A few years ago, Jamie Sharples, who uses a wheelchair, was trying to locate an accessible restaurant in Philadelphia for a special event he was planning. He called around until he found one, but when he arrived, he found himself staring up at a flight of stairs.
"I said, 'Where is your wheelchair-accessible entrance? Where's your ramp?' " recalls Sharples. "The maitre d' said, "It’s no problem. We'll pick you up and carry you.' "
It was because of experiences like this that Sharples founded Level Travel in 2003. The Coatesville, PA-based organization maintains a website, www.leveltravel.com, that ranks hotels and restaurants in major cities on their accessibility for older travelers and for travelers with mobility, vision, or hearing impairment. "We wanted to provide a standard instead of getting someone's opinion" on a venue's accessibility, Sharples explains.
The market for disabled travel is huge. According to Census Bureau figures from April, 51.2 million adults, or 18 percent of the population, has some sort of disability. And a 2005 survey by the Open Doors Organization, a nonprofit group in Chicago that researches travel by people with disabilities, found that 71 percent of disabled adultsmore than 21 million peopletraveled in the past two years. An earlier Open Doors study showed that these people spent $13.6 billion annually on travel; if older travelers are included, that figure rises to $38 billion.
Level Travel rates the accessibility of venues' meeting space, adds Sharples: "We look at how easy the meeting rooms are to get to from the lobby and the guest rooms, and whether there are accessible rest rooms close by."
Evaluating the meeting rooms themselves, however, has proved difficult because the company doesn't tell hotels ahead of time before sending an evaluator, meaning that the evaluator must resort to clandestinely visiting unused meeting roomswhich, if not locked, are usually not set up. "Trying to rate the accessibility of big, empty rooms is challenging," says Sharples.
When coordinating meetings for disabled attendees, planners should ask the hotel if it has assistive devices for the hearing impaired such as tools that amplify the public-address system, says Sharples. As for setup, "For people with vision impairment, you might want them to sit up front. For the physically impaired, don't make them all sit in the back because someone might have a physical impairment and also have difficulty seeing."
Finally, if your speaker has a physical impairment, Sharples recommends asking the hotel ahead of time to install a ramp leading up to the dais. "I've often spoken at seminars where I wasn't able to get onstage," he says. In such cases, he has resorted to using a wireless lavaliere microphone, which allows him to give his presentation while sitting offstage.