Equal Employment Opportunity Compliance

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Compliance Activities

The Disability Rights Section has pursued a comprehensive program of enforcement and public education under the ADA. By promoting voluntary compliance and through lawsuits and both formal and informal settlement agreements, the Division has achieved greater access for persons with disabilities nationwide in the public and private sectors. These efforts have resulted in the removal of architectural and communication barriers, and the elimination of discriminatory policies in a wide variety of settings, including hotels, restaurants, retail stores, sports arenas, child care centers, town halls, courts, and prisons.

Under the Section’s Project Civic Access initiative, a wide-ranging program to ensure that state facilities, counties, cities, towns, and villages comply with the ADA, the Section has negotiated and entered into 145 agreements with 138 communities to make public programs and facilities accessible.

In the past year the Section entered a consent decree to improve the accessibility of Detroit’s fixed route public bus systems and negotiated nationwide consent decrees with the country’s largest movie theater chains to provide “comparable lines of sight” for patrons who use wheelchairs in stadium style movie theaters. The Section joined a settlement agreement with Washington Hospital Center and private plaintiffs to provide accessible hospital rooms and equipment to individuals with disabilities, and it resolved, by consent decree, a lawsuit alleging that Royal Oak, Michigan, violated the ADA by denying Easter Seals a land use permit needed to relocate a day facility, Dreams Unlimited Clubhouse, that provides support services for adults with severe and persistent mental illness.

In addition, the Department entered into an agreement with Ticketmaster, Inc., to make its ticketing services more accessible for people with disabilities, and it also required a Missouri nursing home, by consent decree, to pay damages to a nurse’s aide allegedly fired because of HIV disease and to adopt policies to prevent HIV discrimination in its employment practices.