Quick Catch Up on Links

A few links that I would like to unload off of my docket:

Curb Cut, Take 3

The past few years I have been work­ing in the area of reli­gious spe­cial edu­ca­tion and have recently jumped back into a job where Curb Cut is rel­e­vant to my work again. A cou­ple of fee­ble attempts to start post­ing again in the past quite awhile have led to a blis­ter­ing pace of one to two posts a year. Remark­ably, some peo­ple haven’t cleaned out their feed read­ers for awhile, so hope­fully the remain­ing sub­scribers will stick around as we get things going again.

In my new gig I am work­ing as a web developer/architect in the edu­ca­tional divi­sion of a large Inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion and I’m anx­ious find a place for stan­dards, acces­si­bil­ity and open­ness in the work that I am doing. To that end, Curb Cut lives.

We started out as Curb Cut Edu­ca­tion and evolved into Curb Cut Design. Nei­ther of those titles seemed quite right for the direc­tion I’m head­ing, so this blog shall hereto­fore be known as sim­ply ‘Curb Cut’, enjoy.

How to Build an Accessible Curb Cut

Because this site gets a num­ber of hits on acces­si­bil­ity spec­i­fi­ca­tions of actual curb cuts, I thought I would post a cou­ple of resources for mis­guided vis­i­tors. Specif­i­cally I’ll out­line the lit­tle that I’ve been able to find out about curb cuts and the Amer­i­cans with Dis­abil­i­ties Act (ADA).

Def­i­n­i­tion

First off a def­i­n­i­tion from the Wikipedia entry on curb cuts:

A curb cut (US) or dropped kerb (UK) is a ramp lead­ing smoothly down from a side­walk to a street, rather than abruptly end­ing with a curb and drop­ping roughly 10–15 cm (4~6 inches).

Where

Page 4 of the offi­cial Check­list for Exist­ing Facil­i­ties (PDF) from the US Depart­ment of Jus­tice Amer­i­cans with Dis­abil­i­ties Act Home Page asks the ques­tion, “Do curbs on the route have curb cuts at dri­ves, park­ing and drop offs?” From this I’m going to posit that these are the three places where curb cuts are required.

Slope

The next para­graph in a dis­cus­sion on ramps dis­cusses the slope ration and states that “the slopes of ramps (be) no greater than 1:12,” it then goes on:

Slope is given as a ratio of the height to the length. 1:12 means for every 12 inches along the base of the ramp, the height increases one inch. For a 1:12 max­i­mum slope, at at least one foot of ramp length is needed for each inch of height.

More Infor­ma­tion

For those who are look­ing for more infor­ma­tion, the US Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion Fed­eral High­way Admin­is­tra­tion has a doc­u­ment enti­tled Design­ing Side­walks and Trails for Access, includ­ing an entire chap­ter on “curb ramps” includ­ing infor­ma­tion on how curb ramps impact dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tions, dif­fer­ent types, best prac­tices and great diagrams.

If you’re look­ing for a basic check­list on facil­ity acces­si­bil­ity, check out this Facil­i­ties Check­list from the National Cen­ter on Work­force and Dis­abil­ity.

Curb Cut Lives!

Hello every­one, after a long hia­tus Curb Cut is back in action. Even though I work in a dif­fer­ent field now (reli­gious edu­ca­tion for youth with dis­abil­i­ties), I haven’t been able to stay away from this stuff and am anx­ious to get a few posts out there.

Also, I have changed the rss feed to point to a feed­burner feed for cur­b­cut. If you are sub­scribed to any of the old feeds, I think I have set it so it will auto­mat­i­cally redi­rect to the new feed, please let me know if you have any prob­lems with it.

Housecleaning and New Blogger

Curb Cut Learn­ing would like to wel­come the new Coor­di­na­tor of Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion at the Insti­tute for Com­mu­nity Inclu­sion, Alvaro Tobar. Alvaro comes to us from Boston Uni­ver­sity and has some great dis­tance edu­ca­tion experience.

Along with the redesign, I also changed how com­ments are accepted on the site. We have been using the excel­lent MT-Blacklist Plu­gin which does a great job, but we have now added Type­Key authen­ti­ca­tion as well. You can still com­ment with­out sign­ing up for Type­Key, but your com­ment will then be mod­er­ated (sorry). Side­note– if any­one knows how to block all com­ments from the user­name ‘bob’ I would appre­ci­ate it– there is a guy who uses all kinds of dif­fer­ent ip addresses and domains that some­times gets through MT-Blacklist.

Looking good, feeling good

Many thanks to Christo­pher Phillips for giv­ing Curb Cut a nice new look and feel. It looks great and I’ve never liked gill-sans more. Curb Cut’s new years res­o­lu­tion is to post even more than it did last year. It would also like to shed a few inches around the waist-line. Or maybe that is me. Any­way, wel­come back for another year of Curb Cut and enjoy the new design.

UK struggles with same problems as U.S.

Not really sur­pris­ing, but still a good read. Web inac­ces­si­bil­ity ‘cre­ates net under­class.’

New Beginings

Hi friends, wel­come back to Curb Cut. I’d like to thank Christo­pher for all the won­der­ful work he has done on this site and wish him the best of luck as he moves onward and upward. That said, he still has his login to the site, and we hope he will post as often as he can.

Those of you with a great atten­tion to detail will notice the site has changed ever so slightly. As I will now, hope­fully, be the main con­tent provider, the site’s inter­est will shift more toward uni­ver­sal design for the web, but will still include dis­tance learn­ing. Check this space on Tues­days and Thurs­days (for now) for links and dis­cus­sion on the above top­ics as well as a oppor­tu­ni­ties to take part in a few projects I would like to see done by our com­mu­nity for our com­mu­nity. Thanks again. –jc

Future Curb Cut Posts

I’m still around and thought I would do a dump of all the links I had in my book­marks folder that were intended for future pub­li­ca­tion on cur­b­cut. Here they are are semi-organized, unfil­tered and uncom­mented upon, straight from my bookmarks.html file. There are some gems in here, but you may have to dig to find them. On the other hand, if you’re think­ing of start­ing your own blog– some of these may be a good place to start…

Con­fer­ences

GoogleStuff

future

Con­fer­ence­Tools

arti­cles

Other Sites

The Future of Curb Cut… (and anyone looking for a job?)

You’ve likely noticed there hasn’t been much hap­pen­ing around here lately, here’s why. I recently accepted a posi­tion work­ing in the area of spir­i­tu­al­ity and dis­abil­ity– instead of focus­ing on acces­si­ble dis­tance edu­ca­tion, I’m turn­ing my focus to acces­si­ble reli­gion. If any of your are inter­ested in the topic, let me know, but be aware that I may tell you more than you really want to know =)

The good news is, Curb Cut will live on through other staff at the Insti­tute for Com­mu­nity Inclu­sion includ­ing (hope­fully) my future replace­ment. Along those lines, if you any of you are inter­ested in work­ing for an incred­i­ble orga­ni­za­tion that really places acces­si­bil­ity at the top of their pri­or­ity list, let us know- it’s a great place to work, I’ll post the offi­cial job descrip­tion when it is ready.

I sup­pose a long and lengthy good­bye would be inap­pro­pri­ate since most of you likely don’t really care who writes to the blog as long as there is some­thing writ­ten, but thanks for stop­ping by, it has been a pleasure.

*You’ve also likely noticed that com­ments have been turned off for the time being, we’ll let you know if that changes in the future. I’ll leave them on this post unless/until com­ment spam becomes to big of a problem.

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