I'm Dr Karen Sacs, I'm a professor
and Chair of the Department of Administration, Rehabilitation
and Post Secondary Education at San Diego State University.
I've been here for almost 30 years now, but I started my career
as Special Education Teacher.
And, the first year that I taught,
was the first year that my students were ever allowed
into public school,
because of the severity of their disabilities.
A law was passed in 1975, that allowed students
with very significant disabilities, for everybody to be able
to come to public school.
And that was the first year that I started teaching.
And we were in a small building, with about 40 students,
and a bunch of us, new teachers
trying to figure out what to do with all these kids
from ages 5 to 22, who first stepped foot into public school.
So when I was teaching, this was far before the ADA was passed,
I learned a lot about the lack of accessiblity.
In fact, with the students I was teaching,
I started teaching the older students, the teenagers,
and I didn't have a whole lot of time with them in school
because they've just started.
And I realized that they needed
to learn how to access their community,
They needed to learn how to get jobs,
they needed to learn all those life skills
because you had so short time with them.
And in my school district
they had people whose job was to look for jobs for students,
so they were 'job developers' of sorts, and when I asked
for a job developer for our school,
I was told that we wouldn't be getting one,
because our students couldn't work.
And, as you can imagine,
that just motivated me to figure it out.
Because I knew that my students could work.
And so I started going out and meeting
some of the business people in the neighborhood,
and they introduced me to other business people,
I started learning how to talk to employers,
which was nice, something I learned
in my Special Education Program, learning to be a teacher.
And I found that, my students of course, could work.
and I appealed directly to employers,
and they helped me learn the ropes of how to do all of this
and I started teaching my students
how to ride the bus,
and how to figure out some kinds of accommodations for them
to do jobs, and it was so exciting
when a student got a job
and found something that they liked to do
and that they were good at.
And we had parents who never in a million years had thought
that their sons and daughters could work, and yet
they saw them being successful
and parents who were very nervous about
having them involved in the community
were so excited, they became of course our biggest advocates
for expanding this educational program.
And so I found that no matter where I went
I was trying to raise awareness and more importantly,
raise expectations
about the students I was working for
and well, working with.
When I came to San Diego State,
it was to really look at how we could use assisted technology
to connect people with disabilities
whether they were going to school, getting jobs,
accessing their community in any way.
So assisted technology really became an area I was focused on
and we had a couple of federal grants
that funded me, funded me and other colleagues
to develop some community partnerships
to support the development of assisted technology
so this was in the earlier days, I think the ADA had just passed,
the communities were opening up,
employers were becoming more aware,
and we started getting people from the community
really interested in helping us to make modifications,
to help individual access the work that they wanted to access.
And so I started teaching a course around the applications
of assisted technology,
I co-taught it with an engineering faculty member
and we had students from Special Education, from Rehabilitation,
from Englineering...
we also had people from the community,
we had occupational and physical therapists, speech therapists,
we had people who sold equipment,
we had different kinds of engineers who took the class,
and we all sort of long together
what the possibilities were when we made a good match
with people with disabilities
and an assisted technology that connected them
to the activities that they wanted to do.
And we found out that made such a huge difference
and it gave people control over their lives.
And one of the activities we did in the class
was to do the ADA Accessibility Survey
and this was so eye opening for me and for my students
and for people who were in our community,
who were working with us.
So we would have students go out and conduct the survey
and find out how accessible -or not-
their local neighborhoods were.
They went to retail places,
they went to restaurants,
and hotels, and any kind of places
that they might want to access in their neighborhoods
and what we found is, for all of us,
we just never looked at a place the same way.
And having that ADA Accessibility Survey as a context,
and as a guide to help us look at where we could make changes
because part of the assignment
was not only taking the survey and finding out what was good
and where people could make improvements,
but also to do the advocacy,
to bring that awareness, and to make sure that people realize
that they have a whole market out there
that they hadn't thought about.
And in order for that market to access their businesses,
they needed to make it more accessible.
So it was a really exciting and, to this day, I still teach the class,
and I still do the ADA Accessibility Survey, and luckily
things have gotten better and we've seen a lot of improvements,
but we always find things that can be improved.
So I have seen many positive changes,
both in physical access to buildings,
but also access to electronic and digital communication
and that's a big one that has made a huge difference.
I think that what happens often is,
we don't think about these considerations up front.
That all too often is after the fact.
even at the university, whenever
they're introducing new software, new technologies, new platforms,
that we're using,
I always ask upfront
what about the accessibility?
and it used to be that the answer was always, inevitably...
"we'll get to that."
"We'll get to that later"
I've seen that change and people are really looking
at the accessibility issues upfront.
But I think that really happens... needs to happen more.
And the idea of universal design has to be thought of upfront,
And it's much more inclusive
it's also much more cost effective.
And so I think getting into the mindset of people upfront
and I've had the chance to work
with architecture students, for example, and being able to
introduce them to individuals with disabilities has given them
insight that it's not about compliance
it's not just about compliance and going with the codes.
But once they've met people
who were accessing the community in different ways,
it helped them think about design in a new way.
And it encouraged them to consider their creativity
in how to make their designs,
whether these were buildings, or outside landscapes,
whatever it was, that they should make those
more accessible for a wider range of people.
What I'd like to see, is disability
firmly planted in the diversity discussions.
I think, all too often
the diversity discussions,
particularly that are happening now, often leave disability
out of the equation.
And disability crossings over intersects with every other identity
whether it's gender, age, ethnicity....every aspect
you'll find people with disabilities.
And in fact, any of us can join
the disable group, at any time and most of us will at some point
in our lives. So I think
being able to think proactively and holistically about disability...
is really critical and it has to be forming part of those conversations
that we're having about diversity.