by John Jay Frank, Ph.D., CRC, LPC
(Editor’s Note: John J. Frank is a research scientist at the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Blindness and Low Vision. He can be reached via e-mail, [email protected].)
I sent in a request for research volunteers, which was published in “The Braille Forum” (vol. 38, no. 8, February 2000). My dissertation focused on problems encountered with employment- related requests for print access accommodation per the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). An earlier research study I conducted focused on requests for large print. This time, most of the informants used braille or audio formats to access print information.
Interviews were conducted in the fall of 2002. The ages of the 20 informants ranged from 37 to 64; 16 were college-educated professionals, 4 were unemployed. All the stories were of requests for access to print information made after 1994, they were reasonable and were made to entities covered by the law. The issue I was concerned with was their reasons for the avoidance of requesting accommodation. I revealed that focus in the second set of interviews, when I called the informants back to check the accuracy of the initial interviews.
My research did not look for barriers to employment. We already know lack of access to print information is a barrier. Rather, I sought to research (1) barriers within the ADA request process, and (2) how these affected the people who encountered them. A qualitative interview study can describe a phenomenon, but it cannot determine if it is widespread. Readers will have to consider if these barriers to requests and the responses to those barriers fall within their own experience, and thereby suggest the prevalence of the findings.
A request for access to print for an employment interview or on a job are not the only areas covered by the ADA that aid employment. Access to print information in many areas is needed. Below is a brief summary of my findings. A minimum of three examples was found for each of the areas described and for each of the six major themes that emerged from those findings.
Barriers were revealed in the following 12 areas where requests for accommodation were made.
- School and training. Even programs in rehabilitation failed to provide access.
- Tests, licenses and certification. Some state governments and private national agencies refused to provide alternate formats.
- The search for employment. Newspapers and reader services refused access. Professional organizations refused to provide their journals and newsletters in alternate formats. These all contain employment information.
- Contact with prospective employers. Various telephone services and the United States Post Office refused to provide access to their services.
- Travel to the employment site. This included bus and paratransit services, airports, and information for pedestrians. Requests for alternate formats for information concerning those services were denied or delayed.
- Access to stores, hotels, and restaurants. People who must use those services as part of their employment or as part of a job search were denied access, or told they had access when they did not, and, at times, were humiliated in the request process. After a person had a job, the following barriers in requests for access to print were found.
- Printed material given to all employees. Printed materials such as information about employee benefits and rules, and insurance, tax, and payroll information, were requested in alternate formats, but not provided.
- Access to a bank, and
- Access for bill paying were both denied. This is how a paycheck is used and is a reason for working. It allows an employee to continue working.
- Continuing education, which many jobs provide or require, was not made accessible.
- Using computers. Training on new programs or equipment and information on new products was requested, but not provided.
- The complaint process was found to be ineffectual. Filing complaints after being denied access was a full-time job that was frustrating, futile, and even dangerous.
The multiple stories that went into these 12 areas were analyzed further into the following six themes. First, broken trust and betrayal. The most offensive barriers to accommodation requests came from those organizations that were expected to know and care about the needs of people with severe disabilities. These included: independent living centers, state vocational rehabilitation agencies, university disability counselors, a consumer blindness advocacy organization, and the agencies charged with the enforcement of laws designed to protect the rights of people with severe disabilities at the city, county, state, and national levels. Entities that are required to accommodate, but that do not, are ignorant or lawbreakers, or both. Their illegal behavior is simply the normal, everyday variety of discrimination. When the entities that know better and/or are specifically responsible for providing accommodation or for protecting the rights of people with disabilities, refuse, resist, or obstruct requests for accommodation, that is broken trust and betrayal. That offense is a major reason to avoid requesting even essential ADA accommodations.
The second major theme is the multiplicity of barriers. Describing each obstacle to an accommodation request invites attempts to repair the ADA request process one problem at a time, or on a case-by-case basis. That process itself is a barrier. The sheer number of barriers that can be dissected for a simple ADA request makes avoidance of making requests the preferable choice. For example, there are multiple printed materials that need to be made accessible, there are multiple steps to take for each one, and multiple people to contact at various sources who expect to be trained by the requester. There are multiple types of accommodation to choose from. Multiple problems may emerge for each of the above steps, requiring the requester to come up with multiple solutions. Any one of a multitude of changes requested may cascade into a multitude of additional changes of things that might be better left undisturbed. Further requests invite multiple opinions from the people to whom the request is made. They comment about the need, the accommodation, blindness, the requester, and about the ADA. Those comments may not be relevant to the initial purpose of the request, which gets lost amid this multiplicity of barriers.
The purpose of a request for print access is not to get print access or to pay attention to the process, or to collect opinions about the process. The purpose or goal is to use the information in some way, just like everybody else uses print information. The multiplicity of barriers obscures or interferes with that goal. It may be preferable to avoid requesting ADA accommodation in order to accomplish a task in a less cumbersome way.
The next major theme was fear of retaliation. The most severe example was of the house of the requesters being shot into after they brought state government witnesses in to observe an entity’s refusal to provide alternate formats. Other examples included fear that materials such as state applications or U.S. mail would be deliberately lost, fear of being sued, or fear of inviting the anger of the boss or co-workers. The informants understood that the redress processes designed to protect them were ineffective and often a waste of time, although one informant was successful with complaints due to his very aggressive approach.
Again, all the themes refer to problems in the ADA request process, not just to barriers that have always existed. The next major theme, problems with technology, is in itself nothing new, but for this study the barrier was found in the failure to provide requested alternate formats for training, repairs, and upgrades. The fifth theme, unanticipated by the researcher, was the concept of print is different for some people who have never seen print. Some informants thought braille was a print issue, but they did not think computers were a print issue, and they thought that audible traffic control devices and calling out bus stops, which are accessed by mechanical or by human readers, were not an access to print issue. This highlights the fact that ADA requests are likely to be made only for things that are known and believed to be helpful and covered by the law.
The final major theme was that, given these obstacles, some people resorted to habit to fulfill their needs. They avoided using the ADA request process and instead relied on the processes they have learned that do work, such as their own volunteers providing access to information. Another habit is to do without the access the ADA promised, but does not yet deliver.
Informants avoided the ADA request process because of the barriers they encountered in the request process. They were taught by those barriers not to make requests. The most successful avoidance was to avoid the official ADA process and go to the top, that is, to a better source. Some of the successful means were to go to the director of a firm, or the dean of a school, or to create negative newspaper publicity, or to contact politicians, or to use personal friends who are technology experts, or to use mass political action. However, those means are not desired by or available to everyone. A cost/benefit analysis of the ADA accommodation request process must include its cost to people with disabilities who make and pursue requests.
Some professionals in the rehabilitation field have suggested that problems with the ADA request process indicate there is a need to teach people with disabilities how to request ADA accommodation. That implies that disability discrimination is due to our lack of knowledge. That was clearly not the case for these informants. The covered entities, including state and local governments, refused and obstructed equality of access.
At this time in history, the courts are denying the validity of the need for the ADA and advocacy efforts are often progressing in a piecemeal manner. It is important to record the disability discrimination being experienced within the process of the law in order to discover where attention needs to be directed. This study of 20 people who are blind cannot speak for the millions of people with disabilities in our country that may face similar obstacles, but it points the way to needed research.
I believe we no longer need to collect and discuss opinions about the ADA and its effects. What is needed is to collect information on actual ADA behaviors and why they occurred. The questions that survey researchers should ask are: “What was requested? What was the response? What was received?” If an accommodation was provided, the question to ask is: “Was it effective?” Such research should involve people with disabilities who are obviously covered by the law, making requests to entities that are obviously covered by the law, of things that are obviously reasonable. This will begin the process of monitoring the implementation of the ADA.
A crucial area to record is the effect the law is having on people who are covered by the ADA who attempt to use it. The ADA is teaching some people that they are not wanted, not because they are blind, which was the pre-ADA reason for devaluing us, but rather because their civil rights as Americans to equality of access are not sufficiently valued.
I finished the dissertation and earned a Ph.D. from Syracuse University. Many thanks to “The Braille Forum” and the volunteers who made this possible.