Rights of people with disabilities
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Yesterday, July 26, 2024, marked the 34th anniversary of the day the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law.
The ADA is the greatest policy victory in history for Americans with disabilities. But it often feels like a well-worn theme, or even a well-worn law. Despite its relevance to this day, the Americans with Disabilities Act is always in danger of becoming mythologized, sentimentalized, trivialized rather than revolutionary.
The ADA has always been difficult to enforce consistently, which makes it difficult for most people with disabilities to personally feel that the ADA works for them. It is also a relatively easy law to ignore, which is why people sometimes complain that the ADA is “powerless.” The ADA has not brought any tangible improvement to the lives or economic prospects of people with disabilities. We still frequently encounter physical barriers in our communities. Employment rates for people with disabilities, although improving in recent years, are still significantly lower than those for people without disabilities. To see what has improved under the ADA, one must be deeply involved in disability issues and have a sharp historical perspective.
Perhaps the value of this law has always been educational and aspirational. The ADA is something we feel, remember, and unite around. Its standards shape our practical disability awareness mindset. Even the ADA’s flaws and weaknesses help us focus on what we still have to accomplish as people with disabilities and their allies. The ADA is now classified as an old law, with a record of subtle changes and seemingly little to accomplish. But even after 34 years, there are three things we can learn from the ADA:
1. The record of equity for people with disabilities is broad but shallow.
Accessibility is now a recognized requirement and priority in the construction of commercial and public buildings. People generally expect ramps and elevators where there are stairs, wide, easy-to-open doors in stores, and handicapped parking spaces in offices and major retailers. On the contrary, people with disabilities and able-bodied alike tend to take the accessibility of restaurants, stores, and public buildings too much for granted. We are often shocked when we realize that our neighborhoods are not always as accessible as they should be. It is both a sign of true progress and a sign of naivety. When accessibility becomes even the slightest inconvenience or expense, people can be quick to oppose it. Lawsuits against inadequate accessibility are still widely despised and often ridiculed. And corporations and politicians who oppose any kind of regulation still frequently aim to weaken or repeal the ADA.
Similarly, few people would openly argue that wheelchair users, blind people, or deaf people should be automatically excluded from standard clerical jobs, or even from many blue-collar and service-industry jobs. Meanwhile, many of the same people who reject formal, blanket disability discrimination seem to see little contradiction in complaining about reasonable accommodations offered to disabled employees in their workplaces. Certain disabilities are wrongly viewed as disqualifying people for all but the most menial jobs. And when previously successful and respected employees show signs of a new chronic illness, mental health problem, or physical disability, their value and competence can be instantly called into question.
Accessibility and equal opportunity are widely accepted as not just nice things, but essentials. This is in large part thanks to the ADA. But as we look around today, we realize that this instinctive belief in fairness for people with disabilities is still not very deep or strong. The ADA is important. But it has its limitations.
2. People still don’t fully understand key ADA concepts like “accessibility” and “reasonable accommodation.”
Accessibility itself is still widely misunderstood: companies tend to treat the ADA accessibility guidelines as the gold standard of accessibility, rather than the minimum accessibility that it is meant to be, and people still think primarily of wheelchair accessibility, with sensory, communication, and cognitive disabilities often being overlooked or even forgotten.
“Reasonable accommodations” are even more misunderstood and overlooked. Executives at large companies may understand the basics and procedures for reasonable accommodations; it’s part of their job. But employees with disabilities often find that their coworkers don’t understand workplace accommodations and see them as special favors or undeserved perks. And sadly, a process that was originally meant to be an open, honest, and collaborative conversation between employers and employees with disabilities about practical, achievable accommodations has evolved into a restrictive, exhausting, and demeaning bureaucracy for most employers.
It’s never too late, or too early, to revisit the fundamentals of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is a living law, and in 2024 there is ample room to return to a more humane, collaborative, and generous ethic that welcomes people with disabilities as customers, employees, and fellow Americans.
3. Diverse disability coalitions around a unified goal are possible and powerful, but rare.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, the broad and diverse disability community came together to push for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This law was not the brainchild of any member of Congress or any president, including the president who signed it. From start to finish, it was written primarily by people with disabilities and their organizations. People with physical, sensory, intellectual, learning, and psychiatric disabilities worked together to negotiate a major civil rights bill filled with ambitious and stringent requirements. They did so in a Congress that was deeply rooted in the deregulatory mood of the 1980s. The passage of the ADA was a remarkable achievement by any measure and a noble act by many members of Congress, but it was only because people with disabilities worked together to make it happen.
Decades later, a similar disability coalition came together in 2017 to defend Medicaid and Medicare from proposed deep cuts. Their success is as great and materially valuable an achievement for Americans with disabilities as the passage of the ADA. More recently, small teams of disability activists have also achieved many targeted, incremental victories on issues such as home care funding, subminimum wage, employee benefits, and internet accessibility.
But these victories are the exception. Today, people with disabilities are truly united and aligned on very few issues beyond the most basic goals of respect, opportunity, and physical access. There is currently much less agreement between people with disabilities and disability organizations than you might imagine. The disability community is divided on issues such as:
Issues of freedom and equality; about the role of nursing homes, group homes, sheltered workshops, and sub-minimum wage wages; life-defining issues like abortion and assisted suicide; funding priorities and resource allocation; where disability issues and people with disabilities fit within broader ideologies of left, right, and center; how disability intersects with race, gender, sexual orientation, economic and social class.
Also, many disability issues affect certain segments of the disabled population but not others: people with physical, intellectual, visual, hearing, speech, learning and mental disabilities often have different, and even conflicting, priorities.
Finally, disability issues are no longer as bipartisan as they were at least 30 years ago. We seem to be in a time of growing awareness but rare and small victories. That’s not all bad — small victories are better than none. But it shows that achieving an outcome of the scale and impact of the ADA requires a level and scope of cooperation among people with disabilities that isn’t easy or frequent.
The lesson of the Americans with Disabilities Act is that it remains a political and social achievement worth celebrating. But we can’t take it for granted, nor can we just pat ourselves on the back every July. We need to keep talking about the ADA, explaining its concepts and requirements to new generations of people with and without disabilities alike, defending it from attack, and doing our best to increase its reach and effectiveness.