Thirty years ago today, July 26, I was a little boy living in Asmara, Eritrea. I was living my life in the shadow of what would become a thirty-year armed struggle for independence from Ethiopia, with the safety and security of my family still under constant threat amid a near-daily cacophony of sound and vibration reminding one of the ongoing war. Meanwhile, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became the law of the “land of the free”. With Eritrea still mired in conflict and unable to provide me with the essential tools to succeed and thrive, and with the promise of a new dawn for disabled people, my family brought me to California to begin a new life a world away.
Although unknown to me until my third year of high school at Skyline High in Oakland, the ADA played a crucial role in the accessibility of public places, which contrasted in radical ways from my country of origin. But I took it for granted, having come to America in the post-ADA years. I had assumed that what I was experiencing – Braille signage at the BART station, TTYs,
Braille books, etc. – was part of being an American. Yet, I felt both an immense sense of gratitude to be in America and a feeling of guilt that disabled Eritreans have to endure lack of access, discrimination, isolation. One day I am going to bring America’s pioneering civil rights legislation for disabled people back home to Eritrea and perhaps inspire hope and change, I thought to myself.
But while the ADA paved the way for equal opportunity and equal justice for Americans with disabilities, my strong faith in equal access began to unravel during my high school years. I was denied tactile sign language interpreters, forcing me to communicate with teachers using a noisy Perkins Brailler, slate and stylus, the Teletouch, Tadoma and other ineffective communication approaches that I was using since the beginning of my educational journey in America up until receiving interpreting service. Initially, I accepted the fact that my high school would not provide interpreters, until a teacher in the Hearing Impaired Program” explained that educational equality is mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the equivalent of a civil rights legislation for America’s disabled kids, and encouraged me to assert my rights by writing to the school district. The school eventually relented and hired interpreters.
But it was one day while practicing orientation and mobility that the ADA’s severe limitations became apparent. That day in late 1999, I was riding BART with my instructor when I suddenly wondered how I would know which train I got on. In the past I had thought there’s somehow a way, because this is America. I felt the same when I encountered a TTY, in case I needed to call my mom to pick me up. But on this day, I was dismayed to learn that neither of these expectations were realized: I got on a wrong train, and I had to scramble not only to find but also be able to establish communication with a hearing person to call mom for me. This experience forced me to reckon with the unsettling reality that there’s no such thing as equal access, at least not yet.
In the years immediately after high school graduation, I encountered more and more barriers to equal access. I could not find gainful employment and become self-sufficient, both because I didn’t receive an appropriate education despite the honest efforts of my teachers, who themselves lacked appropriate resources to provide proper instruction – particularly math and science –, and physical and attitudinal barriers in the larger world. I quietly fought hospitals, corporations, colleges, and even government agencies (whose duty it is to serve and protect people) just to live an ordinary life, with at least some access. And I wanted everyone else to live an ordinary life, with independence. Why spend every day of my existence contending with barriers standing in my way and the people who, having taken for granted the essential things for which I have to struggle daily, perpetuate them? Indeed, these taken-for-granted things are not the consequence of my disability – just as being Black isn’t a price one should have to pay for racism, nor is being female a woman’s fault for gender discrimination and misogyny – but the result of society’s systematic and deliberate exclusion of disabled people. There’s no denying that the ADA has led to significant progress for people with disabilities generally, but certain segments of the disability community continue to suffer a great deal of discrimination and neglect; to them, the ADA is progress only insofar that it recognizes and protects their rights mostly in words but not in deeds.
Ten years ago today, I was invited, as part of a small group of deafblind adults, to the White House to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the ADA. At the same time, the House of Representatives was debating passage of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), which I had helped push for its enactment earlier in the summer through a national petition campaign and later witnessed its signing by President Obama in October of that same year. Together, these events provided me with a heightened sense of optimism. I felt that the days of struggling to even effectively communicate with my own family over the telephone or face-to-face would finally vanish. I thought America finally recognized the human dignity of a deafblind person. The years ahead seem promising in terms of equal access. A deafblind man who grew up in a small and poor African country meeting the President of the United States seemed to presage a moment in which the government and America’s business community came together to unleash the power of technology to address the inaccessibility of society.
But fast forward to 2020, even the CVAA, as important as it is, represents only another forward step in the advancement of true accessibility. By merely providing funding for the distribution of communication technological products, whose prices are exorbitant by the standards of the general public, without addressing the giant gap in access to modern technologies between deafblind people and the general population through funding for research and development, Congress and the FCC have essentially failed to live up to both the letter and spirit of the CVAA, just as America continues to fail to fulfill the promises of the ADA. Consequently, communicating with others over the telephone and even the Internet remains highly ineffective at best.
Moreover, titans of the technology industry such as Apple, Google and Microsoft have been extolling the value of accessibility for years. Yet, their products and services continue to exclude deafblind people by emphasizing one-size-fits-all solutions like audio-enabled products. Do these technology giants, with their massive wealth and immense power over our lives, truly care about universal access, or does profit continue to take priority over what should be a moral imperative for society at large: to value life and to recognize the worth in each and every human person? A couple million dollars, otherwise being thrown multiple times by any one major corporation at a political campaign every couple months, could go a long way towards advancing accessibility. Corporate America should give back by investing even just $5 million on the deafbl population to make the most impact on an entire neglected community, instead of trying to influence a political campaign that may not succeed.