Should you follow ADA guidelines when you remodel your home for accessibility?
It sure would make it easy if you could just use the American with Disability Act Guidelines as a cookbook when you need to make your home easier to live in. You know-Open to page 5, look at diagram 35-B and presto! An exact list of what to do to make your bathroom accessible.
But I have to tell you, using the guidelines this way is usually just a recipe for disaster. The guidelines are designed for commercial applications. They address the needs of a mythical average person with a disability, not the needs of an individual. If you or your remodeler use them for your home they should serve only as the minimum standard for situations in which the guidelines are incorporated into the building codes of the city where you live, for example ramp design in the Greater Omaha area. Sometimes you can use them as a starting place for the information you need about what might be useful for you. You should never believe that a product labeled as ADA compliant will automatically work for you.
One of the saddest wastes of money I’ve ever seen occurred when a family thought the ADA description on a shower unit was all they needed to know. The family contacted us after the shower was installed. There was a high school aged daughter with a physical disability requiring the use of a wheelchair. All her life her mother had lifted her out of her wheelchair and put her into the tub and then back again. The girl was bound for college. Mom didn’t want to go to college with her so they were doing everything they could to help the girl learn to be more independent with self care to prepare her. They decided to remodel the bathroom so she could bathe by herself.
A family friend who was a contractor said he would help. This friend found a shower unit that had information on the box indicating it was ADA compliant and everyone agreed that was the shower they wanted. He took out the tub, put in the shower unit and really did a very nice job. Unfortunately, it was not possible for the girl to move into the shower by herself after all because of where the built in seat was located, and now the Mom had to actually step in and out of the shower to get her onto the seat. Worse yet, the seat was so small that the girl couldn’t balance on it and Mom had to hold her in place. The result was the new shower, that was labeled as ADA compliant, was more disabling to the girl than the tub it had replaced and the money the family had saved up for the remodeling was gone.
It was too late, but there were several types of freestanding seats costing under $600 that would have worked with the original tub, a removable device that would have lowered into the tub that was under $2,000, and several different types of shower surround that would have actually worked based on how the girl transferred, or moved from surface to surface. This family learned the hard way that ADA guidelines don’t always work for every individual with a disability.
Don’t waste your money by using the ADA guidelines as a shortcut. Rather than starting with the guidelines a better way to design accessibility remodeling that will work, is to start with your goals, your abilities, and to take advantage of the huge selection of equipment available today to find an answer that meets your needs, your budget, and your style.
