ADA Compliance Plan

2025 Update

Hudson West Fest Inc. (HWF) is committed to complying with Federal and New Jersey State accessibility requirements and guidelines in all of Hudson West’s activities.  We are committed to making our programs accessible to all people, to ensure anyone can fully appreciate those programs. HWF is appreciative of the guidance that Hudson Country has provided to support us in better understanding and realizing this goal. HWF has posted a copy of its ADA Compliance Plan on our website and has pages on the website for requesting accommodations and for filing grievances.  

Accessibility

Hudson West stages events at facilities that either are rented from other organizations or provided by those organizations free of charge. We consider accessibility as a factor in venue selection every time. Since 2021, our annual festival has been presented at the Nimbus Arts Center in Jersey City. The Nimbus Center was built about ten years ago and is fully ADA Compliant (providing curb cuts, elevator, accessible bathrooms and so on.).  In 2024, we started to host outdoor activities in tandem with the festival. To do this, we closed a city street.  This street had curb cuts making it accessible. We anticipate the outdoor program will entirely displace the indoor festival in the future.  Current and planned future festival locations are all close to the elevator-accessible Grove Street PATH Station.  Several of our programs take place in public schools. In such instances, we depend on the school’s compliance with accessibility law.  Programs in public parks, similarly, depend on the park’s access plan.

Visual Impairment

Our understanding of ADA requirements led us to increase font sizes on materials printed for all events three years ago. We will continue to do this.

Hearing Impairment

For the past three years we have borrowed Hudson County’s Assisted Listening System and plugged it into the sound system on the Main Stage at our festival.  We are going to test “Live Caption” software at the 2025 fest. This is an inexpensive app that can broadcast captions in real time to users’ phones. This is attractive for several reasons: there is no limit on the number of users, and it can be deployed at smaller events, which is a challenge for the Assisted Listening System.  The use of a captioning system was recommended to us at our 2024 ADA review with Hudson County and we believe Live Caption is the best way to achieve this.  If we are successful at the festival, we can deploy this app in other programs as well.

Signage

Hudson West uses the standard symbols that denote accessibility (mobility, hearing, visibility) in our marketing and advertising to make potential participants aware that their needs will be accommodated. 

Grievances

A formal ADA Grievance Policy was adopted by the HWF Board several years ago and is posted on the HWF website. An ADA Coordinator is identified at the festival and both Board Members and volunteers are trained to bring any issues that arise to the ADA Coordinator.

Approved by the HWF Board of Directors