Accessibility and Ed Tech

Lawsuits work.

Failure to provide accessible technologies for learners with disabilities can have serious consequences for universities. Many institutions have been sued in recent years for noncompliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act, ratcheting up pressure around accessibility issues. As a result, some universities are thinking about how they might work together to test the technology they buy and make sure it is accessible to all.

What would have been nice is if universities had cared about accessibility without being sued. Even nicer if Congress wasn't threatening to take this tool away. 

The Bipartisan History of Disability Rights

Yesterday I wrote on the Endrew F. v Douglas County decision from the Supreme Court. It's powerful and could make a real difference in special education in this country. In the meantime, though, even as the decision was being handed down, ADAPT (a direct action disability rights group) was occupying the Capitol Rotunda, chanting, and eventually being arrested. I wrote a piece about SCOTUS, Gorsuch, and ADAPT, while remembering all the ways that disability rights can and should be bipartisan.

For decades, Democrats and Republicans have come together to pass legislation and support regulations to make America more inclusive for people with disabilities. Not only did a Republican president (George H.W. Bush) sign the ADA in 1990 after it passed with overwhelming majorities, but the same congress and president easily reauthorized the Education for the Handicapped Act and renamed it IDEA. A Republican congress reauthorized the same bill under President Bill Clinton, in 1997. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed the ADA Amendments Act, passed by a Democratic congress, which explicitly expanded ADA protections to people with mental disabilities. President Barack Obama signed a law permitting some disabled people to work and save money without jeopardizing access to benefits, and another encouraging integrated work opportunities for disabled people. These were both passed by huge margins in the otherwise highly partisan 113th and 114th congresses.

Read the whole piece here.

Berkeley Takes Down Videos over ADA Violations

Berkeley is claiming that they have to remove a lot of online videos because captioning them all would be too expensive.

To which I say: Please build accessibility into everything you do. Deaf people, in fact, have the right to learn. And please don't blame disabled people when your lack of foresight means you're in violation of the law.

Also, Inside Higher Ed - Berkeley is the mothership of the Independent living movement. There are disabled profs and organizations you should have, and could have, contacted for comment here.

Discrimination on the Anniversary of the ADA

"Only hotel guests can use the accessible door."

Logo of the ADA 25: 1990-2015.
From http://www.adalegacy.com/

It's 11 at night on the 25th anniversary of the ADA and the four of us have just arrived at the W Washington hotel. They have a spectacular bar on the rooftop with a view looking out over the White House and a gloriously illuminated city. After a hot and humid day, the air is a little cooler at night, and the car from the Kennedy Center, where we had just celebrated the signing of the ADA and heard from leaders and felt the strength and power of our community. It ended with the fabulous Diane Schuur playing a short set, and her "Louisiana Sunday Afternoon" is still ringing in my head.

S, one of my companions, directs our driver around to the side door where she knows its more accessible. L and M, the other two, have physical disabilities and, after a long day, would find it much less painful to avoid going up steps. From this door, we can just walk through straight to the elevators and up to the bar. Honestly, I need a drink.

And the security guard says no. He says the door is closed. We sputter a little, looking at each other, wondering if this is really happening. One of us, probably M, speaks first, saying that we need the accessibility this door provides. At that point, accessibility should be a magic word, but instead the guard hardens his commitment to compliance. We each speak, hesitantly, then more forcefully, trying to get the guard to realize he's making a mistake. On tonight, of all nights, to this group of four - journalists, writers, performers, disability rights experts - he just doesn't do this. He asks, "Are you guests of the hotel," and we reply that we are not, but want to go to the bar (it's a bar open to the public, of course, so this is not unreasonable).

His reply is that only hotel guests have the right to accessibility.

M has had it. Despite the pain it causes her, she literally runs around the corner, up the steps, and right at the desk. I trail behind, just in case she needs anything, but not to get in her way or play abled savior. She does not need my help. Outside, the guard opens the sacred door, seems M at the desk, and perhaps realizes he's messed up, and just lets L and S in.

At the desk, the manager on duty apologizes for the inconvenience, to which I reply, "it's not inconvenient, it's illegal."

This is discrimination. It's a micro-aggression, the small acts of control that an ableist society asserts over people with disabilities. And it matters. It shows us that the ADA may be great and powerful, and it is, but we have a lot of cultural to do before this kind of denial of accessibility, when explicitly invoked, becomes unthinkable. 

I've called the hotel for a comment and we'll see what they say.

Updated with tweets from L and M (used by permission)

SHAME ON @WhotelDC! Went there to celebrate last night after #ADA25 @kencen & They REFUSED to let us use accessible entrance! @LCarterLong

— Maysoon Zayid (@maysoonzayid) July 27, 2015

@maysoonzayid @WhotelDC @kencen Turns out they'd never heard of #ADA25. Not Inconvenient, Illegal...! @Lollardfish @Waelkyrie

— Lawrence Carter-Long (@LCarterLong) July 27, 2015

Prison Abuse and Assistive Techonology - Two Stories from Public and Private Prisons

In Fresno County Jail, in California, a for-profit prison doctor is accused of taking away an inmate's wheelchair as retaliation for complaints. The details are not proven, but here's the story (via TPM):

Daniel Trebas hasn't had an easy time in the Fresno County jail. The convicted sex offender has served his punishment, plus about 15 extra years after he was deemed mentally disordered. And after seven years in a wheelchair, he says a doctor ordered it taken away as retaliation for his previous complaints against her.
Jail staff overrode the doctor's order and gave it back after 37 days, and then a detective started digging into whether his rights were violated. What he found, according to a search warrant Action News uncovered, was a man who was a victim of dependent care abuse whose medical records had been falsified and altered.
"Was there fraud in covering up the fact that a wheelchair was taken away?" said ABC30 legal analyst Tony Capozzi. "And if it was taken away, was it for medical reasons or was it for some kind of punishment or retribution?"

It may or may not have happened, of course, but it would fit a larger pattern of wheelchairs and other assistive tech devices being seen as optional, as benefits, that one can strip away (for example - the blind child whose cane was removed by the school).

Then there's the recent story of the homeless deaf immigrant who was not provided an interpreter when arrested and jailed for weeks. He can't write in English (not that this matters - interpretation is a right, not a choice), so Abreham Zemedagegehu didn't even know why he was arrested:

He knew he was in jail, but he didn't know why.
Eventually, Abreham Zemedagegehu learned that he'd been accused of stealing an iPad — an iPad whose owner later found it. He spent the next six weeks in jail, unable to communicate with his jailers because he is deaf. He described a frightening, isolated experience in which medical procedures were performed without his consent and he feared for his safety.
Zemedagegehu sued the Arlington County sheriff last month in federal court, saying his treatment failed to meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
"I felt like I was losing my mind," Zemedagegehu said through an interpreter in an interview at his lawyer's office. "I thought Virginia would give me an interpreter and they said no. That's why I felt lost."
Zemedagegehu, who is homeless, is a U.S. citizen who was born in Ethiopia. He grew up using Ethiopian Sign Language. He has learned American Sign Language, but he has never learned more than rudimentary written English.

Note: In jail for a stolen iPad that wasn't actually stolen.

Assistive technology must be treated by authorities, whether for-profit prisons or state agencies, or companies that don't do business with the state (see this piece), as integral parts of the body. They cannot be removed or withheld for punishment,  or because it's inconvenient, or even (in the context of state services like arrest and imprisonment) because it costs money. This is the power of the ADA.

Sheehan vs SF: Waiting on Transcripts

Oral arguments for Sheehan vs San Francisco will begin at the Supreme Court in a few hours (it's the

second case of the day). It will provide the opportunity for the court to do a number of things.

Here are the questions before the court:

Whether Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires law enforcement officers to provide accommodations to an armed, violent, and mentally ill suspect in the course of bringing the suspect into custody; and

Whether it was clearly established that even where an exception to the warrant requirement applied, an entry into a residence could be unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment by reason of the anticipated resistance of an armed and violent suspect within.

What might the court do? They could ...

1. Affirm or severely limit the protections of the ADA for people with disabilities as they apply to policing.
2. More clearly define the limits of qualified immunity (the Fourth Amendment issue).
3. Carve out a narrow ruling that sends the case back to the Ninth Circuit and doesn't establish wide precedent either way.

Three, I think, is the best we can hope for. I am not a lawyer nor a Supreme Court expert, but I did talk to a lot of lawyers, though, previewing the case for Al Jazeera America yesterday. I argued: "This case will determine to what extent police can be held accountable to the best practices of their profession." Please consider reading and sharing my piece.

There are best practices. The police did not follow them. Their claims as to the "public safety" risk that Sheehan presented consistently run counter to the facts, but the law in fact allows them to make up what a "reasonable officer" might have imagined, even if neither officer at the time believed it. 

Here's a very useful preview, especially in its summary of the US Government position on the ADA. My emphasis:

The United States’ ADA argument asks the Court walk a line between the Petitioners’ and Respondent’s arguments. Title II requires officers to provide reasonable accommodations during the arrest of mentally disabled individuals. Yet, if objective evidence causes concerns about public or police safety, then it might not be reasonable for police to provide accommodations (i.e., delay immediate entry to arrest). In those situations, safety can outweigh accommodations. And despite the importance of safety, the United States refused to make the safety exception ironclad, arguing that a plaintiff “should remain free to show that special circumstances rendered a modification reasonable.” (U.S. Amicus Br. 7.) For this case, the United States asked the Court to pass on rendering judgment on the reasonableness of the officers’ actions by instead remanding the case to the Ninth Circuit to determine whether Respondent, who would bear the burden of proof establishing that “special circumstances” were present, was owed reasonable modification despite the safety risks she posed.

In terms of the ADA, that's pretty much what I hope for. That the court affirms the right of a person like Sheehan to argue that she was owed a reasonable accommodation. I'd prefer a much stronger position from the government and for the court to enhance the power of the ADA, but I don't expect that.

More later once the transcript is up. Also, I continue to maintain it is ludicrous that SCOTUS isn't live-streamed.