Basics:
The Disability Rights Movement
One of the things that I found critical in my early years as an advocate for my kids was learning about the Disability Rights Movement. It seems abstract I guess, but the way it came about for my family was pretty specific. This starts with a story:
My youngest daughter was 4 years old when Barack Obama was elected president. Like many Gen Z kids, his presidency was a major part of her childhood. Unlike most of the kids in her generation, however, my daughter loved Barack Obama to a pretty intense degree. It was cute at first, but it was also a little scary. She watched every State of the Union address and was really excited about the idea of citizenry and civil rights.
Remember those emails where if you donated you could get to have a picnic with the Obamas? Let’s just say that she had me read her one of these emails and thought it was a legit invitation and it made things *really* rough for me for a few weeks, lol. (also donated what I could whenever I got those emails in a silly attempt to make it happen – it did not)
During this same period of time, my daughter really started to butt heads with words and she was evaluated for a learning disability. As expected, she had both a writing and reading disability (what is commonly known as dygraphia and dyslexia) and her school’s staff plugged her into reading remediation therapies and suggested that she use two specific assistive technologies (AT) to support her while the remediation was happening. Those ATs were a laptop to write her thoughts and ideas instead of paper and ear reading.
In dyslexia support groups, we work to unify the concept of reading – eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading are all reading. In the US school system, kids in second grade and under are focused on learning to read and reading mastery. In third grade and above, kids are expected to know how to read and they use that reading to learn. Reading is so critical, that kids who cannot read by third grade are fundamentally held back from learning. That’s why ear reading is such a critical skill for dyslexic students – it helps bridge the gap between their eye-reading abilities and their brain’s totally functional ability to learn new things.
These new assistive technologies were a problem for my daughter, who was always hyper-aware of her peers’ perceptions of her. There is no way to hide from other third graders that you have a laptop when everyone else has a notebook. When it’s reading time and you pull out headphones when everyone else pulls out a physical book – kids are going to notice.
As a result, she flat-out refused to use her AT. But she still had dyslexia, so her abilities to write on paper and eye read were still extremely poor and kids noticed that too. Her behavior at school started getting intense. She hid under her desk and started throwing things and crying when the teacher tried to engage her in reading or writing.
I tried a lot of different things to get her on board with using her AT – we listened to podcasts and audiobooks in the car. I stopped using my own handwriting outright, grocery lists became digital and I printed out school lunch love notes. I used chat apps to chat with my 9yo on her Chromebook to encourage her to use it – there were a lot of emojis. They all helped a little bit at home, but nothing could convince her to use these things in school.
Until Barack Obama gave a speech that somehow referenced the Disability Rights Movement. I don’t remember what he said anymore, but it was a real lightning rod of an idea to put the love of my daughter’s life (Barack Obama) in line with what she needed to do (start using her assistive technologies at school so she could keep up with her peers).
The answer was an education in the Disability Rights Movement.
It seems kinda silly saying that because the Disability Rights Movement had already done so much for her. The IDEA is what ensured that she got that evaluation in the first place, and it outlined what process the school had to follow for her IEP (Individualized Education Plan), how to chart her growth, and what the expected standard of care was. Section 504 and the ADA also helped her by making it easier to find and acquire accommodations and set forth the rights afforded to her as an American citizen with a disability.
But those are some pretty abstract concepts for an elementary student. 🙂 So instead I focused on some more tangible tidbits of information. I’m sharing some of them with you because I think they are important concepts to help us understand what our place is in accessibility.
Tidbit #1: The Disability Rights Movement is directly tied to the Civil Rights Movement.
- The historic Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court case that uprooted the segregated education system set a precedent that public school is for everyone. This NPR story (audio only) tells the story of one of the students impacted by a case that followed Brown v. Board.
- The Disability Rights Movement used methods from the Civil Rights Movement to push for their own equality, justice, and inclusion. I really like this article from the Legal Defense Fund that goes into detail about the two movements connection.
- There is so much internalized ableism built up into our concept of disability sometimes that it’s hard to see the forest through the trees. Putting the Disability Rights Movement into the context of the Civil Rights Movement can better help us break down our own internal barriers to understanding.
Tidbit #2: People with disabilities fought for their civil rights, they were not given to them:
- Section 504 was not signed into law until the “504 Sit-In” and the work of early leaders of the Disability Rights Movement. Kitty Cone gives her first-hand account in this article and goes into detail about how big of an impact Section 504 had on Americans with disabilities.
- The ADA was stalled until a group of activists took part in the “Capital Crawl”, where they crawled up the steps of Congress to symbolize their struggles and to force Congress to act. You can read from this first-hand account of the Capital Crawl here.
- I think this is critical for email marketers to understand: we are not *giving* people with disabilities anything when we make our emails accessible. We are helping brands follow the laws and regulations people with disabilities have already fought for and won. We are not being charitable to people with disabilities, we are adding value to the emails we create.
Tidbit #3: A rogue band of disabled students at Berkeley built their own curb cuts.
- Absolutely love this story both in its guerilla response to institutional injustice, but also in the community this group built for themselves. You can read more about Ed Roberts and the Rolling Quads here.
- While we’re on the subject of curb cuts, they are a great example of how making something more accessible benefits everyone. This article breaks down the curb cut effect in some amazing ways.
- I love this story because again – people with disabilities have done the work here, they have shown us that these seemingly small things are important and that we, as allies, are following their lead, not forging the path.
Tidbit #4: Disabled folks protested for the right to accessible mass transit.
- My home city of Denver, Colorado was a focus of the Disability Rights Movement to get the city to create an accessible transit system, and they won. This in-depth article from the Denver Public Library explains the history of ADAPT in Colorado and the work that was done to convince leaders that accessible public transit was a civil rights issue.
- I also really love this trailer for a documentary about ADAPT, though it looks like the full film was never produced. (If you find it please let me know!)
- It’s important to note that while the Disability Rights Movement fought for and won the fight for accessible mass transit, there is still much work to be done. Only 124 of 492 transit stations in New York City are ADA-accessible.
Tidbit #5: A dyslexic man fought his employer in court for his right to accommodation.
- This story was particularly relevant to my daughter – Joe Stutts, a laborer in Tennessee who was denied entry into an apprenticeship program based only on his inability to pass a test. A test that when given appropriate accommodations, he could pass easily. He sued and won and ensured that future generations had the right to use their accommodations in the workplace.
- Ben Foss, the author of the Dyslexia Empowerment Plan, included this tidbit in his book and explained how it helped him accept his dyslexia and adopt accommodations while in law school.
Obviously, I didn’t dump all this on my 9-year-old in one go, but we started by talking about how people fought for her rights to use her accommodations. We talked about how using her AT and her accommodations are not cheating, and I worked hard to show her examples of “socially accepted” AT, like glasses, post-it notes, and pencil grips. (Yes! Your glasses are an assistive technology because you – a visually impaired person – are using them to accommodate your disability.)
By reframing the use of assistive technology into something bigger than herself, she was able to take these tiny steps toward her own independence and self-acceptance. (Well, that and her fourth-grade class was next to the music class so the teacher allowed all students to use headphones to block out the noise, which meant she could ear-read without anyone else noticing, lol)
I hope that learning some of these details about the Disability Rights Movement helps to reframe the work of accessibility for you. I know it did for me!
*I apologize for this post’s centering on the US Disability Rights Movement. I know some of the international laws (Shoutout to the CPACC Body of Knowledge!) but not a whole lot about the movement in other countries. I would strongly encourage you to take this as a challenge and starting off point to learn your own country’s history. And please share because I absolutely love learning about this stuff!
**I’m using the words accommodation and assistive technology somewhat interchangeably here so I thought I’d explain the difference. An accommodation is a “modification or adjustment to a job, the work environment, or the way things are usually done”, and that includes many different things like a sign language interpreter, physical adjustments like a ramp, *and* assistive technologies. So an accommodation is a broader modification or support and an assistive technology is a specific item that supports users with disabilities. Reminder that even though the word “technology” is in there, this doesn’t have to be plugged in – a post-it note, pencil grip, or pair of glasses are also AT.
