In October, the Department of Justice released its 5 year report discussing their ADA efforts nationwide. This includes a study of both DOJ’s enforcement programs and its technical assistance programs, giving examples of their successes. Below is a summary of the Report’s content. You can find the full Report at: www.ada.gov/5yearadarpt/fiveyearada1.htm
The Report starts with detailing some statistics as to the state of people with disabilities today. I won’t include them all but thought to offer a few for informational purposes.
1. Americans with disabilities, on average, continue to attain a lower level of education than those without disabilities. For example, almost 27 percent of adults ages 25 to 64 with a severe disability did not graduate from high school, in comparison to 10.4 percent of individuals with no disability.
2. Only 56 percent of adults ages 21-64 who had a disability were employed at some point in the one-year period prior to participating in the survey. Of those who were employed, the median earnings for someone with a (in quotes) “severe” disability was $12,800 as compared to earnings for people with no reported disability which were at $25,000.
In addition to these figures, the Report also included data from a 2004 Survey conducted by the National Organization on Disability in conjunction with the Harris polling organization.
1. Persons with disabilities are twice as likely as those without to have inadequate transportation (31 percent with a disability compared to 13 percent without a disability)
2. People with disabilities have a higher likelihood of going without medical care (18 percent compared to 7 percent for people without disabilities).
The ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, state and local government activities, public accommodations, commercial facilities, transportation, and telecommunications. The Department of Justice acts as the enforcer for these provisions, having jurisdiction over more than seven million places of public accommodation (Title III), in all state and local government – over 80,000 separate units (Title II), and in all employment practices of state and local government employers with 15 or more employees (Title I).
Historically, the Department of Justice has focused its enforcement efforts on resolving discrete problems brought to its attention through citizen complaints and a part of that is still prevalent in Project Civic Access, which is the Department’s bottom-up review of a city’s or county’s public spaces and services.
As of the printing of this Report, the Department has reached 150 agreements with 141 state and local governments to bring them into compliance with the ADA. Several of these agreements are available at www.ada.gov/civicac.htm. But obviously, there is still a long way to go which is why ACB continues to encourage its members, chapters and affiliates to be proactive in filing complaints where they come up against access issues and discrimination.
The Department has recently launched the second phase of Project Civic Access, which involves reviewing additional communities in all 50 states and focuses on an expanded range of issues, including accessible curb cuts, voting technology, disaster response planning, domestic violence shelters, and government websites.
The EEOC is responsible for ensuring nondiscrimination in private sector employment and the Department is responsible for ensuring nondiscrimination in employment by state and local government employers
As an example, in United States v. Baltimore Public Schools, an elementary school teacher who is blind applied for a teaching position with the Baltimore school system. During her two interviews, she used a cane. She was offered a job. When she mentioned that she would soon be picking up her new service animal, the school principal withdrew the job offer. In its 2001 consent decree with the Department, Baltimore agreed to pay the teacher $55,000 in damages and appointed an ADA coordinator for employment matters to help prevent future discrimination.
Last year, the Department began an initiative to review a number of private colleges and universities and recently announced its first two comprehensive agreements with the University of Chicago and Colorado College. Both agreements address a wide array of issues and require the schools to ensure increased access to their campuses for students, faculty, and visitors – in particular those with mobility, hearing, and vision impairments. Although ACB is encouraged by the Department’s proactive stance, we have concerns as to the depth of review addressed regarding the needs of visually impaired students.
In 2002, the Department filed suit against the Law School Admission Council, the agency that administers the Law School Admission Test, based on complaints that the Council had failed to provide reasonable testing accommodations to four persons with disabilities. The individuals had requested extra time to complete the examination because of their physical disability, cerebral palsy. To date, the Department has not sought action regarding similar reasonable accommodation complaints by visually impaired students.
Equal access to public and private transportation is one of the most important rights guaranteed by the ADA because without it any true independence is virtually impossible. Working, accessing government services, purchasing groceries – many people with disabilities can only do these things if they have accessible transportation. Accessible transportation also helps integrate people with disabilities into the mainstream of American life. An accessible shopping mall, theater, or park is meaningless for someone who is unable to get there.
Private transportation entities such as taxis and shuttles also provide critical services to people with disabilities. Approximately ten percent of the customer base for taxis consists of people with disabilities. The Department has resolved complaints, without litigation, to ensure that individuals who use a service animal because they are blind, have low vision, or are deaf have equal access to taxi cab services.
Shopping and dining out with family and friends are quintessentially American activities from which people with disabilities continue to be excluded. The Department is striving to ensure that over 50 million people with disabilities are given the same options as everyone else to socialize and accomplish daily chores independently and with dignity.
One effort to remove barriers involved the Department's intervention in a lawsuit to enforce the barrier removal requirements of Title III against Valenti Mid-South Management, LLC, a franchisee operating a chain of 54 Wendy's Restaurants in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri. Under the resulting consent decree, Valenti agreed to make a wide range of improvements to each of its restaurants to provide greater accessibility.
Since January 2001, more than 1800 complaints filed with the Department alleging violations of Title II and Title III have been referred to the Department’s ADA Mediation Program. Using more than 400 professional ADA-trained mediators throughout the United States, the ADA Mediation Program continues to ensure compliance with the ADA at minimal expense to the government. Executed through a partnership between the federal government and the private sector, seventy-seven percent of complaints mediated have been successfully resolved.
Many types of ADA disputes are well-suited to the mediation process, including barrier removal; service animal policy modifications; effective communication for individuals who are deaf, hard of hearing, or blind; and access to local government programs and services.
Example. An individual who is blind complained that a motel in Missouri refused to rent him a room because he used a guide dog. The motel agreed to post a sign welcoming persons with service animals and to train front-desk staff and management about the ADA. The motel also agreed to work with the regional corporate office to increase awareness of all franchise motel owners about the ADA's requirements relating to service animals. The motel also made donations of $150 each to two guide dog organizations.
Mediations occur locally, in communities where people live, work, and play and it can have a significant effect on the less tangible but equally exclusionary barriers that confront people with disabilities, including ignorance, stereotypic assumptions, and simple fear.
The ADA is the first civil rights law to require the government to help people and organizations understand their rights and responsibilities under the law. The Department engages in a wide range of activities to foster understanding of, and voluntary compliance with, the ADA. Those activities include providing a vast array of technical assistance materials; maintaining the popular ADA Website; offering a nationwide, toll-free ADA Information Line; running the ADA Business Connection; and conducting outreach initiatives to reach businesses, state and local governments, and people with disabilities
ADA Information Line - The ADA Information Line (1-800-514-0301/v; 1-800-514-0383/tty) assists callers in understanding the ADA and how it applies to a caller's specific situation. The Information Line receives more than 100,000 calls per year and, since January 2001, an average of more than 50,000 callers have been personally assisted by Technical Assistance Specialists each year.
ADA Website - The ADA Website (www.ada.gov) provides direct access to the Department's ADA publications, briefs, and settlement agreements as well as to general information about the Department's enforcement, mediation, technical assistance, and certification programs. The site also includes information about any proposed changes in ADA regulations and requirements, links to ADA press releases, and links to other federal agencies' websites that contain ADA information. The website served more than 2.6 million visitors in fiscal year 2005; those visitors viewed the pages and images on the site more than 37 million times, a 218 percent increase from fiscal year 2001.
The ADA Business Connection - The ADA Business Connection is an initiative that aims to improve access to everyday commerce by fostering dialogue and cooperation between the business community and the disability community. Since 2001, more than 640 participants from small and mid-sized businesses, large corporations, and organizations of people with disabilities have attended 16 dynamic ADA Business Connection Leadership meetings in cities across the United States.
In an effort both to facilitate compliance with all applicable laws and to mitigate the tension between federal and state enforcement processes, the ADA authorizes the Department of Justice, to certify that state or local accessibility laws meet or exceed the requirements of the ADA. The Department has certified the statewide accessibility codes of Maryland, North Carolina. Washington, Texas, Maine, and Florida and provided detailed technical guidance to Indiana and California. The Department has received and is reviewing certification requests from Utah and Washington (which has adopted a new code) as well as a technical assistance request from Michigan. A certification request from New Jersey is also under review.
Day Al-Mohamed
Director of Advocacy and Governmental Affairs
American Council of the Blind
1155 15th St. NW
Washington DC 20005
Tel. 202-467-5081
dalmohamed@acb.org