The Beauty of the Americans with Disabilities Act

In the spring of 1977, I took a quarter off from college, quit my job and, with my best friend, bought a 1966 VW camper van to explore the United States. Before we left, we spent a warm April day (California was in a drought and Jerry Brown was governor, how odd!) practicing the manual shift on the hills of San Francisco. We figured that if we could manage the hills of San Francisco in the bus, we could manage it anywhere.

As we drove into the Civic Center, we noticed a protest – not a rare occurrence in the Bay Area, but this protest was unique because the people protesting were people with disabilities. I admit that as an abled-bodied teenager, I didn’t have a clue what the protest was about, but learned from the local news that protestors were demanding that the Carter Administration issue regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It made perfect sense and it opened my eyes to disability discrimination.

Fast forward 38 years to 2015 and we’re celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), the glorious result of the disability community’s historic campaign to expand the protections of Section 504. In those intervening years, I acquired a disability and had the incredible fortune to go to work at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF), first as its administrative director and now as the executive director.

DREDF was instrumental in the passage of the ADA: with Pat Wright as the leading political strategist, Arlene Mayerson drafting language and providing legal consultation to members of Congress, Marilyn Golden organizing people with disabilities nationwide and Mary Lou Breslin providing the vision, intellect and historical context to DREDF’s work. In 2014, Senator Tom Harkin said about DREDF, “No group has been more instrumental in advancing the cause of civil rights for all people with disabilities than DREDF.”*

The ADA is beautiful – what it has accomplished is spectacular. It has led to the removal of many, many architectural barriers, more accessible public transportation, made it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities in employment, an increasingly accessible Internet, more equitable delivery of health care and much, much more.

I have savored the ADA’s impact on our social consciousness in small but beautiful personal moments:

• In 2005, when my oldest son called from college to tell me that after an overhaul of the online game Star Wars Galaxies wiped out the ability of many players with limited dexterity to use “keyboard-only” commands, there was a major outcry on player forums to correct the programming so that players weren’t excluded. Players with and without disabilities recognized that the upgrade had usurped the perhaps inadvertent, though nonetheless universal design of the original game. I was so happy about the gamer community understanding access and inclusion that I barely even questioned my son about why he was spending time playing video games when he probably should have been studying.
• In 2010, when my stepmother called to say that it dawned on her that she could insist (gently, according to her) that Amtrak allow my father to sit on the lower level of the train because he was no longer able to safely climb or descend the stairs.
• In 2012, when my youngest son, who was working at a movie theater, called to tell me that, after he heard that the chain’s management had moved The Sessions, a film based on Mark O’Brien’s essay, “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” from the first floor accessible theater to an inaccessible upstairs theater, he had called the Los Angeles headquarters to let them know that they were moving the film back to the first floor theater.

It is beautiful that the ADA has been used to:

• Enshrine the rights of people with disabilities to receive public support and services in the community, instead of institutions, pursuant to the Olmstead decision;
• Keep families together (see the National Council on Disability’s 2012 report on the rights of parents with disabilities, Rocking the Cradle);
• Ensure that online streaming videos (see the case that DREDF brought against Netflix) include captions so that people who are deaf and have hearing loss also benefit from and enjoy their content;
• Promote inclusion in school for children with diabetes through a state supreme court opinion that determined that trained personnel or volunteers who do not hold a medical license can administer insulin in schools. The decision also means that people can remain in their homes and have attendants administer medication, instead of being driven into a medical facility; and
• Spark the enactment of disability rights laws around the world, and be a model for the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

There are so many more remarkable outcomes that I could add to this short list (I invite you to add to the list by using the Comments feature) and undoubtedly there are more to come. I am excited to see how disability rights advocates and activists, in the tradition of the 504 protestors and everyone who worked to pass, implement and enforce the ADA, will use it to expose and eliminate lingering discrimination, increase opportunity and secure equality for people with disabilities.

About the Author
Susan Henderson joined DREDF in 1997. In addition to her executive director responsibilities, she directs DREDF’s Parent Training & Information Center, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education. In 2004, she started DREDF’s Foster Youth Resources for Education (FYRE) project to heighten awareness and protect the rights of children with disabilities in the child welfare system. In 2007, she established DREDF’s Disability and Media Alliance Project (D-MAP) to address the misinformed disability coverage that undermines public policy and legal advances to coverage that raises public awareness and helps to end disability discrimination. She works internationally with other disability-led organizations to conduct workshops on disability and human rights in Bahrain, Columbia, Guam, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam.

Susan worked for 13 years as part of the cross-disability team that planned, designed and constructed the Ed Roberts Campus (ERC), a universally-designed building in Berkeley, Calif. She currently serves as the president of the ERC board. She has worked in non-profit and law firm management and finance for over 20 years and has an MBA and a BA in Anthropology.

• Senator Tom Harkin, Remarks at an Event Honoring the History and Legacy of Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller, Berkeley, California, September 3, 2014.

This article originally appeared in Disability Blog