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Locally Based Company Has Become a Main Online Resource for Americans With Disabilities Act Compliance Information

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 November 2005, 03:00 CST

By JIM BAINBRIDGE THE GAZETTE

Given that the founders of Meeting The Challenge Inc. came from an aerospace and defense contractor background, their work to demistify the Americans with Disabilities Act has taken a relatively high-tech arc.

When Randy Dipner, Bob Gattis and Dan Davies started this Colorado Springsbased business in 1989, they meant for it to be all high-tech, creating gadgets to help people with disabilities; a tech transfer sort of business.

The online information services business it became? That was an accident of evolution, a case of need matching expertise and government funding.

"The Federal government created the ADA," said Dipner, the group's senior adviser, "and for each section of the law there is a set of regulations and for each of those regulations there are various technical assistance manuals, all these approved documents - - vetted documents. We just said 'let's make a database, let's create an archive that points to all of those materials.'"

Typing "ADA" into the Google search engine will land you 48.5 million hits.

Meeting The Challenge's site is more targeted and specific, Dipner said. Its free, ADA Document Portal (www.adaportal. org), updated daily, holds more than 7,400 documents -- searchable by category or keyword -- and has become the primary online source of disability information nationwide. All 10 regional disability information centers use the site, which averages 580 visits a day with an average visit time of 101/2 minutes.

The company is building a schoolsic information portal that special-needs educators can use for grades K-12.

The Rocky Mountain ADA & IT Technical Assistance Center, operated by Meeting The Challenge, is one of 10 regional ADA information centers charged by the Department of Education with providing technical assistance to ensure that people with disabilities have access to information about their rights under the act, and that businesses, nonprofits and government agencies are able to get information necessary to comply with it.

MTC is a government contractor, a for-profit company of 12 working on an $850,000-ayear grant from the Department of Education, plus payments from the nine other ADA information centers, to help operate and maintain the Web portal.

In addition to maintaining its ground-breaking site and fielding about 400 phone queries a month, MTC sends mailings, distributes brochures, creates awareness posters and runs about 40 training sessions and 20 conferences a year in its six-state region of coverage: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.

The company is on its third five-year government grant.

"We have called on them many times in the last four to five years," said Sherre Ritenour, division manager for the Colorado Springs Transit System, "and they have always been of tremendous help. They handle the sensitivity training for all our employees, regarding people with disabilities, and they give us technical assistance so that we are sure that all of the information we put out is accessible to everyone."

Shirley Martinez, the Equal Employment Opportunity specialist for Colorado Springs Utilities, has worked with MTC for the past five years and says "they are our ADA yellow pages," helping guide them to the information they need to do their job correctly.

"They help us interpret the regulations, get us the materials we need -- brochures, videos, posters -- and provide classes whenever there are changes in regulations," Martinez said. "They are a huge resource."

Even 15 years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, queries and misconceptions are much the same as in the beginning, mostly having to do with determining the standard for hiring a person with a disability and smallness owners wanting to know if the ADA applies to them -- and, if it does, to what extent.

"The law is not an affirmative-action program at all," Dipner said. "It is not a quota system. At all.

"The goal of the ADA is to create a level playing field. It says if this person is qualified for that job and happens to have a disability, that disability ought not enter into the equation as to whether they are employable.

"That is easily stated, much harder to implement. But that's all the law says. Level (playing field). I think that is still not well- understood."

The other most misunderstood aspect of the law is that, although companies with fewer than 15 employees are not required to adhere to ADA's hiring requirements, they must make their businesses accessible to any member of the public with a disability.

MTC officials estimate that 40 percent of queries come from businesses, 40 percent come from individuals with disabilities and 20 percent come from government groups.

The variety of questions is virtually unlimited: A businessperson wants to know about the tax breaks available for removing physical and communication barriers; a person who uses a wheelchair wants to know if his local paratransit pass can be used in another city; or a restaurant owner wants to know if he must allow guide dogs on the premises.

"To help the search process," Dipner said, "we have subdivided everything into the major categories: employment, private business, state and local government.

"You can click on those links and there is a list of the key documents with a description of each one of them right there on the screen, so you don't have to search at all, if you don't want to. You can browse. That's the beauty of a portal."

Information seekers without computer access or the confidence to work with a large database can get answers over the phone, although the company strives to provide answers online.

"Our measurement of success now is not having the phone ring," said Pat Going, project director. "Our conclusion is that getting the information this way (online) is more efficient."

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0126 or jim.bainbridge@gazette.com

RESOURCES

ADA Documents Portal

www.adaportal.org

Rocky Mountain ADA & IT Technical Assistance Center

www.adainformation.org

Meeting The Challenge Inc.

www.mtc-inc.com

Department of Justice

ada.gov/business.htm

Source: Gazette, The; Colorado Springs, Colo.

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