25% of Airport Kiosks Must Be Accessible by December 2022
The Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 (ACAA) is one of the more detailed laws providing specific requirements for deploying accessible self-service kiosks. An update in 2013 set two deadlines for accessible kiosks.
PAST DUE: Kiosk Deadline: December 12, 2016
After December 12, 2016, each new kiosk in an airport was required to be accessible until a fourth of every cluster of kiosks was accessible. This regulation was designed so that a person with disabilities would have at least one kiosk they could use in each group of kiosks. If a kiosk were on its own, the rules shifted; in that case, the singular kiosk was required to be accessible. As the only kiosk in an area, it needed to be usable by all individuals.
Imminent Kiosk Deadline: December 12, 2022
The next deadline focuses on the total number of kiosks. By December 12, 2022, 25 percent of all the kiosks in the airport must be accessible. 25 percent of any cluster must be accessible, and 25 percent of the total number of kiosks in the airport must be accessible.
What are the ACAA’s Requirements for an Accessible Kiosk?
- Whatever an inaccessible kiosk does, an accessible kiosk must do the same, “e.g., print boarding passes/bag tags, accept payment for flight amenities such as seating upgrades/meals/Wi-Fi access, rebook tickets, etc.”
- Most of the requirements are technical. These include color contrast (“Characters must contrast with their background with a minimum luminosity contrast ratio of 3:1”) and tactile keyboard markings.
- Many of the technical requirements relate to the screen reader functionality, such as making sure users can pause the speech or specifying how the screen reader vocalizes passwords represented as asterisks (“spoken as “asterisk” rather than presented as beep tones”).
Again, by December 12, 2022, a quarter of the kiosks in an airport must follow ACAA kiosk accessibility requirements.
Contact the kiosk accessibility team at TPGi to learn more about the ACAA and how you can bring your self-service kiosks into conformance with the ACAA in time for the December deadline. Learn more about JAWS for Kiosk.