Recently, I wrote about it taking me an hour to pay my garbage bill. I’m happy to say Waste Management has been responsive. I have reason to believe their payment system will be accessible as early as next week.
I contacted Waste Management about the inaccessibility of their website last Sunday. They started calling me on Monday. I have had two conversations with them so far. I have explained the reasons for the inaccessibility, which they have confirmed. Since the issues can be fixed through simple code changes, they are preparing to make the needed changes next week. Since my interest is in making their website accessible, and because they have been responsive, I offered to test their changes and provide additional feedback.
As an extra benefit, Waste Management has been discussing ideas with me as to how they can imbed accessibility into their practices to, hopefuly, prevent something like this from happening again.
This never should have happened. Thirty-two years after passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, people with disabilities shouldn’t be facing obvious inaccessibility. We shouldn’t have to threaten complaints to get entities to follow the law. We shouldn’t have to be helping entities figure out how to develop processes designed to create a culture of universal design.
But the sad reality is way too many things are still inaccessible. Far too often we need to complain, educate, and sometimes fight to get entities to follow the law. But in this case, Waste Management, when told of their inaccessibility, acted immediately to begin to solve the problems. Sadly, that’s as good a result as we can usually hope to see.