When Colleges Need the Technological Touch for Better ADA Compliance

When it comes to ADA compliance on a college campus, Eve Hill says the biggest problem found among decision-makers is “ostrich-syndrome.”

She says colleges often bury their heads in the sand and hope all ADA compliance complaints, requests and requirements will disappear.

“It won’t go away,” says Hill, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division for the Department of Justice. “Students with disabilities are more and more engaged in making sure they have college careers so they can get great jobs. People with disabilities are not going to accept being on public benefits as being their only option anymore. It’s important to be prepared for them.”

Hill also says the old, “grab-another-human” days are over in the realm of ADA compliance. She says that students with disabilities want something more to seamlessly integrate themselves into a college culture.

That something more is a touch of technology.

“Traditionally, colleges and universities have tried to make their instructional materials accessible by providing an extra human,” she says. “You provide an extra note-taker for the blind student, provide an interpreter for the deaf student. Those human-based ways of making things accessible often resulted in students with disabilities getting access later than their non-disabled peers, getting inferior access and getting a level of resentment from their school.”

Hill says technology is key in easily providing ADA compliance support on campus –it boosts accessibility of information and tools for students with disabilities, and thins the gap between special education and regular education.

“It provides equal access for students with disabilities so they no longer have to wait for an accessible book, or have to depend on whether their interpreter or note-takes shows up on time, whether they understand the language that’s being used, etc., that sometimes made those less effective,” she says. [Now, it’s all] the same time, same level of access, same equality and ease of use for students with and without disabilities. It’s potentially a great equalizer.”

Hill says colleges need to be proactive from the start with incorporating technology to support students with disabilities. She says this takes ADA provisions from being an afterthought to a top priority.

“Instead of taking a Disabled Students Services approach – which is “after the fact,” the class is all set up, the student with disabilities asks for accessible materials and the DSS office makes them, usually late and doesn’t always track what the other students are getting, not always available on a 24/7 basis – colleges and universities just have to switch to a proactive approach from the beginning to increase accessibility of their technology,” she says. “That really begins with the people who buy the technology, the people who develop the technology and the people that implement it in the university.”

Mike Luttrell, Sales Application Engineer at Peerless-AV says colleges can start their proactive approach to ADA compliance by checking the most over-looked places, and trust some of the “coolest” technologies to help.

“Doorways need to be wide enough, fire escapes…[need] a certain amount of distance so a person can go and then turn their wheelchair around in that space, and go the other way,” he says. “All those things come into play in a university, where you have so many different things.”

Luttrell says other things colleges should look out for regarding ADA compliance:

• Making sure video walls, kiosks, etc. do not hang off of a wall more than four inches to avoid falling on anyone

• Considering switching bathroom and emergency exit signs from red lettering to green lettering to better support visually impaired students

• Braille font on all campus signs

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