Action Steps

Step 1
Join our Employment Pledge

The Ability Center has created an Employment Pledge, a challenge for the businesses in our community to publicly promote their dedication to hiring workers with disabilities. Even with legal protections in place, people with disabilities are often discriminated against when looking for open positions. Be one of the companies that gets highlighted by our organization and be proud that you’ve joined a growing movement to accept the value of workers with disabilities.

Step 2
Appoint An ADA Coordinator

Even this early in the process, it is likely becoming clear to you that making a business friendly and accessible for people with disabilities can be a lot of work. To keep up with the many different tasks and steps necessary, the smartest move early on is to appoint an ADA Coordinator for your company. The ADA Coordinator’s role is to oversee accessibility within your business and to be knowledgeable of ADA standards during self-evaluations, as well as any additional input afterwards when making future policies and practices accessible. Part advocate and part administrator, the ADA coordinator is a unique position where their focus needs to be on both the needs of the disabled community and the best interests of the company. These needs are not contradictory, however, and it is easy to work towards the betterment of both parties at once. As a member of your business, it is in your best interest to help the company run as smoothly as possible and to keep the costs of renovations as low as possible, while protecting the company legally by keeping it within regulations. But it is also your responsibility to the larger community of Americans with disabilities to ensure that your business is one that is friendly and accessible to them.

This can be a lot of work for someone to focus on while performing other duties for their position. If you have the means, hiring a specialist in the ADA can take stress off your staff and ensure that a highly qualified expert is taking the lead. If not, you can appoint a member of the staff as the ADA Coordinator; but make sure this person either has the knowledge on the subject or is able to dedicate enough time to becoming knowledgeable while performing their normal duties.This guide is designed for the average person who has little to no knowledge in this field, to serve as both a resource and an opportunity to learn more about these regulations and best practices.

Many people in the role of an ADA Coordinator or ADA Manager are staff members with no previous experience or expertise. Many had that title given to them, often with little notice beforehand. In worse situations, an employee may find out that they were “bestowed” the role after coming back from a long weekend. We strongly advise against this. Being an ADA Coordinator takes a certain knowledge base and specific skills, as well as requiring the energy and personal drive to do difficult but necessary work. We suggest that whoever is elected as your ADA Coordinator be the most qualified person, or someone with the drive to become informed on the subject. In the long term, this will help your company and your transition process much more than just appointing the first person to say yes.

Regardless of if you internally appoint an ADA Coordinator or hire one independently, there are several criteria that should communicated to interested parties:

  • An accurate job description in relation to what elements of the ADA are being enforced (not only the duties done and the scope of the transition process, but the hours required and if the position is full-time or combines with pre-established duties)
  • What department the ADA Coordinator serves in, and where they are in the hierarchy of authority in the company
  • Expected experience and knowledge on accessibility
  • Trainings offered for the position (if they’re paid for by the company, if on-the-clock training is approved)
  • If the Coordinator will be working alone or have the support of a team for self evaluations and transition steps

It’s important to realize that the ADA coordinator isn’t going to be someone who knows every single detail of accessibility and can do the entire transition alone. The ADA covers so much material, from the architecture of a building to the color of font on a website, that it would be almost impossible for one person to have all of that expertise. Instead, the ADA coordinator is the person who has a lot of knowledge on the topic, but has the expertise to recognize what an issue is and know where to look for the right answer.

While having someone take a lead as the ADA Coordinator is important, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to shoulder every responsibility for the business’ transition. We highly suggest creating an ADA team to work collaboratively on becoming accessible, both to spread the work out and to get each part of your business involved. For making a team, start with the ADA Coordinator as the lead, to keep the team organized and to serve as the de facto expert on the ADA regulations being implemented.

Team should represent all the different departments of your business. That way, not only can each element of your business contribute ideas that will improve the overall transition process, but then each department will be prepared and kept up to date for future changes that will occur. This can make the transition itself and the following weeks smoother. The more departments involved, or the more business elements represented, the better in terms of having each part working towards the same collective goal. Beyond this, however, try to include employees that have expertise in facets of the business such as budgeting, facilities management, everyday operations, communication/marketing, and Human Resources.

These teams should be meeting regularly (at least once every quarter, but preferably more often) to give updates on the transition process and to offer feedback on what parts of the process are and aren’t working. With so many steps in becoming accessible, each element of the transition can feel so intensive that different departments will forget about the process others are going through as they focus on their own work. Even if each department head doesn’t need to know exactly where in the steps another area is, it will do morale good to see that the other members of the team are working as hard as one another towards the group’s goal. Beyond this, having a representative from each department giving feedback on the transition itself can help your ADA Coordinator identify where the plan is succeeding and where it’s failing. These are great opportunities to get your entire staff involved in the process, as listening to feedback and improving your transition will encourage other employees to be vocal through each step of the operation.

Resources

Step 3
Create a Welcoming Statement and Feedback System

Once you have your ADA team and are ready to start updating your company, the next step is to let the public know what you’re doing. Whether this is a message sent in a newsletter, signs posted on your windows, a pop-up on the company website, an ad on the local radio station, or a combination of all of these; the goal needs to be that your community knows about your efforts to make the business more accessible.  

There are three reasons why this step is important. First, and most simply, it’s excellent PR for your brand. This is your business’ chance to tell the public you’re becoming a more inclusive, friendly business to all of your customers. That type of announcement is only going to garner good will for your company, and likely to have many new eyes on your progress as your transition begins. Second, you should inform the public because of the important to tell people about accessible services in their area. Public entities (in this case, your business) are required to ensure that interested people, those with and without disabilities) can obtain information as to the “existence and location of accessible services, activities, and facilities.” This is an important but frequently overlooked part of the regulations. The real value for your brand, in this case, is that customers that require certain accommodations for a service will then know your business is accessible to them. In the future, many customers will choose your company over competitors if they know their needs will be met by you.

Since you’re already adding messaging to your communication with the public, take this time to create a feedback system for gathering public comment on how accessible your company currently is. Getting feedback from local customers with disabilities, allowing them to tell you specific issues they’ve had with your store before, will save so much time and legwork for your employees during their self-evaluation. After all, it makes sense that the customers you currently have are more likely to know what features restrict their use of your business, they’re the ones having to overcome those barriers! The lived experiences of people with disabilities should always be prioritized when looking for barriers to access, and in the overall transition process. Why would you not get feedback from the community you’re making changes to assist?

It’s also important to try to get feedback from a variety of people with disabilities. The accommodation needs of a person using a wheelchair and a deaf customer will be totally different, but even two customers that both share the same disability may need different forms of assistance. Many disabilities can have a variety of different impacts (and a scale of how strong that impact is), so you won’t know what a specific individual needs unless you ask that person. When starting your self-evaluation and transition steps, look back on this feedback. Do you see one element of your business mentioned repeatedly? That’s probably a common barrier for many customers and should be one of the first things you look at modifying.

The fact is, no matter how thorough your transition process is, at some point you will have a customer who struggled to access some part of your business (documents, your website, new programs, the storefront, etc.). This is just part of the reality of shifting accessibility standards, changes to current technology, and the wide spectrum of disabilities that exist in modern society. Instead of being discouraged by this, take advantage and have an official grievance procedure in place early in your transition. Feedback of this nature will happen either way, so make sure you have a structure for receiving this feedback in place to streamline the process of receiving complaints and working them into your modifications. This serves to assist your store functionally and it helps public image. Not only will this allow you to fix barriers pointed out by the public (this can be included amongst the feedback received during your public notice from the last step), but it also shows customers that you care about listening to their experiences with your storefront.

Your feedback system should at least be made available to fill out online in an accessible document. Make sure this form is accessible! You can imagine how bad it would look if someone wanted to make a complaint about lacking accessibility, only to find out that they can’t use the grievance form you provide. Make sure there are multiple formats that this form can be accessed in.

Questions in this feedback form should include:

  • Contact information (this is a maybe, some people may feel more comfortable submitting feedback anonymously while others would want to receive updates on modifications to fix their complaints)
  • How long they’ve been a customer for
  • The date and time when they encountered a barrier
  • The location (if your business has multiple locations)
  • The nature of the barrier and specifics around what inhibited their access
  • If this barrier is a recent or long-standing one
  • Suggestions for modifications to remove the barrier

Beyond this, having information telling the person when they may expect a response, or a timeline for the complaint to be responded to/fixed, would be appreciated by many of the customers. It is one thing to tell a person with a disability that you’re listening to their feedback, and another to show that there are structures in place to implement that feedback. Again, this step can help both customers’ perceptions of your business and gathering information on barriers that need removed.

Step 4
Conduct Self-Evaluation

Starting Your Journey to Accessibility: A Guide for Businesses

Just to prepare you now, this is one of the most effort-intensive and important steps in this process because of how much information may need to be gathered during your self-evaluation. The specifics here will depend greatly on your business, like the building you work in and the programs you run; so this step will feature a great deal of information that you’ll need to go through and find what is and isn’t relevant to your situation.

How to Conduct a Self-Evaluation

The self-evaluation is when you go through each element of your business to find what is and isn’t accessible, based off ADA Standards and the suggestions offered in this guide. Your ADA coordinator, or the ADA team, will examine each element of your business for accessibility. If your team is trained enough, a different staff member can concentrate on each element of the inspection. Otherwise, having the team focus on one step at a time can take longer, but will ensure that nothing is missed. The self-examination should also include looking into any feedback you received in the first part of your review.

Because there are so many different elements that may go into that, we’ve created several different forms for you to use during your evaluation. They can be found here, here, and here, or they can be found in the Resources tab of this webpage. These can be used as checklists to help keep track of what needs to be evaluated, guides to remember what the standardized measurements that must be reached, and places for you to note your current facilities. Going through these forms and seeing what needs to be examined is a good starting point for this step, as there are many different elements to consider. Make sure to document everything you find that needs altered or modified, these will go towards creating your transition plan in Step 6.

Important Tips for Evaluation

An important note to remember during self-evaluations is to focus on what you’re actually looking for, both in terms of staying on task and knowing the regulations for the area you’re looking at. The most obvious are elements that don’t comply with the ADA Standards. If a toilet seat is 24” off the ground when the Standards say that it must be 17”-19”, then it’s obvious that needs fixed. But what about more minor elements? What if you have a program offered that favors certain customers over others? Let’s say your store does a Wine and Canvas painting event, but you realize that the canvases cannot be set at a functional height for wheelchair-users, then what?

For the actual evaluation, a good tip is to always have at least two people handle any element being examined. The work can be done faster, and having a second person there to catch any mistakes or elements that could be accidentally missed. While your ADA coordinator doesn’t have to be one of these two people, at least one of them should be comfortable with the accessibility standards you’re evaluating. Something may look accessible to the casual observer, but aspects that may look ‘small’ to one person could make a business totally inaccessible to another. Throughout this process, make sure you are thorough and looking at each element individually before moving on to the next.

Part of this self-evaluation will be to look at each department of your business. Work with the employees of that team, from the department heads to the front-line employees. Ask them about their experiences with customers, especially about any instances of needing to assist a person with a disability. If you hear similar stories of needing to help customers with the same barriers, that should be one quickly modified. This information can be gathered by interviewing staff or by sending out surveys. Regardless of the method, make sure that you account for each element of accessibility in your questions, and that you give the chance to answer open-ended questions to get their full thoughts on an issue.

The biggest red flag that come from evaluations is when people say something like “We’ve always done it this way.” That means that a certain method worked for most people in the past, but does that mean it’s the best method for today when looking at everyone? That can also mean that a policy was created before your business was informed of accessibility needs, as the ADA is a relatively new law created in the early 90s. The ADA is 30 years old now and while it’s been updated since then, think of everything that has changed in the last three decades. Especially in terms of the technology involved with your business, there will be aspects that require evaluating.

Evaluating Specific Barriers

Architectural Barriers

When looking at architectural accessibility, beyond feedback that you’ve gathered, the best way to go about this evaluation is to start in the parking lot and work through the path a customer would take using your business.

Elements to consider for physical accessibility include parking, entrances, walking surfaces, steps and ramps, counter and shelf heights, restrooms, and more. Be as exact as possible when writing down measurements, the differences between a 0.25” bump on the floor and a 0.3” bump is huge according to ADA Standards. You can follow this link to go to our premade form for reporting on Architectural barriers.

Program and Policy Barriers

Programs and policies are just as important. To be as disability friendly as possible, the goal isn’t just to remove any barriers that prevent access to the building; we’re also looking to remove any elements that limit a customer’s involvement, or that would make one person’s experience lesser to another’s.

 For cases like these, limiting factors should also be noted so they can also be modified or removed. Review your service practices, activity and program’s policies, and other procedures to determine whether they ensure an equal opportunity for people with disabilities to participate and benefit. Look at both the written and unwritten rules of your business. There will be so many practices you use daily that aren’t written anywhere but have been accepted into your daily routine. Make sure that you pay special attention when analyzing these elements of your business. Again, alternatives and accommodations should never be lesser than the service you would provide for a nondisabled customer. You can go here to our form on Program and Policy Barriers to later address.

Communication Barriers

Finally, communication can surprise some people as an element of accessibility but it’s equally important as any other part of this evaluation. Communication here includes how to interact with customers and answer questions, company documents such as employee handbooks or promotional materials, digital forms found on your website, the website itself and other digital content, and any other way that your business informs a customer. 

You can go here to find our fillable form for documenting and removing Communication barriers.

Hiring Professionals

We put this at the end of this section, but you don’t have to do this step yourself. Many companies, especially larger ones, will hire professionals to conduct this evaluation. If your business has multiple facilities to inspect, or if you offer many different programs and you know it’ll take too much time to evaluate each one with your staff, bringing in outside help for this step might be the best move for your brand.

This can also give you confidence that the job is being done perfectly and that the experts won’t miss anything when they report to you. Make sure that you take the time to research potential contractors for this. This is a vital step in your transition towards accessibility and the report documenting any barriers will be crucial for the next stage of the process. Ensure that the people you hire have the expertise to not just do the job quickly, but to do it properly.

Step 5
Develop a Transition Plan

Here is where all of those notes and checklists from your self-evaluation come into play, because now it’s time to begin the process of making your business accessible. You need to make a Transition Plan, your business’ plan for what, how, and when to address the issue from your evaluation. Much of this process, besides the making of the Transition Plan itself, will be discussed in greater detail in stand-alone webpages of this guide. Here, we can still go over some of the general ideas to understand when beginning to make the form you’ll use for your Transition Plan. The first element to examine is any physical barriers, the elements of the building itself or the furniture and goods around the facility. Then you need to look at barriers that aren’t physical in nature. This includes your policies and internal rules, the programs run, the layout and materials present at your business (and how they’re presented), and communication (this includes communication at your facility, your website, social media posts, and other digital communication). Of course, the most important part of the Plan is listing how these barriers will be removed and altered, the schedule for doing so, who will be responsible for that removal, cost estimates, and funding sources.

Having this information written out for each individual barrier will help keep the task organized, show exactly how much work needs to be done, and help show an effective timeline for the overall process. It may look daunting to see everything listed out like this, but don’t be overwhelmed. Many of these barriers are ones that can be quickly removed or are policies that can be updated to eliminate several barriers at once. Another benefit to having a single document with the entire process is to ensure that nothing is missed or forgotten about. While the transition and modification process can be long, it’s better to fix all barriers at once instead of having to fix other problems months later. How awful would it be to have to go back after renovating an entire restroom because you forgot to change the height of a sink?

That brings up another crucial element, the time this transition will take. There’s no universal answer to this, and no required time for completion according to the ADA. The ADA only requires that you have some type of plan to remove barriers and that you can demonstrate the steps you’re taking towards accessibility. The specifics on your schedule will depend mostly on the nature of your business and the facility it’s in; the smaller, simpler businesses in newer, more accessible buildings will have a much shorter timeline than more complex businesses with larger, older facilities. Sample timelines can be found here, but know that your Transition Plan could be measured in weeks or months depending on the individual needs you find on your self-evaluation.

One additional reason for creating a document with your transition plan (mentioned above) is to protect your business from litigation. Accessibility lawsuits are not as common as many business owners fear, in part because it can be difficult for prosecutors to receive monetary rewards for ADA lawsuits. To make sure you are legally protected, however, your business doesn’t have to be completely accessible, instead, you merely have to prove that you are in the process of transitioning towards accessibility. As long as you can demonstrate that your business is in the process of complying with ADA standards, and you have a transition plan to document the steps you are taking and the timeline, this will protect you in most cases.

We have template Transition Plans for you to use (which you can find here), but your Plan needs to include:

  • All of the physical barriers. This is anything limiting someone from entering the building, participating in programs, or receiving services
  • The method used to remove barriers and restore access
    Barriers to access that come from programs or policies. This can include the way a program is run, how information is communicated, staff training, and more
  • The solution and modifications to these policy issues
  • The schedule to remove architectural and procedural barriers including a date to start and complete barrier removal
  • The name of the person/group responsible for barrier removal. This should include the person from your team as well as any outside contractors being hired
  • Cost estimates
  • Sources of funding. This can be a good place to record where you will use grant and tax credit money, if applicable
  • A space for additional comments

A final note on your Transition Plan is getting feedback on it before starting to enact barrier removal. Make sure that people in your organization besides just the ADA transition team can give feedback, especially when it comes to prioritizing which elements to modify or timelines. Heads of departments should always give their approval before starting to work on policy changes that would impact their team. Outside of your business, look at getting comments from members of the public or disability awareness groups. Some businesses use this opportunity to create an advisory committee to allow community members a chance to further be involved in your transition, with many of these members either being from local advocate groups or selecting individuals who reached out during the grievance procedure step earlier. These committees should always include representatives of the disability community (with a preference for those who actually have a disability) and professionals working in the field. They can offer feedback on the feasibility of suggested removal practices, information on contractors for hiring outside help, a realistic explanation on priorities for removal, and discussion on issues that slipped by your team. This committee can then be included for later feedback on your transition, accessibility issues, and serve to network your business to the disability community in the future.