The Americans with Disabilities Act is 30 years old.

For young people who have grown up with the ADA, the results of this landmark legislation are part of everyday life – sometimes in ways they may not even realize.

I was there at the beginning. As a young deaf man in 1990, I attended the Rose Garden ADA signing ceremony. I clearly recall the sun was shining brilliantly and the joy among leaders in the disability community who had long worked to bring about this civil rights legislation.

In the decades since, I have witnessed the ADA’s profound impact as an educator of deaf and hard-of-hearing students for this population and the U.S. as a whole.

A decades-long journey

Four senators who were major supporters of the ADA in the 1980s had personal connections to the issue. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts had an intellectually disabled sister. Iowa’s Tom Harkin had a brother who was deaf. Bob Dole of Kansas had been disabled in World War II. Connecticut’s Lowell Weicker had a son with Down syndrome. A seminal moment at the passage of the ADA was Harkin’s address to Congress in sign language – the first time the body had been addressed this way.

The ADA prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, state and local government services, businesses that are public accommodations or commercial facilities and in transportation.

In many ways, I feel the most important changes brought about by the legislation relate to making it easier for deaf people to communicate. In his book “A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell,” historian Harry Lang described the long struggle in the deaf community to gain access to the telephone. The ADA provided a huge leap forward by requiring the establishment of nationwide telecommunications relay services. This system provided telephone access 24/7 to deaf citizens who previously had relied on volunteer services with limited hours. No longer would deaf individuals be excluded from employment opportunities requiring the use of the phone. And it enabled deaf people to participate in the mainstream of the American life by being free to call for pizza or to wish a loved one happy birthday.

A more entertaining life

Title III of the ADA required that public facilities, such as hospitals, bars, shopping centers and museums – but, importantly, not movie theaters – provide access to verbal information on televisions, films or slide shows.

Stiff opposition from the motion picture and cable industry prevented the ADA from including a requirement for closed captioning in films and on cable television. However, as a concession, Congress did include a requirement for all federally funded public service announcements to be captioned.

The historian Lang examines the history of access to films and television through captioning. He describes how the ADA was a milestone greatly affecting efforts to make educational and entertainment films accessible to deaf persons.

Creating a ‘deaf middle class’

ADA and Section 504, which guarantees accessibility and accommodations in public schools, provided educational opportunities for many deaf and hard-of-hearing students to attend college. This helped create, as educators and authors Carol Padden and Tom Humphries referred to it, a deaf middle class of community leaders and an ever-increasing number of deaf lawyers, doctors and PhDs.

While great strides have been made, people with disabilities still are twice as likely to be unemployed as those without disabilities. The employment gap between deaf and hearing people in the United States is significant. Only 53.3% of deaf people ages 25-64 were employed in 2017, compared to 75.8% of hearing people an employment gap of 22.5 percent. In round numbers, nearly 10 million Americans are hard of hearing and close to 1 million are functionally deaf.

Deaf college graduates fare much better. The college I lead, Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, puts a high emphasis on building relationships with employers. Historically, 95% of our graduates find employment.

New pandemic challenges

As the world navigates the COVID-19 pandemic, new challenges are arising. Masks make communication difficult for those who rely on speechreading, endless Zoom meetings bring more fatigue for those who rely on visual communication, and access to health care and emergency information can be spotty.

But there are bright spots when one considers progress since passage of the ADA. Recognition of American Sign Language and the importance of ASL interpreters for access has grown tremendously over the past 30 years as deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens have sought greater inclusion in the mainsteam of American society. Captioning is used by more than 60% of students with disabilities, and 50% of those with no reported disabilities. Prior to the current employment crisis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted increased demand for sign language interpreters. Automatic speech recognition apps allow for increased interaction between deaf and hearing colleagues, classmates and friends. These advancements benefit not only the students on my campus, but at other campuses with deaf populations such as Gallaudet University and California State University, Northridge.

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The ADA proclaimed accessibility as a civil right. Just as ADA-sanctioned accommodations such as sidewalk ramps originally designed to benefit those with mobility issues was a positive for families with strollers and bicycles, closed captioning designed as a service for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals now is ubiquitous on televisions, computers and smart phones in hearing households as well.

The deaf community has historically been able to work around challenges and find solutions to communication barriers. This time in our history is no different. Innovative thinkers continually find ways to advocate, modify and make current and emerging technologies work for everyone.

Gerard Buckley, President of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sticking closer to home because of COVID-19 has shown many people what cities can be like with less traffic, noise, congestion and pollution. Roads and parking lots devoted to cars take up a lot of land. For example, in Phoenix, Los Angeles and New York City these spaces account for over one-third of each city’s total area.

When stay-at-home orders went into effect in many parts of the U.S. in March, streets and parking lots went dormant seemingly overnight. Within days, municipalities across the U.S. started shifting these spaces to other uses that better suit people.

As a professor of environmental design and transport, I’ve worked for decades to unravel the many factors that keep people reliant on cars, SUVs and trucks. Weather, time constraints, children – there are many reasons that prevent people from using transportation modes like bicycles. Yet with a simple first step – starting to reconfigure city streets – meaningful change can begin to break down traditional transportation barriers and usher in a new culture of getting around town by means other than cars.

The dangerous, expensive automobile

In large U.S. cities, nearly half of all car trips are less than four miles. Using cars to travel such short distances has many costs.

For example, consider traffic fatalities. Two pedestrians or cyclists die every hour on U.S. city streets, a national trend that’s been worsening in recent years, even though cycling and walking rates are steady or declining. Pollution from cars contributes to climate change and worsens air quality. Designing cities around cars marginalizes individuals who don’t have them.

In my view, this is the time to move beyond the “grab the keys” mentality on the way out the door, as millennials and GenXers already are doing. New visions for streets, where cars use less space and are replaced by smaller vehicles built for individual riders, are gaining currency.

These modes of transport might be new forms of e-bikes, e-scooters or hoverboards. These novel vehicles, which were already attracting attention before COVID-19, complement conventional bicycles, whose sales have boomed during the pandemic.

New thinking, different results

Increasingly, thinking about the future of cities suggests that chiefly relying on cars as a form of transport has run its course. By minimally modifying the existing infrastructure, it is possible for city leaders to repurpose roads and parking spaces while ensuring the same ease of being able to reach daily services.

Emerging forms of mobility and changing mindsets can help deliver these opportunities. Bicycles and bicycle-like vehicles provide a catalyst to shift how city streets are used.

Research demonstrates that people will adopt new ways of getting around town when they are confident that an entire route, including intersections and parking lots, is safe for travel. Some COVID-19-induced street changes that have emerged recently, such as reducing the number of traffic lanes and closing streets to traffic, are a good first step. But they lack the network component.

Networks quickly develop the more people use them. The quickest way to build one that is scaled and purposed for people begins by identifying streets used to make short trips. These are places near neighborhood retail districts, schools and other activity centers.

Informed by local data, leaders can make decisions about which streets should give priority to vehicles such as bicycles, not cars. Changes might include physically demarcated lanes and signs making statements like “Cars are guests.” Initially, these changes might require waivers to exempt them from adhering to current engineering guidelines and standards – restrictions that stifle innovation.

Now large and small U.S. cities are experimenting with different strategies and contending with long-standing equity concerns about which streets to change. For example, Minneapolis has closed a number of parkways to cars, reserving them exclusively for cyclists and walkers.

Pioneering cities like Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Oakland are using this time to test ways of sharing a broader array of streets among cyclists, walkers and car users. Researchers are providing tools to identify the most promising places to reallocate space for pop-up cycle ways.

Enacting change now – in a strategic manner and while travel levels are down – may be an opportunity to reap quick gains with high impact. I believe that a better transport future is within reach by taking advantage of the space dominated by automobiles. This is the time to leverage current low-traffic conditions so that streets and roads can be converted to accommodate new technology and transport.

Kevin J. Krizek, Professor of Environmental Design, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.