Curb Cut » General

Quick Catch Up on Links

Christopher Phillips — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 07:08:15 +0000

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

Learning with a Disability PhD Program
”…a doctoral program designed to provide a broad and comprehensive education, realistic work experiences, and opportunities for problem centered research in the area of learning with disability.”
IBM Strives For Superhuman Speech Tech
” ‘At IBM, we have this superhuman speech recognition [initiative in which] the goal is to get performance comparable to humans in the next five years…’ ”
Accessibility Roundups
- The Great Accessibility Blog Roundup
  A great list of accessibility blogs from Jared Smith at WebAIM
- CETIS accessibility roundup
  A list of links from Shannon Perry from the CETIS–TechDis listserv
- Welcome back and another accessibility roundup
  A few interesting links from Ron Graham

Curb Cut, Take 3

Christopher Phillips — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:16:39 +0000

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

Christopher Phillips — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 05:31:28 +0000

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!

Christopher Phillips — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 01:43:51 +0000

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

Christopher Phillips — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 05:00:05 +0000

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

Jeff Coburn — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 02:25:57 +0000

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.

Jeff Coburn — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 16:24:20 +0000

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

New Beginings

Christopher Phillips — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 21:44:29 +0000

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

Christopher Phillips — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 03:48:35 +0000

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

dmiessler.com — study — google

future

ConferenceTools

Groupware Tools

articles

Other Sites

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

Christopher Phillips — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 04:37:03 +0000

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.

Introducing… Curb Cut

Christopher Phillips — Mon, 01 Dec 2003 21:58:26 +0000

It took me awhile to decide if I really wanted to started a blog. In the past year I’ve seen many become completely useless and wanted to make sure I was ready to jump in with both feet. Two things helped me to decide: 1) this will help me to more systematically review and archive resources that I come across and 2) as far as I know, there isn’t anyone else who has specifically tackled accessible distance education in the blogosphere. So if you’re here, hopefully you can find something useful.

Why Curb Cut Learning? You have likely heard of the curb cut principle– the idea that while curb cuts were originally intended for persons who use wheelchairs they are also convenient for a number of other sidewalk uses such as strollers, bicycles, grocery carts, and luggage. While you can always go back and retrofit your instruction so that it is universally accessible, it is usually easier to do so from the get go.

Thanks for stopping by,
Christopher