So, My name is Michelle ..... I am a social psychologist and teach at .......... College in psychology and biomedical humanities program and I just wrote a book on Abilism the causes and consequences of disability prejudice. My first memory and I'll just back up and say in 1990, when the ADA passed I was in graduate school, in Kansas, and disability prejudice, the ADA or anything related to disability issues were completely off my radar, and I worked at a place where one of the pioneers of disability studies worked, Beatrice Wright, and I had yet to have a class with her. It really wasn't until 1995, which was five years later, when my daughter was born, Sierra, with spina bifoda, that I became aware of disability and found the work of Carol Gill and Simi Litton and began to educate myself on disability studies and its scope, and the first memory I have of confronting inaccessible spaces was a few years later, when we enrolled my daughter Sierra in a preschool, at a Catholic preschool, right down the road; and it just didn't even dawn on me that we would have to work so hard for her to be accommodated as a preschooler, and it was really a function of the fact that the building was older, there were steps, and they really didn't know, nor did they need to legally know, about reasonable accommodations and civil rights of their students, because they were a private facility and weren't subject to the ADA's rules. So it became clear to me that we needed to find a new preschool, and luckily we found another private place - it wasn't a public school - but it was a music school settlement and they had resources and they were already operating under a sort of set of presumptions about the value of diversity and diverse perspectives, and we didn't really have to ask for much, because they bent over backwards to include my daughter in a typical classroom, with her peers, her preschool peers, music classes, there were so many eclectic-- movement classes, and they even purchased equipment for their exercise room and movement room that would be useful to her among others, and she has since grown up to become this teacher and has applied to work there as a preschool teacher, so I think it would be really amazing if she came full circle, but I guess to answer the broader question about being frustrated and aware of inaccessibility and lack of inclusion, we were in a district that, when she then was about to move to preschool, I knew that she probably wouldn't be able to go to a private school, not only because of the financial cost but also because they would not have to think about best practices and the law when it came to accommodating their students with disabilities, and so I knew we would be looking at the public school, and the public school in our neigbourhood was not accessible. We went to visit it, the playground had a little house that she wouldn't have been able to get into, and it was really disheartening and so it came at a time when we were already looking for other opportunities, and my husband got an opportunity to move us as a family to the West Coast of Portland of Oregon, so the way I-- so the way we had to navigate her early educational experiences was to only look at spaces and schools that were in districts that were new, so that had buildings and had training in terms of accommodating their diverse students and their disabled students, because just having the brief experiences that I did with the preschool and IEP meetings that were going to require me to fight at every juncture for her basic rights to show what she knows and participate and recognize herself as a valuable contributor to the school community. We're not going to be forthcoming without a fight, and so we narrowed our search to a district, and thank God we had the opportunity and the resources to do this, that was pretty known for their inclusivity. We did that also when we came back to the Cleveland, Ohio area. We were able to avoid all districts that weren't at the cutting edge of full inclusion and proof of excellence and had newer buildings that could accommodate those with disabilities, but I guess that that was my earliest memory of how, 'Oh, we have a road ahead of us and we have to take it upon ourselves to either continue to fight battles that had already been won, legislatively, or, finds spaces, places and organizations that were ahead of the curve in terms of implementing, monitoring and just execute the basic civil rights of their various constituents The impact that all of that has had on me is to just be able to communicate with other parents and students with disabilities about not only knowing their rights but knowing how to get those rights how to advocate for ensuring that those rights are addressed, are met. I think the ADA has made a huge difference and the 'ah ha' moment was even when I was collating information for this book on disability prejudice, I realised that when I was a kid, when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, people with disabilities weren't able to do any of the things that we took for granted as kids- go to the movies go to restaurants, go to visit a friend, at a friend's house, or invite others to your birthday parties. Since the ADA passed in 1990, it wasn't an immediate set of changes, as, there has been significant progress made, particularly in public spaces and in employment settings, where there are even employers who are part of an organization of inclusive excellence, who recognize that disabled employees are actually more reliable and have less turnover and are worth investing in and promoting. But, there are still so many places, small businesses, educational institutions that are not carrying out basic gains and practices that the ADA has made possible there's just way too much variation, and I think part of that is just a lack of education in terms what is reasonable and what is necessary in terms of accommodating your citizenry and lack of resources in some cases but also a lot of misinformation about whether or not it's worth it. The ADA is going to be 30 here in July. We're celebrating all over the country and we are still fighting for businesses to do what they should have done 30 years ago, those that have been around this long. They have not, they have have waited for complaints or they have failed to do but the bare minimum in terms of recruiting the largest minority I work in the education sphere and to me, we could be doing so much more with advertising and recruiting for those kinds of students that we tend to really, at least my institution, do well to retain because we're a small, intimate college Hiram College. For years I've tried to encourage us to consider more universally designed approaches but also approaches that do more when it comes to housing and extracurricular accommodations for students to who use mobility devices. For example, my daughter ended up having to be carried in her chair, to various club meetings while she was on the Hiram College campus. She was told that, during the winter, when the ice storms came, that they couldn't transport her up the long hill, while they were telling everyone else to walk like a penguin, and we had vans to do this. We had to file with the Ohio Disability Rights Commission and request that the school thinks about other ways of accommodating her should there be a storm, an ice storm, and she can't get up to campus. And the solution was to have her move to a new dorm. You can't just do that over night. You can't just move all your bedding and all your bathroom supplies and your whole... you know at the moment's notice, when the weather changes and so it has been my experience that still a lot of places have done the bare minimum approach and think that that's all they need to do when instead, they could be following more of the latest practices and implementation's science and making it easier for people to register register concerns or complaints.