ARCHITECTURAL BARRIERS FOR THE BLIND: THE MYTH AND THE REALITY On Friday afternoon, July 3, the delegates to the 1992 convention of the National Federation of the Blind settled down to examine the vexed question of dealing appropriately with the alleged architectural barriers that are supposed to endanger blind people on every side. Studying and then stipulating methods of warning us about these hazards has consumed time and attention from the American National Standards Institute Committee on Accessibility for several years. The Federation's position has been that most of these supposed dangers are imagined and the rest can be easily and efficiently detected by proper use of the long white cane or guide dog. Since society can never install warnings at every location in which some person with insufficient vision might be hurt, we would do far better to concentrate our efforts on improving the quality and availability of travel training in this country so that all Americans with limited vision can move about safely. Almost a year ago, President Maurer asked the Federation's Second Vice President Peggy Pinder to attend the upcoming meetings of the ANSI Committee on Accessibility as the NFB's representative. In her Friday afternoon speech, Miss Pinder told the audience what happened when she took that assignment. Here is what she said: ANSI has long been a sort of joke in the National Federation of the Blind. I first heard of ANSI in the mid-seventies as the people who thought that the blind needed detectable tiles and knurled doorknobs. For years, ANSI (which stands for the American National Standards Institute) symbolized misguided officialdom-- people who decided how to rebuild the world to take care of problems they thought the blind had without ever once consulting the blind ourselves. Knurled doorknobs were invented by somebody as a tactile way of alerting the blind that they were about to enter a hazardous area. These included stages, boiler rooms, and loading docks--all places where blind people I know work. The concept was that the blind didn't know where they were, didn't know where they were going, and wouldn't find out until it was too late unless the sighted people around them built cues into the environment to warn them of danger. We laughed and used ANSI as an example of willful wrong-headedness. Detectable tiles emerged from the same premises. These were defined as deliberately shaped or roughened areas within the walking surface, placed to alert the blind that there was danger ahead. The dangers included those same loading docks as well as transit platform edges, streets, and parking lots. As the concept of detectable tiles grew, it metastasized into a cure-all for all the travel ailments of the blind, not only warning us of dangers but also providing what is called "wayfinding," the marking of a path so that the blind can detect it with cane or foot and follow the markings to the destination. Again we laughed. Didn't these people know that canes or dogs, used and controlled by the blind person with good training and experience, already provided us with all the information we needed for safe travel and for wayfinding? Didn't they care? Apparently not. They never asked us if we wanted the detectable tiles. They just standardized them and supported their installation. All of this had long been part of my background when President Maurer called me last November to give me an assignment. He said that he needed me to go to an ANSI committee meeting. I didn't actually refuse to go. I tried to temporize, to suggest alternatives, to raise doubts as to whether anybody really, really needed to go. Mr. Maurer waited me out, every now and then patiently reiterating the assignment. When I got done, I had, of course, agreed to go. I thought one of the two of us must have flipped, and I was pretty sure it was me. Go to ANSI, that group of narrow-minded, humorless, professional custodians who had entertained us for the past fifteen years with their updates of the new paternalism and whose 1986 standard had suddenly been adopted more or less complete in the federal accessibility regulations? I couldn't really think of very many places I'd less rather be! And I went. Through conversations with other ANSI accessibility committee members, I learned that my assessment of the ANSI committee had once been accurate. However, as the building code and manufacturer communities began to take accessibility more seriously in the mid-'80's, ANSI had decided to assign one of its veteran trouble-shooters to the accessibility committee, Mr. Richard Hudnut. Although he has never said this himself, I gather from the bits and pieces of history I have heard from others that Mr. Hudnut reached much the same conclusion we in the Federation had reached about the ANSI accessibility committee, and he dug in to make changes. He recruited fine minds and strong people from all sectors affected by the accessibility standard, using his long service and distinguished stature in the standards community to attract others who shared his commitment to effective, cost-efficient problem solving. When I arrived for the meeting in December as the representative of the National Federation of the Blind, the ANSI standard was much improved from the almost archaic 1986 version now largely copied in federal law. The only parts that hadn't changed much at all since the mid-seventies were those dealing with the blind. Knurled doorknobs were gone, but the detectable tiles were there in profusion, now grown to cover the edge of every parking lot and reflecting pool and the 6 feet in front of every corner in the country where there is a ramp. Detectable tiles are now defined scientifically as "raised truncated domes with a diameter at the base of nominal 0.9 inches, a height of nominal 0.2 inches, and center-to-center spacing of nominal 2.35 inches and shall contrast with adjoining surfaces, either light on dark or dark on light." In addition to all these protections for the blind, I found that ANSI had somehow gotten the wrong standard for Braille, a standard which lacked the specification of all five dimensions necessary to define Braille. The Braille standard required production of a dot much higher than we see in books, yielding signs that are actually painful to read, and it failed to prohibit what amounts to proportional spacing in Braille, allowing a signmaker to push cells together to save space, and actually making the Braille incorrect. For example, alarm if you push it together in Braille becomes tharm. And I've seen a sign that said exactly that. The Braille was no problem. I had with me a copy of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped Specification 800 from its engineering manual. I also did a little drawing, tracing around a penny to create a diagram of three Braille cells. On this penny drawing, I then displayed the various relationships that had to be defined and controlled. I told the committee that the NLS specifications had been the standard for Braille in this country for more than fifty years, for so long, in fact, that NLS no longer has records about when it was first adopted. Wherever the other standard came from, it wasn't the one everyone used, and it was producing Braille different from that to which we are all accustomed. The ANSI committee promptly and a little irritably adopted the NLS standard with some muttering under its breath about who had foisted off upon it some other standard than the standard standard. In light of the Braille discussion, it is interesting to review the committee membership. In addition to people representing the three model building codes, numerous disability groups, manufacturers of various products, and state and federal accessibility officials, membership has long been held on this committee by the American Foundation for the Blind and the American Council of the Blind. The American Foundation representative served as chairman of the membership committee and strongly opposed the NFB application for membership on the ground that ACB already represented the blind on ANSI. Although no one from the NFB was in the room, the ANSI committee voted thirty- three to three to admit the NFB to membership. During the Braille discussion at the December meeting, both AFB and ACB remained silent, and neither chose to answer the questions regarding where the wrong standard had come from or why the right one was never presented before. During the week-long December meeting, I spoke to anyone who would listen about the NFB's objections to truncated domes. Many of the people with whom I spoke indicated that they had no idea that the domes were unnecessary, hazardous in themselves, and expensive. They said that they would be glad to remove them. In addition, people who had worked with the domes waxed quite eloquent about problems of installation and maintenance. The dome discussion at the December meeting took place on Friday afternoon with a thin crowd present, and my motion to delete the whole section failed by one vote. I was horrified since I could count at least four or five people who would have voted for the motion if they had still been there. Well, I thought, there will be another meeting in June. We can work between now and then. I discussed the setback with Mr. Maurer and told him that I thought there was probably a group of other people in the same position we were--knowing that the current draft of the standard wasn't right yet. I suggested that, if we cooperated with these other committee members by voting negatively on the standard and working for further change, our combined strength might prevail. I suggested that the same group might serve as a broad-based and strong force for advocating change in the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (ATBCB) rules based on the improved ANSI standard. He told me to try it. The NFB worked with building owners and managers, state building code officials, and other disability groups in voting no and seeking further change. At the same time, our arguments had taken root, and the committee leadership had decided that ANSI should be published as it stood and used as the basis for asking ATBCB to change its rules. Our group of negative votes threatened both the consensus and the plan for immediate publication. I got numerous calls, assuring me that "we can get the tiles out next time." But, if we wanted to get rulemaking started, we would have to go along and play by the rules and let the detectable tiles stay in this standard since any change in substance would delay publication of the standard for at least a year. Again I discussed all this with Mr. Maurer, and he decided that the Federation should vote against the draft standard anyway and seek elimination of the domes before we agreed to the standard. As he put it: "The Federation isn't afraid of making people mad. What we are afraid of is failing to stand up for the dignity of blind people. We won't ever do that. Go for it." My job was to take Mr. Maurer's instructions and translate them into reality. As usual, he told me to do the thing which would build the best future for blind people. I went for it! The problem was to find a way of getting the domes out without triggering a backlash against the Federation. One track for this activity involved helping the building code people see that they could play an important role in changing the federal regulations which also have domes in them. It was necessary to get the power of a broad array of support for eliminating the domes from the federal regulation. In fact, we had been so successful in convincing the code people to work to change the federal regs that they began pushing hard for immediate publication of the existing ANSI standard as promised without removing the dome language. They argued that, having delivered the ANSI document on time, the Committee would have a solid position from which to pressure the federal government into changing its regulations. The second track was yet to be found. I went to Chairman Hudnut. I just plain told him what the problem was: the Federation could never support a standard with the domes in it, and yet the Federation didn't wish to cause unnecessary trouble. I asked him if he, with his long experience on ANSI committees, saw any way out of the dilemma. I did not know Mr. Hudnut's position on truncated domes then, and I do not know it now. He has never said, and he has never voted. But I had confidence in him that, as an active and committed chairman, he would provide advice to any committee member who sought it. He did, explaining to me the method to use to dump the domes and still publish this year. Mr. Hudnut also pointed out that, using the same procedure, a member such as the Federation which had voted negatively could decide to change its vote to affirmative, thereby strengthening the consensus which ANSI seeks for its standards. The truncated dome discussion at the June meeting a month ago took almost three hours. The AFB and ACB explained how necessary these tiles were and how important it was to have precise measurements. Here is the summary of the Federation's arguments against the domes as I filed them in voting negatively on the standard: 1. Truncated domes in particular and detectable tiles in general are unnecessary for the blind and unsafe for everyone. Without tiles and domes blind persons now move safely throughout the current environment, proving that tiles or domes are unnecessary to achieve access. 2. When achieving their intended purpose (interrupting normal cane use), tiles or domes actually pose a hazard to the blind cane user since they deliberately break the normal flow of information through the cane at precisely those points in which normal information is most vital. 3. Tiles or domes potentially pose a safety hazard to all persons since they will stubbornly retain ice, snow, and debris; pose an ongoing maintenance problem; and catch the heels or wheels of unwary passers-by. The domes are sort of like symmetrical little cobblestones, a surface we have given up for many good reasons, including safety and maintenance. 4. The studies which claim to show the necessity and value of domes or tiles are methodologically flawed and are all based on the assumption that tiles or domes are necessary, the exact point that is not yet proven. 5. The Federation is supportive of accessibility for all disabled people and is concerned that the domes or tiles, applied widely, will constitute an accessibility barrier for persons using wheelchairs and for those with other mobility impairments. 6. The Federation is vigorously opposed to the installation of domes or tiles on subway platforms and specifically urges that these not be installed unless and until there is specific evidence that they are needed because: a. Locations with known drop-offs such as subway platforms are areas in which cane users are particularly sensitive about interference with normal cane use, and interference is specifically intended by installation of the domes or tiles; and b. The Federation believes strongly that accessibility should be affordable as well as effective. Recent estimates from a large metropolitan transit authority indicate that retrofitting a single station will cost at least $40,000 (for the tiles alone, not for any of the additional retrofitting) and that ongoing maintenance of the installation will, over time, cost even more. Once again, the blind are being forced to insist that we are already safe; can already handle the responsibility of watching out for our own safety; and do not need others to take care of us under the guise, this time of that new buzz word of the '90's, "accessibility." In other words, I said to ANSI that we blind people have the tools and the knowledge and the ability to find our way ourselves, that we take this responsibility for ourselves as other Americans do and gather the information we need from the current environment to do it safely and efficiently just as other Americans do. We don't need the world re-engineered for us. We use it as it is. What we need is good training and good attitudes about ourselves. Then just turn us loose and leave us alone. We will be fine. Others at the ANSI meeting joined in. Numerous committee members indicated that they simply were not convinced that the expense and disruption were necessary. For example, you Californians know about the BART statistics. In the San Francisco subway system detectable tiles were installed on every platform edge. But the statistics show large decreases in accidents before the tiles were installed and actually showed an increase after installation. A representative of people using wheelchairs said that the people he represents believe the tiles may very well pose a difficulty and even a complete barrier to persons in wheelchairs and with other mobility impairments. The elevator guy pointed out that his industry has been compelled to spend millions on devices to level elevator cars precisely; why then, he asked, are others being instructed deliberately to unlevel walking surfaces? The hotel guy pointed out that experience in his industry shows that the occurrence and severity of slip-and-fall accidents can be inversely correlated with the amount of foot surface one has in contact with the walking surface. The domes are designed to reduce the walking surface on purpose. When the vote was finally taken, the count was nineteen against the domes and only seven in support. The domes and detectable tiles of any kind are out of the standard. With the ANSI standard much revised and strengthened in general, with Braille correct, and with the "detestable" tiles (as I have heard several federal officials call them), removed, the ANSI standard is now for the first time something close to what we in the Federation would like. There are still problems, but they are minor compared to the ones we have already solved. The next step is to help to bring about changes and improvements in the federal regulation by teaming up with other like-minded folks whom we have found through ANSI. So, President Maurer, I went as you asked and did as you directed. We now can look forward to a day when detectable tiles are in nobody's standard anywhere. There is work to do, but we now have friends and contacts all across the country with whom we can work to make these changes. So far as I'm concerned, nobody's laughing at ANSI any more. Richard Hudnut, Chairman of ANSI's Committee on Accessibility, followed Peggy Pinder to the podium. He confessed later that he had not been sure when she began her remarks where she was heading. He was much relieved when it became clear that she had been pleased by the Committee's recent activity. In addition to chairing the Committee on Accessibility, Mr. Hudnut serves on the American National Standards Institute Board of Directors and chairs its Appeals Committee. He has also served as an independent consultant retained by the Builders Hardware Manufacturers Association for the past twenty-seven years, and he has occupied a number of other positions that demand shrewdness and practical good sense. Here is what he had to say: I understand now why Peggy didn't tell me what she was going to say; I'm not sure what I'm going to say. But I'll struggle through it just the same. I was going to say that my introduction was more generous than it was deserving; however, with some of Peggy's remarks I'm going to be very modest and say, "Yeah, it was deserving." Although I have met a few blind people in my life, this is the first time I have had a chance to speak to an audience largely composed of blind persons. I am glad that so many of you have gathered, have made the decision to take your lives into your own hands and to make decisions for yourselves. I also know that there are far too many people in our country who have not yet realized that our fellow citizens who are blind are and should be fully welcomed into our society. There is unfortunately still a great deal of prejudice, misunderstanding, and inequality in our society. I hope that this message today will describe for you at least one step toward the elimination of these. My topic is the activities of the American National Standards Institute A117 Committee on Accessibility. When one thinks of access, people in wheelchairs generally come to mind, and indeed the arrangement of building elements to make travel and building usage possible for these people is more obvious to most, for example, than Braille on elevator car controls. The Committee responsible for writing the ANSI A117.1 Standard is made up of a number of special interest groups both from the building user and the building owner points of view. Additionally, there are representatives of the building code enforcement community, manufacturers of products being regulated in some fashion, and various groups involved with disability. At present the committee membership is made up of organizations representing these constituencies. We have recently determined that individuals not sponsored by a specific organization, but with expertise not presently represented, should be eligible for committee membership. In short, the objective is to offer participation to every entity having a direct and material interest in the content of the Standard and who can contribute to its worth. The genesis of the ANSI process is consensus, a word also very important to your organization. ANSI has worked for decades on approving standards for almost anything you can think of. When an ANSI standard is desired, ANSI requires the people who would be affected by the standard (i.e., manufacturers, users, builders, building code people, experts in the area) to be represented. Under the ANSI banner, these people are gathered into a single room and encouraged to reach a consensus, forging the concepts and phrases which will literally standardize safe and efficient design and use of whatever the standard covers. In effect we use the country's motto: Out of many, one. ANSI has been very successful in supporting this over the years, and the standards it approves are used daily in numerous areas. When accessibility became a topic of discussion, ANSI accredited the A117 committee in the early seventies to begin the forging of a standard that would distill into usable words the how-to of access. The content of the Standard covers a very broad array of subjects, and it is for this reason that the committee membership is quite large, about fifty as a matter of fact. This entails presentations by those with mobility impairments, those who are deaf, those who are blind, those with restricted use of their limbs, and those who speak as advocates without having any of these disabilities. Those of us on the Committee who are not identified with a cause or type of disability sometimes find ourselves in the difficult position of listening to disagreements among the advocates of the people we are attempting to serve. This is part of what happened in the detectable tile discussion. We also hear from those with a different sort of self- interest involving the required use or non-use of products or the configuration, size, and placement of such products. We can at least to an extent overcome the zealous product manufacturer looking for what I call the legislated sale. While there are many products that undeniably may make things somewhat more convenient, these products are not necessarily essential for access or egress. However, when these products are championed by a segment of those interests we are attempting to serve, such as a disability group, we must then pay attention. This is another part of what happened in the detectable tile discussion. As so eloquently expressed by your leadership, people with sight are not the experts on blindness. People who are blind are the experts on blindness. But when two organizations, each made up of people who are blind, flatly disagree on a given issue, it poses a problem. We then find ourselves in the unenviable position of choosing sides. Naturally this involves listening to the two or possibly more points of view and deciding which is the more persuasive. While blindness is obviously a disability in the strict, descriptive sense of the term, it certainly does not strike me as a devastating, life-ruining condition. Instead, I find your position that it is nothing more than a nuisance is much more accurate. It reminds me of a process we are going through in revising the building codes by mainstreaming the provisions in A117.1 that are regarded as equally beneficial to all people whether physically disabled or not. I know that the most common use of the term "mainstreaming" in your organization refers to choices of educational settings. However, in the building code context we use "mainstreaming" to mean the insertion of requirements in a building code that are applicable to everyone. One example in the accessibility context for which some people have resisted another kind of mainstreaming is emergency building evacuation. As for me, I totally reject and resent some emergency evacuation plans I have seen prohibiting people with disabilities from using the exit stair enclosures. And who are these disabled people? Those who are blind, among others. The justification? "The guide dog might cause problems. The cane might trip people. The disabled would slow egress for those who are not disabled." And other silly reasons. What is even more distressing is the understandable lack of outcry by disabled persons victimized by these silly restrictions for fear of losing employment. The controversy over tactile cues symbolized by the use or non-use of truncated domes was an especially difficult problem for the A117 committee. They are required by the Access Board Guidelines. They were proposed and tentatively adopted by the A117 Committee, and it was not until the National Federation of the Blind became active on the Committee through the very effective participation of Peggy Pinder that we became aware of the disagreement among people who are blind as to the usefulness of truncated domes--difficult because it went beyond an argument among people who are blind. It included concerns expressed on behalf of people in wheelchairs, people who use walkers or canes, and others who saw what they perceived as a possible tripping hazard. In other words the whole truncated dome discussion taught me that we have not yet perfected the networking method necessary to bring all of the views we need to everyone's attention in time for enlightened study and action. Without the full range of views, which most certainly includes the expertise and advocacy of the National Federation of the Blind, the ANSI Committee on any given issue is in danger of adopting criteria based on emotional gut reaction, even if it seems instinctively incorrect. In this instance, the NFB position will likely prevail because it was felt by most to be the most enlightened. At any rate, a substantial majority of the Committee (Peggy gave you the vote) chose to agree with the NFB position and removed the requirement for truncated domes, as did the Board for the Coordination of Model Codes, a group under the Council of American Building Officials, which also serves as the Secretariat of the A117. Let me talk a moment about my frustration over the lack of coordination among the provisions of the ANSI accessibility standard, the Access Board guidelines, and the ADA itself. The Access Board guidelines were largely based on pre-existing Board criteria and the ANSI standard published six years ago. Members of the ANSI Committee updated, revised, improved, and strengthened our new accessibility standard using the ANSI consensus process. So the new standard about to be published is somewhat different and we think better than the Access Board guidelines. We would like to help the Access Board further improve its guidelines as well as bringing about standardization among standards. With this in mind, both the A117 Committee and the Board for the Coordination of Model Codes (BCMC) will be recommending to the Department of Justice to begin rule-making procedures to resolve this and other issues. I know that your organization knows about ANSI, ADA, ADAAG, BCMC, and DoJ. The Americans with Disabilities Act itself is certainly the most widely discussed civil rights enactment, with more impact than any such legislation since the original Civil Rights Act in 1964. I know that your organization had reservations about the ADA from the beginning and insisted on the inclusion of a provision which allowed any disabled person to refuse special treatment of any kind. Without this provision you believed that the ADA could become a source of segregation of the blind. With it you have determined to work hard to make sure that the ADA does not come to separate and stigmatize the blind. You are in the forefront of working to make ADA a true civil rights act instead of another link in the chain keeping the blind out of full participation in society. That President Bush consulted with your Executive Director Dr. Jernigan relative to this Act and conferred upon him the Distinguished Service Award is a great tribute to him, but more important, to all of you--the members of the National Federation of the Blind. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you will go away from this session with hope for the future and the knowledge that, working together, we are making significant progress. That is what Richard Hudnut said in his remarks at the NFB convention. Until a last-minute illness kept him at home, Lawrence W. Roffee, the executive director of the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (ATBCB) was to have taken part in this panel presentation. He subsequently sent Peggy Pinder a copy of the remarks he had intended to make, and they are particularly interesting because they express the views of the man who heads the ATBCB. He began by observing that "The NFB has the reputation of being one of the better organized and articulate advocacy organizations." He went on to summarize the NFB's philosophical position on architectural barriers as he understands it: "For too long many people--those with various disabilities and those without disabilities--have made assumptions about the relationship of people who are blind to the built environment. There have been too many incorrect assumptions about the abilities of people who are blind. "Ms. Pinder's comments to the Board on our recent request for information on our research agenda are particularly appropriate. She wrote: `My plea to the ATBCB is to begin, not with studies, but with careful thought about what is being studied and why. Assumptions about blindness and its effects on the abilities of the people whom it affects are so deep in the human psyche that they must be consciously identified and rejected before proceeding with any study.' "The same," Mr. Roffee continued, "can be said about assumptions about any person with any kind of disability. The Access Board is now finding that assumptions about the abilities of a variety of people with disabilities are incorrect or at least need to be closely questioned. It is becoming quite evident that many of the early studies that underlie most current accessibility standards are based on questionable assumptions.... The Board will be examining and giving careful thought to the basic assumptions that underlie many of the technical standards." A little later he said, "I think it is becoming more and more accepted that legislation cannot be passed for people with disabilities, regulations cannot be developed for people with disabilities, accessibility standards cannot be developed for people with disabilities, and local businesses cannot make their establishments accessible for people with disabilities." He went on to state his hope that the time is coming when everyone will recognize the necessity of doing these things with disabled people. He summarized his thought by saying: "The [ATBCB] standards must be based on reality and cannot stigmatize any sector of the public." Mr. Roffee's prepared remarks concluded with a paragraph that, even in his absence from the convention session, captured the view of everyone in the room at the close of this fascinating agenda item. He said, "I think that it is possible to take the myth out of accessibility. There are many indications that it is starting to happen. You and I know that it will not happen overnight. We also know that there will be numerous political battles along the way. On behalf of the Access Board, I look forward to working with this organization, the ANSI Committee, and many other organizations to make it happen and get rid of the myth."