ADA 'Reasonable' Requirements

[mnehr]

I wonder if anyone has come across this.
We provide to our clients many alternatives to comply with the ADA regarding billing for the blind. Specifically we provide audio and web versions of the invoice (as well as their providers have customer service centers that can read the bill to the customer.) It has been brought to our attention by a clients customer that we MUST provide Braille versions of our invoices. Everything I can find under ADA only says that 'reasonable alternative means' must be provided. The customer claims that the only 'reasonable' means for him is Braille as it is the only alternative that allows him the ability to 'read' his bill at any time.

While this is a specific example, anyone who wants to chime in on problems they have had with the ADA please do. I am finding that all of the uses of 'reasonable' is such a gray area that many people are defining reasonable in their own terms.

Has anyone run into this instance or any instances like this?

[quasar]

I've found that most people (the corporations not the disabled folks) think reasonable means "whatever they think might be reasonable for the person" aka what they want to do that won't cost them any money and little effort. There's no real impetus to really consider what is and isn't reasonable, just to do what they want and only reconsider if someone is willing to make a lot of noise.

I'll give you an example. I had to document a web front end to a product made by the company I used to work for. This company hired human factors people and they designed the front ends to look exactly how they wanted them to look and used pixel placement to achieve what they wanted. One problem. As soon as someone changed their browser settings the pages not only no longer looked that way, they often became unusable with multiple controls falling on top of each other, submit buttons being hid by three different text boxes, etc. I complained about this repeatedly and pointed out that as soon as they had someone who didn't use the exact same browser settings the designers used the whole application broke. Now people choose to change the settings for various reasons and not all of them would fall under ADA, but certainly legally blind people generally will enlarge fonts and make other changes that shouldn't break webpages designed correctly. I pointed out to various other people involved on the project that this application would be a problem to any legally blind users and they waved me off as being unreasonable and raising a stink over something minor. In their mind it was reasonable to insist everyone use their settings who wanted to use their product (I assure this is only true in their own strange reality though).

I could give many other examples of things that companies consider reasonable that are reasonable only in their own minds and not in anyone else's more rational viewpoint.

As for the specific situation you mention, well, I will say this. Just having a web version may or may not be sufficient depending on how it's designed. If the UI has a lot of graphics without alt tags, has a lot of forms that no longer line up when you change the fonts, uses stylesheets that don't allow user settings to override the fonts or use pixel placement or do any number of boneheaded things, the pages will not be readable in either text browsers or with speech tools or in normal browsers with different font settings. The percentage of web pages that are compliant has been seriously going down over time as folks get more and more enamored of making their pages look nice, of having it look as I want it to look. People are forgetting that you should be defining an interface that can be interpreted by different browsers in different ways, not defining the exact implementation you want people to see. More and more people are starting to create pages who never lived in the text-based days, the days before extensive JavaScript and they simply don't know or don't get this concept. It's making it harder and harder to access pages.

Remember too that people who are blind can't drive. Having a few walk-in centers in various locations doesn't mean they are accessible to all of your customers. This is another thing that many people forget or don't think about.

I don't think that Braille is necessarily the only think that will meet his needs, but it's probably the only thing that he can handle without assistance from others and that doesn't leave him vulnerable to companies changing things on him, claiming they told him something different than they really did, etc. I can't blame him for wanting some independence and the protection of paper.

Janice

[kurt_messick]

It is interesting to see the differing definitions of reasonableness. I've recently worked with The Arc of America (http://www.thearclink.org) on various things for the developmentally disabled. It is a fascinating area to delve into.

[conradd]

The ADA requires only that effective communication not
exclude people with disabilities -- which in many situations
means providing written materials for hearing-impaired persons or providing audio format for seeing-impaired persons. The law
does not require any measure that would cause an undue financial or administrative burden. If you are providing a reasonable alternative, you probably won't have to provide a Braille bill as well.

I looked at the ADA a year ago to answer a similar question and what I found then was that according to the Department of Justice, written communications are subject to requirements for effective communication. This means that if you provide written information to your customers, you must, when requested, make that same information available to individuals with vision impairments in a form that can be understood. This might include large print versions of written documents or documents produced with a Braille printer, or audio tapes. You shouldn't have to provide Brailled documents if you provide effective communication in some other way.

Good luck. It's probably worth a call to the ADA technical assistance line. I've misplaced my number, but you could probably start here: (800) 872-2253

Deb

[CurtisEdmonds]

Your friendly local ADA expert here:

It has been brought to our attention by a clients customer that we MUST provide Braille versions of our invoices.

It depends. (The answer to any ADA question is, "It depends.")

While this is a specific example, anyone who wants to chime in on problems they have had with the ADA please do. I am finding that all of the uses of 'reasonable' is such a gray area that many people are defining reasonable in their own terms.

The good thing about the ADA is that the person with a disability does not get to define what "reasonable" is, but the person providing the accommodation. Otherwise, everything would be reasonable.

The ADA requires only that effective communication not
exclude people with disabilities -- which in many situations
means providing written materials for hearing-impaired persons or providing audio format for seeing-impaired persons. The law
does not require any measure that would cause an undue financial or administrative burden. If you are providing a reasonable alternative, you probably won't have to provide a Braille bill as well.

Not quite right. The ADA requires that the business take the preferences of a person with a disability into account. If the business doesn't do that, then the accommodation may not be effective. (For example, providing an audio version of a utility bill does absolutely no good to a person who is deaf and blind.)

I would think that providing an invoice in Braille would be reasonable for all but the smallest business. There's no real reason not to do it, and it's certainly less time-consuming than audio. Providing the invoices online could work just as well, assuming that the website is accessible (which you need to check out) and assuming that the person has Net access, etc.

Your regional ADA center (which is MUCH better than DOJ) is at 800-949-4232.

[mnehr]

The good news to all this is a few hours after posting this, I found out we do have a contractor hired to provide Braille invoices. This issue so rarely comes up that most of us never have approached the subject..