Access Has Been Improved; Social Attitudes Lag Behind

In A Recent Book on the Civil Rights of the Disabled, the "recent book," What We Have Done, documented the creation of the Americans With Disabilities Act as a nationwide campaign for better access for people with mobility problems and other physical disabilities. That is one of the nation's great achievements. The United States has become one of the most advanced nations in, for example, providing wheelchair access in architecture and transportation.

Yet stigma and social discrimination still keep millions of disabled people on the margins. For example, previous posts have discussed news articles on the discrimination against people with cerebral palsy here, here, here, and here, among others. The pervasive discrimination against people with cleft palate is discussed in many posts.

Randy Rutta observes that as the 25th anniversary of the ADA approaches, disabled people still suffer from significantly higher unemployment rates compared to the rest of the population:

The unacceptable unemployment situation for adults with disabilities is a troubling irony as the nation prepares to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The landmark civil rights legislation, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990, outlawed discrimination on the basis of disability.

He describes the areas in which the disabled were marginalized and disenfranchised at the time of the law's enactment:

The text of the law laid bare the hurdles that people with disabilities faced at the time. "Discrimination against individuals with disabilities persists in such critical areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting, and access to public services," the law said.

The ADA established the nation's goals for individuals with disabilities "to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals."

And Rutta notes that not just access, but "discrimination and prejudice" present barriers to equality for the disabled:

The law affirmed that discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete. But it also recognized the huge societal downside of keeping people with disabilities on the margins — workplace discrimination costs the country billions of dollars resulting from dependency and nonproductivity.

It is significant that in What We Have Done there are dozens of examples of ways in which the ADA has improved physical access, but the book does not mention people with cleft palate, whose primary problem is discriminatory social attitudes, not access.