As a grass roots organization, members of the Association for Equal Access were instrumental in achieving increased accessibility at facilities, theaters, Universities and more.  The businesses that have been required to make improvements include name brands such as McDonalds, Burger King, White Castle, Popeye’s, Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, and hundreds of other restaurants and food service businesses. Our members have helped to improve accessibility at several schools, Universities, hotels and hospitals.

We provide information to people with disabilities and their families (as well as businesses) to help remove the architectural barriers the disabled encounter in their everyday lives in public places.

Our members have mobility disabilities, with some confined to a wheelchair while others can get by with a cane or a walker.  We have been fortunate enough to work with some very capable and determined people who are serious about making their community more accessible.

The A4EA came into being with the recognition that people with disabilities did not have an organization they could turn to that would provide information to them that would help them to work with businesses to remove barriers to access.  There are some great disability rights organizations that will assist by filing lawsuits against large entities such as Wal Mart or Target because that is how they can make the most changes with just one lawsuit.  We work more on a local level.

Our job is to provide the information necessary for someone to help them improve access by themselves to their local businesses that they patronize every day. We feel we are helping the disabled to empower themselves by taking advantage of the powerful tools provided to them by Congress. We also provide information to businesses that can help them to improve access to their business. 

The experience of many disabled individuals is that it is often not helpful to send a letter to a facility asking them to make the required accessibility changes. For whatever reason, businesses often do not step up to the plate and fulfill their responsibilities under the ADA, even though this law has been in place for decades. Therefore, it can be necessary for a disabled person to utilize the powers provided to them by the ADA to try to influence or, when necessary, legally compel businesses to fulfill their obligations.

When a business does not allocate the financial resources to make accessibility changes, other competing businesses who did spend money are at a disadvantage because they used money they could have spent on advertising and used it to improve access instead, while the non-compliant business takes the money they should have spent to improve access and uses it to improve sales instead. It is a decision to place their own profits over the accessibility of their disabled customers.  That’s not fair to the businesses who improve access.   Many of them would be better off by taking the tax benefits a business can take to make their business more accessible and providing access to another customer base.

Hopefully a time will come when more businesses will be able to identify with the difficulties experienced by the disabled and do the right thing by complying with Disability Rights laws intended to help them participate fully in our society.

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