The Americans with Disabilities Act happened due to disabled activists taking huge risks to be heard, supported by allies such as the Black Panthers.
Repeated demonstrations, sit-ins, and lying down in front of inaccessible buses (for instance) built the momentum that led to one of those rare moments in time when politicians from both major parties agreed to actually do work and get ADA through.
If you're an abled parent enjoying elevators to BART, or an abled delivery driver using ramps and curbcuts, don't forget the disabled activists who risked so much for the infrastructure you take for granted.
In fact, JOIN disabled ppl in working not just for ADA compliance, but full accessibility & equity! Disability Justice!
🧵 4 years ago today, UC Access Now released the Demandifesto - a document reminding the public that disabled people are part of the public and that our public university system ought to be accessible to us by default.
We also launched a campaign tool allowing people to contact Governor Newsom, the UC Board of Regents, and all the UC chancellors to urge them to read the Demandifesto and act on it.
I (UC Access Now founder) had hoped to make a nice formal thread, but I'm kept so busy by UC's & society's ableism that I haven't had time to make one. So bear with this off-the-cuff update. (1/?)
Hundreds of people started contacting UC decisionmakers using our tool and initially the UC folks panicked and some chancellors actually responded...with lies.
But most chancellors did not respond at all to us or those who'd contacted them using our tool.
When press would ask them, they'd send a paid-by-the-taxpayer PR flack to mouth blah blah at them.
What they did behind the scenes (as we heard from folks on the inside) was to approach disabled student groups who were not activist, not aspirational, to try to look as if they cared, but to maintain the hegemons' modus operandi - continue taking public dollars to funnel to ableist priorities while trying to fund their bare minimum accessibility responsibilities through student fees and crowdfunding.
BUT they put disability on the Regents' agenda for the first time in 10 years! (And did not mention the part our work played in that...funny that).
@disability@academicchatter They put together a Disability Working Group, which UC Access Now was not invited to and whose part in stimulating the creation of was not acknowledged. We know at least one of the people on this working group was disabled, experienced, and would have been a strong advocate.
But all that seems to have happened is an announcement in Nov of 2023 by President Michael Drake that a Office of Disability Rights would be created and put under a new system-wide Office of Civil Rights. He did not announce what its job would be nor whether actual disability advocates and activists would be hired. The press did not follow up asking him this.
Nothing much happened until the UCOP website reflected change in Spring of 2024 (almost 4 years post-Demandifesto!). It was a small incomplete page for the new office. No mission statement that had to do with accessibility & inclusion or even rights. It was all about "compliance".
@disability@academicchatter (4/?) There are many ways I could point to UC doing the same unethical and illegal stuff and being concerned primarily about CYA and smokescreen PR bullshit.
However, although UC has tried throughout to bury UC Access Now's role in stimulating at least a reaction and feeling the need to pretend to be moving, folks on the inside of UC have let us know backchannel that it is OUR activism and the aspirational vision put forth in the Demandifesto that has resulted in any positive change at all.
When we started in June 2020, we never saw UC using alt text and rarely saw any captions (and then usually only auto-captions). This was even after UC Berkeley was sued years earlier for putting videos without captions up on YouTube!
We started hammering them constantly on Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media, keeping receipts and letting folks know. Now you much more frequently see alt text & captions from them - they never mentioned our work.
The catalyst (not the only ableism, but the spark) for the formation of UC Access Now was the inaccessible cycle racks on campus.
Initially, UC Davis Taps wanted to treat it like "special needs" and jackhammer a special "blue badge" accessible rack each time a disabled cyclist needed to stop at a certain building. Enormously expensive and not equitable. Quite silly, really.
We kept fighting.
UC Davis now has 3 pilot installations of more accessible rack types. It was not done in cooperation with us, but in reaction to our work. https://daviswiki.org/UC_Access_Now
@disability@academicchatter We were among the folks pushing what is now UAW 4811 to include access needs in our contract. We were tokenized and sold out by the Administration Caucus of UC-UAW, but we did help create a groundswell among disabled workers within UC that continues to push to undo the harm that UC-UAW ableists added to the UC experience.
We gave of our time & expertise to train groups within UC on accessibility, including the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, UC Riverside Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology Dept., and within various UC-UAW chapters.
@disability@academicchatter (7/?) We facilitated some conversations around what was needed to provide good captioning in classrooms (not just from the student perspective, but the support that instructors and IT needed from admin to not be putting unpaid hours in picking up the failures of UC's systemic ableism).
There's more.
But ultimately, when folks do not join us in remaining vocal, UC can depend on students graduating away or disabled activists within UC burning out even faster than abled ones are. They depend on us all going away and when they bury our name, each new generation of activists ends up having to reinvent the wheel.
UC Access Now is in suspended animation right now because the main movers who were doing the work suffered big health setbacks and/or graduated out.
@disability@academicchatter (8/?) But we keep this Mastodon account active and we still want folks to contact the Governor, UC President Dr. Michael Drake, the UC Board of Regents, and the various UC chancellors to urge them to read and act on the Demandifesto Action Steps.
The Demandifesto needs an update (for instance, we'd like to see the offices of "disability cops" abolished through a phase-out that makes every UC dept responsible for being as accessible as possible by default), but for the most part it has held up well.
It is a comprehensive aspirational approach to accessibility in higher ed that is NOT begging, but demanding our rights. There is no just reason for not already having them. It's not a money problem. It's a systemic ableism problem and the leaders of this PUBLIC university who are paid .75M per yr plus perqs should be held accountable for why it's not accessible and equitable. #UCAccessNow#ADA34#HigherEd#Ableism
On this 34th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act into law, please contrast the alacrity with which US businesses & institutions have adopted AI, even doing re-orgs and new hires with lightning speed, with how many businesses & institutions are fully accessible.
Medical institutions aren't even fully accessible and doctors are who abled people demand disabled people get their papers from!
Today is the 34th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in to law.
Guess how public university UC Davis celebrates it? The same way they "comply" with it every day.
Just imagine what it feels like to pay the taxes, tuition and fees that create UC Davis and constantly be shown how little you are considered to be a member of the public.