Work areas: urging DOJ to maintain these provisions from the new ADAAG

We urge the Department to follow through on its proposal to adopt the 2004 ADAAG work area provisions. The Department’s NPRM properly defends these provisions and explains why they are appropriate and well within the domain of the Titles II and III DOJ ADA regulations. The provisions are reasonable and will provide important benefits for people with disabilities, as well as for the businesses and public entities that inhabit the spaces. They, like the rest of the 2004 ADAAG, are carefully crafted to take the needs of covered entities into account.

As stated in the NPRM, the ADA statute and the 1991 DOJ regulation rightly addressed the employee sections of public accommodations and commercial facilities, as well as facilities of public entities. But the 1991 ADAAG had grossly insufficient coverage of employee work areas. As a result, owners of commercial facilities and public accommodations, including factories, warehouses, office buildings, stores, and other covered facilities often did not provide accessible routes within the work areas of these facilities. As a result, people with disabilities were denied employment opportunities in ways that employers could not have realistically accommodated under Title I of the ADA, because the buildings in which they were housed would have required such extensive changes, changes that would have been much easier and cheaper to provide when the buildings were newly built or altered. As one of many examples, some factories were built with enormous work areas that could easily have accommodated accessible circulation paths, but they were not required under the 1991 Standards.

The only way to effectively address this problem was for the 2004 ADAAG to require accessible common use circulation paths in work areas. When the Access Board did include this provision, it rightly pointed out that such a requirement would not be onerous because virtually all the covered buildings would be subject to state building codes that contain the same requirement. The 2004 ADAAG also includes exceptions that allow deviations from the common use circulation path requirement in situations where, as the Department states in its Analysis of the Proposed Standards, “it may be difficult to comply with the technical requirements for accessible routes due to the size or function of the area.” Though some of these exceptions are arguably too broad, the disability community is not recommending revision by the Access Board, due to the implementation delay that would result. The Department must adopt these requirements expeditiously so they may become effective in reducing barriers in employee work areas across the U.S. As the Department’s Initial Regulatory Assessment notes, the proposed provisions will result in better workplace accessibility, which will benefit people with disabilities and also increase business productivity.