4.14 Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all places that are open to the general public. As a public place open to the general public, small airports must meet ADA requirements.

ACRP Research Report 177: Enhancing Airport Wayfinding for Aging Travelers and Persons with Disabilities
Provides guidance to assist aging travelers and persons with disabilities to travel independently within airports using pedestrian wayfinding systems. The guidebook addresses travel by people with cognitive, sensory, and other mobility challenges.

ACRP Synthesis 51: Impacts of Aging Travelers on Airports
Describes the challenges of wayfinding, fatigue, technology and equipment, and needed amenities, as well as the practices that airports are enacting to accommodate and improve the airport experience of aging travelers. The synthesis is designed to help users better understand the aging demographic and define issues and implement effective practices to accommodate aging travelers at airports.

ACRP Synthesis 90: Incorporating ADA and Functional Needs in Emergency Exercises
Explores how airports include persons with disabilities and others with access or functional needs (DAFN) into emergency exercises. Because not all functional needs are visually or readily apparent, airports find that including these community members with DAFN in emergency exercises improves the safety of passengers, airport visitors, and employees at airports.

ADA Customer Service Quick Tips
Provides helpful tips for serving customers with disabilities.

FAA Advisory Circular 150/5360-14: Access to Airport by Individuals with Disabilities
Provides guidance designed to assist airports in complying with the current laws and regulations regarding individuals with disabilities by identifying the relevant statutes and regulations that affect airports, presenting in a single document the main features of each of the statutes and regulations, providing legal citations to facilitate research, listing sources of assistance or additional information, and identifying Final Rules.

42 U.S.C. Chapter 126
Provides a clear and comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities; to provide clear, strong, consistent, enforceable standards addressing discrimination against individuals with disabilities; to ensure that the federal government plays a central role in enforcing the standards established in this chapter on behalf of individuals with disabilities; and to invoke the sweep of congressional authority, including the power to enforce the fourteenth amendment and to regulate commerce, in order to address the major areas of discrimination faced day-to-day by people with disabilities.