I am writing this blog today to talk about the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and its new standards conditions being imposed on industrial controls and ATM’s/Kiosks manufacturers.
As some of you already know, F-Origin develops a unique “force-based” touch technology called zTouch, and we incorporate this technology into these and many other types of products. zTouch gives you a wide option of capabilities for touch, and is particularly well suited for outdoor environments, heavy use environments, temperature extreme environments, and is the only touch technology that allows touch on any rigid surface, such as glass, metal, granite, ceramic, etc.
Our sensor technology allows the touch coordinates to be accurately measured and gives you the unique capability of using not only an X and Y coordinate, but also a Z coordinate, which is the actual force amplitude. zTouch can utilize 1-8 sensors, and this gives you a wide variety of applications not available using other touch technologies out in the market today.
In discussions with our customers involved in the ATM industries, we get a lot of feedback regarding the guidelines and policies these manufacturer must adhere to, that require us as a supplier to also adhere too, as well as, research, understand and ultimately develop our technology to support it.
This blog is to garnish input and stimulate dialogue in that area to help not only us, but similar companies and manufacturers also facing the same daunting and sometimes costly but necessary task of an ADA compliance strategy.
The ADA imposes a set of standards on manufacturers of devices that require public human contact – elevator control buttons, ATM entry screens, Kiosk control panels, and others.
These new standards require certain areas of adherence for the ATM such as height, reach, accessibility, floor space, speech, functional/tactile controls, key order/layout, Braille instructions, and much more.
The date this act goes into law is March 15, 2012, so the ATM manufacturers have a deadline to meet and the race is on !
ATM manufacturers now have to face the issue of either upgrading their existing ATM’s to ADA compliance, or replace them with new ones manufactured to those standards, as there is no grandfathering clause.
A whole slew of cottage companies are springing up to do ATM upgrades, trade-ins, replacements, etc., to help these companies meet that deadline.
It is worthy to note that a significant share of ATM’s in the field are already, or near ADA compliant, because most ATM manufacturers started to proactively produce compliant ATM’s a few years ago.
Failure to comply to these new standards by the deadline date can result in fines of up to $55,000 for the first offense, and possibly double that amount for subsequent offenses - that’s a very costly scenario ATM owners and manufacturers must face, especially since it is estimated that there are over 500,000 ATM’s in use today in just the USA alone !
What are the ATM manufacturers doing to adhere to this new legislation, and what have peripheral supplier companies done to support these manufacturers on this as well ?
Here at F-Origin we are diligently researching these new guidelines and how we can develop our product roadmap strategy to comply with the new ADA legislation. Our budgetary pricing and prototypes are designed to incorporate required relevant pieces, such as raised Braille lettering, keypad layouts, panel sizes and angles, tactile feedback options and future synergy with complementary technologies such as voice/speech recognition.
Although cost is a factor in order to meet these new regulations, planning ahead and implementing upgrades efficiently could save you quite a bit of money and prevent you from costly legal issues in the future. F-Origin’s opinion is that doing the cost analysis factoring up front in the budgetary phase, will help you avoid these legal scenario’s and save you money not only up front, but also in the long run !
We would like to hear from you; please share your ideas, strategies and business experiences around the new ADA guidelines and how you support ATM manufacturers and like companies with best practices for this ADA compliance.
Thank you !