The Americans with Disabilities Act

In 1986, four years before Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, The Annenberg Washington Program convened a forum and issued a compen dium of papers on Marketplace Problems in Communications Technology for Disabled People. The meeting, convened by Katherine Seelman of the Gallaudet Re search Institute, and publication focused on a wide range of government and private measures for improving access by people with disabilities to communica tions technologies and for using those technologies to help integrate people with disabilities into society.

That effort proved to be prescient because in 1990 Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the first comprehensive federal effort to prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities. Shortly after the law's enactment, The Annenberg Washington Program launched a series of projects addressing the role of communications in implementing the Act and in integrat ing disabled Americans. The Program's first initiative in this area was a Roundtable Forum on Title IV of the Americans with Disabilities Act in February 1991, cosponsored by the National Organization on Disability. Title IV re quires development of a nationwide telecommunications relay service to con nect people who have hearing and speech disabilities to all telephone users through third-party operators. At the roundtable, convened by Annenberg Senior Fellow Stuart N. Brotman, government regulators, telecommunications experts, and leaders from the disability community examined a wide range of issues affecting practical implementation of Title IV. Their views were reflected in a subsequent report--Extending Telecommunications Service to Americans with Disabilities--written by Brotman and published by the Program.

Drawing on its growing expertise on the role of communications in medicine, the Program expanded its inquiry into the role of communications in imple menting other sections of the ADA. In February 1993, the Program joined the World Institute on Disability in hosting a Briefing on the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Program also published a White Paper on the employ ment provisions of the ADA. Authored by Annenberg Senior Fellow Peter D. Blanck, The Americans With Disabilities Act: Putting the Employment Provision to Work provided detailed information about the employment provisions in Title I of the ADA and about the early results of studies concerning the implementa tion of those provisions. Among the White Paper's findings:

Employees with disabilities seldom have higher turnover rates or absenteeism than other employees
Employers believe that providing reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities is not unduly expensive
As people with disabilities are more integrated, their skill levels rise, they have fewer medical needs, and their general life satisfaction increases

The White Paper reflected a conscious effort by the Program to educate the press and the public about the Act and to dispel inaccurate assumptions and beliefs about the cost of integrating people with disabilities into the workforce.

In 1994, the Program expanded on the White Paper in Communicating the Americans with Disabilities Act--Transcending Compliance: A Case Report on Sears, Roebuck and Co. The 1994 report documented Sears' ADA-related employment prac tices and found that the average cost of most ADA accommodations was $36--less than dinner for two. The report found that the impact of the ADA on American business is proving evolutionary, not revolutionary. Far from creating onerous legal burdens, the ADA provides employers and employees with a framework for dispute avoidance and resolution, not the impetus for an explosion in litigation that some observers predicted. A follow-up report will be released in early 1996.

The Program further broadened its inquiry in 1994 by examining the impact of the ADA on the classroom. Communications Technology for Everyone: Implications for the Classroom and Beyond proved to be one of the Program's most ambitious and influential meetings. The forum featured demon strations of the use of communications technologies to accommodate the needs of disabled students. The meeting was followed by a report by Annenberg Senior Fellow Blanck and a multimedia CD-ROM. Five vital principles emerged from this effort:

Accessibility must be built in, not added on, to information technologies. This type of universal design will benefit all users, not merely those with disabilities.
As information technologies become more important in the workplace, the classroom, and the home, accessibility also becomes more important. The National Information Infrastructure must not be off-limits to people with disabilities.
Technology has the potential to make education vastly more inclusive-- again, for all students--through individualized curricula, supported communication with classmates, access to distant educational resources, and other innovations.
Accessible technology has implications beyond education. For example, telemedicine will help bring medical advice to geographically isolated people, and telecommuting will reduce chronic unemployment and underemployment among people with disabilities.
Additional dialogue and research are needed to investigate emerging technology accessibility problems, not only for people with disabilities, but for all underrepresented individuals in society--the poor, the isolated, and the vulnerable.

The Annenberg Washington Program's most recent work in this area examines the special communications issues confronting people with disabilities when disasters strike. Annenberg Senior Fellow Blanck's report, Disaster Mitigation for Persons with Disabilities: Fostering a New Dialogue, draws on the Program's considerable expertise in two distinct fields: medical communications and communications to mitigate the impact of disasters. The report is the first step toward sensitizing the disaster response community to the special needs of people with disabilities and facilitating a dialogue between the two groups.

The Annenberg Washington Program has demonstrated a longstanding com mitment to improving the use of communications to serve all people, including the 50 million Americans with disabilities. The Program has stressed the im portance of communications technologies in integrating people with disabilities and in implementing the ADA. It has also worked to educate policymakers, industry officials, the press and the public about the Act and its implementa tion, and to facilitate discussions among these groups and disability organiza tions. The Program has also actively supported the research and professional publications of its fellows in this area, and has helped bring the fruits of those efforts to the public and the press. Implementation of the ADA is far from complete; changes in the political climate threaten its future enforcement. But the Program is proud to play a role in helping to guarantee the benefits of communications for everyone.