The ADA Turns 36 and Disability Pride Is Personal

On July 26, the ADA turns 36, and as we recognize Disability Pride Day during Disability Pride Month, I find myself thinking less about what the Americans with Disabilities Act says on paper and more about what life looked like when it became law. I was 20 years old when the ADA passed in 1990, barely two years out of high school, and trying to figure out adulthood at the same time the country was finally beginning to acknowledge that people with disabilities deserved equal access to education, employment, transportation, public spaces, and everyday life.

You know that person who always starts a story with, “When I was growing up, we didn’t have…” and then explains how everyone survived without technology, convenience, or apparently joy?

Yep. I have become that guy.

When I started college, there was no smartphone in my pocket, no campus app sending notifications, and no Google Maps guiding me toward the accessible entrance hidden somewhere behind a building. Email was not yet part of everyday life, and the internet as we know it today was still years away. I was attending college while America was learning what the ADA was supposed to mean, which makes me prehistoric on several different levels.

That also makes Disability Pride personal for me. I did not learn about the ADA as a historical event in a textbook or from an anniversary post shared on social media. I watched it begin, and then I spent the next 36 years watching America slowly figure out what it had promised.

College Before Accessibility Had a System

When I started college, I became the first student with a disability to live in campus housing. Today, that might sound like a nice piece of personal history, something worthy of a small plaque, a framed certificate, or at least a free sweatshirt from the bookstore.

At the time, it mostly meant that nobody had a clue what to do with me.

There was no established Office of Disability Services with a full staff, accessible website, online accommodation forms, and a coordinator ready to explain everything during orientation. The “office” was essentially one woman doing a juggling act involving about five unrelated jobs, with disability accommodations tossed into the air whenever someone like me showed up.

I am not exaggerating by much. Supporting students with disabilities was just one item on a to-do list that probably also included answering phones, scheduling meetings, solving housing problems, locating missing paperwork, and figuring out who had taken the good stapler.

To be fair, she did her best, but the system depended heavily on her ability to solve problems as they happened. There was no streamlined process and no campuswide accessibility plan sitting in a neatly organized binder. If something was inaccessible, we usually discovered it when I tried to use it, which was a stressful way to attend college and probably an equally stressful way to run one.

Sometimes the Accommodation Was Moving the Entire Class

Several of my classes had to be relocated because the original classrooms were inaccessible. Some buildings did not have elevators, while others technically had a first floor but did not have an accessible entrance that allowed me to reach it.

That is a special kind of architectural creativity. The classroom was right there, the building was right there, and I was right there, but the three of us were apparently not meant to meet.

Instead of selecting accessible classrooms before the semester began, the college would schedule the class, I would arrive, and everyone would discover that I could not get inside. Then the search would begin for another room that worked.

In some cases, accommodating one student meant relocating the professor, the other students, and the entire class schedule. It was not exactly subtle. Nothing says, “Welcome to college, please blend in and enjoy a normal student experience,” quite like being the reason 25 people suddenly have to grab their books and migrate across campus.

There was also no quick group email explaining where the class had gone. There were no smartphones, text alerts, or campus notifications. Adjustments required phone calls, paper notices, word of mouth, and the ancient human tradition of standing in a hallway looking confused while hoping someone wandered by with useful information.

When I tell Jacob stories like this, I can practically see him deciding whether to believe me. To a teenager, describing life before smartphones is roughly the same as claiming I attended college alongside Abraham Lincoln. For the record, Lincoln graduated a few years before me.

The ADA Did Not Instantly Make Everything Accessible

The ADA becoming law was historic, but the country did not suddenly wake up on July 27, 1990, with ramps, elevators, accessible bathrooms, curb cuts, and enlightened attitudes appearing overnight. There was no accessibility fairy flying across the country, sprinkling automatic door openers and properly striped parking spaces along the way.

The Americans with Disabilities Act created a civil rights foundation, but actual accessibility required implementation, enforcement, investment, and a cultural shift that is still happening today. The law established protections, while the country began the much slower process of figuring out how those protections should work in classrooms, workplaces, businesses, transportation systems, and everyday life.

In those early years, many people genuinely did not understand accessibility because they had never been required to think about it. Others treated accommodations as personal favors instead of civil rights. If someone moved a class, unlocked a different entrance, or found a dorm room that worked, the response sometimes carried the feeling that something extraordinary had been done for me.

I appreciated the effort, but I was not asking for the presidential suite. I was trying to attend class, live in campus housing, and participate in college like everyone else. The accommodations may have required additional planning, but the goal was ordinary access.

That distinction still matters 36 years later.

Real stories. Real access. A little prehistoric technology.

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What Disability Pride Means to Me

Disability Pride does not mean pretending that having a disability is always easy or that every challenge should be celebrated. Cerebral palsy has shaped my life, and some of what comes with it is frustrating, exhausting, inconvenient, and occasionally painful. Pride does not require me to smile while confronting a flight of stairs and thank it for the personal growth opportunity.

For me, Disability Pride means refusing to view my existence as something that needs to be apologized for. It means recognizing the creativity, problem-solving skills, adaptability, humor, and persistence that develop when you spend a lifetime navigating places and systems that were not designed with you in mind.

People with disabilities become pretty good at spotting problems because we are often the ones who discover them. Everyone else enters through the front door without thinking about it, while we are outside examining the side of the building like contestants on a scavenger hunt nobody told us we had entered.

I have written before about growing up before the ADA and how my understanding of Disability Pride has changed, but looking back at my college years makes that history feel especially personal.

Disability Pride also means understanding that people with disabilities have always belonged in classrooms, college dorms, workplaces, neighborhoods, families, and public life. The ADA did not give us our value. It gave us a legal tool to challenge the barriers that kept society from recognizing it.

The ADA was also part of a much broader civil rights history, something I explored when writing about how Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream helped lay the foundation for disability rights.

Being the first student with a disability to live in campus housing sounds impressive now, but I would rather future students never have to be “the first.” I want accessibility to become so routine that nobody needs a meeting, a committee, or one extremely overworked woman with five jobs to make it happen.

Thirty Six Years of Progress and Unfinished Work

The ADA changed America. It gave people with disabilities legal protections that previous generations did not have, pushed businesses and public institutions toward greater accessibility, and helped move disability rights into the national conversation. Many of the opportunities I have had as a student, employee, husband, father, and wheelchair user were influenced by the doors the ADA helped open.

Some of those doors even had automatic openers that worked.

Still, anniversaries should not become victory laps that ignore what remains unfinished. An accessible entrance does little good when it is locked, blocked, or located behind the building next to the dumpsters. The ADA Standards for Accessible Design establish requirements for accessible buildings and facilities, but a design standard only helps when accessibility is understood, properly implemented, and maintained.

A policy promising equal opportunity also means very little when employers make assumptions about productivity, attendance, accommodations, or cost before an applicant with a disability gets the chance to prove anything.

Technology has created possibilities that would have seemed like science fiction when I was in college. Students can register for classes online, communicate with professors instantly, attend courses remotely, use digital textbooks, and request accommodations without chasing someone around campus with a piece of paper.

Technology has also created an entirely new collection of barriers, because apparently we could not let progress get too comfortable. An inaccessible website can shut someone out just as effectively as a staircase, although at least the staircase does not make you create a password containing a capital letter, a number, a symbol, and one ancient rune.

These barriers are not limited to college campuses, either. Sometimes they show up in something as ordinary as an inaccessible neighborhood cluster mailbox. Accessibility is often decided by the small details that most people never notice because they have never needed to notice them.

We have come a long way from relocating college classes because a wheelchair user could not enter the building. Unfortunately, people with disabilities are still too often expected to discover accessibility problems after arriving and then help everyone else figure out how to solve them.

That is not full inclusion. It is the same old juggling act, except now everyone involved has email.

The ADA at 36

As the ADA turns 36, I am proud of how much has changed since I was that 20-year-old college student. I am also proud of the people with disabilities who spoke up, filed complaints, challenged institutions, designed solutions, entered spaces where we had been excluded, and refused to accept that “we have never done this before” was a good enough answer.

Disability Pride Day is a chance to celebrate that history, but it is also a reminder that access is not something people with disabilities should have to earn through patience, persistence, or being unusually good sports about inconvenience.

Thirty-six years after the ADA became law, the goal should no longer be figuring out how to accommodate us once we arrive. The goal should be building schools, workplaces, technology, transportation, and communities that expected us all along.

I may officially be that guy telling younger generations about college before widespread email, smartphones, campus apps, and an actual Office of Disability Services. I am one step away from explaining that we walked five miles to class, uphill both ways, although in my case that story would raise several obvious questions.

The technology may have changed, and I may have accumulated enough “back in my day” stories to make Jacob roll his eyes on command, but the basic expectation has not changed.

People with disabilities belong.

We belonged before the ADA was signed. We belonged during those awkward early years when everyone was still figuring it out, and we belong today without needing to be treated like an unexpected addition to the plans.

The ADA gave us stronger tools to demand access. Disability Pride reminds us why we should never stop expecting it.

Were you around when the ADA became law, or have you grown up in the world it helped create? Share what Disability Pride means to you in the comments, and then pass this post along to someone who thinks accessibility begins and ends with adding a ramp.