LSU has been renovating University facilities since 2002, making the trek across campus more accessible for people with physical disabilities.
The progress is part of a project to bring the campus into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Title III of the ADA requires that “places of public accommodation and commercial facilities” adhere to disability access regulations.
Past improvements include renovation of the area between Thomas Boyd Hall and the Music and Dramatic Arts building in the summer of 2003, which needed ramps and curb cuts to allow disabled students to travel in a continuous path across streets and onto the sidewalk, said Associate Director of the Office of Disability Services Benjamin Cornwell.
Designers made sure that Free Speech Alley was redone in compliance to the ADA code and path accessible, Cornwell said. Workers installed curb cuts and ramps to make it easy for people who use wheelchairs to travel through the Alley.
For the past five to eight years, the University has received both state and private donations to fund these changes, Cornwell said.
Cornwell said the University also has contributed funds. Chancellor Mark Emmert matches the money from the student fee to contribute money to these improvements.
“The Student Government pushed to use some of the money from the former athletic fee for the campus accessibility project,” Cornwell said.
The office of disability services is now concentrating on external access from parking lots to buildings, said Cornwell.
Workers have begun grinding down uneven sidewalk cement around campus that pops up because of oak tree growth and other wear and tear effects, a “simple, cost-effective alternative to putting down new cement,” Cornwell said.
The cement grinding will be especially effective for places like the curb cut across the street from Hodges Hall, which is at an angle inconvenient to people who use wheelchairs.
For every one-inch rise, there should be 12 inches of slope, Cornwell said. Twenty inches of slope are preferred, but not always cost-effective because it makes for a long ramp.
“The curb cuts start out in compliance to ADA, but when new layers of tar or cement are put down on the road, they ruin the angle of the curb cut making it difficult to maneuver a wheelchair up the ramp,” Cornwell said.
A future project that will renovate in and around in the Quadrangle, from the Fieldhouse to Tower Drive and from Dalrymple to South Stadium will cost more than $300,000, Cornwell said. The project will add curb cuts and take out parking spots to make walkways safer to make the route more accessible.
Web site seeks to ‘remove barriers’
The Enterprise Solutions Group, along with the Office of Disability Services, has given LSU’s Web sites a technology makeover to make them more accessible to people who are visually and hearing impaired.
In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act and added Section 508 to “remove barriers in information technology, to make new opportunities available for people with disabilities, and to encourage the development of technologies that focus in achieving these goals.
“The Web sites reach an entire gamut of people who are visually and hearing impaired and people without disabilities,” said University webmaster Byron Honore.
Honore uses alternate position description, “altpegs,” a software that “reads” Web sites for the visually impaired. When designing the Web site, Web designers can input alt tags, which describe the graphic when the computer mouse moves over the graphic.
JAWS, another visual aide Honore uses, is a screen synthesizer that provides access to software applications and the Internet. It is composed of an internal software speech synthesizer and the computer’s sound card and takes text and processes it into audible words.
Honore said some designers put the transcript of what is being said in multimedia information, such as video clips, in a separate document for people who are hearing impaired.
Laura Sanford, an application analyst, works with Studio Web, a program developed for Academic Services. It creates a template for graphics, with a text-only version underneath it.
Studio Web, a tool LSU web designers have used for about three years, formats these Web sites with a “text-only” version of the Web site, which provides the same text with a font that is easier to read. Studio Web’s homepage provides a portfolio of Web sites that use this tool.
Robin Ethridge, manager of Web applications and PAWS project leader, said minimizing the number of graphics on the PAWS homepage makes it easier to navigate for all Web site users.