COVID-19 / Coronavirus - has it affected you

[Sharon Toji]

We still have some money from our PPP grant, thank goodness, so today we wrote another salary check, 35 hours to our three full time employees, 15 hours to a couple of part time "as needed" employees. We actually got a couple of emails from some regular customers, like Pepperdine College. We also snagged a new customer, even though it's just tiny vinyl jobs. It is our landlord. I told them that if they would buy their signs from us, we'd just take out the cost of the materials for the time being, and put everything else back into paying them our lease payment. Hopefully a couple of months of that, we'll have made a dent in what we now owe them, and we'll have a good new client for the future. 

 

For anyone who sells ADA signs and gets them wholesale, we're working on something new that might interest you, especially if you do color printing and vinyl but don't have any way to do raised characters and braille. We've come out with a new line called "ADA/SterilEaze™." It takes advantage of a change in the ADA Standards from 2010 that almost no one knows about. You can have a completely separate raised character/braille message and corresponding visual message that is much larger, bolder, serif font if you want and placed much higher on the wall. It's just that the information has to be the same identification of the door or floor level. So, in other words, you could have a big hospital room number, say A135, mounted up above where most people could touch it and then down at the legal location have a very small virtually invisible raised sign, also A135, with braille below it. The visual sign's major requirements is that it must have high contrast and be non-glare and not use decorative fonts. The tactile sign doesn't need any color at all and it's even preferable to use tiny 5/8 inch high letters because that makes it easier and faster to read by touch. You could paint it on the back to match the wall color, for instance. Or, you could order a larger tactile plaque and put the company logo on the second surface or a message that says "Did you wash your hands?" or for a religious institution, a scriptural verse. A school might have the school mascot. Obviously, the blind person who only reads by touch is unaware of all this, and it does not interfere with reading the information needed. 

 

The good thing is that the tactile sign will be extremely easy and fast to sterilize and it absolutely will not disintegrate or degrade in any way. For anyone who wants to sell ADA signs but can't do thermoforming it gives them an opportunity to provide the visual sign, and to provide any subsurface color or even decoration they might want to add to customize the background of the tactile sign. I should add why it's so important that the sign be thermoformed. Although photopolymer is advertised as a one piece sign, it's not. It's a water soluble gel layer on either plastic or metal. Too much moisture and the braille dots and edges of the characters disintegrate. Metal won't disintegrate, but it needs to be painted, so that's another porous virus catcher, and too much cleaning will eventually start to wear the paint away. You can apply letters and rasters to acrylic, but those signs may also start losing the adhesive adhered letters or braille dots may fall out if they need to be cleaned a lot. Thermoforming is a true one-piece or monolithic piece of molded acrylic with no coating of any kind on the surface required. Because it is molded, you can create perfectly rounded braille dots and also completely rounded character profiles, so its not only very easy to read, but easy to clean. 

 

So, we invite all our electrical sign friends who have clients who would benefit, to inquire about our new ADA compliant SterilEaze™ system. 

Steril-Eaze_Signs.pdf

Edited May 29, 2020 by Sharon Toji
Needed to take a a big extra space between parts of a sentence.