Jacquie Brennan: Hello and welcome to the Disability Law Lowdown. Today this podcast features reporter Patrick Going interviewing Marian Vessels, director of the DBTAC MidAtlantic ADA Center which, together with a national network of regional DBTACs, launched an initiative within the hospitality industry to promote accessibility and opportunity for people with disabilities. So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Patrick Going.

Patrick Going: Hello and welcome to the Disability Law Lowdown. This is Pat Going at the DBTAC Rocky Mountain ADA Center and I have the pleasure of talking with Marian Vessels, the Director of Region Three DBTAC, who is involved in a very exciting project that we think our listeners will find quite interesting. We wanted to chat with Marian and find out what’s going on and how all of us might participate and make it an even better project. Good morning, Marian.

Marian Vessels: Good morning, Pat.

Pat: Tell us what’s going on and, if you will, by way of background, would you describe your DBTAC a little bit?

Marian: Absolutely. We’re in the MidAtlantic region so we cover from Pennsylvania to Virginia, including Washington DC, West Virginia, Maryland, the state of Delaware and Pennsylvania.

We have initiated this hospitality initiative in order to reach out to a growing industry within our region. Hospitality and tourism is a huge, growing area for employment and for places of public accommodation. We thought this was a great way to reach out to people who needed to comply with the ADA and may not know all of the resources available and also reasons why it is beneficial to include people with disabilities in their outreach strategies.

Pat: Have you been working on this project for a while?

Marian: We started it about two years ago with the concept that we came up with from all the other Disability Business Technical Assistance Centers. Realizing that it was one of the Department of Labor’s high growth areas, my region took the initiative.

Pat: What are some of the things you’re actually creating in some of those entities that you have interacted with?

Marian: One of things we did initially is we talked with people in the industry itself and said, “Is this even something that is of interest to you?” We think, from our perspective, that it probably is something, when we look at Department of Justice’s initiatives that show a lot of people with disabilities having trouble getting jobs at a restaurant with their service animals, etc. The industry said they always felt that there was room for improvement. They thought they had been doing a good job but would like to take it to the next level and they agreed to work with us.

So what we thought was the first step is developing a customer service initiative. Our feeling was that if businesses in the hospitality industry, by the hospitality industry for this project we’re talking about restaurants, places that serve food, and lodging industries, narrowing it down a little bit. Hospitality now can mean casinos and theme parks, all kinds of things. We’re trying to focus right now specifically on lodging and restaurants, places you get food. We developed a customer service initiative.

Pat: This is really targeting the staff who are providing...

Marian: Exactly. Front line staff. We wanted to make sure they were very comfortable in dealing with people with disabilities. So we have developed this training program where we do a PowerPoint, we go on-site and do a PowerPoint. We eventually will be posting this PowerPoint on our website so folks can go on independently and other individuals can offer the training.

We’ve been getting wonderful feedback saying, “Gosh, I used to ignore people with disabilities because I was afraid that I would act inappropriately or do something wrong. Now I feel very comfortable going up and saying ‘gosh, can I help you?’ or ‘how can I assist you?’ or ‘is there anything you need?’” They’ve learned how to lay food out so it’s accessible to all people including people who are short-statured or people who are in wheelchairs. They’ve learned how to assist blind individuals. They’ve learned that’s it’s okay to offer assistance but not to insist on it. They’ve learned other points about how to speak and not worry so much about the specific language they’re using such as saying “see” to a blind person and “if you’ll follow me” or “walk this way” to a person who has difficulty walking.

This will be the first step in marketing to people with disabilities and possibly hiring people with disabilities as well.

Pat: Very good. A couple of questions, Marian. On the individual level, visualizing that you’re actually going to a hotel, as an example, and having this session with the staff and then leaving materials behind that they could reference and pass on to future employees?

Marian: Absolutely. We’ve developed some materials, they’re available on our website, that are small little brochures about access to restaurants, access to hotels. We have a big poster that shows sign language so the folks can learn a little bit of sign language to be able to assist folks and that also has tips for communication etiquette that we’re encouraging be put near a time clock or break room so people can look at it, reference it in the time that they have in their facility.

Pat: Sure. What is your website address so people can really get more familiar with what these products are?

Marian: It’s www.adainfo.org and you’ll see our hospitality initiative on the left hand side.

Pat: Is there a cost to get some of these, I think of it as almost a pocket guide that would accompany the posters?

Marian: Absolutely not. Right now we’re just giving all of them free. They’re also available on pdf so people can download them free on our website.

Pat: Very good.

Marian: You can call 1-800-949-4232 and talk to your local DBTAC who’d be happy to send you one or go on the website and download it on your own.

Pat: Have you shared this with the Department of Justice?

Marian: Yes, we have. We have let them know that we are doing it. They don’t authorize or endorse these materials, but they have seen it and they are very excited that we are reaching out to this very important industry that they get a fair number of complaints from. Also the federal government is pushing as a major priority for the employment of people with disabilities.

Some of the statistics in employment look at overnight accommodations and food services make up about 8.1% of all employment. That was based on a 2004 Bureau of Statistics survey.

Pat: Can you say that again?

Marian: Eight percent of all employment is in overnight accommodations and food services.

Pat: Oh, my gosh!

Marian: So that’s a tremendous amount of people that deal with the public on a daily basis.

Pat: Marian, you have probably seen the checklist for new lodging facilities that the Department of Justice put out several years ago.

Marian: Absolutely. That is listed as one of the many resources on our hospitality website that folks can go to and look at. There is EEOC guidance on it, Equal Employment Opportunities Commission guidance, on food service workers. There’s a variety of documents that the Department of Justice has put out on accommodating people with blindness in the hospitality industry, new lodging facilities standards and guidelines. There are also links to other documents put out by the industry themselves so people have a wide variety of resources they can access when they go to our website.

Pat: What are some of the companies that you have really enjoyed working with and have been so receptive to this while project? I think you mentioned Marriott?

Marian: We’ve worked with Marriott, we’ve worked with Holiday Inn, we’ve worked with small hotels and restaurants. We’re looking at growing this in the years to come as we work with many more facilities. As I said, we’re getting a lot of overall industry support from agencies or entities like the American Hotel Lodging Association, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association and other entities that are excited about looking forward to reaching out to people with disabilities.

Pat: Oh this is tremendous. I just wanted to share with you the Democratic National Convention is being held in Denver in August, and with all of the interest in this year’s election, that whole activity is really raising the awareness about serving people with disabilities and the hospitality industry and we intend in the Rocky Mountain DBTAC here to really utilize several of these handouts and reference guides that you put together to share with the DNC who in turn are working with all of the major hotels and so forth. I just wanted to thank you for providing another tool that I hope that we can utilize and hopefully our listeners will become more interested in and can call upon you or their regional DBTAC.

Marian: Yes, we think this is a very exciting opportunity for all of our listeners to look at being able to take one of these restaurant guides and go to their local favorite restaurant and talk with them about providing more access, even if they do provide some, to people with disabilities, to heighten their awareness of the importance of over fifty million people with disabilities in the United States and their need to utilize their facilities and to make it a good positive experience.

We’re looking at it from an economic perspective. Over fifty million people use a restaurant or hotel on a very regular basis and that we can make a huge impact by making them more accessible and welcoming to people with disabilities.

Pat: That’s perfect. Just one last comment from me if I may, Marian. As you know we’ve worked with Vail resorts quite a bit in the past and it’s just incredible how groups will determine which restaurant or which hotel they are going by virtue of which is most accessible and the most accommodating, including etiquette, and just that general welcoming attitude. So the one person in eight will really steer that whole group to a particular establishment. The folks that are smart are saying, “boy, this is good business.” That is certainly the feedback I hear you’re receiving also.

Marian: Absolutely! The phrase that we use in the DBTAC is “good access is good business” and we truly believe that and we’re finding that the industry is embracing that as well.

Pat: Super. Well, Marian, that has sort of used up our time here. I want to thank you for sharing with us all of t he exciting things that you’ve got going. We really hope this will lead to additional contact for all of us.

Marian: Absolutely. We’re looking forward to it. I hope that people will visit our website, again it’s www.adainfo.org and look for the hospitality initiative or call their local DBTAC at 1-800-949-4232 and that’s voice and TTY.

Pat: Super. Hopefully we’ll be talking to you again.

Marian: Thank you very much, Pat, for this opportunity.

Jacquie Brennan: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Marian Vessels. If you have any questions or would like more information on this topic, you can contact the DBTACs at 1-800-949-4232. And don’t forget to visit our website at dll.ada-podcast.com where you can find the transcript of this show and also an archive of our past episodes and their transcripts.

The Disability Law Lowdown wants to thank its funder, the National Institute of Disability Rehabilitation and Research.

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Have a dazzling day!





The Southwest and Rocky Mountain ADA Centers are part of a program of Independent Living Research Utilization at TIRR - Memorial Hermann in Houston, Texas, and is funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. If you have questions about disability law or would like to request materials or training, please call 1-800-949-4232. This podcast is protected by the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works 2.5 License. For more information and transcripts, visit www.ada-podcast.com.