San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Fight for disabled people’s rights goes on
When Kayleigh Joiner reached out to read the sign on a bathroom at a Texas airport a few years ago, all she found was a meaningless jumble. Unsure whether she was outside the women's or men's entrance, she ran her fingertips over the sign to determine if the figure was wearing a triangular dress. Then again, on a work trip, Joiner realized the braille on her hotel fire extinguisher was upside-down and backward.
Growing up blind in Pearland in the 1990s, Joiner has observed change in her lifetime, but accessibility still sometimes falls short for people with disabilities. The signs might be there, but they might be incoherent. The bus might have lifts for wheelchairs, but the sidewalks leading there are cracked and broken.
“I want people to have opportunities that I necessarily didn't have growing up,” said Joiner, 28, the assistant program coordinator at the National Federation of the Blind of Texas. Joiner came of age alongside the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legislation that makes signs such as those mandatory.
Today marks 30 years since President George H.W. Bush signed the ADA into law on the White House South Lawn. The act was monumental at the time, and it aimed to solve the obstacles faced by people with disabilities in their day-to-day lives. The law bans discrimination in areas such as employment, public services and transportation because of a disability. It also requires government programs and services to be accessible to those with disabilities. For the estimated 61 million American adults, or 1 in 4, who are categorized as having a disability by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the ADA has helped this community enjoy the same rights and freedoms other Americans do — getting on a bus, working in an office, hearing a presidential speech or staying in a hotel.
Three decades later, advocates continue that fight.
“Although we've made great strides in many aspects of American life, there is still so much more work that we need to do,” said Gabe Cazares, director of the Houston Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities.
On Friday, the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of Texas announced settlements with five Houston-area property owners that had violated the ADA, and it said the properties will be monitored to ensure they comply.
This year alone, 4,751 ADA lawsuits have been filed nationwide, according to Chris Palamountain, an attorney at Seyfarth Shaw LLP's Houston office. The number is down from 2019, but Palamountain said that's likely because of the pandemic and that the numbers could rebound once businesses start to reopen.
While Palamountain said most recent lawsuits in Houston involve website accessibility, disability advocates in the city also focus heavily on transportation accessibility — and have for more than 40 years.
It's a story that is told often: In the mid-1970s, Lex Frieden and a group of young Houstonians with disabilities would get together and talk about the discrimination and challenges they faced. Every place they met, they were cultivating an idea to demand change.
“It happened on the back porch over a beer on Friday afternoon, it happened in the lunchroom on Wednesday after class, it happened in the yard outside the campus building at (the University of Houston),” said Frieden, who is now a professor at UTHealth.
Then came organized meetings at the back of an IHOP or a Denny's. Eventually, Frieden, who suffered a spinal cord injury after a car accident during his freshman year in college, and a group of at least 30 others decided to stage a public demonstration. They wanted to show how inaccessible public transportation, city buses, were for people with disabilities.
When Houston Mayor Fred Hofheinz was promoting the city's transit system in 1978 through free rides on city buses, Frieden and others lined up. Getting on and off the buses posed an issue for those in wheelchairs, and the camera crews didn't miss a beat.
“The mayor disappeared real fast,” Frieden said.
It took Houston 13 more years to get accessible buses, but when it did, Frieden said, it was one of just two cities in the country that made this kind of change.
Frieden's continued his fight on the national level, working on the National Council on Disability and a 1986 report it produced that set the groundwork for the ADA.
Frieden continues that advocacy, serving as a member of the Metropolitan Transit Authority's board of directors. He said that over the years, investment from political leadership and local disability activist groups, as well as Houston's diverse culture, have helped the city sustain momentum.
Transportation poses a challenge across the entire state and is a major ADA issue Texans with disabilities face — a product of the state's sheer size and vast rural swaths. While its cities have worked to make public transportation accessible, those services are not always available in smaller towns.
Across Texas, 80.6 percent of people drove alone to work, while 10.2 percent carpooled and just 1.4 percent used public transportation, according to a 2018 American Community Survey.
“When you're in a small town and you don't have a bus system, and you can't drive because of a disability, it's difficult,” said Brian East, a senior attorney at Disability Rights Texas.
The ADA's 30th anniversary also comes as the nation is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, which Cazares said has highlighted existing disability rights issues and created challenges.
About 43 percent of COVID-19 deaths in Texas have been among residents in nursing homes and assisted care facilities, according to the most recent data from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. Hastily made websites do not always keep in mind the needs of people with disabilities. Social distancing signs and requirements can be hard to navigate. Texas polling places are not always accessible, and the alternative — mail-in ballots — pose their own issues.
Yet the pandemic has helped with some hurdles — many employers are more amenable to work-from-home scenarios, and access to telemedicine has expanded.
Cazares is hopeful that the future will hold further progress.
“As we continue to collect lessons learned from the pandemic, people with disabilities won't be excluded because we are part of these communities,” Cazares said. “We're students, we're workers, we're parents.”