Vendors need to ramp up

PALMER — Leaning on the counter at his espresso booth at the Alaska State Fair Tuesday, T. J. Kelly said he’d be happy to put in an elaborate deck to help handicapped folks get their coffee.

He said maybe if the fair moved a business that complements his next door, the two could build something in between. Maybe a deck.

“I’d be happy to have the deck built,” Kelly said. “That might be our only option is to group difficult booths together.”

Kelly was just one of dozens of vendors volunteers from Access Alaska visited this week. The volunteers, most of them in wheelchairs, were on hand as part of a push the fair is engaging in to make vendors’ booths more accessible. The fair is planning on writing fix-it tickets to non-compliant vendors and requiring next year’s booths to be as accessible as reasonably possible.

But, as Access Alaska’s Executive Director Jim Beck found out, it’s kind of a tough sell.

Booth owners don’t want to be set back too far. They think it makes them less visible. And a lot of the booths are set so high up they’d need a massive ramp.

The industry standard, said David Barton, an accessibility consultant brought along for the inspections, is that every one-inch rise needs a foot-long ramp. A lot of booths are more than six inches off the ground.

Beck suggested the fair institute a rule — entrances to booths should be no more than six inches off the ground. Barton agreed.

“Otherwise, you’re just setting yourself up for failure,” he said.

Still, Beck said, for a good deal of booths the problem isn’t so extreme.

“For a lot of these they’re gong to be able to be completely accessible once they get their minds around it and see how easy it is and how cheap it’s going to be,” Beck said.

Barton said he believed it’s in the vendors’ best interest economically. He quoted studies showing that disabled people have twice the spending power of the coveted teenage demographic.

On the tour of the fair, Beck said, nearly everyone was amenable to suggestions. Still, a few vendors seemed unwilling to talk. “I’ve been doing this for years and wheelchairs come in and out all day,” seemed to be a common refrain.

Some booths seemed to have made a half-hearted attempt.

Looking at one booth’s ramp, Gerry Milbrett, a wheelchair-bound volunteer along for the inspections, wasn’t impressed.

“These you’ve got to take a run at, then take out the inventory when you get inside,” he said.

But Beck was persistent. At a military surplus booth the busy owner didn’t seem to want to spend the time talking. But with a little cajoling he eventually came out and eventually they were talking and even joking.

The vendor, Kevin Burke, said he usually has a ramp anyway since a lot of his customers are disabled veterans.

His booth sat on pallets, meaning he didn’t have too extreme of a rise. Milbrett suggested Burke could cut a slice out of his floor and install a recessed ramp.

“I’m going to have you test it when I do it,” Burke called out as Milbrett left.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.