Hi, I'm Beth Haller.
I'm a professor of Mass Communication at Towsen University in Maryland.
I also teach Disability Studies there and at several other campuses.
I teach at City University of New York and their Disability Studies programme;
I teach at York University in Toronto and their Disability Studies programme;
I teach at University of Texas, Arlington and their Disability Studies minor.
So I've been doing research since the early 90's
about media representations of people with disabilities.
So I have a kind of unique relationship to the ADA
because I did my dissertation on how the news media covered it.
So before I went to Temple University in Philadelphia to get my PhD,
I was at University of Maryland College Park getting my Masters.
I started that in 1989,
and there's a reason for all these numbers (laughs) these dates,
and in 1988 is when the Deaf President Now movement happened
that gathered at university in DC, and I think somewhere in the back of my mind
I knew about what was happening because I was a journalist before I became academic.
So when I started at College Park in 1989 I ended up doing an article for a class
about a deaf student at Gallaudet and I got very interested in the deaf community,
there's a huge deaf community in the DC area.
Doing my Masters thesis on how the deaf community was represented
before, during and after Deaf President Now
in the New York Times and the Washington Post,
that was a jumping-off point.
When I left College Park it was 1991 and so the ADA had just been passed
and when I got to Temple to start working on my PhD
I knew that I wanted to still work in the area of disability
and we just had this major disability rights law passed.
I remember it more as a focus of my research
cause I don't necessarily remember seeing the actual coverage on the day it happened
in 1990, but I do remember looking at all the coverage cause that was the subject
of my dissertation.
So it was really interesting to look at it as an academic
and to kind of watch it happen and then not happen (laughs)
as it moved into the future.
So my dissertation looked at how the mainstream news media,
you know, all the big news magazines and the major newspapers back then.
So I finished my dissertation in '94, graduated in '95
so it was very early days of the ADA so it wasn't really being implemented yet
because they gave several years for people to get into compliance
but as the years have passed it's been very interesting to watch how things
weren't happening.
And I think what we all thought was going to happen was:
Congress was going to pass this major disability rights law
and people would then follow it because it's now federal law
not to discriminate based on disability
but that isn't what happened (laughs).
And from a media standpoint, that really kind of hurt ADA because-
and I've even had this conversation with disability rights scholars and
disability rights activists- because they I think thought
in that same way that it's now law and everything will be fine,
and there was such a history of being covered in the media so badly
that the activists thought they could get this past and everything would be fine
and they didn't need the media for anything.
So I come onto the scene, I start going to Society for Disability studies,
meetings in the early 90's, started presenting my research
and even the disability community in those first early years right after the ADA
didn't understand why the media was important.
Because I remember presenting at a conference,
at a Disability Studies conference, and people coming up to me and saying
"That's really nice that you do work on media, but we have bigger things we
need to be dealing with: getting people jobs, getting people proper education
getting people out of nursing homes." My response to everybody was
"How do you think you're going to do that if you're not getting out information
into public opinion, so if you're not able to change public opinion
how can you get these things accomplished?
And how do you get public opinion changed? You get a proper narrative
going in the media." And now there's actual disability studies, research
and disability activists who've talked about this in the early 2000's
about how they took the wrong tactic after the ADA was passed
and decided that when it was passed it would get enforced.
"Yay we can move on." Unfortunately the business narrative
came into the mix and they controlled the message that was in the media.
And so from quite a number of years after the ADA was passed,
it wasn't being enforced because there was this narrative in the news media
that it was an unfunded mandate and "Well, we never saw a person with a
disability in our store, why do we have to do all this stuff?"
Well of course, the reason they didn't see a person with a dis- as a wheelchair user
in their store is because it wasn't accessible, or nobody came to their
website because it was inaccessible (laughs) but they didn't get that.
A lot of the journalists didn't know people in the disability community
and the disability community was very wary of the news media
because they'd done such a bad job, but any news coverage in my opinion is better
than no news coverage usually (laughs).
And so the business community really took over the narrative and had this really
negative perception of the ADA that was funnelling into the media,
and then people just didn't know about it cause it wasn't getting covered that much.
There was a national poll done, I believe in, like, 1995, of Americans
about what they knew about the ADA and other disability rights issues.
Only 18% of Americans in 1995 had even heard of the American Disabilities Act
if I'm remembering the stats right.
To me, that is the fault of not engaging with media to do stories about that,
and I know it's very difficult.
Even today I know it's difficult to get the media to do a more complex, policy,
legal, government related story about disability
and not one of those inspiration narrative stories,
but it's still worth fighting to try to get those stories into the media.
And the other data point I would say, what I always tell my students when we're
talking about the ADA: the ADA's enforcement depends on who's
in the White House.
So we had quite a number of Republican Presidents
who did not care about the ADA being enforced for, like, 8 years,
so that is why it really only got more enforced when Obama became President.
There's a lot of external factors that meant that the ADA
was not going to be changing things as radically as we would have hoped,
or what we were thinking back in 1990.
The ADA has had impact in more recent years since President Obama
came into office and it was just getting enforced.
I use a lot of these example in my class, of news stories about the ADA
finally being implemented.
A couple that I use, one is about a little city in Pennsylvania.
The headlines of a lot of ADA stories, still, I say they have this blaming tone.
"Things are expensive because of the ADA; things are closing because of the ADA."
I always tell my students that narrative should be flipped.
The story really is, "Why didn't this town in Pennsylvania comply with the ADA
for however many years, 20 years." So that, to me is the real story.
This one headline was about this town, I believe was Logansport, Pennsylvania,
the headline was, "They must pay $8 million" for some kind of ADA compliance
that they were finally going to do, I think in, like, 2008 or something.
And I'm like, okay that $8 million would have been a lot less
if they'd just been compliant back in 1992 like they were supposed to be compliant,
but they're still blaming the ADA.
But now I think people, the general public now knows a lot more
and I actually chalk a lot of it up to social media,
because now people are getting, not a mediated story through the news media
and some journalist or some newscaster.
They're actually on social media with people with disabilities
and see what their life is like.
And I know in the last couple of years when there was an assault on the ADA
and people in Congress were thinking about and the President was thinking about
figuring out a way to knock it out.
I saw lots of allies on social media because they were finally aware that there
was a disability rights law and they said it should stay, it should not be repealed,
and so I think the media have a lot of power,
and now that we have this very personal media of social media,
people get to know actual people with disabilities in their community
and they see the benefits of having things in braille or having captioning
or having wheelchair ramps, or just thinking about asking somebody before
you barrel ahead and create something that may be inaccessible.
So I think the general public is a lot more aware than they were in 1995
when only 18% of people had even heard of the ADA.
And even if they haven't heard of the ADA, they're in favour of disability rights,
and I think that one thing that came out of that survey, even back in 1995,
is that, they might have never heard of the ADA, but if you pose to Americans
the concept of disability rights then they agree with that.
They don't think people should be discriminated against just because they
need a ramp to get into a building or need a sign language interpreter
to apply for a job.
So I think there's a better feeling among the American public in terms of
understanding disability rights and making sure that everybody has equal access.
And also I think people now understand people with disabilities are them,
are their friends, are their family members, and so a lot of the hidden stuff
that was happening before the ADA where people with disabilities were being
hidden in their families, where nobody talked about it,
I even noticed that, in my teaching at Temple when I was a grad student,
that the younger generation, because a lot of them had grown up
in inclusive education, there was no shame they were proud to talk about their own
disability, their parent's disability, their sibling's disability.
I still remember a student, we had a discussion, actually one of my journalism
classes, and one student, she was talking about, her mother was fluent in sign
language cause both of her grandparents were deaf, so her mother's first language
was sign language even though she was hearing.
Another kid was like, "My brother has Down's Syndrome"
and he said it with pride.
So I think the cultural change that the ADA brought was really powerful too,
cause that is what gets you to the place, if you're a business person,
"Oh okay, maybe I should be more open to hiring somebody with Down's Syndrome
to work in my grocery store, or whatever."
So I think having that cultural change where people are now including
the disability community as part of the American citizenry,
then that is a very powerful thing, I think that the ADA did.
Yeah. If the ADA stays around, I think that's a really good part of our future
because it's a really good law. It was written really well,
and it just needs to be enforced at all times.
We learned about how it could be enforced in those 8 years that President Obama
was in office, and I think we can continue to learn that.
And the Justice Department and Department of Ed. and all the other federal agencies
that enforce it, I think the community knows how to reach them
and tell them to enforce things,
and people are even getting a little bit better, even the business community
understands now that people with disabilities are a major part of our
consumer culture, and now with the pandemic and everybody working online,
people with disabilities have been, can be the leaders.
They're the ones that have been doing the workaround to try to make a living
when they've not been able to go to an inaccessible building.
So I think the future is bright if we will listen to disabled people about
what the world needs to basically embrace everyone and accommodate everyone,
and it'll be a better future for everyone because we talk about the hidden benefits
of access for everyone, so think about all the people that use curb cuts
for their wheelie luggage and all the UPS guys that use curb cuts
for rolling their hand carts. All the bars that use closed caption cause they're loud
So everybody gets benefits from disability related access and I think it can only get
better, if people learn to trust that the disability community can lead us,
because they're the ones who are most innovative and entrepreneurial
about making sure that they can move forward in the most access-friendly ways.
I think there should be a lot more listening to people with disabilities
in the future cause they've already worked out the problems
that we're now dealing with in a pandemic.
I think they can help us build a future that's better for everyone,
whether you have a disability or not.
What steps can we take right now?
I think if you're not a person with a disability, being a good ally.
If you're a family member, being- helping to make sure that the person
in your family with a disability is empowered to be independent,
and giving them all the support they need.
If you're a person with a disability, making sure that the world
is accommodating to you.
And everybody needs to focus on making the world completely accessible.
A lot of people live in houses that cannot be made accessible,
and a lot of things were grandfathered into the ADA because they were built long
before the ADA existed, but there's other locations.
There's online, there's video chatting, there's all kinds of workarounds
that I think we can all embrace, and we got to quit whining about this stuff
because, I'm talking to you in the middle of a pandemic (laughs).
But I hear so many people complaining about things that I'm like, you know,
this is all good, we can all still be connected, it's fine,
and things are going to change, we need to learn to adapt.
People with disabilities can teach us how to adapt, and they have a major disability
rights organisation called Adapt as well (laughs).
So I think that's the key for all of us, is to start learning to roll with it,
learning to adapt and make sure that we're bringing everyone along
into this new world that we're going to have to fashion post-pandemic,
and that it's accessible to everyone, that we're all equal,
that we're making sure that supports and what people need are in place,
and then we can be a better community.
It's kind of a weird time to be talking about all this (laughs).
I mean, I know it's the ADA's 30th anniversary, I'm very glad that it's here
and still exists, but I really feel like we can use the model of the ADA
from 30 years ago as we move forward.
We're going to have to restructure so much of our world,
why not do it accessibly this time?
And I think the ADA can still give us guidance even though it's 30 years old,
I think it can, it was built to lead us into the future just like a lot of our
founding documents were, and I think if we look at the spirit of everything that's
been passed in the good way of giving people rights in this country
and we follow them, we will fashion the future of a place that's hopefully very
accessible and make sure that everybody has equal access to our world.