On Americans With Disabilities Act Anniversary, the Struggle Continues for Full Access and Inclusion

I was born one year and three days after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), so I’ve never known life without it protecting my rights as a disabled person. In fact, my mother, who is also disabled, reminds me often of how lucky I am to have grown up in a world so much more accepting and inclusive of disability than it was when she was growing up pre-ADA. And she’s right. The activists who fought to make the ADA a reality are my heroes and role models. I never take for granted the blood, sweat, and tears they poured into their efforts. But even as we honor and celebrate the milestone 30th anniversary of this landmark legislation, we need to acknowledge some hard truths about the work that lies ahead to fully realize its promise of equal opportunity.

When President George H.W. Bush signed the ADA into law on July 26, 1990, he declared it was time that “the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.” Looking back on the past three decades, I’d say this metaphorical wall of exclusion hasn’t so much crashed to the ground as it has been gradually crumbled by disability activists—especially multi-marginalized disabled people—and our allies, piece by piece, with much of it still standing.

I think it’s fair to assume that most Americans hold at least some understanding that people with disabilities are a protected group under federal law, but many have limited, if any, familiarity with what the ADA actually covers. It technically prohibits discrimination against disabled people and ensures access in all areas of public life—work, school, transportation, etc. Here’s the problem, though: you can legislate public access, but it’s not truly possible to legislate public attitudes.

In the years since Donald Trump has taken office, the disability community has been repeatedly subjected to attacks on our rights. But if asked to name Trump’s worst offense against people with disabilities, the vast majority of people will immediately point to the meme of him mocking a disabled reporter named Serge Kovaleski during a campaign speech. This incident happened in November 2015, and by August 2016, it was still considered the most awful thing Trump had done, according to a Bloomberg poll. As we near the end of this presidential term, the mocking meme continues to regularly make the rounds among both progressives and conservatives eager to point out Trump’s egregious inhumanity.

I can’t help but wonder, though, just how many of the people who have this meme at the ready to demonstrate the ills of this administration are aware of recent attempts to weaken or flout the ADA that had nothing to do with Trump himself. In 2016, Guillermo Robles, who is blind, filed a lawsuit against Domino’s because their website and delivery app wouldn’t work with his screen reader, a type of software that reads text on a computer or phone screen aloud. You’d think that Domino’s would have wanted to make the smart business moves of settling this lawsuit quickly and making their online ordering system accessible. Pizza and justice for all. Instead, they tried to escalate it all the way to the Supreme Court in 2019. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, fortunately solidifying the decision of lower courts that the ADA applies to website accessibility, but the whole situation is incredibly troubling. Instead of putting money toward adhering to the law and updating their systems, Domino’s found it preferable to essentially throw their money in the trash because they were so bent on intentionally continuing to shut out blind customers.

Another attempted attack on the ADA happened when the House passed the grossly misnamed ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017 (H.R. 620). The goal was to amend the ADA so that a person with a disability would be required to send written notice to a business in violation of the law due to inaccessibility, allowing the business 60 days to acknowledge the problem and another 120 days to merely start resolving it — essentially trying to eliminate consequences for breaking the law. This wasn’t exactly a reasonable change to the law when you consider that businesses have already had multiple decades to comply with it. Thankfully, Senator Tammy Duckworth rallied her colleagues to ensure that H.R. 620 wouldn’t pass in the Senate, but disability activists haven’t rested since, because threats to the ADA always remain.

So, did you know about the Domino’s case or H.R. 620? If not, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, nondisabled people are often unaware of the accessibility battles that the disability community endlessly fights. Here’s one of the hard truths we must acknowledge: These battles against barriers aren’t just playing out on the fields of big business and government; they’re also happening within social justice movements. In far too many cases, nondisabled progressives who champion civil rights and condemn discrimination, the same ones who frequently circulate the meme of Trump mocking the disabled reporter, have actually reinforced the wall of exclusion instead of helping to knock it down. As such, I’ve often felt that although I believe in and support progressive causes, they don’t always actively support the disability community.

Consider, for example, how the group who began the Women’s March didn’t meaningfully include disability in their platform until disability activists spoke up. Consider how, more recently, Black disabled people have had to speak out about exclusion within the Black Lives Matter movement because of a lack of broader understanding of connections between racism and ableism. And consider how disabled people — especially those who are multi-marginalized — have had to fight for our right to lifesaving care among attempts to ration and withhold it during the COVID-19 pandemic (a violation of multiple laws, including the ADA).

Thirty years after the passage of the ADA, it’s well past time for every level of our society to move beyond inaccessibility, exclusion, and discrimination toward disabled people. And while pushing society in this direction shouldn’t be the disability community’s load to bear, I know it remains up to us. So, on July 26, I’ll be celebrating the progress we’ve made in working toward this reality. And the next day, I’ll wake up and jump right back in to joining my community in the work we have left to fully realize the promise of the ADA.