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THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT: BEYOND THE ADA Story by Craig Collins
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efore he was a 50-year veteran of the disability movement, an executive, and a board member, John Kemp was, among other things, a kid in a wheelchair. Kemp, president and CEO of The Viscardi Center, a nonprofit network that provides lifespan services and advocacy for people with disabilities, was born without lower arms or legs, and when he was younger it was difficult to plan outings. He never knew whether he’d be able to enter the building he wanted to visit: Most other people lived, literally, on a higher plane, and though it was a difference of only a few inches, it might as well have been a mile. “We always did a drive-by,” he said. “That’s how we learned whether we could get into a place. We’d either call someone who’d been there, or we’d drive by it. Prior to 1990, we had no expectation of accessibility when we traveled or moved about our communities.” Of all the obstacles confronted by people with disabilities in society, one of the most immediately conspicuous is the inability to simply move around: to access a world designed and built by other people. It was one of the first obstacles to be addressed amid the disability rights movement; in 1961, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the nonprofit organization that
oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards, created the first set of guidelines to ensure that individuals with disabilities would be able to enter and use public facilities. In 1968, Congress made these standards mandatory for federal facilities with the Architectural Barriers Act (ABA), the first federal effort to ensure access to the built environment. The ABA’s enforcement provisions were weak, and Section 502 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was, in part, an attempt to strengthen them by creating an independent board to take charge of designing and enforcing accessibility standards. As groundbreaking as they were, the Rehabilitation Act’s standards applied only to facilities owned, leased, or funded by the federal government. The results, said Kemp, were underwhelming. “A study of that law showed that almost 90 percent of the buildings failed to comply with the Architectural Barriers Act and Section 502,” he said. “So wherever we went, we found hotels that had barriers everywhere, restaurants with barriers everywhere. People were literally isolated, and limited in what they could do.” The story of America’s disability rights movement is full of grim ironies that perfectly illustrate this point: As activists with disabilities became more outspoken about
their lack of access, authorities often encountered – as if for the first time – the difficulties they faced every day. Several of the activists arrested and sentenced to probation for staging a protest in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in March 1990 to persuade House leaders to vote the ADA out of committee and bring it to the floor found themselves unable to report to their parole hearing, because the office, administered by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, had no wheelchair ramp. The court officer had to meet with the activists outside. Titles II and III of the ADA restate and expand the federal mandate for access. Title III’s general rule, which mandates equal access to public accommodations, is stated with forceful eloquence: “No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation.” The Expectation of Access A quarter-century later, American society is undeniably more accommodating, says Kemp. “The passage of the ADA, the changing of transportation systems, real enforcement of the building code, the expansion
