WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.393 Hi, I'm Beth Haller. 00:00:02.393 --> 00:00:08.413 I'm a professor of Mass Communication at Towsen University in Maryland. 00:00:08.413 --> 00:00:12.872 I also teach Disability Studies there and at several other campuses. 00:00:14.344 --> 00:00:18.643 I teach at City University of New York and their Disability Studies program; 00:00:18.643 --> 00:00:23.049 I teach at York University in Toronto and their Disability Studies program; 00:00:23.049 --> 00:00:26.990 I teach at University of Texas, Arlington and their Disability Studies minor. 00:00:28.290 --> 00:00:32.698 So I've been doing research since the early 90's 00:00:32.698 --> 00:00:35.579 about media representations of people with disabilities. 00:00:36.247 --> 00:00:39.178 So I have a kind of unique relationship to the ADA 00:00:39.178 --> 00:00:44.070 because I did my dissertation on how the news media covered it. 00:00:44.070 --> 00:00:48.464 So before I went to Temple University in Philadelphia to get my PhD, 00:00:48.464 --> 00:00:52.963 I was at University of Maryland College Park getting my Masters and 00:00:55.266 --> 00:00:57.762 I started that in 1989, 00:00:57.762 --> 00:01:01.182 and there's a reason for all these numbers (laughs) these dates, 00:01:01.182 --> 00:01:05.527 and in 1988 is when the Deaf President Now movement happened 00:01:05.527 --> 00:01:10.648 at Gallaudet University in DC, and I think somewhere in the back of my mind 00:01:10.648 --> 00:01:17.289 I knew about what was happening because I was a journalist before I became academic. 00:01:17.289 --> 00:01:24.733 So when I started at College Park in 1989 I ended up doing an article for a class 00:01:24.733 --> 00:01:29.529 about a deaf student at Gallaudet and I got very interested in the deaf community, 00:01:29.529 --> 00:01:31.760 there's a huge deaf community in the DC area. 00:01:31.760 --> 00:01:36.009 Ended up doing my Masters thesis on how the deaf community was represented 00:01:36.009 --> 00:01:38.832 before, during and after Deaf President Now 00:01:38.832 --> 00:01:41.907 in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and it kind of 00:01:41.907 --> 00:01:44.621 that was a jumping-off point. 00:01:44.621 --> 00:01:50.551 When I left College Park it was 1991 and so the ADA had just been passed 00:01:50.551 --> 00:01:54.002 and when I got to Temple to start working on my PhD 00:01:54.002 --> 00:01:57.167 I knew that I wanted to still work in the area of disability 00:01:57.167 --> 00:02:00.720 and we just had this major disability rights law passed. 00:02:01.930 --> 00:02:05.766 I remember it more as a focus of my research 00:02:05.766 --> 00:02:11.423 cause I don't necessarily remember seeing the actual coverage on the day it happened 00:02:11.423 --> 00:02:16.773 in 1990, but I do remember looking at all the coverage because that was the subject 00:02:16.773 --> 00:02:18.663 of my dissertation. 00:02:19.463 --> 00:02:23.705 So it was really interesting to look at it as an academic 00:02:23.705 --> 00:02:28.530 and to kind of watch it happen and then not happen (laughs) 00:02:28.530 --> 00:02:30.463 as it moved into the future. 00:02:30.464 --> 00:02:36.014 So my dissertation looked at how the mainstream news media, 00:02:36.014 --> 00:02:40.762 you know, all the big news magazines and the major newspapers back then. 00:02:41.792 --> 00:02:45.607 So I finished my dissertation in '94, graduated in '95 00:02:45.607 --> 00:02:53.294 so it was very early days of the ADA and so it wasn't really being implemented yet 00:02:53.294 --> 00:02:57.769 because they gave several years for people to get into compliance 00:02:57.769 --> 00:03:04.221 but as the years have passed it's been very interesting to watch how things 00:03:04.221 --> 00:03:06.389 weren't happening. 00:03:06.389 --> 00:03:09.005 And I think what we all thought was going to happen was: 00:03:09.005 --> 00:03:12.420 Congress passes this major disability rights law and 00:03:12.420 --> 00:03:16.351 then people would follow it because it's now federal law 00:03:16.351 --> 00:03:18.833 not to discriminate based on disability 00:03:18.833 --> 00:03:21.979 but that isn't what happened (laughs). 00:03:21.979 --> 00:03:29.607 And from a media standpoint, that really kind of hurt the ADA because- 00:03:29.607 --> 00:03:33.744 and I've even had this conversation with Disability Studies scholars and 00:03:33.744 --> 00:03:37.525 disability rights activists- because they I think thought 00:03:37.525 --> 00:03:41.134 in that same way that it's now law and everything will be fine, 00:03:41.134 --> 00:03:48.242 and there was such a history of being covered in the media so badly 00:03:48.246 --> 00:03:54.176 that the activists thought they could get this past and everything would be fine 00:03:54.176 --> 00:03:56.410 and they didn't need the media for anything. 00:03:57.150 --> 00:04:01.212 So I come onto the scene, I start going to Society for Disability Studies 00:04:01.212 --> 00:04:06.553 meetings in the early 90's, started presenting my research 00:04:06.553 --> 00:04:10.330 and even the disability community in those first early years right after the ADA 00:04:10.330 --> 00:04:14.487 didn't understand why the media was important. 00:04:14.487 --> 00:04:16.853 Because I remember presenting at a conference, 00:04:16.853 --> 00:04:21.244 at a Disability Studies conference, and people coming up to me and saying 00:04:21.244 --> 00:04:26.255 "That's really nice that you do work on media, but we have bigger things we 00:04:26.255 --> 00:04:30.885 need to be dealing with: getting people jobs, getting people proper education 00:04:30.885 --> 00:04:34.858 getting people out of nursing homes." My response to everybody was 00:04:34.858 --> 00:04:40.890 "How do you think you're going to do that if you're not getting out information 00:04:40.890 --> 00:04:44.310 into public opinion, so if you're not able to change public opinion 00:04:44.310 --> 00:04:47.396 how can you get these things accomplished? 00:04:47.396 --> 00:04:52.040 And how do you get public opinion changed? You get a proper narrative 00:04:52.040 --> 00:04:58.878 going in the media." And now there's actual Disability Studies research 00:04:58.878 --> 00:05:04.157 and disability activists who've talked about this in the early 2000's 00:05:04.157 --> 00:05:07.821 about, they took the wrong tactic after the ADA was passed 00:05:07.821 --> 00:05:12.400 and decided that, it was passed it would get enforced. 00:05:12.400 --> 00:05:18.741 "Yay we can move on." But Unfortunately the business kind of 00:05:18.741 --> 00:05:23.811 narrative came into the mix and they controlled the message that was in the 00:05:23.811 --> 00:05:28.348 media and so from quite a number of years after the ADA was passed, 00:05:28.348 --> 00:05:34.372 it wasn't being enforced because there was this narrative in the news media 00:05:34.372 --> 00:05:38.559 that it was an unfunded mandate and "Well, we never saw a person with a 00:05:38.559 --> 00:05:41.518 disability in our store, why do we have to do all this stuff?" 00:05:41.518 --> 00:05:45.336 Well of course, the reason they didn't see a person with a dis- a wheelchair user 00:05:45.336 --> 00:05:48.651 in their store is because it wasn't accessible or nobody came to their 00:05:48.651 --> 00:05:51.933 website because it was inaccessible (laughs) but they didn't get that. 00:05:51.933 --> 00:05:56.570 A lot of the journalists didn't know people in the disability community 00:05:56.570 --> 00:06:00.621 and the disability community was very wary of the news media 00:06:00.621 --> 00:06:06.628 because they'd done such a bad job, but any news coverage in my opinion is better 00:06:06.628 --> 00:06:08.681 than no news coverage usually (laughs). 00:06:08.681 --> 00:06:14.475 And so the business community really took over the narrative and had this really 00:06:14.475 --> 00:06:20.431 negative perception of the ADA that was funnelling into the media, 00:06:20.431 --> 00:06:24.412 and then people just didn't know about it cause it wasn't getting covered that much. 00:06:24.412 --> 00:06:30.271 There was a national poll done, I believe in, like, 1995, of Americans 00:06:30.271 --> 00:06:35.133 about what they knew about the ADA and other disability rights issues. 00:06:35.793 --> 00:06:41.938 Only 18% of Americans in 1995 had even heard of the American Disabilities Act 00:06:41.938 --> 00:06:43.909 if I'm remembering the stats right. and 00:06:45.090 --> 00:06:51.859 So to me that is the fault of not engaging with media to do stories about that, 00:06:51.859 --> 00:06:53.359 and I know it's very difficult. 00:06:53.359 --> 00:06:58.523 Even today it's very difficult to get the media to do a more complex, policy, 00:06:58.523 --> 00:07:02.523 legal, government related story about disability 00:07:02.523 --> 00:07:06.875 and not one of those inspiration narrative stories, 00:07:06.875 --> 00:07:12.652 but it's still worth fighting to try to get those stories into the media. 00:07:14.181 --> 00:07:19.691 And the other kind of like data point I would say, what I always tell my students 00:07:19.691 --> 00:07:23.380 when we're talking about the ADA: the ADA enforcement depends on who's 00:07:23.380 --> 00:07:24.286 in the White House. 00:07:24.286 --> 00:07:28.825 So we had quite a number of Republican Presidents 00:07:28.831 --> 00:07:34.821 who did not care about the ADA being enforced for, like, 8 years, 00:07:34.821 --> 00:07:39.840 so that is why it really only got more enforced once Barack Obama became 00:07:41.357 --> 00:07:45.357 president. There's a lot of external factors that meant that the ADA 00:07:45.357 --> 00:07:49.791 was not going to be changing things as radically as we would have hoped, 00:07:49.791 --> 00:07:52.664 or what we were thinking back in 1990. 00:07:53.754 --> 00:07:59.921 The ADA has had impact in more recent years like I said since President Obama 00:07:59.921 --> 00:08:02.584 came into office and it was just getting enforced. 00:08:02.584 --> 00:08:09.732 I use a lot of these examples in my class, of news stories about the ADA 00:08:09.732 --> 00:08:11.733 finally being implemented. 00:08:14.173 --> 00:08:18.179 A couple that I use, one is about a little city in Pennsylvania. 00:08:18.184 --> 00:08:26.094 The headlines of a lot of ADA stories, still, are kind of I say they have this 00:08:26.094 --> 00:08:31.382 blaming tone. "Things are expensive because of the ADA things are closing 00:08:31.382 --> 00:08:35.233 because of the ADA." I always tell my students that narrative should be flipped. 00:08:35.233 --> 00:08:40.890 The story really is, "Why didn't this town in Pennsylvania comply with the ADA 00:08:40.890 --> 00:08:50.260 for however many years, 20 years." So that, to me is the real story. 00:08:50.260 --> 00:08:56.028 This one headline was about this town, I believe was Logansport, Pennsylvania, 00:08:56.028 --> 00:09:02.501 the headline was, "They must pay $8 million" for some kind of ADA compliance 00:09:02.501 --> 00:09:06.569 that they were finally going to do, I think in, like, 2008 or something. 00:09:06.569 --> 00:09:11.536 And I'm like, okay that $8 million would have been a lot less 00:09:11.536 --> 00:09:16.347 if they'd just been compliant back in 1992 when they were supposed to be compliant, 00:09:16.347 --> 00:09:19.168 but they're still blaming the ADA. 00:09:19.168 --> 00:09:24.433 But now I think people, the general public now knows a lot more 00:09:24.433 --> 00:09:27.539 and I actually chalk a lot up to social media, 00:09:27.539 --> 00:09:33.620 because now people are getting, not a mediated story through the news media 00:09:33.620 --> 00:09:35.784 and some journalist or some newscaster. 00:09:35.784 --> 00:09:39.632 They're actually on social media with people with disabilities 00:09:39.632 --> 00:09:41.826 and see what their life is like. 00:09:41.826 --> 00:09:45.937 And I know in the last couple of years when there was an assault on the ADA 00:09:45.937 --> 00:09:50.104 and people in Congress were thinking about and the President was thinking about 00:09:50.104 --> 00:09:52.621 figuring out a way to knock it out. 00:09:53.964 --> 00:09:59.270 I saw lots of allies on social media because they were finally aware that there 00:09:59.270 --> 00:10:04.919 was a disability rights law and they said it should stay, it should not be repealed, 00:10:04.919 --> 00:10:08.034 and so I think the media have a lot of power, 00:10:08.034 --> 00:10:10.942 and now that we have this very personal media of social media, 00:10:10.942 --> 00:10:15.522 people get to know actual people with disabilities in their community 00:10:15.522 --> 00:10:20.698 and they see the benefits of having things in braille or having captioning 00:10:20.698 --> 00:10:26.268 or having wheelchair ramps, or just thinking about asking somebody before 00:10:26.268 --> 00:10:30.351 you barrel ahead and create something that may be inaccessible. 00:10:30.351 --> 00:10:35.330 So I think the general public is a lot more aware than they were in 1995 00:10:35.330 --> 00:10:38.330 when only 18% of people had even heard of the ADA. 00:10:38.330 --> 00:10:43.012 And even if they haven't heard of the ADA, they're in favour of disability rights, 00:10:43.012 --> 00:10:47.802 and I think that one thing that came out of that survey, even back in 1995, 00:10:47.802 --> 00:10:53.430 is that, they might have never heard of the ADA, but if you pose to Americans 00:10:53.430 --> 00:10:57.946 the concept of disability rights then they agree with that. 00:10:57.946 --> 00:11:01.598 They don't think people should be discriminated against just because they 00:11:01.598 --> 00:11:06.648 need a ramp to get into a building or need a sign language interpreter 00:11:06.648 --> 00:11:08.218 to apply for a job. 00:11:08.218 --> 00:11:14.778 So I think there's a better feeling among the American public in terms of 00:11:14.778 --> 00:11:20.941 understanding disability rights and making sure that everybody has equal access. 00:11:20.941 --> 00:11:26.284 And also I think people now understand people with disabilities are them, 00:11:26.284 --> 00:11:33.455 are their friends, are their family members, and so a lot of the hidden stuff 00:11:33.455 --> 00:11:37.205 that was happening before the ADA where people with disabilities were being 00:11:37.205 --> 00:11:39.849 hidden in their families, where nobody talked about it, 00:11:39.849 --> 00:11:44.713 I even noticed that, when I started teaching at Temple when I was a grad 00:11:44.713 --> 00:11:48.836 student, that the younger generation, because a lot of them had grown up 00:11:48.836 --> 00:11:53.948 in inclusive education, there was no shame they were proud to talk about their own 00:11:53.948 --> 00:11:58.054 disability, their parent's disability, their sibling's disability. 00:11:58.054 --> 00:12:01.780 I still remember a student, we had a discussion, actually one of my journalism 00:12:01.780 --> 00:12:06.240 classes, and one student, she was talking about, her mother was fluent in sign 00:12:06.240 --> 00:12:11.040 language cause both of her grandparents were deaf, so her mother's first language 00:12:11.040 --> 00:12:13.202 was sign language even though she was hearing. 00:12:13.202 --> 00:12:15.812 Another kid was like, "My brother has Down's Syndrome" 00:12:15.812 --> 00:12:17.335 and he said it with pride. 00:12:17.335 --> 00:12:23.227 So I think the cultural change that the ADA brought was really powerful too, 00:12:23.227 --> 00:12:28.511 cause that is what gets you to the place, if you're a business person, 00:12:28.511 --> 00:12:34.758 "Oh okay, maybe I should be more open to hiring somebody with Down's Syndrome 00:12:34.758 --> 00:12:36.921 to work in my grocery store, or whatever." 00:12:36.921 --> 00:12:43.238 So I think having that cultural change where people are now including 00:12:43.238 --> 00:12:47.028 the disability community as part of the American citizenry, 00:12:47.028 --> 00:12:50.824 then that is a very powerful thing, I think that the ADA did. 00:12:51.343 --> 00:12:57.193 Yeah. If the ADA stays around, I think that's a really good part of our future 00:12:57.193 --> 00:13:00.668 because it's a really good law. It was written really well, 00:13:00.668 --> 00:13:05.278 and it just needs to be enforced at all times. 00:13:05.278 --> 00:13:10.648 We learned about how it could be enforced in those 8 years that President Obama 00:13:10.648 --> 00:13:14.858 was in office, and I think we can continue to learn that. 00:13:14.858 --> 00:13:19.018 And the Justice Department and Department of Ed. and all the other federal agencies 00:13:19.018 --> 00:13:23.018 that enforce it, I think the community knows how to reach them 00:13:23.018 --> 00:13:24.588 and tell them to enforce things, 00:13:24.588 --> 00:13:29.708 and people are even getting a little bit better, even the business community 00:13:29.708 --> 00:13:35.208 understands now that people with disabilities are a major part of our 00:13:35.208 --> 00:13:41.780 consumer culture, and now with the pandemic and everybody working online, 00:13:41.780 --> 00:13:44.594 people with disabilities have been, can be the leaders. 00:13:44.594 --> 00:13:49.370 They're the ones that have been doing the workaround to try to make a living 00:13:49.370 --> 00:13:53.167 when they've not been able to go to an inaccessible building. 00:13:53.167 --> 00:13:57.598 So I think the future is bright if we will listen to disabled people about 00:13:57.598 --> 00:14:03.482 what the world needs to basically embrace everyone and accommodate everyone, 00:14:03.482 --> 00:14:10.173 and it'll be a better future for everyone because we talk about the hidden benefits 00:14:10.173 --> 00:14:15.803 of access for everyone, so think about all the people that use curb cuts 00:14:15.803 --> 00:14:20.428 for their wheelie luggage and all the UPS guys that use curb cuts 00:14:20.428 --> 00:14:26.639 for rolling their hand carts. All the bars that use closed caption cause they're loud 00:14:26.639 --> 00:14:34.148 So everybody gets benefits from disability related access and I think it can only get 00:14:34.148 --> 00:14:39.206 better, if people learn to trust that the disability community can lead us, 00:14:39.206 --> 00:14:43.763 because they're the ones who are most innovative and entrepreneurial 00:14:43.763 --> 00:14:51.329 about making sure that they can move forward in the most access-friendly ways. 00:14:51.741 --> 00:14:55.860 I think there should be a lot more listening to people with disabilities 00:14:55.860 --> 00:15:01.179 in the future cause they've already worked out the problems 00:15:01.179 --> 00:15:03.977 that we're now dealing with in a pandemic. 00:15:05.530 --> 00:15:10.088 I think they can help us build a future that's better for everyone, 00:15:10.088 --> 00:15:11.856 whether you have a disability or not. 00:15:14.072 --> 00:15:16.217 What steps can we take right now? 00:15:16.217 --> 00:15:20.989 I think if you're not a person with a disability, being a good ally. 00:15:20.989 --> 00:15:27.339 If you're a family member, being- helping to make sure that the person 00:15:27.339 --> 00:15:31.382 in your family with a disability is empowered to be independent, 00:15:31.382 --> 00:15:34.423 and giving them all the support they need. 00:15:34.423 --> 00:15:38.116 If you're a person with a disability, making sure that the world 00:15:38.116 --> 00:15:40.306 is accommodating to you. 00:15:40.306 --> 00:15:50.287 And everybody needs to focus on making the world completely accessible. 00:15:50.287 --> 00:15:54.623 A lot of people live in houses that cannot be made accessible, 00:15:54.623 --> 00:15:59.431 and a lot of things are grandfathered into the ADA because they were built long 00:15:59.431 --> 00:16:02.844 before the ADA existed, but there's other locations. 00:16:02.844 --> 00:16:06.984 There's online, there's video chatting, there's all kinds of workarounds 00:16:06.984 --> 00:16:12.074 that I think we can all embrace, and we got to quit whining about this stuff 00:16:12.074 --> 00:16:15.719 because, I'm talking to you in the middle of a pandemic (laughs). 00:16:15.719 --> 00:16:21.167 But I hear so many people complaining about things that I'm like, you know, 00:16:21.167 --> 00:16:25.634 this is all good, we can all still be connected, it's fine, 00:16:25.634 --> 00:16:30.075 and things are going to change, we need to learn to adapt. 00:16:30.075 --> 00:16:36.404 People with disabilities can teach us how to adapt, and they have a major disability 00:16:36.404 --> 00:16:39.184 rights organisation called Adapt as well (laughs). 00:16:39.184 --> 00:16:46.560 So I think that's the key for all of us, is to start learning to roll with it, 00:16:46.560 --> 00:16:51.230 learning to adapt and make sure that we're bringing everyone along 00:16:51.230 --> 00:16:54.625 into this new world that we're going to have to fashion post-pandemic, 00:16:54.625 --> 00:17:00.237 and that it's accessible to everyone, that we're all equal, 00:17:00.237 --> 00:17:05.046 that we're making sure that supports and what people need are in place, 00:17:05.046 --> 00:17:08.819 and then we can be a better community. 00:17:09.680 --> 00:17:12.674 It's kind of a weird time to be talking about all this (laughs). 00:17:12.674 --> 00:17:17.764 I mean, I know it's the ADA's 30th anniversary, I'm very glad that it's here 00:17:17.764 --> 00:17:22.144 and still exists, but I really feel like we can use the model of the ADA 00:17:22.144 --> 00:17:25.438 from 30 years ago as we move forward. 00:17:25.438 --> 00:17:29.517 We're going to have to restructure so much of our world, 00:17:29.517 --> 00:17:32.369 why not do it accessibly this time? 00:17:33.567 --> 00:17:37.567 And I think the ADA can still give us guidance even though it's 30 years old, 00:17:37.567 --> 00:17:41.460 I think it can, it was built to lead us into the future just like a lot of our 00:17:41.460 --> 00:17:47.390 founding documents were, and I think if we look at the spirit of everything that's 00:17:47.390 --> 00:17:51.300 been passed in the good way of giving people rights in this country 00:17:51.300 --> 00:17:58.674 and we follow them, we will fashion the future of a place that's hopefully very 00:17:58.674 --> 00:18:04.565 accessible and make sure that everybody has equal access to our world.