Many are familiar with Uber’s high-profile scofflaw policy toward paying its drivers. For years, disability advocates have been challenging a lesser-known violation—its fleet is not accessible for people who use non-folding wheelchairs. Uber’s motto is “We ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion.” Opportunity for some, barriers for others.
It’s not fair that we are being left behind while other folks are enjoying the benefits of Uber’s new technology.
Irma Allen, who brought a …
One of the hottest topics in the ADA legal world is whether websites (and their ilk, like smartphone applications or other technological public platforms) have to be accessible to people with disabilities. Without ADA oversight, website development often prioritizes certain users—those who access content visually or using a mouse, for example. Blind people who use a screen reader and text instead of visual content, people who use hands-free technology instead of a mouse, people with low…
Zoning laws can pose serious barriers to people with disabilities and their organizations. Setback codes block building ramps. Rules forbidding people who are not related from living together in residential neighborhoods bar group homes. Disability discrimination laws – the ADA, the Fair Housing Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and local laws, often make these zoning laws illegal.[1] Indeed in some cases they violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and…
In the midst of violence that seems targeted at our civic life and a pandemic imposing “social distancing,” I find myself thinking a lot about community.
As I have previously reflected, “community integration” is a legal phrase about the ADA’s requirement to provide services to people with disabilities in small, community-based settings rather than in segregated institutions like nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals. Yet it can also refer to the idea of a…
Thirty years ago, people in the United States on both sides of the aisle came to a clear agreement: we need to build houses and apartments that are accessible to people with disabilities, including people who use wheelchairs. Laws and regulations were passed to require that accessible home design and construction. Thirty years later, these rules are still far too much theory and too little action.
The rules are not perfect, but, if followed, they…
On this Veterans Day, with a deeply divided country, I find myself reflecting on another divide: military service and our civil society. When I was in college, this divide prompted me to join the Navy, exploring how to bridge the chasm between my liberal, ivy-league world and the military that many people I knew looked down on. The military-civilian divide has increased, and remains an issue worrying to the right and the left.[1]…
It is, of course, illegal to discriminate against an employee because they have a disability—to fire someone because the employer learns they have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example. But what about when the disability causes conduct that might otherwise be a legitimate basis for an action like firing? What if, for example, that schizophrenia or its treatment sometimes makes the employee late for work?
While the cases discussed in this piece involve employment, accommodations…
The EEOC recently posted updated guidance about employers’ obligations related to COVID, What You Should Know About COVID-19 and the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act, and Other EEO Laws. Like the EEOC, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from people trying to understand how to navigate work in these times. Here are some common questions and answers drawn from this new guidance and my experience:
What kinds of testing and information about COVID can…
The recent failure of the criminal justice system to hold anyone accountable for the death of Breonna Taylor is a devastating reminder of that system’s failures. As police misconduct attorney and author Andrea Ritchie told the New York Times, “The system that killed Breonna Taylor is not set up to provide justice or reparations for the killing of Breonna Taylor.”[1] I have made similar arguments in the context of military sexual assault. We…
Advocates in wheelchairs who flew to Washington, DC to press for disability civil rights in the 1970s rode to lobbying meetings in the back of a moving truck. There was no accessible public transit.[1] Brand new buses were not accessible. Even though people had designed wheelchair-accessible vehicles decades earlier, neither public nor private transit companies used them.[2]
The ADA (and a predecessor, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973) changed…