ADA at 35: A Milestone of Progress and a Mountain Still to Climb

Thirty-five years ago, on July 26, 1990, the United States took a monumental step forward in the journey toward a more just and equitable society. The signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was more than just legislation; it was a declaration of civil rights, affirming that individuals with disabilities are entitled to the same opportunities to participate in public life as everyone else. As we mark this 35th anniversary, it's a time for both celebration of the profound progress we've made and a sober reflection on the significant work that remains.

The Victories We Must Celebrate

It can be easy to forget what the world was like before the ADA. The law fundamentally reshaped our physical world and our societal expectations. The presence of curb cuts, ramps alongside stairs, accessible parking spaces, and usable public restrooms are now so common that we often take them for granted. These changes did more than just open doors; they allowed millions of Americans to attend school, hold jobs, shop for their families, and engage with their communities in ways that were previously impossible.

The ADA mandated "reasonable accommodations" in the workplace, shifting the focus from a person's limitations to their abilities. It brought us closed captions, which opened up the world of broadcast media not just for the deaf and hard of hearing, but for countless others. The law established a legal framework for inclusion, creating a powerful tool to fight discrimination. These are not small achievements; they are pillars of a more inclusive society, and they deserve to be celebrated.

The Unfinished Promise: Where We're Still Falling Short

For all the progress, the promise of the ADA remains frustratingly incomplete. A walk through any city or a browse through the digital world reveals that compliance is often treated as a suggestion rather than a mandate. The spirit of the law is frequently ignored, leaving millions behind.

• The World of Things: Consider the modern kitchen appliance. The sleek, buttonless microwave with a flat touchscreen is an aesthetic triumph but a functional nightmare for someone who is blind. Without tactile buttons or screen reader compatibility, it's as useless as a brick. This trend extends to thermostats, washing machines, and countless other devices where usability has been sacrificed for a minimalist design that excludes.

• The Built Environment: Countless older buildings still hide behind "grandfather clauses" or simple non-compliance, lacking ramps, elevators, or accessible entrances. But the problem is also painfully present in our public spaces. How many street corners have you crossed that lack audible pedestrian signals and tactile paving to guide a visually impaired person safely? These are not luxuries; they are life-saving essentials that are still not universally available.

• Transit and Travel: For many, public transit is a lifeline. Yet, many transit stations remain mazes of inaccessibility, with broken elevators, a lack of high-contrast signage, and no logical wayfinding for people with cognitive or visual disabilities. Once on a bus or train, you might find that the system for announcing the next stop is broken or was never installed, creating a stressful guessing game for anyone who can't see out the window.

• The Digital Chasm: In 2025, so much of life happens online, yet digital accessibility remains tragically elusive. Websites with poor color contrast, images without descriptive alt-text, videos without captions, and forms that can't be navigated with a keyboard lock people out of commerce, education, healthcare, and social connection. We have failed to build the "digital curb cuts" that are so obviously needed.

The Mindset Shift: From Checkbox to Cornerstone

This is where we find the root of the problem. For too long, accessibility has been treated as a line item on a compliance checklist, an afterthought to be addressed before launch, or worse, a "bug" to be fixed only after a complaint is filed.

This has to change. Accessibility is not a feature; it is a fundamental requirement for creating a good, usable experience.

The wonderful secret is that when you design for accessibility, you improve usability for everyone.

• Curb cuts, designed for wheelchair users, are a gift to parents with strollers, travelers with rolling luggage, and delivery workers with carts.

• Closed captions, essential for the deaf community, are used by people in noisy gyms, quiet libraries, and by non-native speakers learning a new language.

• High-contrast text, critical for people with low vision, helps anyone trying to read their phone screen in bright sunlight.

• Clear audio announcements on a train help not just a blind person, but also a tourist navigating an unfamiliar city or a distracted commuter who almost missed their stop.

Inclusive design is simply better design. It forces you to be more thoughtful, more deliberate, and more empathetic.

A Call for Holistic Design: The Journey, Not Just the Bug Fix

To truly embrace this mindset, companies and organizations must stop playing "whack-a-mole" with accessibility issues. Fixing an unlabeled button here or adding alt-text there without context is not enough. They must consider the end-to-end user journey.

When a user with a disability reports a problem, the first question shouldn't be, "How do we fix this single bug?" It should be, "What was this person trying to accomplish?"

Imagine a blind user trying to purchase a shirt online. A bug-fix approach might fix the unlabeled "Add to Cart" button. A holistic, journey-based approach would trace their entire experience:

• Can they easily find and use the search bar with a screen reader?

• Are the search results and filters announced clearly?

• Can the interface be navigated efficiently without excessive tabbing or use of linear navigation?

• Are the product images properly described?

• Can they select a size and color?

• Is the checkout process, including filling out forms and making a payment, fully navigable?

Fixing one button on a broken path is a hollow victory. Ensuring the entire path is smooth and usable is true accessibility. It requires empathy, user testing with people with disabilities, and a commitment to seeing the whole picture.

As we look toward the next 35 years of the ADA, let's carry its legacy forward not just by enforcing the letter of the law, but by embracing its spirit. Let's challenge ourselves—as designers, engineers, city planners, and citizens—to build a world that is not just compliant, but truly, thoughtfully, and beautifully inclusive for everyone.

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of his employer. The post was not written with any particular situation or entity in mind, but rather as a reflective piece about the state of accessibility on the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

This blog post was written with the assistance of Google's Gemini to improve clarity and readability. However, all views, opinions, and the core message are entirely those of the author.

The World is in My Hands: An Unseen Look at Everyday Design

Modern life is full of beautiful promises. The promise of a seamlessly connected smart home, of appliances that anticipate our every need, and of technology so intuitive it just works. I’m a big fan of these promises. The reality, however, can be a little less… seamless. As a blind person, my hands are my window to the world. When I unbox a new gadget, my fingers do the seeing. And sometimes, what they find leads to a full-blown comedy of errors that wasn't on the program, turning a five-minute task into an epic saga.

The Saga of the Incommunicado Dock

I recently decided to ascend to a higher plane of organizational nirvana by purchasing a new computer dock. You know the kind—a sleek, aluminum brick that whispers promises of a one-plug utopia for my entire digital life: keyboard, audio interface, monitors, you name it. The marketing photos were stunning. The box felt expensive. I was ready for my life to change.

Unboxing it was a tactical delight. The satisfying tear of the plastic, the perfect fit of the lid... this was peak product design. Then, I lifted the dock out. It was gorgeous. Minimalist. A triumph of industrial design. And my fingers immediately told me we had a problem.

It was a brick of silent judgment. My fingers, doing their best detective work, could distinguish the rectangular USB-A ports from the oval USB-C ports, the DisplayPort from the headphone jack. A minor victory! But that's where the good news ended. The row of USB-C ports were like identical quintuplets who refuse to wear name tags. My fingers had no way of knowing which one was the designated heavyweight champion that could deliver power to my laptop, which were its weaker data-only siblings, and which were the all-powerful Thunderbolt ports.

This kicked off a game I like to call "Port Roulette." I'd plug the main cable into a USB-C port, hold my breath, and mash my keyboard hoping for a sign of life. Nothing. I’d move it to the next port. Silence, broken only by the sound of my own sighing. Was this the port of call? The port of last resort? Judging by the silence, it was the port of “No.”

Once I finally struck gold and the laptop powered on, a new quest began: The Fellowship of the Thunderbolt Port. Which of the remaining identical twins were the super-powered ones, and which were just along for the ride, offering a trickle of power and a shrug?

I figured I’d consult the manual. Surely, a text description would guide me. I embarked on a digital treasure hunt to the manufacturer’s site, only to be rewarded with a single, elegant, and completely inaccessible PDF full of diagrams. There were undoubtedly beautiful, clean lines pointing to each port, but to me, it was a map written in invisible ink. The dock, with its twenty inscrutable ports, sat on my desk, a monument to the hilarious gap between looking good and being good. All it needed was one tiny, raised ring around the main port to turn my 20-minute escape room into a 10-second dream. All the manual needed was a single sentence describing the layout.

And while I could ask for sighted help or deploy an army of AI tools to scan the document, that turns a simple task into a research project. Sometimes you just want to plug something in without having to form a committee first.

A Partial, Yet Glorious, Victory in the Shower

Let's leave my uncooperative desk mate and travel to a place where things went surprisingly right: the shower. For years, my morning routine involved a dangerous game of "Shampoo or Conditioner?" The bottles felt the same, their contents a mystery until it was too late. Will my hair be clean and bouncy, or will it be conditioned into a state of slick, pancake-like flatness? Let's spin the bottle and find out!

Now, I have my own systems, of course. A complex code of rubber bands and hair ties that only I understand—a system that works great until I'm half-asleep and can't remember if "one band" means "the good stuff" or "the stuff that makes your hair flat."

Then, everything changed. I bought a new bottle of Paul Mitchell shampoo. In the middle of the shower, my thumb slid across the bottle and stopped. What was this? A rogue bit of plastic? A secret message from the hair-care gods? No, it was a letter. A single, raised 'S'. The heavens didn't part, no angelic choir sang, but in the steamy acoustics of my shower, it was a hallelujah moment.

Eagerly, I grabbed its partner bottle, the conditioner, searching for a triumphant 'C'. I found… nothing. Nada. Zilch. The bottle was as smooth as my freshly conditioned hair. For a second, I felt a pang of disappointment. But then I realized, this wasn't a failure. This was a win! A win is a win!

I don't need the conditioner to be marked. The fact that one bottle has the 'S' and the other is blank is all the information I need to tell them apart. Paul Mitchell didn't give me a perfect system, but they gave me a clue. A single, beautiful clue. And in the world of accessibility, we take our clues and we run with them, conditioner-free hair flying in the wind.

The Appliance Rebellion

This isn't just about docks and shampoo. My house is filled with appliances staging their own quiet, sleek, and utterly baffling rebellion against tactile feedback.

Take my oven, for instance. It’s a flat, black, glass panel of infinite possibility. Am I setting it to 350 degrees or activating a secret "turn lasagna to charcoal" function? The chorus of identical beeps gives me no hints. Then there’s the washing machine, armed with its flat buttons and its "Dial of Destiny." It clicks with such authority as it turns, yet provides no earthly way of knowing if I’ve landed on "Delicates" or "Industrial Scour."

For all of these, I could embark on a domestic arts-and-crafts project involving Braille labels and tactile dots. But that's a bespoke solution for my house. What happens when I visit a friend? Do I travel with a label maker? "Don't mind me, Brenda, just need to quickly tag your 'delicates' cycle before we have coffee."

These appliances aren't malicious; they’re just suffering from a case of design tunnel vision, assuming every user will interact with their beautiful, flat, silent screens in the exact same way. It's a world designed for eyes only, leaving the rest of us to hope we're baking cookies and not the user manual.

The Simple Fixes That Go a Long Way

My experiences prove a simple truth: accessibility doesn't have to be a big, complicated, expensive thing. It’s about thoughtful design.

• Embrace the Bump: A raised dot on the "5" of a keypad, a textured power button, different shaped dials for different functions—these are low-cost, high-impact solutions.

• Describe, Don't Just Show: Include clear, text-based descriptions of layouts in manuals and online. "The main power-in port is the third USB-C port from the left." That’s all it takes!

• Universal Design for the Win: The magic happens when we design products for everyone from the start. Curb cuts on sidewalks were for wheelchair users, but parents with strollers and travelers with luggage love them. Good design, like good coffee, just makes life better for everyone.

A Call to Action for a More Accessible World

Let's get this conversation going. We have the power to nudge designers and manufacturers in a more inclusive direction, one story at a time.

If you've ever been outsmarted by a toaster or celebrated a well-placed tactile dot, I want to hear about it! Share your stories in the comments below. Let's build a library of examples of what works and what drives us bonkers.

And if this post made you nod, laugh, or just say "huh," please consider sharing it. The more people who understand these small daily hurdles, the more likely we are to see a world where we can all plug in our computers and wash our hair without having to solve a puzzle first.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Content was edited for readability and conciseness by Google's Gemini, but the message and views are entirely my own.