MORE TO DO: Efforts target online access, public transportation
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 upsidedown 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 signage might be there, but it 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 coordina
“Although we’ve made great strides in many aspects of American life, there is still so much more work that we need to do.”
Gabe Cazares, director of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities
tor at the National Federation of the Blind of Texas. Joiner came of age alongside the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legislation that makes such signs mandatory.
Sunday 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 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 due to a disability. It also requires state and government programs and services to be accessible to those with disabilities. For the estimated 61 million American adults, about 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 Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.
On Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Texas announced settlements with five Houston-area property owners that had violated the ADA, and 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 lawsuits are down from 2019, but Palamountain said that’s likely because of the pandemic, and 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 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 city buses were for people with disabilities. When 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 another 13 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 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 unique, diverse culture, have helped Houston sustain momentum.
Transportation poses a unique 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 carpool and just 1.4 percent use public transportation, according to the 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.
In Houston, Frieden praises work that focuses on new transit centers, equipment and adaptable seating, among other things. The city also has about 13 sidewalk accessibility applications that it’s working on, according to Cazares.
But change takes time, and some city projects may take a few more years to reach completion.
“You cannot rebuild 900 bus stops overnight,” Frieden said. Nevertheless, Frieden is confident they will get there.
Improvements, however, take vigilance and near-total attention to detail. In the past two years, at least three significant redevelopments in Houston on bustling and highly touted corridors — along Richmond, Kirby and Washington Avenue — remade sidewalks in a way that squandered the space by leaving them inaccessible to wheelchair users or failing to connect to the bus stops someone might depend on.
Even Metro’s own projects have come up short in the past few years, notably along Harrisburg where the Green Line light rail led to new sidewalks — and CenterPoint Energy installed a utility pole in the center of a curb ramp.
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 unique 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 signage and requirements can be hard to navigate. Texas polling places are not always accessible, and the alternative, mail-in ballots, poses its 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.”
Dug Begley contributed to this
report.