…To the ADA, whose sixteenth Gordon K mentioned in comments. Because I never pay attention, I didn’t notice the date even though I just spent a long time searching up information and blog posts on the ADA’s fifteenth anniversary, one year ago today. Of course.
Blue at The Gimp Parade has a post up, with a link to a story about disability in the world of tomorrow:
There’s a short story that further illustrates this need for a paradigm shift. In a fictional utopia of disability inclusion in the year 2050, a historian tells the awakened Crip Van Winkle how things have changed:
All conveyances, public or private, for transportation by land, air, sea and cyberspace, for individual or collective travel are naturally covered by the Universal Design principle. You don’t seem to understand, van Winkle, the United States of Europe officially abolished Apartheid in the year 2024 — 30 years after South Africa but better late than never. Since then, Universal Design has been the law of the land and the international sign of access that you guys were so proud of, is forbidden. It singles out and stigmatizes a particular group of citizens. Besides, it is not necessary anymore — I guess it never really was necessary. Already in your day and age it would have been better to mark the places that were inaccessible in order to point out the full extent of the injustice. By using the symbol of access you did yourself a disservice, because the symbol served as an alibi for the accepted norm of inaccessibility emphasizing the exception rather than the rule.
She also links to this post, which is the one I was attempting to find for the post about ignorance vs. hatred:
But in the current print edition of New Mobility (other portions of that issue viewable at the link), Mark E. Smith of wheelchairjunkie.com describes a situation the law was designed to stop, where lack of wheelchair access fueled the rationale of exclusion and exclusion fueled the bigotry that belies the patronizing belief that all people just want to help the disabled if only given the chance.
Only a few months before the ADA’s 1990 passage, Smith, his future wife, and three other couples went for dinner at a restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area. Smith’s friends easily carried his wheelchair in the inaccessible front entrance, but the hostess refused to give Smith a menu or even speak directly to him:
“If he wants to eat here, you’ll have to order for him — we don’t serve people like him.”