ADA Changes and Best Available Seating

Hi Paul,

We're also sorting through all of this, belatedly.  With or without Non-SYOS shows, my understanding is that we are expected to provide exactly the same services options to those buying wheelchair spaces as to people buying regular seats.  We're taking this to mean:

• We must offer the seats via SYOS and Best Seat.
• We cannot have "click-through" or promo code based access to these seats.
• We cannot restrict seats to a previously established list or constituency.

Complicating things are that the wheelchair spaces now have three companion seats available to them.  Our reading is that there is one companion seat that is only available to the purchaser of the wheelchair space (until waived), as always, but now there are two more which should ideally be adjacent, but must be very near (i.e. directly in front of, probably what we can accommodate), that should be available, though it seems vague as to whether they might be generally available for sale.  In our circumstance, though, I think we have to group them in the same section/price as the corresponding wheelchair space, at least, and that has some ramifications, because as we don't have an accessible balcony, we have a "balcony" section in the back of our orchestra for wheelchair spaces.

I had originally planned to have a click through page explaining our accessible seating rules and locations, and then would break the holds on those seats so that the customer could go on and purchase them.  It now sounds as though that is not acceptable: this means, I think, that we will have to stop placing holds on those seats.  In SYOS we can call them out with icons and rollovers, and simply expect patrons to choose them correctly, but now we must find a way to keep them from being accidentally distributed to a "Best Seat" request, and also to be selectable via "Best Seat", and also have a way to associate the appropriate number of companion seats (and the appropriate seats) with the chosen wheelchair spaces.  That is, I need to handle a Best Seat request for example for 1 wheelchair and 5 additional seats (we have a six seat maximum online): this then needs to be translated into 1 wheelchair space, the adjacent companion seat, then two more adjacent (or next row but in front) companion seats, if they are available still (maybe, or maybe they're reserved like the first companion seat), then regular best seat in the corresponding section (which might be a different floor, on account of our balcony issue) for the remaining 2-4 seats.  If two wheelchairs are selected and four other seats, now two of the other seats need to be the matching companion seats and the remaining two taken from the four additional companion seats (again, if still available, provided we choose to not have them reserved...)

After that ideally we need to be able to figure out when companion seats have been waived (a wheelchair space was purchased, but the companion seat(s) was declined), and have a mechanism for releasing them for public purchase, but currently that would involve a change of seat type and now potentially a change of section.  But this issue is our problem, and not mandated by ADA, so I suppose it can wait or be resolved manually on call-in orders.

Anyway, anyone else puzzling through this right now?  Any thoughts on what exactly the new regulations require?

--Gawain

Our reading and understanding of the new "companion seat" requirement is not really a change from before.  We must now provide a seat right next to the wheelchair seat, and then provide up to 2 additional companion seats as close as possible to the wheelchair and first companion seat. 

If talks about being adjacent and what not, but it goes on to say that if there are no other seats available near the wheelchair seat and 1st companion seat, we need to offer them available seats in a different location.  So prior to the new laws, we would have already held one seat next to the wheelchair location, and then sold them two more (or as many as they want to buy) as close as possible to the wheelchair and 1st companion seat. 

Section 36.302(f)(4)(i) of the final rule requires public accommodations to make available for purchase three additional tickets for seats in the same row that are contiguous with the wheelchair space, provided that at the time of purchase there are three such seats available. The requirement that the additional seats be "contiguous with the wheelchair space" does not mean that each of the additional seats must be in actual contact or have a border in common with the wheelchair space; however, at least one of the additional seats should be immediately adjacent to the wheelchair space.

Be careful because the regulations discuss that unless you limit the maximum amount of tickets, you can not inflict a maximum on people desiring to purchase wheelchair seats and companions.  Therefore the "3 additional companion seats" cannot really be enforced. 

The Department has also added paragraph (4)(iv) to clarify that the requirement for three additional contiguous seats is not intended to serve as a cap if the maximum number of tickets that may be purchased by members of the general public exceeds the four tickets an individual with a disability ordinarily would be allowed to purchase (i.e., a wheelchair space and three additional contiguous seats). If the maximum number of tickets that may be purchased by members of the general public exceeds four, an individual with a disability is to be allowed to purchase the maximum number of tickets; however, additional tickets purchased by an individual with a disability beyond the wheelchair space and the three additional contiguous seats provided in § 36.302(f)(4)(i) do not have to be contiguous with the wheelchair space.

Again, we do see the new companion seat regulations as really changing our existing ticketing policy. 

We currently don't offer SYOS. We are approaching the wheelchair and companion seating by creating a separate price zone and adjusting the contiguity so that the correct seats are selected.

We have just rolled this out in production, so I don't have any real-life data yet, but it worked in our test environment. Janna Ellis at Yale Repertory Theatre did the configuration and testing.

I'm interested to hear how others are approaching these requirements!

Just curious Mara, are you creating separate price zones just so they are grouped together? OR are you also using the best seating utility? If you are using the best seating facility are your companion and wheelchair seats that are grouped together ranked the same on the best seating map?

Hi Rosa,

I created price types and price zones in order to make our website the most user friendly.  Our price types are now Student, Standard, and Accessible, and our price zones or sections are 'Orchestra Left' and 'Orchestra Left, accessible', etc.

We do not use SYOS, but we do have Best Available, which is why I found creating a price zone along with price types to be the easiest for those using the website.

Unfortunately we did not have the means to do anything fancy, so this had to come completely out of Tessitura and with the resources we already had.

When you first click on our ticket link, you'll find a selection like this:

If you click one of the accessible sections, you will only be given the accessible price type.  But if you click the 'Best Available" option, you'll be given this:

With the way our hall is set up, we are lucky enough that we did not have to change contiguity with our accessible seating.  Since the Accessible price zones are only available with the accessible price type, we also did not have to update our best seat map.

Oh gosh, my pictures didn't show.

When you first click our ticket link, you get this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/1003/Evilbunnie127/Tessi/pricezone.png

And then after 'best available', this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/1003/Evilbunnie127/Tessi/pricetype.png

~The username is from high school -  please don't judge me.

Just a quick update on this topic from the Development department.  We have recently made some changes to the Best Seating algorithm to better accommodate some of the new rules.  This is in review and testing now and that will continue for a few weeks.  We'll send an email out when we're finished which will include instructions on how you can add this to v10. 

What we're attempting to do is enhance the ability of the best seating system to seat both wheelchair locations and companion locations appropriately.  So in essence, the new procedure will look at the number of wheelchair location requests as compared to the total number of seats requested.  The difference between the two will be considered companion seats, which will be divided as equally as possible between the number of wheelchair location requests.  Then the process will select each wheelchair location (in normal best seating order) and then attempt to select that wheelchair location's companion seats as close as possible to the selected wheelchair location.  Calculating "close as possible" is done using both row and seat contiguity. 

I can't get much more specific than that until we are through with development and testing.  But our goal is to both adhere to the spirit of the new regs which call for being able to accommodate best seat requests in a like manner whether wheelchair locations are included or not, and to stay backward compatible with the existing best seating process.

Was this ever implemented? Did I miss the solution in another thread?

We implemented this internally for two reasons: 1) the accessible seating system in Tessitura wasn't going to be updated by the drop-dead deadline (um, March 15th, 2011) and 2) our interpretation and implementation of the rules was a little different to the direction that Tessitura went: namely that the 2nd and 3rd companion seats could be assigned from nearby wheelchair spaces.  That is to say, our layout typically looks like this (S: Standard, W: Wheelchair space, C: Companion seat):

SSWCCWWCCWWCSS

So someone asking for one Wheelchair and three other tickets would be entitled three companion spaces, but we would provide two Companion seats and one Wheelchair space, e.g.:

SS[WCCW]WCCWWCSS

To do this, I have had to divert online requests that include wheelchair spaces, and instead of using Best Seat API methods, I pull a custom table that matches wheelchair spaces in each venue with companion seats in order (set up by the box office manager), and run my own (rather complex) algorithm to generate a specific seat request (or identify that the request cannot be executed).

--Gawain

We experimented with the plan that you mentioned, trying to find companion seats as close as possible to the selected wheelchair seats.  The problem that we ran across was that it worked as expected for some house configurations and in a totally unexpected manner for other facilities, depending on how they were built.  We could never succeed in making the process consistent enough to release.

So we decided to take another approach and added the ability to do best seating out of a specific hold code.  In v11 you can pass a special request of a holdcode to the ReserveTicketsEx method and the best seat request will honor that hold code.  This allows a web developer to take special action on ADA seating requests and even have different pools of seats for different situations--one hold code for wheelchair locations and a different hold code for hearing impaired seats, for example. 

This has proven to be a better solution overall.  In addition, we added the hc_no (hold code number) element to the GetSeats methods to facilitate indicating special pools of seats in any seatmap rendering a developer might want to do.

A quick note to v11 developers--we discovered a problem with this functionality in the released version of the web api and a hotfix has been posted in TASK under the Version Upgrades and Patches project, in the v11 Post v11.0.3 Hot Fixes solution.