay. This is Jim Pecht. We have said in technical assistance and even on our website that if you are using the iron pipe standard, and that is a specific industry standard, that is acceptable, because, basically, there is a little thing up that the front that says the tolerances are subject to standard billing industry standards. This is an industry standard. The iron pipe standard sizes pipe from the inside diameter, and not the outside diameter so an inch and a half iron pipe standard actually goes up to about 1.9 something inches, almost 2 inches outside diameter. We have said since that is the industry standard, if you are using that standard, that is accessible. In the new document, we basically moved it up to 2 inches, because that pretty much goes along with this iron pipe standard and what the building code has been doing and what they have gone to. But you are correct. The current standard that the Justice enforces says were 1.25 to 1.5 inches. If you are talking about a wood hand rail it would have to be an inch and a half, no more. If you are using something that specifically references the iron pipe standard, that would be allowed to go up to whatever that industry standard allows for an inch and a half which would be 1.98 inches, or whatever it is.
You know if the Department of Justice has made that same determination?
I do not know. That is an interpretation we have made on our website. I do not know what Justices position on that is or how they are enforcing it. You would have to talk to them.
Okay. Thank you.
Next question please.
It is from Eileen.
Hello. My name is Dan. I am the director of Miami Dade office of ADA Coordination. I have a question on the application of the new ADA accessibility Guidelines in the public right of way. How the Department of Transportation has adopted those, would those standards apply to the public right of way for Title II generally, or more specifically, for Title II public right of way sidewalks, curb cuts, etc. that are funded by DOT funds? David Capozzi: Hold on one second. I am going to consult with Lois here since she just walked into my office.
We just want to make sure that when you get down to some of these technical and specific issues... Dave is consulting with his staff to make sure that he gives you the appropriate answer.
I think the question was given the fact that DOT just adopted at the end of October our guidelines, what effect does it have on the public rights of way?
Public rights of way generally under Title II, and more specifically, public right of way projects that are funded by DOT. The ADA or ABA might apply.
I think the short answer is this is not a lot because DOTs responsibility under Title II is just for transit facilities not public rights of way projects. To the extent that it is a public right of way project like a curb ramp improvement or street enhancement, that is more than likely going to be addressed under 504 and really would not be affected by the DOT adoption of the ADA/ABA guidelines.
Would the 504 though, apply the ABA guidelines and were they adopted by DOT also?
504 is still UFAS.
So ABA has not been adopted by DOT?
Only for transit facilities. So, to the extent that a new train station is being built or a new Metra Rail station is being built, then the new provisions would apply. If your question is on street parking situation or curb ramps or street enhancement, then DOT does not have jurisdiction in that area, that would be DOJ.
My follow up question is if that transit station is being built with federal funds, do the ABA requirements apply under DOT? Under 504? You said that 504 is still UFAS. But if it is a DOT transit facility, what standard do you apply?
If it is a DOT transit facility then as of October 30th or whenever, I forgot what the effective date was-.
It is effective now.
For a transit facility project under the barriers act, then the new guidelines would apply. The new ABA standards would apply.
ABA.
But to the extent that it is a curb ramp project or something in the public right of way, then, you are still, DOT rulemaking does not affect that.
Thank you very much.
It gets very confusing to apply these different standards with different things. Especially when people are so used to looking at when you look at UFAS, Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards, many people think of that as ABA. It is not. They are different. That is where the confusion comes in.
One of the things we talked about in a staff meeting the other day is that we are going to be revamping our web site to actually put in the new standards that have been adopted by the agencies that have adopted them, so DOT, postal, GSA, we will actually either link to it if they have done them in HTML or we will create our own version of the standards. We will make it clear that if you are interested in a court house or a prison or a new federal office building, then here is the new standard to apply. If it is a new transit facility, then here are the new standards to apply. If it is a public accommodation, then you are still in limbo land. We are going to try to make it a little clearer because of the ambiguity during the time when the other three agencies have not yet adopted the new standards. So you have multiple standards out their.
Hopefully we will have that figured out, probably about the time when things will change again.
Exactly.
Next question.
Hi David, my name is Penny, I am actually Cliffords partner. I had a question related to 4.3.2. For sites that are located within a boundary site off of a public right of way but do not provide a sidewalk at the public right of way or any kind of a pedestrian route to the public right of way, is an accessible route still required?
Could you repeat the question again?
Sure. For locations that are set back in off of the public right of way, but there is no sidewalk at the public right of way and no real pedestrian route from the accessible entrance of the building or accessible parking to the public right of way, is there an accessible route required to there?
Technically, the way the current standard reads is that you have to connect and accessible route to public rights of way. I do not know how Justice is enforcing that or if they are using our clarification that we put in the new guidelines. We basically but in an exception that says if the only way you there is by vehicle the accessible route starts at the accessible parking and then goes to the entrance. You are not required to put in a circulation path all the way out to the road and you were not planning on doing that and you were not planning on doing that for everyone and everybody had to drive their car down through that site to the parking lot. I am assuming that Justice is thinking about that but I do not know how they are enforcing the current standards. I do not know.
We have actually been told when we have questioned that although it is a current enforceable standard, they are not actually enforcing it. So that leaves us sort of in limbo when we are trying to assist our clients in knowing what to currently comply with. It helps knowing that there is more clarification in the new guidelines. But how we advise our clients to comply right now is a little trickier.
Since we have no enforcement authority, that is something you have to go directly to Justice. Sometimes they tell us those things, sometimes they do not.
It is always a tricky thing to balance the issues of what the Department of Justice may be saying that they are currently using-or what they are currently enforcing. You have to remember that suits and complaints can be it brought in many different arenas and the bottom line is what is interpretable by the courts. The Department of Justice might be doing one thing but if the court is looking at it as we have found out with some other complaints and things, it might be interpreted differently based on who is reviewing it and looking at the information. If you are strictly looking at the Department of Justice, that might not always be the body that you are dealing with in an enforcement action. Going back to the standards, look at what does the standard call for. Whether it is being enforced in a real time, is going to be a variable.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Lynn.
Hello. I have a question here from Jackie. She is on the board of the local regional transit. I would like to know if you have ever considered making laws for emergency under the ADA?
So we can paraphrase that, of looking for regulations regarding emergency evacuation?
Yes.
So more specificity of things like, the type of equipment used, like evacuation chairs and things?
Yes.
There are currently some issues within the built environment such as areas of rescue assistance and such. But you are talking about more specifics related to equipment that would be used in emergency evacuation?
Yes.
Thank you. This is the case where we have sometimes limited jurisdiction. Marsha from our staff has a familiar saying that if you take a building and turn it upside down and shake it, if you were Atlas or somebody really strong to do that, all of the stuff that falls out is not within our jurisdiction. The stuff that remains, that is fixed, we can regulate. Oftentimes, there are things like evacuation chairs that we do not have jurisdiction over. It is more like furniture and equipment, it is policies and procedures and we only have jurisdiction over the built environment or under 508 for technology, unless we were given specific statutory authority, and we were not. On the other hand, the Department of Homeland Security is developing guidance materials. As we speak, they had 90 days under their 2006 appropriations act to develop guidance materials on emergency evacuation issues. We have been helping them with that but it is not going to be accessibility guidelines, but more technical assistance, guidance as to things that exist in the marketplace, regulations that exist, policies and procedures that exist to alert people to emergency evacuation issues. There is one issue that I will get to after this question and answer period, where we are going to be developing guidelines for trailers, what we call emergency transportable housing. That is the extent of our jurisdiction.
That is, again, because it gets back to the built environment issue?
Exactly.
Thanks. Can we ask one more question?
Sure. Go ahead.
On the board that you speak of, is there anyone on that board that actually has disability?
On the access board? Both the public.. the overall board itself?
On our board? Absolutely. The board is required to have half of its public members have a disability and our vice chairman has a disability. Let''s see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of our 12 public members have disabilities. Either people who are blind, people who are deaf, wheelchair users, people of short stature.
Thank you.
Next question, please.
Our next question comes from the line of Kelly.
Yes. We were wanting to know, will we be able to get a copy of the outdoor guidelines version that is being submitted to the AMB?
OMB? Not until after it has been cleared and been published in the federal register. Because it is not a public document until then. There is our advisory committee report that is on our web site. If you go to publications, then scroll down to-where is it? It should be under committee reports. It is on our publications page just above public rights of way, is the outdoor developed areas committee report. That is the best that I can do right now. Then when the rule gets cleared by OMB, the rule will be on our web site, usually the day before it appears in the Federal Register.
When do you anticipate that will be?
My guess is around April, because we will submit it to for OMB on the first week of January and they have 90 days. That will be sometime in April.
Okay. Thank you.
Why don''t we have you go back and resume your comments.
Okay. Hold on one second. So, the last two topic areas that I wanted to talk about were rule makings that the board had agreed to begin, but are less mature than the ones that I have already spoken about and some other initiatives that we have under way or are available on the boards website that you can take advantage of. So, the rule makings that we have in development, there are four. Let me just list them first then I will talk about each of them briefly. The first one I will call our technology revision and update. The second is an update of our transportation vehicle guidelines. Third is a communications update. And, fourth, it is in emergency transportable housing. The first one, it is the one that has actually begun. That is an update of our Section 508 standards and Telecommunications Act accessibility guidelines. Both of those standards and guidelines had been issued previously, so we had issued our 508 standards in 2000 and our telecom guidelines in 1998. Both of the laws we wrote those under required us to periodically review and update our standards or guidelines. And so now we are doing that. The reason for us combining this into one rule making is because our telecom provisions in the Section 508 standards, are based on, and are consistent with, the guidelines in our Telecommunications Act guidelines. It just makes sense to have one document that has everything in it. For those of you that are familiar with Section 508 and the Telecom Act, you will know that there are different, what I would call, levels of effort that apply to each law. So for Section 508, Section 508 applies to federal agencies only. It applies to federal agencies when they develop, procurer, maintain or use electronic and information technology like computers, websites, fax machines, copier machines, etc.. The level of effort is the agency has to comply with our standards unless it is an undue burden. As you know, that is a relatively high standard for the Telecommunications Act. The Telecommunications Act applies to manufacturers, not to government agencies or to end users or purchasers, but to manufacturers of telecommunications equipment. It only applies to the extent that it is readily achievable, which for new products, it might not be the best standard, but it is a standard that Congress gave us and so, we cannot change the audiences, for 508, it is federal agencies, for Telecom it is manufacturers or the level of effort, undue burden, readily achievable. What we can change is the technical provisions and make them consistent and put into one document so that is what we are doing. We created an advisory committee to advise the board how to do that. The committee is called the TEITAC committee. You will guess what they will get for their present when they are all done. They will get little tie tacks. It is a forty-two member advisory committee, it is our largest advisory committee that we have ever had. And it has representation from other countries as well. The European Commission represented the European Union, Canada, Japan and Australia. All four of those are on the committee. They are members of the committee and are fully participating. We have 38 other organizations, technology trade associations, technology manufacturers, Microsoft, Adobe, AOL, groups like that. Then we have numerous national and local disability organizations as well as a few federal agencies and some state agencies, because our 508 standards are being applied at the state level also. So, that advisory committee is in process. It has met twice already in September and November. Their next meeting is February 6th through the 8th in Washington. All the meetings will be in Washington. We have created a Web site for the committee. You can get to that right off of our front page of the Access Boards website. If you go to the bottom left of our web site, and you will see an acronym called TEITAC. You can click on that and it will take you to the committee website. There is also a wiki, so if you have ever gone to wikipedia, you will know what a wiki is. We have set up a wiki for the committee to do their work. A lot of their documents and thought processes are there. Everything is totally open. If any of you want to participate on any of the subcommittees, there are eight of them, you can do that by going on to our wiki and just signing up for a list serve. You can lurk in the background and listen, or you can take part in conference calls. We always have Colorado captioning which provides captioning for our conference calls. Thank you very much. All of our conference calls are accessible so if anyone wants to participate, please do so. We have hundreds of people that are on our subcommittees. It is a very active advisory committee. We expect that the committee will finish its work this September. We would start developing a proposed rule based on their work. The second rule making that I wanted to talk about is the update to our transportation vehicle guidelines. We had issued our vehicle guidelines back in 1991 and accept for over the road buses, which we added amendments to in 1998, they have not been changed in 15 years. They are in need of an update, an overhaul and so we are starting that process. We have had a couple of information meetings where we are trying to gather information on what the topics are of concern to people. We have our own ideas of things that we would like to see changed. We would like to hear from the public and from transit operators and manufacturers, as to issues that they have. We have done two already. There is a summary of the meetings that we have had, and that is right on the front page of our web site. It is under information meetings, right on the front page. We are planning the third one for our January board meeting, on January 10th in Washington. Some of the issues that we are looking at are securement, low floor vehicles, they did not exist when we issued the guidelines in 1991, bus rapid transit, which is an emerging type of transportation, kind of a cross between a bus and light rail vehicles and other issues like size and capacity of lifts and the associated footprint changes that might be necessitated on the vehicle itself. So for example, wheelchairs are getting longer and wider and heavier. Should be changed the guidelines to reflect that? If so, in what regard? Should it just be the weight capacity of the lifts? Should it increase the overall footprints of the lifts, then also of the securement location and the route to get from one to the other. What are the implications of that? We are really just at the beginning phase of looking at updating our vehicle guidelines so if you have input or thoughts, you can either, if you are in Washington in January, you can come to our meeting, otherwise we will be soliciting input subsequent to January to get input on what some of the issues are for our vehicle guidelines. The third issue is what we are calling an update of our augmentation of our communication access issues. We already have a number of provisions for communication access, visual alarms, assistive listening systems, accessible ATMs, but there are a number of other areas that we do not address or do not address very well. For example, interactive transaction machines. For those of you that fly a lot and you go to the airports, you can have all of those ticketing devices, and most of them are not very accessible to people who are blind. That is an area that we would like to address. Point of sale machines that are very popular at the grocery stores and big box stores and hardware stores, that is another area that we do not address in our guidelines currently and is an area that we would like to. Public address systems, drive through machines, a variety of issues like that that we do not address well or at all in ADAG right now. Or, we address it in our 508 standards, but they only apply to the federal government. What we are planning on doing is waiting until our 508 advisory committee is finished and then taking a look at that work and seeing how we might apply it to the entities other than the federal government, so, state, local, the private sector and other areas that the advisory committee is not going to be addressing. Like I know they are not going to be addressing public address systems just because it is not an issue for federal agencies. But they will be addressing point of sale machines and transaction machines, so we would want to benefit from their thinking. That was the third rule making, and then the fourth is what we call transportable emergency housing and by that we essentially mean FEMA trailers. And to develop technical guidelines that are reflective of the constraints that trailers have, as far as size, portability, and there are restrictions as far as width for roadways, when you are transporting these, and none of that really is reflected very well in the standards that FEMA would have to use which is UFAS because as these trailer were being procured using federal funds. So if UFAS was the standard, and UFAS frankly was not developed with the trailers in mind, so we want to take a look at if there are any changes that we need to make to UFAS to make it more reflective for transportable emergency housing. Frankly, when the trailers were being purchased right after Katrina and Rita, the agencies that were responsible did not really have a good sense of what to specify. We are trying to be responsive to that and be helpful so the next time it is clear as to what the provisions are. Those were the four new rules that I wanted to talk about. Lastly, I wanted to go over a couple of initiatives that the board has undertaken, or that we will be doing soon, just to let you know about some of these other issues. One that is just finished is our court house access advisory committee. That committee was formed to develop technical assistance on better ways to make courthouses accessible. We already have guidelines and place. In many cases they were not being followed or not followed well. So, we formed this advisory committee, which was a fabulous group of people, including federal agencies and judges, and judges with disabilities, advocates, it was really a great group of people. And they just finished their work, and they presented their report to the board on November 15th. The committee report is available on our web site. There is also a link to a mock up of actual court rooms that we had constructed. We had four different styled and sized court rooms constructed out at a warehouse through funding from the General Services Administration and the administrative Office of the court. A drywall wall and plywood mocked up courtroom with a judge''s bench, witness stand, jury box, a court reporter, ballot station, etc. There was a public seating area, litigants tables, etc. showing the committee''s recommendations. That was a fabulous experience because it showed people firsthand how you can incorporate accessibility into the design and do it in a very seamless way so that you are kind of surprised by the accessibility because it is not so overt, yet it is totally integrated. I think doing that mock up was one of the cornerstones of the advisory committee''s work. It is going a long way toward making things better. The mock ups were filmed and we will be putting that on -we will create the new web site for the court house issue. The film clips will be there. The design drawings for the mock up will be on the Web site. Right now, you can see some of the pictures on our web site. That was one thing I wanted to call to your attention, in case you have courthouses that are being built in your area, you should definitely take a look at our advisory committee report. The other thing is that we have done a couple of side-by-side comparisons of the updated ADA and Architectural Barriers Act guidelines versus the original ADA standards and the International Building Code. We also linked to similar comparisons that were done by the International Code Council and the International Fire Protection Administration. Those are all on our web site and you can get to them from the front page of our site. I would not say that they are pocket guides. I think ours is a 500 page comparison. The others are equally as long. But it at least shows you the differences between the new guidelines and the original standards. In some cases, that can be very helpful. The last two things that I wanted to talk about were that our board every year does an out of town even and the next one is going to be in Denver, Colorado, July 25th through the 27th. We are working with the people at the Rocky Mountain DBTAC to help find hotel space and we will be working with them to help flesh out an agenda. We are doing it in July so that we can help celebrate the anniversary of the ADA and do it in a local community. We will also be focusing on outdoor developed areas. Our plan is to have the proposed rule issued on a street under public comment at the time that we are in the Denver in July. We will have a public hearing on the proposed rule and some site visits to some of the national parks in the area, probably the Rocky Mountain National Park. That is an issue that will be coming up in July. Finally, we collaborated with the DBTACs on a new web site called rebuilding communities and you can get to that from our front page also. That focuses on resources that are available for communities that are rebuilding after last year''s hurricane. That goes back to the question before about things that we can do that are not related to the built environment. In once case we are going to be developing guidelines for emergency housing, trailers in particular. We have also tried to provide technical assistance and documents and training to the extent that we can on the emergency evacuation issues and we are doing that in partnership with the DBTACs. With that I am finished with my remarks and I would be happy to take any more questions.
Thank you, Dave. There is a lot of information and we will see what types of questions we have from our participants. Just to let people know, people have submitted questions to me electronically through the online system. With any question, if it is not specific to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Access Board, I will not be forwarding that on to the Access Board but we will be in contact with you directly in regards to that question because we do not want to take up time with areas that would not specifically be the Access Board but would be enforcement issue as it would relate to the Department of Justice. So I apologize for your questions not being transmitted in this format but it is for that particular reason. Let''s see if we have any questions out there.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to register for a question, please press the one on your touch-tone phone. We have a question from Debbie.
Go ahead.
I have a question. This is Ben ADA Specialist with the State - on Public Transportation. There was a study a couple of years ago regarding construction tolerances and right of way and I was wondering what the status of that is.
We did a project, which is still ongoing with CSI Construction Specifications Institute. It is not finished yet.
Okay. Thank you.
Any ETA on that?
I would not want to guess without talking with Scott.
Okay. Next question?
Next question is from Donna.
I am going to let John ask. Good afternoon, John in Nashville here at the Center for Independent Living in Middle, Tennessee. Earlier in the broadcast there was a question about access to public rights of way from places of public accommodation. I believe Mr. Pecht or another person from the Access Board responded to her question in such a way as to indicate that there is an exclusion for places of public accommodations complying with the requirement to provide path of travel to public rights of way if it is reached exclusively through a motor vehicle. My question was, I have not been able to find in my research what would be a place of public accommodation which one can reach exclusively through use of a motor vehicle. Is anyone available to give us some ideas of what might constitute such a public accommodation?
Dave, do you want me to...
This is Jim Pecht. I am trying to think about what might be a place where... Possibly an office complex that is on a very large campus where each building has its own separate parking lot, maybe the buildings are interconnected but not connected to main road to get to their site, basically. Everyone would be expected to drive onto the property and park in a space utilize the office building. There are probably others but that is the first thing that jumps into my head. I imagine there are others.
Okay. More and more these office complexes spring up all over the U.S.. I can see what you mean. They would be - to impose the path of travel in a public right of way in a 500-acre office park for example. Thank you.
Okay.
Next question, please.
The next question comes from the line of Ilene of Miami-Dade County.
Hi. This is Dan again. We have a difficult problem in our airport and I am wondering if you have developed any standards or you have standards that would apply. Where we have the ticket counters and behind the ticket counter is the conveyor belt that carries the luggage. The people working at the ticket counter have a lot of trouble lifting the bags from the little openings in front of the counter to place them on the conveyor belt. What the airport wants to do is add additional conveyor belts that would go from where the passenger puts the baggage onto the scale, beside the ticket counter, that would carry it back to the conveyor belt in back. But what that creates is a little square area for the person behind the ticket counter that can only be reached by climbing up on a conveyor belt on either side. On the end once, they can be an open. We would have that problem except for the end one. Is there any kind of standard or exception written in? The problem is, the way it is now, no one that cannot lift heavy bags cannot work there.
I have not heard of that before. You are right. The issue would be an employee workspace. Right now, under the standards, we require approach, enter and exit. Under the configuration that you have described, I do not see how I could approach, enter and exit that workstation. That definitely sounds like it is problematic. A complaint with the EEOC would be in the offing. One thing that I will say is that I talked before about our Court House advisory committee. That is the result of what we call a focus issue that we focus our attention and resources on a very discrete issue to make a difference in a particular area. Our next focus issue is going to be on airports. The issue that you described is not one of the reasons that we chose airports but it is certainly something that we can point out not to do. What you described does not sound like it would comply with our guidelines.
Would there be anything in the context of the fact that you would have a percentage of them being accessible? Being that they are all identical?
Again, given the current standards, that is not in the offing. You would have to have a change, and I do not see us doing that.
There would be no exception, they are making these job sites more accessible to people that cannot do heavy lifting.
I understand. It is trying to improve the situation for people that cannot lift but then it is disallowing people the ability to hold that job if they cannot step over that conveyor belt.
They cannot hold that job now either. Okay. The other question is, the ticket vending kiosks that they have in front of the ticket counters.
Right.
What do they have to do to provide access? Also, where we have tickets at the rail stations, the ticket vending machines, they do not come under 508 because they are not federally funded.
Correct. They do not come under 508, because they are not purchased by a federal agency. It is not whether they are federally funded or not, if it is whether a federal agency procures. Ticketing machines at a train station are already covered by our transit facility guidelines. We already have guidelines for that. For the other types of machines like where you get your airline ticket, those are in a regulatory black hole, where we do not address them under ADAG, and they are not covered by 508. They are not covered by a federal agency. They need to be purchased by the airlines. DOT has not address them under their Carrier Access Act. DOT has proposed an overhaul of their Air Carrier Access Act regulations, in that, they proposed requiring those machines to comply with our 508 standards. That may be fine. We still plan on going ahead with doing rulemaking to clarify it for ourselves. We will closely coordinate with DOT. They did propose to require those machines to comply with our 508 standard.
The fare vending standards that are already in DOT do not make those accessible, as I understand it.
The fare vending machines -
They do not make them usable.
We have our robust provisions for ATMs and fare vending machines that make it much better then to make it independently useable and operable. So, many of the fare vending machines in subway stations have verbal directions, not just a Braille on the machines. There are provisions in place.
Okay. Thank you, very much.
Okay. I have a question from our online individual regarding Section 508. This question is, is there any obligation for a credit union that that utilizes space in a federal government office building to make their Web site or transaction Web site accessible for their members, most of whom who are federal government employees?
Only to the extent that the web site is procured, developed, maintained by a federal agency. So to the extent that it is a federal credit union that does not make it a federal agency. 508 is very specific in that it applies to federal agencies only.
And just because it is used by federal employees, just for clarification, does not make a difference?
Yes.
It has to be developed, operated and specifically a part of a federal agency.
Exactly.
Not just a service. The fact that the federal government might be a landlord of their space does not make a difference.
Under 508, that is correct. There might be an obligation under 504 so that would be something to pursue but 508 only applies to the federal agency.
But even under 504, Section 508 standard does not apply to a section 504 entity.
That is correct although, if push came to shove, if there were litigation on the issue, one would point to the standard that does exist. You are correct. The 504 rules do not require compliance with the 508 standards. There are a lot of 5s.
Next question, please.
At this time there is no one on cue. And just as a reminder if anyone would like to ask a question, please press 1 on your touch tone phone.
Well, we are at the bottom of the hour as well so let me just take a minute here to a thank you, David, for your time, and also your staff who have chimed in here and others who have assisted in the responding with the various technical questions. A topic like this always generates a great deal of broad interest, because obviously the U.S. Access Board is involved in so many different things. You start talking about the various rule making issues and of course technical questions due arise. I appreciate your time and willingness to respond to those various questions. For those of you on the call, it the transcript for this will be available within 10 days on the www.ADA-audio.org web site. Dave, do you want to give your web site and your technical assistance telephone number?
Yes. The web site is access-board.gov so it is pretty simple. Our technical assistance number is, I will give you the e-mail address first. It is ta@access-board.gov. And the phone number is 800-872-2253. TTY is 800-993-2822.
Just as a reminder, you can also contact your Regional ADA Center. We work closely with the US Access Board staff to respond to technical assistance questions. You can access those centers at 800-949-4232, both voice and TTY. If you are not aware of which center serves your geographic area, you can go to the National Regional network of ADA centers website which is www.ADAta.org. and locate the center that serves your area. All of the centers have websites and email and operate a universal 800 number for technical assistance questions. We are concluding the first three months of this years series of sessions. Our next session is starting in January. We have a variety of different topics. Our first session in January and February, we will be switching gears and be going into some employment issues. And the series will focus on the recruitment of people with disabilities, resources to assist employers. We have a session related to veterans with disabilities and issues surrounding the veterans with disabilities and access to them and the employment programs available for them. As well as, there will be a session focusing on EARN, the Employer Assistance and Recruiting Network, from the Department of Labor, Office of Disability and Employment policy. There are a variety of other things. In March we will beat focusing on a study that was done looking at the data from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in regards to the type of charges that they have received over the 15, 16 years that the ADA has been in effect for employment provisions. What have we found out from that and the types of complaints that have been filed? I encourage you to take a look at the website to see the up coming sessions and encourage you to register for those sessions. As I said earlier, they cover a variety of different topics over the 12 month period of time. Once again, I would like to thank David for his time and the other staff members of the U.S. Access Board. I hope everyone got some valuable information out of today''s session and will join us again in the future. Farewell to everyone and we will see you in the new year.
Thank you all.