Introduction
On July 23, 2004 the U.S. Access Board published new design guidelines that cover access for people with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). These guidelines update access requirements for a wide range of facilities in the public and private sectors covered by the law. They also include updated guidelines for Federal facilities covered by the Architectural Barriers Act (ABA). Both the ADA guidelines and the ABA guidelines, which the Board updated jointly to make them more consistent, address access in new construction and alterations and contain scoping provisions, which indicate what has to comply, and technical specifications, which sp ell out how compliance is to be achieved.
This new design document is the culmination of a comprehensive, decade-long review and update of the Board’s ADA Accessibility Guidelines, which were first published in 1991. Revisions have been made so that the guidelines continue to meet the needs o f people with disabilities and keep pace with technological innovations. For example, new provisions for ATMs specify audible output so that people with vision impairment s are provided equal access, and reach ranges have been lowered to better serve people who use wheelchairs and persons of short stature. The guidelines also feature a new format and organization and have been extensively edited for greater clarity.
As part of this update, the Board has made its guidelines more consistent with model building codes, such as the International Building Code (IBC), and industry standards. It coordinated extensively with model code groups and standard-setting bodies throughout the process so that differences could be reconciled. As a result, a historic level of harmonization has been achieved which has brought about improvements to the guidelines as well as to counterpart provisions in the IBC and key industry standards, including those for accessible facilities issued through the American National Standard s Institute (ANSI). The Board believes that this achievement will greatly facilitate compliance.
The Board’s guidelines serve as the baseline for standards used to enforce the ADA and the ABA. These standards, which are maintained by other Federal agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Justice under the ADA, will be updated according to the new guidelines. It is these standards, not the Board’s guidelines, which the public must follow.