Culture
Athens City Commission on Disabilities Speaks on the 30th Anniversary of the ADA
By: Emily Votaw
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Sunday, July 26, 2020 will mark the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (abbreviation ADA). The ADA prohibits discrimination against Americans with disabilities (physical or mental, temporary or permanent), requires public accommodations to conform to accessibility requirements and requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees.
“I have a form of spinal muscular atrophy, which means that I have a slowly progressive neurological disease that I was born with but that wasn’t evident right away. I was still able to walk in elementary school, but in middle school when I started to need to use crutches and a wheelchair, the ADA was so important, along with the Rehab Act of 1973, because it meant that the school had to be accessible,” said Davey McNelly, chair and co-chair of the Athens City Commission on Disabilities, who was eight years old when the ADA was passed. “A lot of the schools, especially in Southeast Ohio, hadn’t yet made the necessary accommodations to become accessible.”
McNelly spoke to WOUB about the 30th anniversary of the ADA, the difficulties that the disability community continues to deal with, and what we can do, as communities and as individuals, to make our world a more accessible one, in the interview embedded above.
Claire Gysegem is a member of the Communications Committee for the Athens City Commission on Disabilities, and she spoke to WOUB about the The National Center on Disability and Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University‘s journalism campaign that has been providing a diverse array of news stories about people with disabilities in anticipation of the 30th anniversary of the passage of the ADA this weekend.