TravelAbility Insider

The Intersection of Travel and Disability

Mobility

Paralympian Deserves Medal for Scouting Out Accessible Beaches

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Paralympian wearing a medal blue jacket huge smile
photo courtesy TEAM USA [Paralympian Rausin holds a medal and wears her TEAM USA blue jacket]

USA Paralympian Arielle Rausin has loved the beach in Florida since she was young child growing up there. But because she didn’t grow up with ADA accessible mats (imagine them like sturdy rubber runways), her family had to drag her across the sand to get to the water, according to a Tampa-area Fox13 news piece. New ADA accessible Mobi Mats installed by the city of Tampa make the trek from car to shore a breeze. Rausin said the mats make such a huge difference she’s committed to recording and posting the best accessible beaches she finds online—all 660 miles of them if she can. No surprise there.

OUR TAKE: The wheelchair accessible beach mats aren’t new. According to its website, Mobi Mats has been making them for parks and recreation departments for 20 years. So what’s changed? Greater awareness and planning for millions of tourists and locals. “It’s not just people in wheelchairs, it’s people who use walkers, it’s people with baby strollers, it’s for everybody,” said one visitor interviewed in the news piece. These portable mats are a good example of using Universal design that is movable. 

British Artists with Disabilities Show You How They’d Make Guests Miserable

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artist in over alls sits on motor scooter in what looks to be a woodcrafters shop
Samuels is an artist with a sense of humor and he’s using it to show how important accessibility in housing is. photo credit: DANIELLE BOWER

 Artist Christopher Samuel, who uses an electric wheelchair, knows how inconvenient and frustrating hotel rooms can be for people with disabilities. He spent three months in transitional housing in an inaccessible hotel room as disability agencies found a place for him, according to a story by Ian Youngs in BBC.COM. He had three words to describe the experience to you: Frustrating and sometimes humiliating. But it also made him industrious.

To call attention to the housing and accommodation issues in the U.K. he created a room that was completely inaccessible for people without disabilities. “I knew people would find [the room] amusing at first, but in reality, when you live that every day it’s not funny anymore,” says the artist. 

OUR TAKE: Frustrating and inconvenient. When you speak with people with disabilities, those words are a common thread. Awareness of how people who use wheelchairs and motorized devices to navigate the world is scarce in the travel business. The room inspired other artist to create their own personalized rooms. What’s the famous line? In so many words, it’s that art is not supposed to change the world, but to change perceptions—the way we see the world. As changemakers in the hospitality business, it’s our opportunity to make a huge difference in people’s lives, simply by changing the way you look at things.

OUR TAKE: Frustrating and sometimes humiliating. We hear those words often from people with disabilities. Awareness of how people who use wheelchairs and motorized devices to navigate the world is scarce in the travel business. The room inspired other artists to create their own personalized rooms. What’s the famous line? In so many words, it’s that art is not supposed to change the world, but to change perceptions—the way we see the world. As changemakers in the hospitality business, it’s our opportunity to make a huge difference in people’s lives, simply by changing the way you look at things. READ MORE OF THE STORY, here.

VIDEO: Hotel Manager Uses Wheelchair for a Day

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Hotel manager talks about what he learned using a wheelchair on his own property. Screenshot courtesy Spin the Globe.

Some of the most genius ideas are the simplest ones. For example, if you want to experience a hotel from a wheel-chair-users perspective and do an ADA compliance check at the same time, sit down and spend time in a wheelchair. In 2018, the hotel manager at the Alfond Inn Hotel did just that–with some coaching from Sylvia Longmire, who writes about the accessibility of destinations in her travel blog, Spin the Globe. The hotel manager later shared his insights with hospitality students. All are interviewed on camera about the experience. To see the video, visit Sylvia Longmire’s YouTube Channel here.

OUR TAKE
 The hotel manager’s nervous smile during his on-camera interview with vlogger Sylvia Longmire is priceless—he’s humble, friendly, honest and relieved. He’s a gem in a world of hotel managers, many of whom declined the offer. Longmire worked with hospitality program students at Rollins College on the video. They contacted over 50 hotel GM’s before they found one that would agree to be recorded in a wheelchair.

As for Longmire, she is her classically, compelling professional self: An Airforce intelligence vet, a 2016 Ms. Wheelchair America who is the first wheelchair ambassador for Oprah Magazine‘s Advisory Board and the author of an accessible cruise book. Working with the Rollins students on the video, the team really connects with viewers.

“I was able to navigate the hotel pretty easily—with the right coaching,” he says with a hand gesture to Longmire that infers, Yes, I needed an expert’s help but we did pretty well as a team! Still smiling he adds, “It seems as though we are compliant.” The short video has a great message, which is: The days of not understanding wheelchair users are over. I might as well try to be compliant and then some.”

Is This Approach to Creating an Accessible Website Too Affordable to Be True?

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2 young men with brown hair and Jake wearing a striped shirt standing in front of a board that says "impossible....illegible"
At accessiBe’s Tel Aviv office with Co-founders, (left) Gaz Vizel, CMO, Shir Ekerling, CEO, and TravelAbility’s Founder Jake Steinman.

Last July we decided to make TravelAbilitySummit.com accessible and the proposals we received– ranging from $2400-$18,000 per year with installation times estimated at 8-12 weeks–were discouraging, to say the least.  Then we found accessiBe.com, a Tel Aviv based software developer that used A.I. tools to automate websites into compliance. The cost: $495/year for websites under 1000 pages and $1495 for websites over 1000 pages. Thinking it was too good to be true, we decided to take them on their 7-day free trial. Once the line of code they sent us was loaded on our website the site began to become compliant within 10 minutes. Within 48 hours our entire website had been compliant to two different standards.  While vacationing in Israel I dropped by to quiz the founders as I felt they presented an affordable solution to many of the small DMO’s as well as boutique hotels, restaurants, campgrounds and tour providers who are vulnerable to predatory website compliance lawsuits but find the pricing so unreasonable they’re willing to roll the dice that they won’t get caught. 

Below you’ll find the interview, straight from Tel Aviv:

  1. What need does accessiBe serve?
    accessiBe solves the universal business problem of web accessibility.  Every business website in the United States must be accessible and the vast majority are not. This is largely due to complexity and cost, both of which factors accessiBe entirely ameliorates.  Our tool is completely automated and affordable for any business. Thousands of businesses are sued by individuals unable to equally access their sites every week, so there are two equally important needs we have made it our mission to solve:  business compliance needs and the physical needs of 26% of American adults living with a disability.

2. What is the accessibe origin story?
Our founders have a background in software development and also owned software development and digital marketing agencies. Our founders realized in 2016 the only solution that could achieve widespread adoption was an AI-powered and automated one, which they proceeded to create using members of the disabled community as testers to ensure it help the people it was intended to aid.       

3. How does your software work? 
Our tool uses Machine Learning, Contextual Understanding, OCR and IRIS technologies, among others, to achieve full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)  It is entirely session-based, so while it doesn’t permanently change a site’s source code, it can be individually tailored to each user’s session without affecting any other session. 

4. Which physical disabilities does the software support? 
The software enables people with all disabilities to use the internet, providing support for those with visual, motor, cognitive and other impairments.  Users can change the appearance and function of websites using the accessiBe interface both on the front end (changing fonts, colors, and contrasts) and the back end (adding alt texts for Screen Readers and enabling keyboard navigation).

5. How many clients are using the system? How many are travel related?
Currently,  accessiBe administers more than 500 travel-related websites.  accessiBe is used by more than 18,000 websites, from small businesses to large enterprises like Avon, PlayMobil, Volvo and Lonely Planet.

6.. Will Accessibe’s system avoid predatory digital crawlers trolling for non-compliant websites to threaten?
Our tool is capable of entirely remediating a site and bringing it into compliance with European and U.S.  standards within 48 hours. Therefore, if a predatory entity uses a  session-based crawler like WAVE or Lighthouse, which are the most common tools used to check sites before sending a demand letter, accessiBe would likely deter that threat. In cases where an unfamiliar application is used to scan for accessibility, there may be different results, for which we have solutions prepared.

7. What support do you offer in the event of litigation?
As of yet, not a single customer of ours has ever received a lawsuit under our watch. Many arrived at our doorstep with papers already served and when given time to fix the failures, as is legally required in many states, our solution either significantly reduced their settlement fees or enabled them to remove the threat entirely. 

We asked four people with different disabilities to test our website and grade it on an A-F scale for accessibility. The results: A, A, A-, B+. 

TravelAbility Summit Hasn’t Even Started Yet—and Already Our Speakers Our Making Big News

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l to r headshots of Josh Loebner, Ann Madison John Morris and Will Butler, all experts appearing at the TravelAbility Summit (tTravelAbilitySummit.com)

Accessibility (on and off-line) means creating experiences all travelers can enjoy. These four speakers will be at TravelAbility Summit (live from San Francisco in a matter of days!) have recently published pieces of interest: 

Advertising and Disability by Josh Loebner, contributor to Adweek 
READ MORE

Blind people can show each other something by Will Butler on LinkedIn READ MORE

The Top 10 Signs Accessibility is Going Mainstream by John Morris on WheelchairTravel.org READ MORE

What Can the Supreme Court Teach the Travel Industry? by Anne Madison, Travel Vertical Blog  READ MORE  

Learn more about TravelAbility Summit November 12-13 in San Francisco, HERE.

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