Contributed by Jim McCarthy, Executive Director, MDTAP
As a program challenged to enhance awareness of and availability to assistive technology for people with disabilities and their families, MDTAP has had many opportunities to participate in commemorations of the Americans with disabilities Act 25th anniversary. Participating in these events compels me to think about the relationship of the ADA and assistive technology. At passage of the ADA, I used a typewriter in school to write papers and did the same for the first half of my first year in law school. From that time to the present, assistive technology has undoubtedly changed my life for the better.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is the most important and far reaching civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities. The ADA prohibition against discrimination improves the access of people with disabilities to public places, government programs, transportation systems and more. With the passage of these 25 years of ADA, we are more likely to see curb ramps, braille labeling on elevators and floors in public buildings, talking Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) at banking locations, just to name some obvious examples of the changes.
It appears to me that developments in assistive technology and implementation of ADA requirements have both resulted in more integration of people with disabilities into the fabric of America, but that these have not always worked harmoniously. Like technology as a whole, assistive technology develops at a rapid pace, though law is slower to recognize and incorporate this development. To remedy discrimination against people with disabilities, the ADA requires that those providing services or programs make reasonable accommodations; basically alterations in their programs of services when a person with a disability seeks the program or service that allow the person to avail herself of that service. In physical access, access for someone who uses a wheelchair, we do not think it is sufficient to offer a strong person to lower someone and her chair into the street at the curb and lift them up to the curb on the other side. For much of the history of the ADA until the last 5 years, the same was not true for a blind person who wanted money from an Automated Teller Machine. That individual needed to find someone to read the screen to her or perhaps memorize the sequence of prompts for one regularly used machine.
Upon passage of the ADA in 1990, Telecommunications devices for the Deaf (TDDs) were mandated to facilitate telecommunications between people who were deaf and those who were not. Today, real time text and several other better methods of telecommunication are made possible through technology and yet many entities still offer their TDD phone numbers. Cassette tapes are a relic of another time but many still assert them to be a viable option for providing information to people who are blind. I do not mean to suggest that the ADA in fact supports either of these but it is asserted by some to support such outdated solutions, solutions assistive technology has rendered obsolete.
Perhaps the largest divergence between what technology makes possible and what the ADA permits is the issue of the World Wide Web. The ADA is a broad anti-discrimination mandate. However, the role played by the web was unknown and unanticipated at passage of this legislation. Today, the web contains characteristics of a public accommodation though it is not a place one physically enters. Should that lack of being a brick-and-mortar establishment mean the ADA does not apply to it? Actions taken by the United States Department of Justice and results in a growing body of litigation hold that the ADA does apply to the internet but the government continues to delay a regulation clearly stating the ADA applies as fact. As this delay continues, the gulf between what assistive technology makes possible and what the ADA in fact requires will grow even greater. Thus, there is much to celebrate but we are reminded there remains work to do in a quest for equality of people with disabilities.
