August 6, 2021
The ADA and Accessibility
July 26, 2021, marked the 31st anniversary of the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, better known simply as the ADA. At its core, the ADA is a civil rights law, prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in a variety of areas: employment, public entities (programs run by governmental bodies), public accommodations (shops, restaurants, schools, transportation, etc.), telecommunications, and more. While it is far from a perfect document, it was a critical step along the path of creating institutions and communities that are accessible for all people.
Because “disability” can affect such a wide range of characteristics (vision, hearing, mobility, mental health, sensory processing, cognition, executive function, etc.), accessibility must take many forms. For someone who uses a wheelchair, accessibility includes curb cuts, ramps, and lifts. For someone who is blind, accessibility includes crosswalk buttons that talk and the bumpy tiles along the side of train platforms. Accessibility is ensuring people can take their service animals into coffee shops, broadcasting TV shows with captions, creating “quiet rooms” at large conventions, giving students multiple options to demonstrate learning, and so much more.
When a an educational institution, workplace, or program is not fully accessible to an individual, they are legally entitled to accommodations. An accommodation is a way that a non-accessible process, facility, or item is adapted to make it more accessible to a specific individual or group. Accommodations are relatively small fixes that are made to an established system, rather than a complete overhaul or redesign to make things accessible more broadly. While accessibility measures are usually proactive, accommodations are reactive, and some may only partially or temporarily meet the needs of an individual. Therefore, disability justice advocates support building accessibility into everything we do from the beginning, a framework known as Universal Design.
To learn more about disability and accessibility in academic fields, I encourage you to read one of these articles and consider how it applies to your role at SAFS. What can you do to make your class, lab, or project more accessible? What adjustments would help make SAFS a more accessible place for you?
- “Between a rock and a workplace”, an article about structures and cultures that routinely impede the success of people with disabilities in academia, from Nature Geoscience.
- “Make It Safe for Employees to Disclose Their Disabilities”, an article with recommendations for improving workplace culture for people with disabilities, from Harvard Business Review.
- “6 Ways to Dismantle Barriers for Disabled Faculty on Campus” from The Mind Hears, a blog by and for deaf and hard of hearing academics.
- “Expanding American Sign Language’s scientific vocabulary”, an article about the language barriers facing deaf and hard of hearing scientists, from Chemical & Engineering News.
If you are a student in need of disability accommodations, apply through the UW Disability Resources for Students page; you can read about the process here. If you are a staff or faculty member in need of disability accommodations, visit the UW HR Disability Services Office website; you can read about the process here.
If you are interested in learning more about accessible technology, visit the Accessible IT page from IT Connect. From there, you can find information ranging from how to use various accessibility tools to creating accessible course materials. Another excellent resource is DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology), which works on “advancing the success of people with disabilities in education, research, & careers” and is home to The Center for Universal Design in Education.
For more accessibility resources at UW in general, DSO has a list of available services and information.