Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Issue 10: What are the recommendations for long-term activities?

Participants agree to working as a Committee

How does this group see coming back together over some time? Is that advantageous? Should we set up a bloggers site? What are your feelings about this? It’s an area that has not been explored. You’re sort of the pioneers in it. You know, it’s been explored but in a fragmented way.

Question by Fred Krimgold: Can we have some kind of status within NIBS as a temporary committee or as an exploratory committee?

Sure, if that’s the recommendation of the group.

Responses by [three Participants]: “That would be terrific.” “That would be good, yeah.” “Yeah.”

[A committee] or something like that?

Response by [Participant]: NIBS would be a terrific forum.

Okay. You’ll have to pick a chairperson because it won’t be me.

Comment by [Participant]: We should re-gather in less than six months, because otherwise, three months – some way so that we don’t lose the current –

Response by [Participant]: I think even if we do conference calls.

Yeah, we can do that.

Response by [Participant]: We can do, once a month, once every two months. You can do conference calls at least to keep in touch and then you do another meeting.

And we can set up subcommittees, people who are interested in specific areas.

Comment by [Participant]: Or you can have a taskforce where everybody goes into what they’re interested in and then you have one conference call with everybody so you update on what the task forces are. I think a conference call is not that onerous.

Response by Fred Krimgold: That’s right. I think if we could schedule a point, say, three or four months out as one in which we intend to have some kind of a draft or set of proposals or action initiated by this group and its membership, and either a conference call or some other kind of consultation at that point, that that would be useful. It would give us a framework and that it would allow us to reevaluate –

All right, well, we’ll put something together and send it out and get a consensus from everybody.

Question by [Participant]: Can you set up something on your website for this group that would allow people to post things to it that would be of interest to the group?

Yup. We can set up the website. We can have free conference calls. We can even teleconference if we ever want to. The one restriction is getting travel dollars for you, and we’ll have to get some agency – either GSA or DVA or someone to throw in a few bucks and – to get you here personally, but all the other stuff, we can handle it.

Comment by Tom Williams: I can’t speak for Susan but I’m sure that she’ll support it – and we can get agency money to back up some of this travel.

Comment from Kurt Knight: One of the goals that I think we should come up with in the next three months is some noncontroversial things that we should do in our criteria. The simplest ones – Fred brought up the issue of elevators and the way the numbers are portrayed on the elevators. For us at VA, that’s a no-brainer. I could just go into our master specifications and say it has to be this way. That doesn’t require anybody but me to say, do it. I mean, there’s other things of that type that are small, safety-oriented that we could make some recommendations of guidance or something – guidance would be the word to – that doesn’t need any studies; it doesn’t need a great deal of contravention. It’s obvious and commonsense.

And that was my point in that second piece – to get our foot in the door, to show that it’s an issue. Low vision is an issue. And then we can go from there.

Comment from Marsha Mazz: Just very quickly, coming from the federal agency perspective, I wanted to piggyback on that. I was just going to write an e-mail. But things like contrast, that’s your low-hanging fruit. It’s something that the federal agencies can do right away. And when I had conversations with counsel last night, those were some of the things that we were talking about. What are some of the things that this group can provide in guidance that can be implemented right away? And then it puts you on the map. It lends credence and then [Low Vision] catches the momentum.