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Two senators are pushing the Department of Transportation to digitize the paperwork that Americans with disabilities will have to fill out before they can do so with their service animals, calling both the existing form and an updated proposal “inaccessible, humiliating and time-consuming. “
In a Jan. 12 letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and made public Wednesday, Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. , and Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill. , said voters had reached out to their offices to express explicit fears that the agency. The service animal’s form is “poorly designed and unnecessarily difficult to complete. “
The DOT’s existing service animal form went into effect in 2021, and the company is in the process of seeking public comment on an updated version. However, lawmakers said the existing form, as well as the updated proposal, “violates either federal law or policy issued through the Biden administration. “
Previous law, such as the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, which became law in 2018, and the subsequent Office of Management and Budget policy that implemented the law also stated that agencies deserve to prioritize “the design and progression of virtual bureaucracy. “. . . than the creation of a virtual bureaucracy. paper bureaucracy or electronic bureaucracy.
President Joe Biden’s December 2021 executive order on transforming the federal tourism experience also called, in part, on high-impact service providers, including the DOT, to focus on “simplifying and facilitating the accessibility of bureaucracy and virtual experiences” and “ensuring the accessibility of services. ” for consumers with disabilities.
Wyden and Duckworth noted in their letter that the DOT only provides the service animal format as a PDF file, which they called “a superseded electronic format that is difficult to access and interact with when using cellular devices or screen readers and other assistive technologies, which are imperative for many other people with disabilities. “
As the DOT finalizes its updated service animal documents, lawmakers wrote that the company intends to offer “an accessible and mobile-friendly internet form. “
The letter also noted that “DOT permits airlines to require travelers with service animals to complete a new copy of the form before each trip,” which Wyden and Duckworth said only amplifies existing accessibility concerns for disabled travelers.
Lawmakers need the company to “offer travelers the ability to purchase a virtual copy of their form that they can reuse, update if necessary, and virtually send to airlines, for example, a QR code or other machine-readable form. “
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