Stories indexed with the term ‘ADA’

[Editor's Note: HD, a.k.a. Dave Askins, editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle, is also publisher of an online series of interviews on a teeter totter. Introductions to new Teeter Talks appear on The Chronicle.]

Nine months have now passed between views of the world from the end of a teeter totter. This most recent view down the board was of Brian Kerr. One way I know Brian is as a downtown pedestrian who strolls hatless down the sidewalk, even in bitterly cold weather, and who must be admonished as you bicycle past: “Put on a hat, it’s cold out here!”

The chosen venue of our teeter totter ride was the middle of the intersection of Main and Liberty streets last Saturday morning, the last day of the Ann Arbor art fairs. We compromised on our chosen venue somewhat by moving to the edge of the intersection, to accommodate concerns of art fair staff.

It was a small concession to make – we’d already dealt with the disappointment of being denied access to the bottom of the pit being dug for the underground parking garage along Fifth Avenue, just to the northeast. Construction sites can’t reasonably be expected to be made accessible to random members of the general public – patrons of the arts, teeter totter riders, wheelchair users, the blind. That makes construction sites somewhat different from websites.

Under the Section 508 amendment of the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973, federal agencies are required to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities. It’s a different piece of legislation from the Americans with Disabilities Act, which just recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. But Section 508 is to websites what the ADA is to buildings – the idea is to make things accessible to disabled people.

Kerr works for a company called Deque, which specializes in helping to make websites work well for hearing- and visually-impaired people.

Here’s a simple example. Visually impaired people sometimes use a screen-reader to get information from a website – it’s a software program that tries to interpret the page using text-to-speech technology. If there’s a picture on a page, say of a guy sitting on teeter totter, then what the screen reader interprets – and what the visually-impaired person hears – is just an indication that there’s an image. If the author of the page supplies some description in the “behind the scenes” coding, the visually-impaired person might hear: “Brian Kerr, who is sitting on the end of a teeter totter. The view is down the board.”

Like librarian Metta Landsdale, Kerr has a professional interest in making information accessible to people. And like Lou Rosenfeld, Kerr is a product of the master’s degree program at the University of Michigan School of Information. And like Brandon Zwagerman, Kerr was one of a group of co-founders of ArborUpdate, a now-defunct local news and discussion website.

But there’s something else that Kerr has in common with Landsdale, Rosenfeld and Zwagerman. [Full Story]

In a letter dated Sept. 1, 2009, addressed to Ann Arbor’s city clerk, Jackie Beaudry, the nonprofit Michigan Protection & Advocacy Service Inc. gave the city a Sept. 15 deadline to respond to its concerns about accessibility to polling locations in Ann Arbor.

The response deadline comes two weeks ahead of the expiration of a grant for which the city was approved in 2007 under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The grant was for improvements in accessibility to Tappan and Eberwhite schools.

Lansing-based MPAS is concerned that the city has not submitted work for reimbursement under the 2007 grant. And that would put in jeopardy the city’s 2009 grant application for improvements to five additional locations – Northside, Dicken, Lawton, Lakewood and Pittsfield elementary schools. The MPAS letter paints a picture suggesting the city has not made progress towards addressing problems that the city itself identified in 2004 at 21 of the city’s 48 precincts.

However, after checking into the matter with MPAS, the state’s Bureau of Elections, and Ann Arbor city staff, The Chronicle has concluded that: (i) the situation with the 2007 grant is a matter of non-communication and paperwork follow-through, (ii) that prior to 2007, the city of Ann Arbor completed work under HAVA grants, with some reimbursements already made, and other payments still in process, and (iii) the city’s strategy for ensuring access uses a variety of temporary measures on election days, as well as a work plan for more permanent fixes. [Full Story]