Today is Wednesday April 14, 2021 
ADA National Network State of the Science. 

Wednesday April 14, 2021 
>> KURT JOHNSON: Good day.  Welcome back to the second day of the ADA State of the Science virtual conference.  We are so pleased you are here.  I am Kurt Johnson, the co‑principal investigator on the ADA Knowledge Translation Center.  I am standing in for Dr. Mark Harniss, the principal investigator, who could not be with us today.  I would like to acknowledge Kim Canaan, Linea Johnson, and Fiona who are part of our team to make this all work with zoom.  The ADA National Network is made up of 10 regional centers, plus the Knowledge Translation Center here at the University of Washington.  Anyone who needs technical assistance on the ADA can either phone or E‑mail, and one of the regional centers will respond to the request.  You can also find this information on our website.  We also are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the network this year.  The ADA National Network is funded by the National Institute on Disability Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research within the Administration on Community Living and we would like to acknowledge their support for this work and for this conference.  Now let me go over some issues around zoom.  Many of you are familiar with it.  First you should see the slides on the left and the presenter and the ASL interpreter on the right.  You can use your mouse and click and resize the video and the PowerPoint.  We will use chat and Q and A that are located at the bottom of your screen and I will tell you more in a second.  The audio settings are on the left bottom of the screen and the advance view option is at the top middle of the screen.  Next slide.
Next slide?
Well, we are not getting slides advanced so I will just talk.  There we go.  You can listen with your phone if you have trouble with your computer audio, select audio settings to search phone and follow the directions and dial the number to log in.  Next slide.  You will have a chance to ask questions.  Submit the questions in the Q and A.  And you will have an option to do ‑‑ to submit anonymously.  Don't submit questions in chat, we won't be monitoring it for questions.  If you are listening on the phone, not connecting, E‑mail your question to ADAKT@UW.EDU.  We will have realtime ‑‑ you can up vote your questions.  If you see a question that you like, you can update it clicking thumbs up icon.  Updated or up voted questions will rise to the top and be more likely to be asked.  We also, if you have need technical assistance during the webinar, send a message in the chat area or E‑mail ADAKT@UW.EDU.  We will have real‑time captioning called CART.  It's on the next slide.
And next slide, we will have ASL interpreters with us today.
So, we are two slides behind now.
To ensure ‑‑ I think we are readjusting the PowerPoint here.
So, I will just keep talking.  To ensure the equivalent visual access presenters will describe any visual content on the slides.  In addition, presenters may provide a visual description of themselves.  So for example I might say:  My name is Kurt Johnson.  I am a white man in my late 60s, almost 70s, with long red hair, that you can't see because I tied it back today, and blue eyes.  I am wearing a shirt.
It's increasingly common practice in the disability studies circles and it may be new to some of you, and maybe not to others.  Now we are ready to transition to the keynote.  We still don't have slides.  Guys, how do you want to proceed? 
>> Give me one second, folks.  I am really sorry.
How is that?
>> KURT JOHNSON: I don't see a slide.
>> And now?
>> KURT JOHNSON: I see that you have said ‑‑ oh.  I see that you said you are starting to share a screen share, but there are no slides yet.
>> MARK HARNISS: Kurt and Kim, this is Mark.  I believe Sachin doesn't have a PowerPoint, but will be speaking, so we can problem solve while he is speaking.
>> Okay.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Excellent.  With that, let's begin today.  Today's theme is community development planning we will hear from our keynote speaker Sachin Pavithran with the U.S. Access Board.  He will present for about 30 minutes.  After that we will have a short break and then we will begin 5 research presentations covering a variety of topics related to the community development and planning.  We won't take questions during the 20 minutes ‑‑ during the presentations but we will have 20 minutes after the presentation to ask questions.  And then we will take another short break.  After the break we will have our closing speaker Victor Pineda who will summarize what we have heard today and talk about where we go from here.  So with that, I would like to welcome Sachin from the U.S. Access Board to kick it off for us. Sachin?
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  Thank you.  And good afternoon, or good morning, depending upon where you are.  My name is Sachin Pavithran.  My pronouns are he/him/his.  Image description:  I am a dark‑skinned Southeast Asian descent person.  I am wearing a black suit, a gray shirt, with a black tie.  I have a virtual background with a U.S. Access Board logo behind me.  With that ‑‑ plus I want to thank the ADA National Network for inviting me to be part of this event today.  I have been ‑‑ I have been part of the U.S. Access Board for a few months now as Executive Director.  It's an honor to be part of this event today.  On behalf of my colleagues at the Access Board I want to extend the appreciation of all of the work that the ADA National Network and the regional offices are doing to extend accessibility and promote accessibility within the region that you are working in.  It's ‑‑ it is an effort that we all need to be joined together to do and we appreciate the hard work each and every one of you are doing to promote accessibility.  The work that you do promotes the guidelines and the stands that we put forward to really make that a reality in the communities that you all live in.  So thank you very much for your hard work and also thank you for putting on this event which is important to have some conversation in regards to what the future of accessibility looks like.  To start off, I want to give background about myself.  I was born in India ‑‑ I am a blind individual, born in India, grew up in Dubai United Arab Emirates.  Before migrating to the U.S.  I had no exposure to what it means when it comes to accessibility I was very limited what I came across when it comes to accessibility.  Even through my education K through 12 I had no access that we find here in the U.S.  My K through 12 was accomplished because my mother took the time and effort to read all of the textbooks for me.  Accessible information was not available for me throughout my entire K through 12 period.  So, accessibility was new concept after I migrated to the U.S. to start my college and to enter university here in the U.S.  That was my first exposure to what accessible design could look like.  What is access.  What someone like myself who is blind could do to be successful.  Having that exposure, sudden exposure to getting accessible information, getting access to equipment that I could use as a blind person in a university setting, as a student was a huge ‑‑ it was a huge change for someone like myself who had zero exposure to anything what equal access should look like.  I was very excited to see the different things I could do independently when access was provided, even just the basic things that, you know, having my textbooks available in an accessible format that I didn't have to rely on anyone else.  Like I said, in my K through 12 almost my entire education was based ‑‑ was done because my mother was able to help me read my textbooks to me.  To do that and to have access available to me open doors that I did not have options before.  It gave me opportunities that I never thought I would have.  But also while I was exploring all of the new opportunities I was getting, I realized there is more to be done and the more I started realizing that there are things that I needed more access to, the more conversations I was having with my peers who are blind or who are involved in disability rights.  I started seeing the gaps, I started seeing what the potential of access could look like for everyone in the disability community.  So, that is where I got into the disability rights movement to be an advocate for equal access and pushing accessibility so we can really get ‑‑ so we can really have an equal playing field.  So full community inclusion is something that I started pushing in my early years of my career.  In order to do that I realized the only way you can make something happen is having bold statements putting out there making bold moves that really challenges the norm.  You can't just expect changes to happen by just asking for the very basic needs.  You need to make those bold asks to really get what you really ‑‑ what the end goal needs to be.  It is scary to make those bold asks, sometimes you are looked at as being unreasonable.  Sometimes people wonder whether you understand what it takes to do those different areas.  But I also know what it means to me personally, what I am missing in my life without having equal access.  So, in order for me to be fully inclusive, fully included within the community I live in, and the environment that I work in, I need to have the access that everyone else has.  And the only way to do that is keep pushing for this bold ‑‑ keep pushing for this bold ask that I was requesting, which I was advocating for.  So, that's ‑‑ you know, that's a little background about myself where someone who came from no exposure to accessibility, no exposure to what access could look like, and how my perspective changed after coming to the U.S. and what I could do as being an advocate.  You know I worked in the higher education space for 20 years pushing for accessibility within university sectors, but I also pushing for accessibility within the communities around the country and internationally, and been very involved in advocating for equal access.  I was fortunate to be appointed by President Obama in 2012 to the U.S. Access Board as a public member and I served in that capacity for 8 years.  And in last fall I accepted ‑‑ last December I accepted an offer to be the Executive Director of the U.S. Access Board which I currently serve as ‑‑ in that position right now.  So I have been in my current role as Executive Director of the U.S. Access Board for little over three months now and it's been a great ride and I am learning a lot but I also know there is a lot of work yet to be done.
I want to give you background about what the U.S. Access Board is and what we do in this federal agency.  So the U.S. Access Board is a small independent federal agency whose role is to push for accessibility designs.  We set standards and guidelines that is ‑‑ that helps the environment we live in be accessible for all people with disabilities.  So we do this by partnering with agencies but also reaching out to folks in the community, like all of you who are researchers or city planners or people with disabilities.  Bringing all of the different players to the table to have conversation whether it's through training whether it's through making ‑‑ working on regulations, setting guidelines, whatever it may be.  Our role is to make sure that we have quality guidelines and standards and design ideas out there so that accessibility is taken into consideration.  So, the federal agency, like I said, is a small federal agency but we have a board that governs us.  It's a board of 25 people where 13 of the ‑‑ let's see, there is 12 federal agencies that sit on the board like Department of Justice, Department of Transportation, Education, Commerce, Health and Human Services.  United States Postal Service.  So, 12 different agencies have a seat on the board.  The other 13, up to 25, are public members like myself who was appointed by Obama.  I am not a public member now but 13 are appointed by the President, they come from various backgrounds with expertise in accessibility from different parts of the country.  One of the requirements, most of ‑‑ the majority of them need to be people with disabilities.  So, that is kind of the makeup of the agency.  So we have 25 board members and we have a staff of about 30.  So, with this group it's how we work together to make sure the accessibility conversation is happening within the federal government but, also, in the communities that we live in.  I want to touch on some of the big areas that we are focusing on in the Access Board right now.  With the new administration coming in, with the Biden administration, there are several changes that happened.  One of the changes happened on January 20th.  January 20th was the Executive Order that President Biden put in where we had been given the authority to start getting into the business of rulemaking, because under the previous administration, the Executive Order that required two for one regulation, which stated that for any regulation that we introduced we had to get rid of two existing regulations, which limited the work that we could do and any rulemaking we had to do.  President Biden coming in, on first day, he rescinded that Executive Order and now we are able to get back into the rulemaking business, which is one of the big focus areas for the U.S. Access Board.  So, let me touch on a few of the rule makings that we are going to be involved in.  PROWAG, public rights of way rule that has been in the back burner for a long time. 
I know when I accepted the position, one of the biggest push I got from the community, especially people with disabilities and those who work in accessibility is when is PROWAG going to get done.  I want to show you the rulemaking on PROWAG is our highest priority.  PROWAG is the rulemaking that sets guidelines and standards on the sidewalks, your shared paths, everything that you see within our community, to have equal access for accessible travel, that it's, crossing signals all of those different areas within the communities to ensure accessibility is addressed for people with disabilities.  So, that is the highest priority right now for the Access Board as far as rulemaking is concerned.  The other regs that are also in existence that we are working on, so for example, the medical diagnostic equipment.  There was a regulation that was passed right before the end of the Obama administration.  There was one provision that was in there where setting the seat height for transfer.  So, there was a seat height provision for 17 to 19 inch that needed to be addressed.  So that is something that we are working on addressing because we are looking into doing some research to make sure we have the right data to support whatever we promote coming out of that.  So that is one provision that's left completing the reg, everything else is out there, as far as the regulation is concerned.  So, we will be working on that, that research has to be ‑‑ research has to be ‑‑ has to be stopped last year due to COVID in order to do the research that we are trying to do, we needed major ‑‑ we needed wheelchair heights in person, with COVID that limited what we could do.  So that's another a high priority.  There are different rules, the passenger vessels, there is the railway accessibility guidelines you know, conversation about what happens with self‑service transaction machines.  All of these are different areas we are trying to focus on PROWAG is going to be our highest priority this year to make sure that gets done because that is very important with the different conversations that's happening around the country right now.  We all heard about the discussion happening around infrastructure.  What is infrastructure going to look like in this country.  We have a big role to play as, you know, folks in the accessibility space on what we can do to influence the future infrastructure of the country because we want to make sure whatever is being done that it is done accessibly.  That is one thing that we want to make sure that gets done.  Other than rulemaking, the other pieces that we work on is technical assistance.  We provide a lot of technical assistance, not just to federal agencies but also to any entity or individual that's looking for guidance and direction when it comes to accessibility.  Our TA hotline is always available for anyone who wants to reach out and information for how to reach us is on our website, which is access‑board.gov.  On top of technical assistance we provide a lot of different trainings.  We provide trainings in the space of Section 508, anything to do with the 508 accessibility guidelines.  We do built environment, any accessibility in the built environment.  We also provide different trainings throughout the year in the virtual manner.  And pre COVID we used to do a lot of these trainings in person.  But all of these trainings that we are providing virtually is archived and available for anyone to view at any point and it's available ‑‑ there is no charge to it so please sign up for the different trainings that we have, that we are offering.  The other area we focus on is the enforcement of the Architectural Barriers Act.  The U.S. Access Board was founded for the ‑‑ to enforce the Architectural Barriers Act, that was the initial reason why we were put in place in 1973.  We still do that role where we make sure federal buildings are accessible for all people with disabilities.  There is a process that any of you can reach out to us and file a complaint if there is barriers when it comes to access to any federal spaces, so please do visit our website.  We work with the agency that has jurisdiction over those spaces to make sure any complaints that comes forward is addressed and accessibility is pushed forward.  So, those are some of the big ‑‑ those are the different focus areas that we have with the Access Board.  With that said, you know, there is still a lot of work to be done when it comes to access, you know.  The things that the Access Board has been involved in over the last many decades.  I said the Architectural Barriers Act was one of the areas that we were founded on.  Then we started getting involved in the different areas like ICT so information communication technology, and the transportation aspects, you know, how to do accessible pathways.  Passenger vessels.  All of the different areas we started getting involved in.  Now we are starting to get more involved in conversation around autonomous vehicles.  We have been having webinars around what would autonomous vehicles look like in the future.  You know, does ‑‑ people aren't sure what that space is going to look like.  What ‑‑ you know what is our world going to look like when autonomous vehicles is in place and there is a fleet, whether public transit or ride shares happening with autonomous vehicles.  We all know if we don't push for it, and if we don't make accessibility a priority right from the start it does not happen.  So, at the Access Board we are trying to engage in these spaces so that we can have those kind of bold statements, like I said earlier, to make sure we are part of the conversation.  And it ‑‑ I do have to say this is not just the role of the Access Board, but it's all of our roles to make sure that we push for equal access and be bold about how we ask for what access should look like.  Now, I know that we have researchers in this ‑‑ in the audience.  What can you do as researchers to push for good research.  When you ‑‑ when you are creating your research question, how are you coming up with that research question.  Who are you involving when you design your research question, when you design what you are trying to research.  Are people with disabilities who are going to be the end user, who are going to be impacted, are they part of the conversation.  How are we bringing people with disabilities to be part of the conversation of any research that's being done, so that they are not just seeing the end product.  It is critical as researchers to make sure people with disabilities are part of the conversation from the start.  Because if you want to make your research ‑‑ if you want to make sure that your research has good end results, people with disabilities need to be part of it.  You know, as someone who is very strong in the disability rights movement and really believes in advocacy, I really would like to push for researchers to really ask:  Are you doing everything you can to include people with disabilities.  The reason that I bring that up is I have seen how some research gets done, and the end result could have been significantly better if you have included people with disabilities from the start.  The other group is, you know, what are we doing when it comes to city planning?  We talk about full community inclusion.  So, if you work in the city and towns, and if you are part of planning commission, if you are working on infrastructure within our communities, if you are working ‑‑ if you are working on the conversation of what city access, what access within the community should look like, how are people with disabilities involved in that conversation?  Are you locating or are you involving people with disabilities to be start of that conversation?  All of that ‑‑ it is critical, like I said earlier, to have people with disabilities be part of all of these conversations because you are missing the key ‑‑ you are missing the key component if they are not part of the conversation.  Now, there are communities that do this phenomenally, they do it great when they involve people with disabilities, you can see how the end results are compared to when people with disabilities are not included.  But as a person with a disability myself, I know there is a role for me to play also.  I can't always just wait for the researchers to come to me or the city planners to come to me.  I know there is a role for me to play to advocate for myself as well.  You know, for all of those who are, you know, who have a disability within the audience here today, I challenge you to do the same, to be bold about what you are looking for.  Push for what you are looking for when it comes to access.  Without really pushing for it, without really asking outloud what you need, it's not going to happen.
Accessibility is not something that just happens because we wish it would be there.  Accessibility is something, it's an ongoing effort that we all need to come together to make it happen, whether it's lawmakers, whether it's researchers, whether it's folks in academia, whether it's people with disabilities, we all need to play a role to make sure that we get ‑‑ we play our part to ensure the priorities always there.  The conversation is now happening around the country about what the future of this country is going to look like when it comes to infrastructure and other important aspects of our community, healthcare and all of the different spaces.  And we talk about smart cities, we talk about, you know, modernizing transportation.  We talk about all of these different areas.  And there is a role that we all can play if we choose to.  The only way that we can ‑‑ we can make it a reality and we can make it happen for all of us is if we take it upon ourselves to be bold and we take it upon us to really ask for what is ‑‑ you know, what should the future look like.  With that said, I want to thank all of you for joining us.  And, also, I want to thank all of you for the hard work that you do, because without your hard work, we wouldn't see the accomplishments that has happened over the last many decades.  I know many of you have been involved in this space for a long time.  And many ‑‑ many of you have been mentors for us who are coming into the space.  So, I encourage and I thank and I show my appreciation for the hard work that has been done over the last many decades but also look forward to the work that needs to be done.  And I look forward to partnering with all of you that's out there.  And also, please do reach out to the U.S. Access Board and hold us accountable for the work that we need to be doing as an agency so we can be, you know, we can be the model that we have been founded upon.  With that said, I am going to close my comments and open up for any questions that might be there in the audience.
>> Sachin, this is Linea Johnson, I am taking over for Kim to ask questions.  We have a lot of really great ones, but the first big thing was everyone saying congratulations on your appointment as chair to the Access Board.  So congratulations.  And I had my question document open and of course, you know, I have lost it.  So our first question is from Courtney, she says:  My name is Courtney I am a pro bono scholar in a disability justice program at New York (inaudible) Republic Interest.  People with disabilities continue to face accessibility issues on New York City ferries and city law on accessibility does not address accessibility for people with hearing and visual disabilities.  What is the current status of federal Access Board guidelines on passenger vessels?
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  Thanks for the question.  So before 2017, before the previous administration, we at the Access Board were working on the passenger vessels regulations.  Then we had our ANPRM out.  We had comments that we were going through and we had to come to a stop in the change in administration because of the Executive Order that was put out.  With that said, the Access Board is going to pick the passenger vessel regulation back up.  But it is going to be further down the road for us because of the priority shift that we have in regards to PROWAG rule.  The PROWAG rule from what we have heard from the community at large is something that we at the Access Board feel like that needs to be addressed and completed son sooner rather than later.  As soon as that is wrapped up in the future we plan to pick up the passenger vessel rulemaking process.
>> Thanks, Sachin.  And our next question is, you spoke a lot to researchers, how will current and emerging research inform the new guidelines and any other new standards guiding ‑‑ standards for guiding document?  Have you noted any data gaps?
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  So, I am trying to understand the question.  So guiding ‑‑ any research?
>> Yeah.  So, in the current and emerging research ‑‑ sorry, I am trying to read it while I go ‑‑ how will current and emerging research inform the new guidelines and any other new standards vetting documents.  In your research have you found any data gaps.
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  All of the different guidance we have put out and different standards that we put out, we try to base it on good research.  Good research is important for the work that we do.  There is, as far as research gaps, you know, there are ‑‑ in the space of ICT, in the space of anything to do with the information communication technology, there is a lot of work to be done.  I gave you an example of autonomous vehicles.  There is a lot of conversation happening, what accessibility should look like in the space of autonomous vehicles, but there is still a lot more research to be done.  Research is going to guide the work that we do, no matter what the topic area might be.  Is there gaps?  Yes, there are gaps in the different areas, especially the I.T. space that we need to addresses.  We got web accessibility and a few of the areas which we have been working on for a long time.  Pretty much under control what that should look like.  Not saying that we have figured out everything.  But there are emerging technologies that is going to require research that needs to happen in order to push good guidance out there.
>> Thank you.  You spoke a lot about PROWAG and you may have already touched on this but folks are wondering if you can speak more about the timeline for PROWAG rulemaking.
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  There is no way for me to give a deadline.  The best thing that I can do is we are hoping that we can ‑‑ you know, we can have a rule text out there that can start ‑‑ because we need to have our rule text out there, after which is when we start what we call our regulatory process which is the process that assesses how much is this rule going to cost the country as a whole to implement.  That portion is the portion that's going to take the longest time.  Now, it's not something that we do internally, that is something that we have to contract out to assess that.  Once that portion is done, the final rule should come out soon after.  Now, the Access Board, our role is to put the rule out there as far as the PROWAG is concerned, but we do not enforce PROWAG, that is not our role.  Department of Justice, Department of Transportation are the two agencies that enforce whatever rule comes out.  So it will be up to the Department of Justice and Department of Transportation to enforce that.  Our portion we are hoping in the next year, but it's hard to say ‑‑ give an exact date.  I wish I could but it's just ‑‑ there is no way for me to give an exact date to that.
>> We have all of the hard questions for you.  So people ‑‑
    (LAUGHTER).
>> Our next question:  Are there any plans or hopes to consider updating the Section 508 regulations to include the web content authoring guidelines WCAG 2.1 this update came out after the 2016 refresh which includes WCAG 2.0 by reference. 
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  We have had conversations about what that should look like.  Again, we don't have any timing on when that would be undertaken.  But internally there is conversation happening about how to include WCAG 2.1.
>> Sorry, I am getting some up votes as we go.  What are the plans to update the 2010 ADA standards for accessible design?
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  (laughter) I feel like I don't have concrete answers for all of you.  That is also another ‑‑ that is also another issue that we are wanting to undertake.  With the way rulemaking works within our agency, being a small agency, when we undertake a big rule such as PROWAG it ‑‑ the staff resources that is associated to work on a rule of that ‑‑ of that size really takes up the capacity what we have with the agency.  That's one of the reasons why some of these big rules take the time it does.  It's not because, you know, we don't have the desire to do multiple rules at the same time.  If it's different topic areas like, you know, working on ICT separate from ‑‑ those are different topic areas that we have different staff that can focus on it.  When we work on PROWAG, which has the same ‑‑ we need the same staff expertise that we are working on PROWAG and the Artificial Barrier Act, it ‑‑ it limits how much we can spread out.  So with that said I am not trying to say it's not going to happen, it is something that is going to happen, but right now, we made a decision to put our resources all into PROWAG because that needs to come out especially with the infrastructure conversation that's happening around the country.
>> Thank you.  And some of these questions may already have been answered in different pieces, so I apologize if you are getting some ‑‑                                                              >> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  Oh, no, that's fine.
>> I have a question from Kelly Mack.  This week the 11th Circuit Appellate Court ruled that businesses do not have to provide accessible websites under the ADA.  Can you comment on that ruling and what the U.S. Access Board is doing to promote web accessibility.
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  The Access Board, we issued our regs, the ICT rule in 2017.  So, our role was to put the guidelines out there in the Section 508.  We do training and awareness about what web accessibility should look like.  The enforcement part of that comes ‑‑ it's not part of the Access Board.  With that said, do we have a role to play to raise awareness?  Yes.  We just don't have the jurisdiction to enforce that.  Now, what do I think about that ruling?  If I was to take my Access Board hat off and put my disability rights hat on, I am a little surprised that ruling came down the way it did.  With the different lawsuits that have been going around the country when it comes to web accessibility, I was surprised, the turn it took.  So, it shows there is still work to be done in raising awareness and advocating for the web accessibility component, so that businesses can't get away with not providing accessible content.  So, there is work to be done not just ‑‑ not just at the Access Board but also all of you out there, what you can do to raise awareness and advocate for that.
>> Thank you.  That's an important point.  I have a question from Herschel Jackson.  My question is regarding the automotive industry.  During the last several years, as a deaf individual, I found it very frustrating that automobiles are not fully accessible for deaf and hard of hearing drivers and for passengers.  Especially during an emergency.  How do we get the automotive industry to make their vehicles fully accessibly equipped for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing?
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  Thanks for the question.  And I will be honest.  You have stumped me with that question because I am not sure exactly what ‑‑ what the gaps are in the automotive industry when it comes to the deaf population is concerned, it's probably lack of my awareness and it's something that I would encourage you to E‑mail me so I can better inform myself on that topic.  But we do have experts that sit on our board who are experts in the space who might have a better answer to this.  So I don't want to state something that ‑‑ that might be inaccurate.
>> We appreciate that.  I told you I was going to ask you the hard questions.
    (LAUGHTER).
>> These are hard answers.  Let's see if ‑‑ I have been looking for grant sources for ADA architectural improvements I have been monitoring U.S. grant websites for some time perhaps you can recommend some good sources.  I would like to provide architectural design and construction services to public housing projects.
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  I am not sure I am aware of, you know, grant options that's available for that particular space.  I know there is research grant options through our colleagues at NIDILRR for the different areas.  But that's ‑‑ that specifically on research that's happening within the accessibility space.  Not exactly sure whether this would fit in that or not but I am sure our colleagues at NIDILRR attending this conference who could answer that at some point, if you want to direct that question to them at some point.
>> And we will be able to put some links in chat and send out things afterwards as well if people want to send these questions in later.  And, is or will Access Board development guidelines ‑‑ let me rephrase this.
Will the Access Board develop guidelines to accessibility requirements as it relates to biplane projects where on‑street work parking is located away from the curb, such as parking protected bike lanes.
>> It's one of the areas we trying to address in PROWAG.  It's one of the areas in which we are focusing, so yes.
>> And I think this is going to be our last question of the day, or for you of the day.  Sorry, I just saw it move.  Are there plans to update ADA regulations to explicitly include Certified Deaf Interpreters?
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  Another question that I don't have an answer to so ‑‑
    (LAUGHTER).
>> SACHIN PAVITHRAN:  I will need to get back to whoever asked the question, if you want to E‑mail me probably at access‑board.gov, I do not have an answer to that.
>> Well, I will see if I have another better question for you.  Again, we have another question related to street parking which we kind of covered.
And I think that I am going to see if Kurt has any questions or ‑‑ he would like to bring?
>> KURT JOHNSON: This is Kurt.  I don't have any questions but Sachin ‑‑ well, I have many questions, but I am not going to ask you now.  Sachin, thank you so much.  You did a fabulous job of covering what the Access Board does and some of the issues related to ensuring that we have consumer participation or direction and research.  And obviously you have generated a lot of questions which I think allowed this to be more interactive than I might have expected, so thank you so much.  We are going to take a break now.  It will be 15 minutes.  And you will see a countdown of timer on the screen.  And we will see you again in ‑‑ at 10:05 thanks.
(Short recess taken.)

ADA National Network
(Our program will resume momentarily).
ADA National Network State of the Science.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Welcome back from the break everyone, we are going to move into our research presentations where we will have 5 presentations related to community development and planning.  Each presentation will be about 15 minutes.  After the final presentation, we will have a 20‑minute question‑and‑answer period.  Please feel free to pose your questions as you go, if you would like, in the question and answer feature.  To start us off, Matthew Brault, from the New England ADA Center will discuss the challenges that cities and towns have in implementing the ADA.  So Mathew, go for it.
>> MATTHEW BRAULT:  Hello.  Good morning, afternoon.  My name is Matthew Brault and I am a research consultant with the New England ADA Center for several years now.  For those who cannot see me, I am a white man, just shy of 40, with brown hair with just enough gray it's starting to become noticeable, and I am wearing a green shirt and glasses.  This presentation is entitled:  Identifying Challenges to Implementing ADA Survey Results.  I just wanted to quickly recognize my colleagues from the New England ADA Center who worked with me on this project, Oce Harrison, Kathy Gepps, Jason Angel, Catherine Blakesly, Stacy Hart, our state affiliates who helped with data collection and NIDILRR, the funder of this project.  Next slide.
So, the New England ADA Center undertook this research project with several questions in mind.  First being:  How are cities and towns across New England faring at meeting their ADA Title II obligations.  Which requirements were the most challenging to implement and why.  Were there municipal characteristics predictive of compliance.  How could the ADA Center better tailor it resources to help municipalities to meet their obligations.  Next slide.
So, what we did, we fielded a survey with the help of our state affiliates to representatives from municipalities across the region.  We did two rounds of data collection.  Each was separated by about a year and a half.  And combined, those two rounds, we got about 775 responses.  We took the sample and we weighted it, just to make sure that the sample was correcting for over and under representativeness of municipalities of different population sizes from the different states.  We also took the responses from the survey and linked them to characteristics from the 2018 five‑year American Community Survey.  And then we did our analyses, we ran on a number of different ways, looking at the region as a whole, by state, by population size, the population of the municipality and by the number of municipal employees, which is an important factor because the Title II obligations differ depending how large of an employer the municipality is.  Next slide.  The questions asked about compliance with the five administrative requirements under Title II, namely whether they had an ADA coordinator, a notification procedure, complaint procedures, had performed a self evaluation or had developed a transition plan.  Respondents were asked follow‑up questions if they indicated they were not ‑‑ they had not completed a requirement, which asked them:  What was the reasons for like ‑‑ that presented challenges for them to complete them.  In addition to these administrative requirements, the survey also asked about accessibility of services programs and activities, such as accessible polling places, emergency shelters and whether or not the municipal website was accessible.  Each of these responses were linked to statistics about the municipalities aging population, socioeconomic status, their disability rate and the potential tax base which we use the home value as a proxy for.  In addition, municipalities were assigned to an intervention which occurred between the two rounds of collection which I will discuss next.  Next slide.
Yes, so in between the two rounds we conducted an intervention to get municipalities more engaged with the information to become more compliant.  Namely the ADA Center had an ADA action guide that we sent out to municipalities, and we really wanted to them to become more engaged with that action guide.  So, we randomized group ‑‑ the municipalities into four groups.  The first just received the usual standard, they just received the informational E‑mail with the ADA action guide.  Group 2 received that E‑mail but also got statistical information about the area to kind of increase the salience of this topic and really try to bring them into wanting to engage on this in this area.  Group 3 they got an invitation to a webinar which would give a more intensive kind of assistance on this.  And then group 4 received essentially both the statistical information and the webinar.  Then in our analysis we would then compare the compliance levels in round 2.  Because there was a slightly shorter time horizon we wanted to look to see if municipalities had taken positive steps towards compliance so we developed a point system.  That gave 2 points for having completed a requirement and 1 point for being in process with a requirement.  That way if someone moved from having made no effort to in process we could see that in the data.  Next slide.  So, this slide shows a bar chart with administrative compliance rate, accessible services programs and activities rate, and in overall compliance rate for the region in each state.  Overall only 5% of municipalities in New England met Title II obligations.  1 in 5 were meeting the administrative requirements, 1 in 7 were providing accessible services, programs and activities.  The rates differed across the states but all were very low.  Connecticut seemed to be doing better than most of the others.  We think this is related to ‑‑ they have a strong program for training ADA coordinators in their state.  We think that has likely been paying off.  Next slide.  This chart shows the relative rankings of reasons why municipalities were not compliant for the region overall and by state.  What we see here is that the lack of personnel was a persistent problem across states with a lack of knowledge as a commonly cited reason as well.  In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, however, the lack of money was the more common cited reason.  We were actually surprised to see that money wasn't more cited because anecdotally people have always list ‑‑ have kind of said things like, well, if we had more money we would do this.  It didn't seem that just one of the ‑‑ in the written responses that, you know, they just didn't know what they were supposed to do seemed to be a big challenge.  Next slide.  Did the thing advance?  Oh, I don't know if it's advancing.  So the next slide basically gets to the ‑‑ yeah, this chart shows the results from some of the regression we did using the characteristics about municipalities on predicting compliance.  Basically, the center axis of each graph represents no relationship so the closer the point is to the center line the more likely it means that those characteristics really do not ‑‑ are not very predictive of compliance.  What we see here is that characteristics like the percentage of the population in the municipality that were age 65 and over, along with the median household income and median home value were associated with slightly higher compliance for the administrative requirements but much of the association went away once we got to the multiple regression models.  Also in the simple regression, disability rates were negatively associated with compliance but after controlling for other characteristics namely socioeconomic status of the municipality, that association flipped.  So, overall municipal characteristics were not very predictive explaining only a small portion of the variance in compliance.  Next slide.  This chart shows similar results from our intervention.  And disappointingly the intervention did not seem to produce really any noticeable change in compliance.  The effects were both small and statistically insignificant.  Next slide.  So, all of these findings and other presentations as well these are being made available on a dynamic web tool that we created that allows users to create customized charts and tables based on the geography and municipal population size.  We are getting ready to ‑‑ I think we got more or less going right now.  We have been in Beta testing it for a while.  But it's trying to make sure that it is fully accessible.  And so, if you want to learn more or want to find more specific breakdowns you can do that with this tool.  Next slide.  Our main takeaways were first and foremost a large percentage of municipalities are not meeting obligations under Title II.  Basically known state specific actions appear to be helping municipalities gain compliance in the states that tended to do better, namely in Connecticut with the ADA training ‑‑ ADA coordinator training program, and in Massachusetts which has started a grant program to help municipalities both achieve their accessibility obligations in addition to some of their administrative obligations.  But largely municipal characteristics were not predictive essentially having a large proportion of the population likely to need their local government, their governments to be sort of on top of their ADA obligations just didn't seem to be a driver for compliance.  It doesn't appear that making the communities more aware of that fact encouraged them to take steps towards compliance.  Largely, it's that many efforts to further engage municipalities with the tools they need went ignored.  So, next slide.  So kind of where did we go from here.  In the study we identify that the ADA Centers, really the ADA Centers need stronger ties with the municipalities before they can effectuate change sending out a newsletter, wasn't going to be sufficient to get people engaged with the information and have them do what they are supposed to be doing.  So those who may not be in a position to move things forward often are not in the same networks.  Namely, I think there is a siloing that occurs between policy of certain types.  And when you get to the ‑‑ at the municipal stage a lot of the municipal policy is discussed through organizations like the State Municipal Association.  So I think trying to get the ADA Centers more involved in these other organizations that may not be disability specific or disability targeting as a way to sort of get in and start engaging these municipalities and the representatives from those municipalities on these topics.  But, largely, closing the knowledge gap is still the primary aim for this.  As many of our surveys told us they didn't know what they had to do.  So, sort of continuing with that effort of trying to really improve knowledge is where this ‑‑ we are going to still be going.  Next slide.
And this just has my contact information.  And you know, I will happily take your questions during the Q and A.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much Matthew.  That was great. We will look forward to some questions during the Q and A.  Just a reminder to you, if you have questions about implementation of ADA or how it relates to your rights and responsibilities under the law, you can call the ADA National Network 1‑800‑949‑4232 and you can also access that through the website, which is WWW.ADATA.ORG.  Now we will move on to a presentation from Rich Sternadori at the Great Plains ADA Center.  Rich, are you ready to go?
>> RICH STERNADORI:  I am here, yes.  Good morning everyone.  I appreciate the opportunity to be here.  I want to be sure to give our acknowledgments to my colleagues, as well as the KT Center, ADA Network, ACL and NIDILRR.  Let's go to the next slide, please.  I can't see my slides on the screen, so I am ‑‑ there we are.  Let's go to the next slide.  Our study was the status of Americans with Disabilities Act in Local Governments, Integrating Community Capital Resources in Advancing Sustainable Accessibility.  Very similar to what New England Center did in some ways, and I know Matthew and I will need to talk now that I see what they have been up to.  Our study was, you know, what did we want to know?  We wanted to know how our local governments, not state, city and county governments, were applying the ADA regulations, in particular Title II but also some related provisions.  We wanted to understand a specific set of resources there.  It was more of a practical matter not theoretical.  We used a specific set of public resources or community capitals to gauge where our communities were.  We had four central objectives, that is, how can we improve delivery of our ADA Center services.  What is the impact of rural versus urban demographics in that local government's endorsement and application of the ADA Title II regs.  How can that responsiveness of that jurisdiction affect the livability of the community.  And then, finally, how would what we learn affect our ACTPT and other webinars and targeted trainings.  Next slide, please.  We developed a needs assessment, I would call it.  We developed a questionnaire and instrument that had 58 items ‑‑ 51 items, all together 28 with 23 subcomponents that we actually distributed through each of the states, leagues of cities and associations of counties, as well as risk management association that underwrites all of Nebraska's counties.  We did a pre‑advertising with them, a recruitment through them.  And we used their listserv, without access to the listserv I might add, to distribute the promotion, as well as follow‑ups, and the actual instrument.  This gave us some credibility because the recipients and respondents knew who the E‑mail was coming from, knew there would be some assurance.  There is no enforcement going on with some of the sensitive questions we are asking.  We had about 3,021 jurisdictions that we could have reached and we ended up with about 13% of them responding, or 387.  The majority of which, about 77%, were actually identified as rural.  Self identified.  Next slide, please.  So, we used a community development model.  Waiting for the next slide.  There we are.  We used the community development from Flora, Flora and Frey.  We took seven community capitals or resources, if you will, which had to be integrated and looked at as a whole to measure these community and those resources would be natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial and built.  Now the community capital framework measures strengths of those not the weaknesses or not the shortcomings of the community.  And we triangulated those into themes.  Next slide, please.  Synergistically we look at all of the seven community capitals analyzing them in a way that, as an example, financial, cultural, human capital might be the inclusion and influence of the disability community in accessibility, budget‑driven strategies, policy strategies, support for ADA coordinators.  The status of self evaluations and transition plans for built environment which might include ‑‑ which does include the web, web access.  We would also look at adoption and enforcement of accessible design documents including the building code and the 2010 ADA standards, et cetera, et cetera.  Use of PROWAG.  We looked at compliance of facilities under the built environment, in particular recreation, which speaks to liveability, same as the web access.  Next slide, please.  I want to mention there are handouts, the handouts include three ‑‑ two matrices.  These ‑‑ that matrix we put together, number 9 in the handouts, I will get to that in just a moment.  What you are seeing on the screen here is a blank field because it's so complicated we couldn't make it accessible.  Down the left‑hand side are the community capitals.  Across the top we looked at possible examples to explain what is built capital or human.  What questions would we use to measure that exactly with the communities.  Next slide, please.  We are going to take that blank screen you just saw and explode it with the actual ‑‑ some of the actual information just for built and human capital.  Showing the examples that we use to explain where we are, the status for built or human or financial capital and then questions that would measure that in our instrument.  Next slide, please.  We also have in the handouts, it's slide number 9, it's the JA Maxwell integrated approach to qualitative research, where we would ask what do we want to know, why do we want to know that, what kind of data answer that, what are our analysis plans, what are validity threats, what are possible strategies for dealing with the threats and rationale for the strategies.  We applied them to the four objectives in the beginning, that is improving delivery of our services, impact of rural versus urban, ADA responsiveness of the community affecting livability, and then how the findings affect our educational offerings.  Our findings are the constructs for cultural, political, social, financial and human capitals, these are underwhelming in the rural areas.  As I mentioned, 78% identify as rural.  So the majority of people that reported, just like in the New England Center, indicated an insufficient allocation or focus of financial and staff resources to prioritize the ADA.  So it's almost like Maslow's hierarchy.  We looked at again Title III access to goods and services and Title II recreation and found that livability was inconvenient for the rural communities.  The top three ways our center could assist the jurisdictions were sidewalks, financial assistance and Title II recreation.  We also learned 60% of ADA coordinators are housed in HRs departments, human resources departments, which immediately gave us some, again, practical information that we are going to do a stronger, more robust outreach to Society for Human Resource Management.  Out of 40% of the respondents that had 50 or more employees, not just full‑time but employees, 63% of them have no ADA coordinator where, of course, they would be required to have one.  And 78% of the respondents were able to dedicate less than 20% of their time toward their ADA duties.  Next slide, please.  There is a strong finding that you know we are going to focus with SHRM, as an example, and other agencies, small rural jurisdictions under 5,000 reportedly were really underserved, compared to those within 25 miles of the Metropolitan centers.  So as we gauge this we had what we call remote rural, farther than 25 miles from Metropolitan center, rural within 25 miles and then urban suburban.  We are able to tease apart those four demographic categories.  About 78% of the jurisdictions responded they had used the ADA Center, 78% had responded they were aware of the ADA Center.  That leaves about 22% that we maybe hadn't reached or we reached and there was a branding issue.  Where we were partnering maybe with outside agency or about something like that.  There might have been limitations.  One of the weaknesses of the study is that we did use the listservs of the agencies of the city leagues and county associations, and therefore were not able to control who received that.  Their membership might have been sheriff, it might have been the county clerk or building official, ADA coordinator, we couldn't control that.  That also was a strength in the study but also a limitation.  We found that 57% of the jurisdictions, rural ones, still required building permits.  But 52% of those didn't do preconstruction reviews.  So then speaking to the 10‑year alliance with the International Code Council which the ADA Centers have spearheaded, in particular, our center was involved in bringing them forward 10 years ago, our alliance in that symposium, at their conference and webinars, et cetera, we found insignificant influence in rural communities of the disability community in the role of governance, 15% indicated they had no influence in the disability community had no influence in governance and 25% indicated just somewhat.  We can see some issues with political leadership in these rural communities and the need to strengthen our alliance with them through the leagues of cities and association of counties who distributed our questionnaire.  Next slide, please.  So now we have access, what can we learn.  We reached 3,021 jurisdictions that we hadn't reached before through the leagues of municipalities and counties associations.  That's a big deal.  We are using that.  We already met in the annual conference with the Missouri membership and reported these findings back to them.  Their own findings, their own reporting and indicating what we learned from them.  That is right now in the works for Kansas and we will be meeting with the Kansas conference in their annual conferences.  And then we are going to do that again within Nebraska and Iowa, so that's a big deal.  We know now that we reached 22% of people who had previously indicated they hadn't heard from us almost the Hawthorne effect, if you will.  We can see we need to do enhanced rural capacity outreach and education.  In particular with our ADA coordinator program, which is going to be a great tool in the rural areas where communities that have more than 50 employees.  We also can see the critical alliance with the International Code Council and how we are going to refocus that and the education that we are offering there.  As an example, the code council has begun to offer ADA coordinator introduction to the building code.  Because we see that the building code is a default mechanism in a lot of these smaller communities for enforcement.  Next slide, please.  Our branding is an important issue.  We feel that when we partner let's say with a state agency or some other agency and they are the host of educational program, that maybe we are not getting our name as the ADA Center up front and center as we need to.  We also learned a great deal about web masters.  As an example, Nebraska has a web master for the entire state.  When we talk about web access we can see that we have a very strong need for education there within our jurisdictions within the local governments.  And we are going to do that through the leagues of cities and association of counties.  We found grant funding, sidewalks and education of elected officials in the qualitative answers.  We are very strong and a need there.  Recreation, access to recreation and rural.  And then, as I mentioned, distributing the data back to these jurisdictions is underway.  Next slide.
Finally some of the limitations as I mentioned, we didn't control who received and who responded to the instrument that we distributed.  And that's good and bad.  The other things that happened, another weakness of the study is that, we authored a few items after the Kansas survey because we felt we weren't hitting our targets, that made it difficult for an apple‑to‑apple final analysis through Qualitrics when we compared all four states.  Regardless, we separated it out.  During the study COVID hit, university and our college underwent some significant changes.  We had retirement of our dean and our director of our center.  One of our co‑directors passed away sadly.  Our analyst needed to be replaced and our thanks to our new analyst Dr. Fischer.  There were a lot of changes that occurred throughout this study that kept us on our toes as far as keeping this thing moving forward.  We are very excited for what we learned as a practical component of it and what we can do to move forward with what we learned.  So, thank you and I look forward to your questions.  Next slide.
I look forward to your questions as we wrap up all of the presentations.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much, Rich.  I know your center has been through a lot in the last five years, and impressive that you were able to conduct and complete this.  Next we are going to move to Yochai Eisenberg from the Great Lakes Center.  Yochai is going to present on the ADA transition plans.  Yochai?
>> YOCHAI EISENBERG:  Thanks, Kurt.  I am really appreciating these presentations, I don't know about everyone else, but I am really enjoying the conversation.  So far I think these are great presentations and hope my conversation can add to that now as well.  So I am Yochai Eisenberg.  I am a white, middle‑age male, with short brown hair, wearing a blue button‑down shirt and black blazer.  And as Kurt mentioned, I conduct research at the Great Lakes ADA Center with my colleagues listed here below as well.  Today I am going to tell you a tale of an elephant, an apple and million‑dollar lawsuits, and try to synthesize some of the strengths and limitations of current efforts to plan for pedestrians with disabilities.  You want to hear the quick version?  Okay.  Here goes.  There is a big elephant in the room that is being ignored.  Do you all see it?  Take a minute.  The elephant that is being ignored is the lack of barrier removal in the pedestrian infrastructure.  It's strange that it's being ignored really because an elephant can be very costly.  Communities that aren't dealing with the elephant are paying millions of dollars in required infrastructure changes, and lawyer fees, EEEKK!  I would feel trampled if I was in that situation.  But there are communities talking about the elephant, and are taking on the enormous challenge that the elephant represents.  We will share some valuable lessons from these communities, such as not eating the apple all in one bite, which seems obvious but is important to help communities keep in mind they can be strategic and realistic in the face of the elephant.  Let's go to the next slide.  Where we will start the feature film here.
To set the scene, the story will focus on pathways.  These pathways include sidewalks, curb ramps and crossings.  And I will just wait a second for this slide to come up.  Great.  So, as I was saying, pathways for walking and wheeling are important for people to get to the places that they want to go and to be a part of the community.  However, pathways that are broken or not built in the ways that are easy for people with disabilities to use make walking or wheeling difficult.  People with disabilities describe how such barriers limit community mobility participation, and as we heard yesterday, even access to employment.  Next slide.  The problem is that these barriers don't seem to be going away.  I say don't seem, because it's not like this is a new problem or that nothing has been done about it.  I show two images of these types of problems:  One is a corner with no curb cut, one is a badly broken sidewalk.  I will say there is no doubt that progress has been made.  There is much more infrastructure that is accessible than 30 years ago.  But what seems clear is that the progress is not sufficient.  This has been made apparent through numerous class‑action lawsuits highlighting the enormity and widespread scale of the problem including Sacramento, Chicago, Seattle, and a very interesting case study in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2020 that I encourage you to look up.  Furthermore, in a study we conducted of 401 entities in the U.S. we found that among communities reporting barriers in the pedestrian environment, an average of 65% of curb ramps 48% of sidewalks were not accessible.  In other words, more than half have barriers.  Next slide.  As many of you know, under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, local public agencies are required to develop barrier removal plans for pathways called ADA transition plans.  However, in our systematic evaluation of plans we found that only 13% of communities in the U.S. have plans for pathways.  And perhaps importantly, the quality of the plans was not strong.  None of them met all of the minimum criteria required.  And what you could see is pretty similar results between what we found and what Matthew shared earlier.  Now why does this matter?  Well, plans that are low quality are not likely to be effective in making pathways more accessible, and are more likely to end up sitting on a shelf.  Next slide, please.  After learning about the lack of ADA transition plans, we wanted to understand more about what goes into making a high quality plan, i.e., how communities are dealing with the elephant.  We wanted to focus in on how these key ingredients of success share them so other communities do not have plan ‑‑ that do not have plans can learn what they need to do to be successful.  We saw to learn from individuals who work in cities and towns and other local governments called ADA coordinators about how they have developed high quality plans.  We wanted to answer the question:  What are the community organizational interpersonal factors that support the development and implementation of high quality ADA transition plans for pathways.  Next slide.  So how did we do this study?  We identified municipalities who developed high quality ADA transition plans.  We identified them through State Departments of Transportation and ADA Center technical assistance providers.  We then recruited ADA coordinators and their team and conducted a one‑hour interview using a structured interview guide.  Next slide.  Once we conducted the interviews we transcribed them and organized the findings from our interviews using a template that other researchers developed to study successful practices that organizations use when putting new services or interventions into practice.  This template called the consolidated framework for implementation research or CFIR for short helped us to organize successful practices of ADA coordinators to categories that are important for carrying carry out a plan effectively.  In other words, what researchers like to call:  Validated categories.  Think about it like you had a really good stew at a friend's house back when we used to go to other people's homes and eat their food.  You really want to know ‑‑ you know it's really good and so you ask for the recipe and how they made it.  We wanted not only the recipe, but the details for how communities with really good stews made their plan.  The CFIR gave us the categories of how to ask for that in terms of the spices, the time, the oven temperature, how long to mix the batter for, all in terms of ADA transition planning.  Next slide, please.  So, what did we find after talking with these master chefs?  Here are just some of the important findings we wanted to share and some excerpts from ADA coordinators that we interviewed.  On the next couple of slides there is going to be some of the headings I mentioned in terms of validated categories.  But I am not really going to go into them for brevity sake.  The first important finding we wanted to share was that organizational change is needed to build support and buy‑in for the plan and implementation.  Next slide.
So, what does organizational change mean?  Here is an example quote:  It's not just a block on a checklist, right?  That's not what the intent of the ADA is in my opinion, it's a complete philosophy change in the way that we look at and treat other people.  It's a sense of awareness that someone who might have a disability still has the same rights and accessibility to everything that we provide as a city.
And another:  It's amazing how a 30‑year‑old law requires so much hand holding and educating but yeah that is consistently being reinforced.  This isn't just about having a speaker with a disability for a one‑day event or even just hiring an ADA coordinator, it was described as an overall change in how disability is understood and valued in the organization of the municipality from the top, mayors and managers, to department staff and down to, of course, citizens as well.  That is something that doesn't just happen once it's something that requires ongoing reinforcement.  Next slide.  Waiting for the next slide.  Interviewees described how involvement of people with disabilities in planning was key.  Something that was said earlier the keynote speech, right?  And reinforced throughout this conference.  But involvement needs to go beyond posting plans on a website.  We see many examples of in ADA transition planning, and it needs to involve a committee where people with disabilities have important voices.  Should I wait for the slide or ...
>> I am going to stop sharing and come back on just one quick minute.
>> YOCHAI EISENBERG:  Sure, yep.
I will just say while we are getting the technical parts going that involvement in talking about public right‑of‑way you know takes a certain touch because the language of it is very technical, right?  And those who are involved, engineers and architects, speak very technically about the process and the development, and you know, one of the things that we see in some of these plans and ADA coordinators who did really good work with their plans and engagement is that translation of this engineering language to citizens most people like myself who don't have that engineering background. 
I will go ahead and read the quote since it's not much there on the slide, this is an example of successful involvement of people with disabilities.  They are instrumental in us developing the plan, we communicate to them what the plan is, and where they really get into the meat of the plan was how they are addressing our barriers this our transition plan and what we are prioritizing.  In other words, the disability advisory committee was valued and engaged in the process to arrive at the priorities that they felt were important.  Another finding is interviewees mentioned the importance of their own experience and training as being critical supports, something that Richard talked about just now in terms of the training that they provide.  We heard about the one in Connecticut too that these are important supports for the ADA coordinators to lead the way in developing successful plans.  The issue is they come from often diverse backgrounds and training.  As Richard mentioned, a lot of them from HR, engineers, architects, planners to lawyers.  It's rare that ADA coordinators have only one hat.  They typically have another position and ADA coordinator is another hat that they wear.
So the example for the characteristics of ADA coordinators the quote is:  I understand it.  I grew up near Berkeley so I know about the independent living movement.  There we are, thanks.  This coordinator had a long history and thorough understanding of the disability community, they were involved with the disability community locally, and through that were supported in the work to create a successful plan and successful engagement with the disability community.  Next slide.  Coordinators also discussed the importance of just getting started, with the planning and barrier removal.  Indeed seeing the size of the elephant is scary.  The hundreds of roads that potentially have barriers but it's important to just start.  Next slide.  Our interviewee shares this advice:  Eat the elephant one bite at a time, take baby steps.  Okay, what is the first thing that you need to do?  And then when you do that, find someone, for example for me it was let's get this data collection started.  Let's try an engineer.  But for other communities that don't have that money, we have got to get this data collection.  Let's find a partner with our schools and our volunteer groups to make this happen.  I think this quote speaks to the iterative nature of the ADA transition planning and what officials like to describe as a living document.  You have to start somewhere, make some progress, learn from that progress and keep moving forward with it as you are adding on to it.  Importantly for engagement, be transparent about that progress and what you are doing when you are doing it and when people can get involved.  Next slide.  Finally, last important finding that I will share is the communities need to be both strategic and realistic.  We all would like our communities to be fully accessible tomorrow.  And while communities should have done more than they have by now, the lack of municipal funding is not something that is changing and likely to get worse due to the COVID‑19 pandemic.  Next slide.  Here is a quote related to being strategic.  My recommendation to any community regardless of size, getting ready to take on an inventory ‑‑ to explain, an inventory is what you do to learn about the barriers in your community and involves going out assessing or looking at aerial imagery.  So what he is talking about is getting that started.  It's not productive for them to take the approach that they are going to eat the apple all at one time.  Taking it in manageable pieces is reasonable for everyone, right?  It goes back to the concept of good faith.
Now communities can't wait until they get sued because then guess what?  It's not going to be manageable.  Communities need to be strategic of what they are going to accomplish and through that approach make good faith progress so that all parties involved are feeling like progress is being made and communicated.  Next slide.
So, what is the takeaway?  First, I think communities that have not developed plans or with lower‑quality plans can learn these important lessons from the communities with high‑quality plans.  In other words, there are good recipes and ways of cooking and dealing with the elephant that we have all been ignoring.  Clearly certain resources, networks and voices can help support communities in creating higher quality plans.  But I think tools are needed to make that easier for lower resources communities to get started and make progress.  For example, crowd sourcing platforms for data collection and more detailed technical assistance with making the plan along the way.  Creating a high‑quality plans mean the whole organization needs to change and this is a daunting but important effort.  Organizational change is an investment that takes time and reinforcing.  But is really needed for a high‑quality plan to be developed and implemented.  We want to see that plan be implemented.  Next slide.  Our next steps to strengthen our findings we want communities to learn from the successes that we identified.  We plan to share our research findings in various forms including on the Internet and through case studies.  The process that we used can also be an iterative process as well to gather and disseminate successful strategies online so that more and more communities can learn from each other, and these examples can be shared.  Our aim is for more communities to use the successful practices, identified in the study to develop high quality ADA transition plans and ultimately more accessible communities.  That's all that I have for the presentation.  And look forward to any questions or comments that you might have.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Yochai, thank you so much.  We really appreciate it.  Sorry for the interruptions.  Our next presentation is about emergency management, and we will hear from Robyn Gershon from the Pacific ADA Center.
>> ROBYN GERSHON:  Thank you so much Kurt, and thank you  so much to my colleagues on this panel.  I have really been enjoying these presentations absolutely.  Now, before I begin I would just like to describe myself.  I am a clinical professor at NYU.  I am a public health disaster researcher, and yes this past year have been the busiest one I have ever had in my life.  I hope to never have another year like that.  I am a white, middle‑age female.  I have brown hair and brown eyes.  And I have a bright blue jacket on.  Now, I'd like to first start by acknowledging my wonderful colleagues, most especially my long‑term colleague Lewis Kraus, he and I have been working on emergency preparedness and planning for people with disabilities several years now.  We have a few other junior colleagues listed here, we are grateful to them and to NIDILRR for the funding.  On the next slide, why do we do this study on ADA roles and responsibilities with respect to emergency management?  What did we want to know here?  We wanted to know what they were doing, what the barriers to their ability to influence not only their office but other entities in ensuring ADA access with every aspect, the full paradigm of emergency management.  Which means mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery, the full paradigm.  We of course wanted to identify strategies for improvements that would be suggested by the data.  One of the things you might be asking, why is it important for us to know.  If you are not in the world that I am in, I have been in this for two decades now, you may not realize what the trends are that are making this imperative that we address this issue.  First of all, in an earlier setting that was not conducted, it was just published, if anyone would like a copy of that we are happy to send it to you.  We found that the Office of Emergency Management, which is arguably the most important agency in charge of every aspect of emergency management.  We found in that survey, FEMA Region 9, or Region 9, that they were not ready, they were not prepared and they did not have the time or the resources to be responsible for ADA.  But in addition to this issue about their being responsible for ADA, other very important, critical nature converging trends are happening that you may not be aware of, a perfect storm is forming.  You may have some idea because of what happened this past year with COVID in terms of how unprepared we might be for major public health disasters.  And of course every major disaster becomes a public health disaster where we have several things going here.  One is, of course, the incredible increase risk of disaster‑related events climatological in nature, but even such things as earthquakes and natural disaster of a pandemic, these are also increasing.  It's very well documented.  The major trend, is that we have increase number of people with disabilities.  And of course we have a huge population of older people that will be joining that category, because a lot of them do have one or more disabilities.  I don't know how many you know but 10,000 people a day turn 65 years old in this country.  That is something else we have to think about.  And very importantly, in earlier studies we conducted, we found that people with disabilities are half as likely as people without disability to have even the most rudimentary aspects of preparedness planning, even the most rudimentary thing such as extra medications on hand, three days worth of water or food.  They are not prepared, if you think that they are, for the most part they are not.  And then the worst of it all is, of course, people with disabilities have more than twice the risk of having a disabling injury related to the disaster and or death.  And of course, they are much less likely to receive benefits and less likely to recover and less likely to return to pre‑disaster status.  So, for all of these reasons it's absolutely critical for us to know what is the relationship between ADA and the emergency management world.  And not only of course is it an issue of disparities health disparities, inequities for sure it's also of course the law, it's against the law to discriminate in this way.  On the next slide, please.  Our methods were quite straightforward.  This was basically qualitative quantitative descriptive study the first half.  It was conducted right before the pandemic.  We had wonderful input from our key stakeholder ADA coordinators, some of you may know, Ali Everett, Laney Davidson and Kristen Damody.  We also had wonderful assistance from Marcie Roth, Erica Jones and June Kailles, who were absolutely essential every step of the way.  Now this confidential web‑based survey using Qualitrics was focused on the ADA coordinators from Region 9, California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands.  We used the multi‑modal recruitment basically it was passive recruitment.  We had several major domains basically focused on their own role, their responsibility, their training, their level of influence, knowledge and so forth.  It was a short survey, only 36 items, took about 15 minutes.  And after cleaning up data that was incomplete we wound up with final sample of 131.  Next slide, please.  So, mainly the sample came from California, followed by Arizona, more than half.  56% were women.  35% had a disability.  More than half were 50 years and older.  44%, this gets to something, you know, Yochai, I hope I am pronouncing that correctly Yochai, 44% were full‑time as an ADA coordinator.  They had all kinds of other jobs, they were coming out of all sorts of different agencies, mayor's office, the city planner, the architect, the legal, they were all over the place.  Even a few from the Office of Emergency Management, so they had different titles, different roles, different jobs as an ADA coordinator.  Now, one of the most critical findings, and I remember feeling when Lewis and I went over this we had this one important question:  What specific training or qualifications are needed for this incredibly important job?  And a remarkable 26% said:  None.  Next slide, please.  When we asked ‑‑ in the next slide the title is:  Who is responsible?  Who do you think is responsible for assuring access?  Who do you think is responsible?  And this was asked of the ADA coordinators.  45% said that, Office of Emergency Management is responsible.  Well, that's simply not the case.  Because they told us that they were not responsible.  11% of our ADA‑Cs said first responders were responsible.  Very unlikely job for them.  9% said the ADA coordinator's responsible.  And 8% said no one.  On the next slide when we asked them, well, what about your capabilities?  How capable, what about your capabilities for doing this job?  16% said they felt influential in their role in terms of emergency management.  22% they said felt knowledgeable about it.  36% said they felt that they had adequate training.  The next slide.  Yes.  What limits their effectiveness?  Many of them, this was a write‑in question, many said:  Lack of time.  Lack of awareness.  Lack of resources.  Lack of staff, another colleague said that recent.  And lack of competent staff.  My own lack of knowledge and training.  A lack of authority in my role as ADA.  And changes in administration making it hard to develop relationships.  On the next slide we asked:  What would increase your effectiveness?  Many wrote in:  More training.  Some said:  More support from other entities.  Some said:  More involvement and collaboration with the Red Cross and the OEM.  More coordination with disability organizations.  Stronger work relationships and more supportive work environment.  On the next slide, in conclusion, it seems pretty clear, at least in this small sample in one region, that no one seems to be in charge for ensuring equity.  Obviously we have a lot of study limitations, including it was not a representative sample, it was not a random sample but it's a first pass.  It's a step upon which we can build upon.  We definitely feel and have heard this from many of our colleagues that there is tremendous underutilization of ADA coordinators.  I think we have seen it already here in today's talks.  There is definitely interest on their part in improvement in having a much greater role.  They want to know more about ADA compliance with respect to emergency management and that is highly admirable.  Obviously next steps would be a much more robust and rigorous study replicated in other regions.  And importantly, next steps that are already happening gets to the issue about organizational culture and climate and change.  And that is that they are taking matters into their own hands and they are forming networks.  Of course it is with a lot of support especially from the Pacific ADA and I am sure it's happening in other parts of the country, they are forming peer‑to‑peer support.  Peer‑to‑peer mentoring.  They are helping each other and supporting one another because there are unfortunately limited avenues for them to get this very kind of specialized training.  And if you think, oh, it's not such a big deal, how hard can it be.  They can certainly learn what they need to do.  Think a minute about Hurricane Sandy, which by the way led to huge class‑action lawsuits, having problems with evacuation, having shelters ready, identifying where people may be sheltering in place, people without power, people needing food or supplies, their caregiver, all kind of things.  Emergency management world, it's complex.  So, we hope going forward that more people will advocate for greater role for the ADA, we think they are well positioned for it.  I think I better stop there so I stay on time.  Thank you.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much, Robyn.  This an important issue for the ADA Centers and it's been a difficult path filled with many obstacles to have an impact on them.  Now, I'd like to transition to Lindsay Braun, from University of Illinois at Urbana‑Champaign, Lindsay is going to talk about the quality and access to transit services.  Lindsay?
>> LINDSEY BRAUN:  Hi.  Thank you for being here, and thank you for having me.  My name is Lindsay Braun.  I am assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign.  I am a white female.  I have long blonde hair, pulled up into a bun.  I am in my early 30s, until tomorrow, where I enter mid 30s.  And I am wearing a dark gray shirt.  Today I am here to give a talk entitled, Bus Stops and Beyond:  Connecting Riders to Transit Services in the Chicago suburbs.  This talk is abased an applied research project that I conducted with two colleagues also listed on the slide.  This research is motivated by the importance of pedestrian access to transit.  Pedestrian infrastructure elements such as sidewalks and crosswalks are critical for connecting people to transit service and thus they are critical to the efficiency, effectiveness and equity with which transit providers can provide service.  And this contributes to overall patterns of mobility in the community.  Transit agencies do have ADA standards that they need to comply with but most of these focus on accessible vehicles and accessible stops and stations.  From the transit agency perspective there is less emphasis on changes to the broader pedestrian network.  This is a critical gap.  Because the majority of people who ride transit arrive and/or depart as pedestrians and so the infrastructure beyond just the bus stop is really important for their accessibility.  But building pedestrian infrastructure is a challenge, not exclusively, but especially in suburban areas for a number of reasons.  Some of the barriers are physical in nature, related to the fact that we tended in the U.S. to design our communities mainly with the automobile in mind.  And this creates environments that are difficult to retrofit for walking.  The images on the slide show the contrast between a bus stop in an urban area, right in the heart of downtown Chicago on the left, which has great multi‑modal infrastructure.  But then the photo on the right is a view from a bus stop in a suburban location along a wide high‑speed road and an environment where low density development means destinations are far from one another.  Overall it's a difficult place to walk and accommodate pedestrians safely.  Also, there are a number of institutional barriers, we will get into funding issues here in a little bit.  One key institutional barrier from the transit agency perspective, as much as they might like to change the pedestrian infrastructure network in the communities they serve they are limited in doing so, that's not where their authority lies.  They have the authority to change infrastructure at and maybe right adjacent to their stops and stations but the authority to make changes to the broader community pedestrian networks tends to lie with municipalities.  Next slide, please.  So, our goal is to examine these and other challenges in the Chicago suburbs which are served by Pace Suburban Bus, which I will call Pace from here on out.  Pace serves a large and diverse service area.  The map on this slide shows the Pace service area.  Chicago proper is just a small portion of this map but Pace stretches out wide to cover 6 counties and a whopping 284 municipalities.  Those are the municipalities that tend to have authority over changing the pedestrian infrastructure.  As one agency, Pace has to try to coordinate with all of those, which is a daunting challenge.  They have been trying to do this because Pace recognizes the importance of pedestrian access to transit.  They have been doing a lot recently to try to encourage it, even developing a set of transit supportive guidelines that they hope communities will consult as they build their transportation network.  But these and other efforts have had limited success on the ground.  Pace wanted to partner with us to understand what are the barriers to building pedestrian infrastructure near suburban transit services and how can the barriers be overcome.  Next slide.  With these questions in mind we designed a project approach that had several main objectives.  They are listed in the table on this slide alongside the methods that we used for each one.  First, given the sheer number of municipalities in the Pace service area we wanted to get a handle on existing conditions, existing plans, policies and funding sources that support pedestrian access to transit.  We did this reviewing documents and conducting a survey with planners in the region.  Second, we wanted to understand physical barriers to pedestrian access which we did by interviewing Pace riders and conducting on the ground field audits in several communities.  Third, we wanted to understand barriers to project implementation.  Getting at some of the more institutional barriers.  We did this through stakeholder interviews with Pace, with regional municipal planners and engineers, with advocates in the region.  Finally, we wanted to gain inspiration by examining the practices of other suburban transit agencies.  We did this through surveys and case studies with similar types of transit agencies in 10 regions across the U.S.  We pulled all of this together to develop policy recommendations for Pace and other stakeholders in the region for building pedestrian infrastructure near transit.  And rather than give you a comprehensive look at all of the findings of this large and multi‑year project, I want to in the next several slides pull out some of the main findings that I think are particularly relevant from the ADA perspective.  Next slide, please.  So, the first set of slides will be about physical barriers to pedestrian access to transit.  I divided this up into sidewalks, crossings and the bus stops themselves.  These are all barriers that we are very familiar with.  But sidewalks in the region tend to be ‑‑ to have gaps in the connectivity of the sidewalk network.  Oftentimes sidewalks are missing, they often end abruptly and in some cases communities, you know, found it to be a measure of success if they had sidewalks on just one side of the road.  But that doesn't provide you know accessible and connected mobility.  When sidewalks were provided, they often were in poor condition or faced obstructions.  And those are illustrated in the image on this slide which shows a Pace bus stop that does have sidewalks around it but those sidewalks appear to be in pretty poor condition and they are blocked by an important amenity, a fire hydrant, but that shouldn't be in the sidewalk so that's an obstacle to accessibility.  This image also shows the frequent problem of pedestrians being inadequately separated from motor vehicle traffic, often sidewalks are just a thin strip of pavement with no buffer protecting pedestrians from cars.  One of our interviewees a Pace rider said there are no sidewalks to walk across or the street that they are on are always busy, so it's hard to get to the stop.  Some of them are not accessible to people with disabilities.
Next slide.
Crossings in the region often were unlabeled or had worn out markings.  The image on the slide is of a crosswalk near a suburban bus stop, if you look closely you can just see the faded remnants of what used to be a marked crosswalk, so often the infrastructure is in poor repair.  The sidewalks leading to crosswalks often have missing curb ramps and curb cuts or they have steep curb ramps.  They often lack detectable warning materials that help activate the crossing signal.  One of our interviewees said:  The bus stop by my house there is only one side of the street you can walk safely through a crosswalk.  The other side doesn't have a crosswalk where the bus stop is.  You have to walk all the way around, which could be for someone with a disability could be a little bit more difficult.  I would argue that it's actually a lot more difficult.  It's a symptom of having the authority to place pedestrian infrastructure and the authority to build bus stops be in different and uncoordinated hands.  Next slide, please.  The final physical barriers are with the bus stops themselves, they lack shelters and seating.  This is shown in the image on the bottom left where somebody is waiting at a Pace bus stop without any place to rest or be protected from the elements.  They often have limited signage, which creates challenges for safety and navigation.  And then bus stops had a host of other ADA accessibility issues.  The one I think is the most dramatic is shown in the image on the right side of the screen where we have a bus stop that does have a sidewalk, it does have a shelter, but only accessible by stairs.  What is maybe worse, this bus stop is right outside of a medical center.  So one of our interviewees said:  We need somewhere we can sit down comfortably and wait there for the bus.  You know how sometimes you have to sit there and stand.  I mean, there are older people that can't stand.  I am a senior citizen, I know how that feels.
Next slide.  Now turning to some of the implementation barriers.  As I hinted at earlier and as many of my co‑panelists brought up funding is a critical barrier to ADA compliance and more broadly to building pedestrian infrastructure.  In the U.S. even though we have a growing awareness of the importance of pedestrian infrastructure funding tends to still remain limited and uncertain and unsteady, especially compared to what we spend on modes such as the automobile.  Even if communities have funds to build pedestrian infrastructure they are often prohibited from doing so because of high cost of ongoing maintenance.  That's a barrier to even getting the infrastructure built in the first place.  And many communities have difficulty funding ADA improvements in their pedestrian infrastructure that are required because pedestrian funding is so over omitted.  There are often jurisdictional issues that get in the way.  At intersections where state and local roads meet both parties often yield responsibility.  What is interesting one of our interviewees who was just a Pace rider not a decision maker in the community noticed this.  They said:  They pawn it off on the state, because it's Route 31.  And then they pawn it off on the city, but the sidewalks are crumbling and they are tilting and it's sad because we have older people here.  The director encourages people not to go on those sidewalks.  So, when we have cases of kind of fuzzy boundaries and jurisdictions it's the people who need to use the infrastructure that end up feeling the consequences.  Next slide.
Two large implementation barriers specifically about ADA.  There is often, as we all know, a lack of ADA compliance.  And we saw this in our interviews throughout our project activities.  And this is illustrated in a recent report where the sidewalk is, the cover of which is shown on the screen here.  That report found only 11% of municipalities in the Chicago region have current ADA transition plans and among those that do, there is a lot of variation and plan quality.  And fewer than half of the plans provide public input opportunities, and fewer than half outline a schedule for removing environmental barriers.  Beyond compliance we see a lack of ADA centrality for emphasis.  We spoke with advocates who have success in getting infrastructure installed or upgraded, but the only way they could have that success was by being what they call the squeaky wheel.  Accessibility they described as an uphill battle that they had to repeat over and over again with every new project, every community, rather than there being a baseline expectation that infrastructure will be accessible, this is due in part to limited awareness among decision‑makers but not exclusively.  Next slide.  Just pulling out a few of our recommendations.  On the planning side we recommend Pace document existing conditions at its stops and conduct equity and accessibility analyses so that stops can be prioritized based on their needs.  And more broadly we recommend they develop an access to transit plan in coordination with their riders and the community they serve.  On the policy side we had some recommendations around building capacity for ADA compliance and emphasis centrality.  So providing guidance, technical assistance funding for ADA compliance, and for attempts to shift the approach to ADA from one of regulatory compliance, to routine meaningful integration of ADA considerations across projects and throughout the planning process.
And then we also had recommendations to encourage communities to complete ADA audits and transition plans.  Next slide.
For bus stops we recommend Pace implement a better bus stop program that helps prioritize improvements to the infrastructure at and around bus stops.  But ensuring at a minimum that their stops are ADA accessible and to provide ‑‑ to review the process for reporting issues at stops which riders often were unclear about.  And then these are directly related to the ADA but we also recommend that stakeholders build and maintain a list of funding sources, create a platform for communities to share knowledge with one another.  Develop training and awareness campaigns for community members and staff members to understand the importance of accessibility and pedestrian infrastructure.  And to revise prioritization and funding formulas so that our growing awareness that pedestrian infrastructure is important can translate down into day‑to‑day decisions about what gets funded and built.  Next slide.  So, we just finished the full report, it's now available as of last month on the website linked here.  We are now in the process of doing outreach to decision‑makers and advocates at the state, regional and local levels.  I am happy to answer questions as we get into the Q and A period.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much, that was great Lindsay.  Now we are ready to move into the question‑and‑answer period.  I will turn it over to Kim.  We have 20 minutes.
>> Kim:  All right.  Thank you, Kurt.  Right now I have a few questions, looks like I have one for each of the presenters.  We will begin with Robyn.  We recently had an emergency disaster in Texas, many people with access and functional needs died in the storms and blackouts.  What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of emergency assistance registries?  Do you think they give a false sense of hope and preparedness to people in government?
>> Robyn:  It's a very hard question right now.  It's a great question.  There are some people that absolutely think they are fabulous, and other people say they quickly go out of date and people might not be where they say they might be.  Clearly, there needs to be a way to identify people who are in absolute need.  That's how we lost people in Hurricane Sandy who could not get out of their home, and their family members could not reach them because of flooding and nobody knew where they were.  They couldn't access anything.  Those people died.  It was completely preventible.  And here again, I think in Texas the same thing.  So there needs to be a way in realtime to let the emergency managers, or in this case it was the first responders, early search and rescue, let them know where people are so they can get in there and get the best route out possible.  I think that certainly is preventable.  Thank you.
>> Kim:  All right.  Thank you, Robyn.  The next question is for Matthew:  Do you think there is a correlation for municipalities clients if local advocates filed complaints? 
>> Matthew:  One of the things with this study, we were getting compliance from the viewpoint of the municipalities, the representative from the municipalities.  I think if you were to survey members of the community they might have a very different picture of what their municipality's compliance levels are.  I think not in ‑‑ I think in a less optimistic way.  So, I ‑‑ I think there is also what we see in terms of correlations that's observable in the data and what we kind of say you know, yes I think we have seen across the number of these studies that you know the squeaky wheel definitely gets people moving.  And so advocates you know there is definitely a correlation with advocacy.
>> Kim:  Thank you Matthew.  Our next question is for Rich.  How receptive were the jurisdictions when they presented the results of the research to them; were they concerned?
>> Rich:  The responses we have gotten ‑‑ we have only presented it back to the state of Missouri, cities, through the league of cities, not to the association of counties yet.  And we are in the process right now of setting up additional dates to present that.  What we have found ‑‑ you are asking me about, you know, concern, what we have found is the concern is coming from the league of cities and the associations of counties themselves, as representatives of all of these 3,000‑plus jurisdictions that they recognize the importance of this for serving persons with disability, for, I say risk management issues for their clients or their ‑‑ for their membership, put it that way.  And so, I think those are a couple of driving factors there.  And, yes, we are getting a response from those associations and leagues, but not feedback directly from the cities yet.  We haven't, or the county governments themselves yet.  But I will say in the narratives in the qualitative answers that we got throughout this mixed method process, yes, a lot of them indicated that they are concerned, they are concerned about political support, concerned about financial resources, as all of my colleagues brought up for community development.  So we were getting a lot of answers in the narratives themselves that indicate concern and indicate strengthening some very targeted issues for us in our region.
>> Kim:  Thank you very much Rich.  The next question is for Yochai.  Did you find in the municipalities that provided significant detail about the role of people with disabilities in their plan, how might meaningful disability inclusion change the planning process for impact compliance? 
>> Yochai:  Yes.  Great question.  Thank you.  We definitely did find plans and communities that did a lot with trying to establish meaningful public involvement.  One of the lessons that I think they shared is this need for planners to go outside of the local government to not hold the meeting in the local government office but to go to where people with disabilities are and to get their input and seek it, to listen to it, and that there was this need to reach out to multiple disability organizations, you know, the disability community there's a lot of different types of organizations, right?  That represent different groups within the disability community.  And so, the ones that we saw really do a nice job are those that reached out to those broader organizations.  And then that kept them involved you know throughout the process.  It was both like a kick off and an involvement and then, you know, reaching back out as they ‑‑ they had these important milestones in the planning process of identifying barriers or prioritizing barriers.  But this is a tricky and important area and you know in our future research this is definitely something that we want to focus on.  And we plan to conduct research with commissions and coalitions of people with disabilities who have this role of being involved with communities so we can also learn from them about what does successful disability involvement and engagement mean, how does it work, and how can more communities do this better.  Thanks for the question.
>> Kim:  Thank you, Yochai.  Our next question is for Lindsay.  Is there any compliance guidelines for having a transition plan.
>> Lindsay:  Thank you for the question.  The ‑‑ so I am not an expert in this particular area but have learned a lot recently, and in terms of our specific research, we ‑‑ you know, we know that some communities, based on their size and characteristics, are required to complete the plan.  And then it's our understanding that others, particularly smaller communities, are not.  And so our recommendations for kind of two‑tiered to make sure that the communities who are required to have them come into compliance, and complete the transition plans and there were several stakeholders, not really Pace, but some of our regional planning agencies that we think can be involved in that process.  And then even for the communities that aren't legally required to complete them, to encourage them to do so and to conduct audits, and for both of those tiers are ‑‑ an overarching recommendation is that as they conduct the audits associated with the transition plan that they prioritize audits near areas better served by transit and near areas of high bus use.  And because we obviously can't audit every ‑‑ you know, every single part of the community and prioritizing locations that you know we might focus on that integration with transit.
>> Kim:  Thank you Lindsay.  Our next question is back to Yochai.  Here is a statement that comes before the question:  I find a significant lack of awareness about the readily achievable barrier removal requirements among property owners.  How can we improve awareness about this to effectuate greater accessibility in building prior to the passage of the ADA?
>> Yochai:  Yeah.  No, great question.  And I think, you know, it might be relevant ‑‑ I think the question is more related to private property owners, and to perhaps the infrastructure, pedestrian infrastructure around those buildings.  And I think, you know, part of that comes from the local governments, right, in educating those property owners about, you know, specifically like the sidewalks that might be abutting those buildings.  And then, you know, for the building themselves, I think awareness can also come from the local government, as well as disability advocacy organizations, the Great Lakes ADA Center used to have this great little card that could be given out to property owners if, you know, anybody, a person with a disability, anybody who can kind of identify some of the barriers that are there could leave this card for that business or property owner and identify here is ‑‑ here is some access issues that I see.  And you know here is some resources for how to change those.  So, those are just some of the ideas that I could think about right now.  But you know what we saw in some of the communities I think was successful is again that, like I talked about, that organizational change around disability.  We saw organizational change also led to community change in awareness about disability.  And that happened through various public events, and different ways that you know, that the community got out there and, you know, talked about this, let people know about it, had ‑‑ involved in different kinds of events to raise that awareness.  Thank you.
>> Kim:  Thank you.  We go back to Matthew for this next question.  Who are the actual respondents for the jurisdiction to your survey; were they, for example, ADA coordinators or a legal department or maybe city managers?
>> Matthew:  Yes.  It started off with a list of ‑‑ largely of ADA coordinators but basically the contacts which the ADA Center already had with municipalities.  For those municipalities which we didn't have a contact already, we contacted the office or looked through the website to try to identify who might be the most likely person in the office who could answer questions about disability policies and procedures for the municipality.
>> Kim:  Thank you.  I hope that answers your question.  For this next question we go back to Robyn.  There is a state beforehand:  There are coordinated efforts across municipal state and national Community Emergency Response Teams.  How might one leverage this to implement training in the courses and training that CERT members must take?
>> Robyn:  So, I think you are saying, I think the question is, how might you leverage the training that is already going on, ongoing training for CERT team members, MERT team members; is that the question?
>> Kim:  I believe so, yes.
>> Robyn:  Okay.  Well, obviously, they have multiple training ‑‑ by the way, somebody did ask me about FEMA training for disability, there is a very good FEMA training.  Some of my students have taken it.  I have taken it.  It's quite good.  It's under training.FEMA.org.  And it's IS‑368, it's the training for people with disabilities to ensure that you are compliant.  But it's hard for me to picture.  An ADA coordinator has so many different roles, they are doing way too many things.  For them to attend, let's say it's a once or twice‑a‑month training that's been given by the local OEM which is probably how it would happen or the local DOH, have them attend training, which would be great, and meet some of the community members for sure.  But it's hard for me to picture they have that availability.  Most of those kind of trainings, of course, are held at night.  I think Lewis Kraus is on this Q and A, if somebody could open his mic.  I think Lewis can speak to this area much more definitively than myself.  Lewis.
>> Lewis:  Yes.  Thanks Robyn.  I wanted to add, a lot of these questions about training have to do with what kinds of training people were telling us they wanted, I don't think it's necessarily the ADA coordinators were looking at FEMA training or, you know, that kind of training specifically.  They were trying to understand how ADA connects with emergency management.  And so that's the kind of training that they were looking for, which is a very different kind of training than maybe sometimes with the FEMA and other emergency management trainings were making available.  So, that's ‑‑ that's the fundamental point here is that you have got these ADA coordinators, who have all of this responsibility, many things going on as Robyn said, and yet they have this responsibility or maybe they have this responsibility or they are juggling the responsibility with the emergency managers and nobody has got the responsibility for dealing with the disability issues that happen in planning and in preparing and in during emergency or even after.  So, that's the gap that's happening there.  And the training is something that would be I believe something new and different than what exists now.  
>> Kim:  Thank you both Lewis and Robyn.  Looks like we have one last question now, we might have time for a few more but I am not sure.  The last question is for Rich.  Is this a common problem where commissions on disability are reluctant to push issues in the face of residents and elected officials who don't want to follow the ADA law?
>> Rich:  Would you repeat the question please.
>> Kim:  Of course I can.  I will start at the top.  Is this a common problem where commissions on disability are reluctant to push issues in the face of residents and elected officials who don't want to follow ADA law.
>> Rich:  I am not sure what commissions the questioner might be ‑‑ to which they might be referring.  We have seen a great deal of cooperation across our region between our independent living centers and our CILs with who we work closely on the issue as self evaluation and transition plans continue to be generated one of the recommendations we see often is some kind of an advisory commission ad hoc, whatever it might be, that is disability focused using members from the CIL or the community who have disabilities.  We have seen a lot of progress in that particular issue.  But we also do see, you know, some smaller communities, especially those remote rural ones, where there is a lack of understanding among the elected officials about what's required of them.  Where you will hear comments about, well, our courthouse doesn't need to be accessible, we don't have anybody with disabilities using it.  And so, we have, you know, both ends of a spectrum, if you will, on that particular topic.  I would like to add one thing to the last question, if I could, please.  There is ‑‑ the International Code Council has in their website within their programs education for building officials, and people involved in enforcement of the building codes for emergency preparedness.  That's boots on the ground type of stuff.  Where, you know, after an emergency, code officials come together at the community, and they coordinate tearing down, turning off utilities turning on utilities, rebuilding.  They coordinate and flag buildings step by step and have specific provisions for persons with disabilities and for ‑‑ and for application for persons with disabilities within their own training programs.  I think that's a worthwhile thing and speaks, again, to our alliance with the code council.
>> Kim:  All right.  Thank you Rich for the last addition.  Those are all of the questions we have.  I will turn it over to Kurt, who has a few quick words before we begin our break.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you all for asking questions and thank you all for answering questions.  We are going to move to a 15‑minute break now.  When we return, we will have our final speaker who is Victor Pineda, so please have a break and we will see you back in 15 minutes.  
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(Our webinar will resume shortly).
Wednesday April 14, 2021.
ADA National Network State of the Science.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Welcome back.  We will hear from Victor Pineda who is the president of World Enabled.  Victor will reflect on what we have heard this morning and try to bring that together, so Victor I will pass it to you.
>> VICTOR PINEDA:  Thank you so much.  And again, what an honor to be with so many colleagues really thinking about how do we meet the moment, where do we find ourselves, not only 50 years, 50‑some years after the ADA and 30 years after the ADA but where do we find ourselves in terms of building back better.  Where we find ourselves reimagining what we can accomplish to build a more accessible and inclusive space.  My background is, for the folks that can't see right now, I am a 42‑year‑old Latinx man with brown hair, brown eyes, light‑colored skin.  I have ‑‑ I have a big smile on my face.  But I am also bringing to you an attempt to synthesize our discussion from various advantage points.  I am a two‑time presidential appointee to the U.S. Federal Access Board.  I served now under three administrations.  And it was one of the greatest honors that I had was negotiate and implement the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.  That national treaty really took a lot of our values and principles around building barrier‑free environments, and elevated it to a set of principals and elevated the promises that allowed cities around the world to elevate what we have done, at least to attempt to create laws, policies, procedures, programs, training, and research that gets us closer to a world without barriers.  Now, what we heard today is a series of very important interventions.  Those build off of conversations that we heard yesterday.  Now, whether it was, you know, understanding yesterday employment and economic self‑sufficiency with my good friend Maria Town, and thinking through the way that the John talked about AUCD to think about how we might be able to really create new opportunities.  We need to be able to understand what is happening on the ground.  Where are the patterns of exclusion, where are some of those access for inequality, where the dimensions in which we can be visible that which is too often invisible.  And by that I mean, how do we actually see those barriers and respond to those barriers.  Now, when we have heard from Matthew, earlier, from his center is understanding that the surveys that have been deployed, and what we can gain from the surveys, can get us a little bit closer to active ‑‑ an active condition on the ground.  But the question that remains is how do we see bigger patterns in various dimensions.  How to we help create tools, resources, actionable intelligence that local governments can integrate into their capital resourcing and budgeting.  And how do they look at building sustainable solutions to their accessibility conditions.  I think the Great Plains ADA Center Richard gave us again really great insights.  That the questions that were made cities will be facing tremendous budgetary pressures.  Part of the work that I have done beyond the Access Board and the global work is I helped draft the Dubai Disability Strategy.  And I also teach a class in the Department of City Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley on building the inclusive city.  One of the primary vectors or the vehicles or dimensions for understanding and operationalizing access and inclusion making the ADA real is through the budgetary process.  And the budgetary process is ‑‑ is something that has to incorporate you know, real costs, or and deferred costs.  Yochai did a great job synthesizing the strength and limitations of ADA plans the pedestrian infrastructure, helping us to remember that you know there are ‑‑ you know, lawsuits and there is you know, the lack of productivity and ubiquity of the ability to access the public route apparently through ‑‑ the barriers through sidewalks.  The barriers limit, you know, an effective recovery and how do they limit, you know, making it pleasurable or making it feasible for people to not be so dependent.  The question becomes, what are the other costs relative to the environment, relative to financial exclusion and employment rates by having not only the lawsuits, but also cities that make a big chunk of people whether it's, you know, there are recent estimates 25% of people in cities experience barriers on the basis of age or disability.  There was great conversations in the chat box really linking together age and disability.  Really linking in together ways of designing age and accessible barrier free cities.  Also, with the Pacific ADA Center Robyn talks about ADA coordinator's role and specifically how much pressure's put on the ADA coordinators.  How that experience is something that's mandated by federal law, and trickles its way through hundreds of, if not thousands of agencies across the U.S. still have you ‑‑ still has you know a million ways of being interpreted and even more so a million different pressures now with the rise of jurisdictional emergency management.  The perspective on Region 9 is really telling, not only of the lack of institutional and coordinated capacity, and really highlights a key finding to search globally, which is that the biggest barrier to inclusive and accessible cities is the challenge on the local level isn't just better laws or better policies, it isn't just budgets, rather that's the coordinating capacity of the local agencies that carry on in multidimensional transformation of that city both from the hardware and soft ‑‑ what I mean by hardware, is the built infrastructure.  The roads, the public spaces, the transportation networks.  But also beyond that, is to understand that there is a software, there is a software to a city.  And that incorporates the issues of culture that incorporates the issues of history.  And its own trajectory, its own struggles on racial equality.  You know, the visibility of the disability rights movement you know, the demographics of the aging communities so all of those in ‑‑ you know, create, you know, the conditions by which the hardware and software constantly needs to be negotiated, needs to be defined.  Needs to be mobilized and resourced.  So accessible cities require us to look at those barriers ‑‑ those various dimensions and to qualify those dimensions.  I can share with you my approach, I will ask similar colleagues that are here to maybe share a link to my book, which is available as open access.  It's an academic book called:  Building the Inclusive City.  I have a copy right here behind me, it's that orange book right underneath the mirror.  But it really presents a holistic rapid assessment for our research community and for the ADA Centers to think about multiple dimensions.  Obviously in research we want to have tight research protocols and we want to have research question, but we also want to be able to understand images by which our research, for example in the built environment, relates to research on accessible transportation and relates to digital transformation and co‑benefits of accessibility and that ground zero or that net zero climate in the future can be environmental transformation of our built environment and our cities.  So, you know, I think, for me what this opportunity presents us is the opportunity to have new kinds of partnerships.  And I really want to commend Pimjai and all of the colleagues at NIDILRR, all of the colleagues at the ADA Knowledge Translation Center, to really focus on the local works.  I want to develop some statistics just to give you guys a, you know, a bigger framing.  The world is rising so rapidly that we are building urban areas of 2 million people every week, that's a hundred million people are moving into cities every year.  Which is just a tremendous burden on cities all over the world, not just in the U.S.  How we build those cities, how we build the capacity to be at the forefront of the global transformations as they happen during the pandemic really call upon us to leverage technologies, such as artificial intelligence, such as equitable approaches to autonomous vehicles.  My friend Sachin started off today's conference on how to look at block chain as a way for all people, including people with disabilities, to make a secure and private disclosure of their preferences when interacting with digital infrastructure that is in our cities.  Or whether they are using an app that allows them to use public services.  And I also serve on the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is a research center here at Presidio working with the world economic report.  As part of my research there as a fellow I have been thinking a lot about how is the deployment of IOT information ‑‑ carry out of things, technologies, how is that being done in an equitable way.  How are we ensuring that the future we build is the future we want.  Can, you know, in my work with the UN in negotiating the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, as well as the sustainable development goals, you know, SDG11 that's the SDG we were able to get very clear targets for the world that we will not build cities that leave people with disabilities behind.  But all of those are just promises and aspirations.  Unless we have the data, unless we see, you know, what those challenges look like.  Unless we understand how to respond to those challenges as skill, both in a nuance way and a way that allows us to really understand various dimensions.  But also a way that allows us to really elevate the priorities on that local place.  We need the framework.  So I think my book I am going to present to you, my framework is my parting gift summarizing thins for our discussion today.  But I did want to definitely give a shout out to Lindsay and her team on the bus stops and beyond.  Obviously as I mentioned we cannot think about public spaces without the linkages between those public spaces and the transit services thinking about micro ability as well beyond the bus stops, right?  And other kinds of mobility solutions that are coming online.  And so, just to give you guys that framework in a way that can be really helpful to you.  And when you think through this is so that you can dive in deeper in my book, but it's got five interrelated pillars.  And these pillars really are about the ways we can dive deeper into research, and these pillars include obviously understanding what the local municipal ordinances are and how closely they connect to the national ‑‑ state to national federal or national statutes.  The second pillar, that's legal, the second pillar really looks at what I call leadership.  I define leadership as having both a rhetoric around access and inclusion by the mayor, by the municipal leader, by the city council, as well as linking that leadership to adequate budgets.  The third I mentioned briefly is this idea around the institutional capacity.  That's really where cities and local governments constantly need support, the administrative recording capabilities, the City of New York it's like 56 agencies within the municipal government, the local government.  So how do they coordinate those access challenge, how do all of those ADA coordinators embedded within all of those other agencies actually, you know, work together as a coordinated team.  How do they do that in smaller settings where they feel very much alone.  The other ‑‑ how do they coordinate that with civil society.  Research organizations or working in the private sector, leverage solutions.  The fourth area of analysis is salience.  Which is really attitudes, beliefs.  And we are noticing that even though we have made a lot of progress and there is a cultural sort of awakening around that people with disabilities are here to stay and that we have a legacy and a culture around civil rights and civil liberties and protections, legal protections, that there still might be imbedded ableist notions that we need to be able to understand in order to elevate and amplify the legal or the institutional or the rhetorical approach, such as equity and access in cities.  The final pillar, which again I highlight in my book, I want to encourage everybody to download, because it is open access, it's available to download each chapter, is the issue of participation.  And we have heard a lot around ‑‑ rallying cries around participation.  I don't believe in participation unless it's substantive participation.  And what I mean by that, is that there has to be a way to get people choices to have them evaluate those choices, and act upon those choices and to have them realize, you know, the result of those choices.  And it's really about expanding human agency.  If you are having a participatory process, not just about having a consultation.  It's about having a process for empowerment and to unlock human agency for community, for network, and for individuals who can continue to elevate their own leadership.  And that's ‑‑ that substance participation also has to be representative.  If you don't have, you know, white males that use wheelchairs, can you think that you have identified the needs of the disability community, you got a lot of challenges that you are going to encounter in terms of really understanding the dimensions and the breadth and diversity.  Elevating the visibility of older persons.  Elevating the unique needs of LGBT, undocumented, BIPOC communities in the multiple levels of institutional exclusion.  Institutional ableism, institutionalized racism that exists.  But there is hope for us and that hope is specifically by continuing to really look towards the future, what we mean by that, we can't just complain about the past, but actually get a head start in building the future.  And by that, I mean really doubling down on the kind of research that is emerging around the autonomous vehicles and micro mobility, around artificial intelligence in public services, and facial recognition and machine vision.  I want to leave my E‑mail address below, for everybody, all of the panelists to feel to reach out if you feel there was something really powerful about my contributions, I am happy to sort of set up a one‑on‑one to guide deeper with anyone.  This is my link, if you want to set up a little virtual coffee, I am happy to sort of explore that with folks.  One big goal right now is I'm dedicated over the next 10 years to incentivizing and transforming 100 cities to be more inclusive, accessible and resilient.  And we are doing that for the Cities for All global compact and campaign.  The website just went down today because we were hacked, but hopefully in a day or two we should have it all up.  We just started piloting a series of learning modules which will also provide platforms, teachable, to really help elevate training tools but we really need to work together.  So if you have developed training tools for local governments, if you have developed resources and guidelines, please share it with me.  So that we can put it on a global information clearinghouse in a Cities for All campaign and really share the knowledge.  Because the U.S. is ahead of the curve and a lot of cities want to do more they just don't know how.  Sorry about the noise in the background, my grandson is one year's old, he is visiting my 86‑year‑old grandmother is here we have five generations of people sharing a little quarantine bubble, that is why you might be hearing background noise.  But in conclusion, we each have an opportunity to look at, you, know our capabilities.  And eliminate the capability deprivations that other people are encountering.  I think if we start to reimagine disability as a capability deprivation, instead of just medical abnormality, we will see cities have a lot to share in terms of unlocking our capabilities, in terms offering our lifestyles, and in terms of helping us all feel like we belong.  Because ultimately, in a city that we belong, in a city that we care about, in a city that we invest in and a city that also invests in us, that's the fundamental nature of the social contract.  Even so we are in a great reset post pandemic and facing major challenges with upcoming recession and climate change, the work that you do at the local levels is really what is going to determine the quality of life for people, how their day‑to‑day lives, how they go to the grocery store or movies or a restaurant, the ways they get to work.  But that knowledge and that process can add transformation just limited to the U.S. it's happening in thousands hundreds of thousands of cities around the world.  So I want to invite you all to join me, learn more about our work.  Obviously the website Cities for All will be up again soon.  I really look forward to a strong partnership with the ADA Knowledge Translation Center, with NIDILRR, and for the regional groups as well so we can really leverage today and shape a better tomorrow.  Thank you all so much for your time and for your contributions today.  I will leave it at that.
>> KURT JOHNSON: Thank you so much Victor we really appreciate that, it was thoughtful and gave us lots to think about.  And thank you all for attending today we really appreciate it.  Tomorrow we will back again with a focus on access and inclusion with a keynote speaker and five research presentations and then we will have a summary as well.  When you leave today ‑‑
>> VICTOR PINEDA:  Sorry Kurt, I just want to make sure if anybody had any questions I am happy to answer them either in the Q and A or in the chat, and feel free to just introduce yourselves I am happy to sort of engage in the chat.  Okay.  Thank you Kurt. 
>> KURT JOHNSON: Victor, I think the problem is that we are going to shut this down in a second so perhaps you have given the E‑mail could they address questions to you by E‑mail?
>> VICTOR PINEDA:  Sure, of course.  That's great. 
>> KURT JOHNSON: Okay.  We will put that out once again in the chat window.  So, tomorrow ‑‑ when you leave the webinar today, another window will open which is the ‑‑ has the feedback form.  We would really appreciate you responding to that survey and giving us feedback.  Stay connected with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and we will talk to you tomorrow!  Thank you!  
(End of session.)   

(End of session.)