Chris Bell
1022 Fearrington Post
Pittsboro, NC 27312-5503
C: (612) 859-4938
Email: [email protected]
1. I am running for election to serve a second, four-year term as a Member of the ACB Board of Directors. In addition to being a civil rights lawyer for over four decades, I am a Lifetime Member of ACB and have been actively involved in our organization for over 40 years. During my first Board term, I served on the Resolutions Committee and the Advocacy Steering Committee. In addition, I assisted with the drafting of the updated Prohibited Conduct Policy and process, drafted a procedure for seeking Membership input on proposed Board policies, and revised and ACB Policy on Convention Accessibility.
2. In addition to being an ACB Board member, I have helped to shape ACB’s advocacy efforts by serving on many important ACB Committees including the Advocacy Steering, Advocacy Services, Pedestrian Environment Access, and Transportation Committees. I have developed legal and policy expertise regarding our right to Accessible Pedestrian Signals in our communities and I have written and spoken at length on this topic to assist our affiliates and chapters and to represent ACB in writing before the Access Board, the Federal Highway Administration, the Department of Justice and the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. I also served for several years as ACB’s representative on the ANSI A117.1 Standards Committee on Accessible Buildings and Commercial Facilities.
As President of the North Carolina Council of the Blind (NCCB, I initiated the successful ADA litigation against the NC State Board of Elections which resulted in a Court Order enabling visually impaired citizens of North Carolina to electronically vote absentee privately and independently and to return their accessible, marked ballot electronically. Prior to moving to North Carolina, I served in several officer positions in ACB of Minnesota. As a Lifetime Member of that affiliate, I shepherded a bill through the Minnesota legislature to criminalize assaulting a service animal. I was the first blind Co-Chair of a state-wide disability advocacy organization, the Minnesota Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities. I also represented the disability community as Co-Chair of Minnesota’s State-Wide Advisory Committee on its Olmstead Plan. However, my most significant contribution to the disability community in general and to blind and low vision people in particular was to be one of the disabled lawyers who wrote the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). After the ADA was signed into law, I served as the head of ADA policy at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) In that role, I oversaw the development of EEOC’s ADA employment regulations and its ADA Technical Assistance Manual.
3. First, we must always remember that each of us is a human being. ACB needs to work through an approach to intersectionality which recognizes how our common life experience as people with varying degrees of vision loss is intertwined with our varied cultural, ethnic, gender and religious backgrounds which affects how we view the world and how the world interact with us. When a blind, African American female is unlawfully denied a promotion, we cannot say which of these characteristics, or all in combination gave rise to discrimination. Nor can we focus alone on the disability issue, ignoring the possibility of race and gender discrimination. We cannot ignore the reality of this intersectionality as it impacts our lives as blind and low vision people. ACB should permit advocacy that supports our members when they face intersectional barriers in addition to obstacles which arise from vision loss and how the sighted world misjudges our abilities. However, although major political, social, and economic trends inevitably impact members of the blindness community, ACB’s limited resources, and our focused expertise and experience regarding blindness and low vision do not permit our organization to meaningfully respond to these trends even though many members may do so as individuals.
4. ACB has a long-term opportunity to create an income stream by developing the capacity to assist organizations to meet their digital accessibility requirements. ACB will need to enlist its BITS affiliate and other members with internet accessibility certification to train a cadre of members to provide such services to financially benefit ACB and to compensate our members for providing this service.