ADA Enforcement Is Tough Sledding

by Kevin Burton

   I let the 33^rd anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act pass July 26 without writing anything about it. Why?

   It was partly because I ran out of time, as I was preparing to travel to the Beep Baseball World Seies in Oklahoma.

   But it was mostly because I couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say about it. I couldn’t find any “news we can use” to give us hope that disabled citizens will be looked at as anything other than, “other.”

   Most of what I found was proclamations and, remembrances, technical documents, boilerplate.  I didn’t find anything that a disabled person could point to as a comfort in a job search.

   For example, here is part of a press release from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

   “The EEOC today released an updated technical assistance document, “Visual Disabilities in the Workplace and the Americans with Disabilities Act,” explaining how the ADA applies to job applicants and employees with visual disabilities.”

   “The document outlines when an employer may ask an applicant or employee questions about their vision, how an employer should treat voluntary disclosures about visual disabilities, and what types of reasonable accommodations those with visual disabilities may need in the workplace. The updated document highlights new technologies for reasonable accommodation, many of which are free or low-cost, and describes how using artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms to make employment decisions can impact individuals with visual disabilities.”

   The release goes on in that vein. It is fine as far as it goes.

   I don’t know what the changes were from the old to the new document. I’m not sure what any of the changes could possibly do, to make a sighted hiring manager take the whole thing seriously, if she is not inclined to do so.

   I’m not sure how to make the ADA leap from a book on a shelf into the real world.

   I get news stories about ADA lawsuits all the time. I can’t run them all. The news trickles in and the beat goes on.

   Most recently it was United Airlines and Dollar General. Somebody is suing them because parts of their websites are not compatible with the software that blind people use to read.

   The first story of this kind that I ever posted on Page 7 was about Domino’s Pizza (“Domino’s Indifference Leaves Bad Taste,” Aug. 27, 2019). I’ve stopped following up on these stories because they wind ploddingly through the courts, probably toward some small-to medium sized cash settlement. What good has it done?

   One story I found is exactly two years old. I have a strong suspicion that not much has changed in those two years and that not much is going to change in the next two.

   Michael Hingson, author of the book “Thunder Dog: The True Story of a Blind Man, His Guide Dog, and the Triumph of Trust.” told CNBC in 2021 that the business community has a long way to go to achieve accessibility.

   “There hasn’t been a lot of improvement. There’s been some,” Hingson said. He said one challenge to improving accessibility on the internet is simply its vastness. Hundreds of new websites are created every minute.

   “Websites are proliferating much faster than accessibility can even be made available to them, because it’s all usually done by manual programmers who do one website at a time,” said Hingson, who is blind.

   There are many issues relating to access even on the “most supposedly accessible sites,” Hingson said. Over the weekend, for example, Hingson said he tried to buy something on a major online website and “all I found were links that went to images and there was no description of them.”

   It’s ironic that United is in the news now because it is adding braille signs to its airplanes. Braille can be found on a dozen planes and will be added to all the rest by 2026, the company said.

    But how will blind people get onto United planes if they can’t book flights because the website is inaccessible?

   If you have a taste for cardboard with tomato sauce, Domino’s Pizza can be ordered on the phone. So it’s illegal and annoying but ultimately not tragic that the website is flawed.  But that says nothing for the hundreds of other personal and professional tasks the disabled are blocked from by inaccessible websites.

   Of course the ADA is not the only law that looks better on paper than it does in real life. Laws prohibiting racial discrimination are routinely ignored.

   My hope for this belated ADA anniversary story is that someone will alert me to some good news on this subject that I have missed.