This past May, Stephen Kuusisto, a University Professor and director of interdisciplinary programs and outreach at the BBI, traveled to Kazakhstan to give poetry workshops as part of an international disability and cultural diplomacy outreach program. Kuusisto has traveled all over the globe, creating opportunities for children with disabilities to demonstrate their talents through inclusive arts workshops, as well as participating in public readings and visits to universities, literary institutions and other venues. Continue Reading

Dr. Peter Blanck, University Professor at Syracuse University and Chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute (BBI), will speak at the Annual American Bar Association On August 10, 2019.

The ABA Annual Meeting will be held August 8, 2019 – August 13, 2019 in San Francisco, CA at the Marriot Marquis. Dr. Blanck will speak on “Interrupting Bias: The Keys to Doing Diversity Right in the Workplace.” Blanck will discuss the recent American Bar Association nationwide study, conducted by the Burton Blatt Institute to identify the biases encountered by LGBT and/or disabled lawyers in the legal profession and to help develop and implement strategies to ameliorate such biases.  Preliminary results will be discussed from the national online surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Continue Reading

On July 27th, Mike Galifianakis interviewed Dr. Peter Blanck on Capitoal View Program on Georgia Radio Reading Service (GaRRS). Capitol View is a monthly program to inform you of legislative activity, disability law, and policy that could impact your lives. Dr. Blanck is an American academic, psychologist, and lawyer who holds the titles of University Professor and Chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University. Mr. Galifianakis is the former State of Georgia ADA Coordinator. Listen as they discuss the history of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), Dr. Blanck’s achievements in enforcing the ADA, the endeavors of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, and the potential of universally accessible applications across platforms.

 

Transcript of Session

[Music]
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS: This program is ended for a print impaired audience and it’s a production of the Georgia Radio Reading Service Corps. Thank you for joining us for this month’s edition of capital View. I’m your host Mike Galifianakis. Capitol View is a monthly program to inform you of legislative activity, disability law, and policy that could impact your lives. This month I am speaking with Professor Peter Blanck on disability law and policy including the area of accessibility in Information and Communication Technology. Professor Blank is a university professor at Syracuse University and academic rank only awarded to 8 prior individuals if the New York School. He’s also chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University. The Burton Blatt Institute works globally to advance the civic economic and social participation of people with disabilities. Professor Blanck welcome to Capitol View.
PETER BLANCK: Oh thank you, it’s really a pleasure to be with you.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  Professor Blanck I wanted to start by asking you to share with our audience the story of Burton Blatt and the founding of the Burton Blatt Institute.
PETER BLANK:  The story of Burton Blatt, and my story goes back to before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. I’m kind of an odd bird. I’m a Ph D. researcher in Psychology and also a lawyer. For a number of professional and personal reasons, like many of us, gravitated to this new area of disability law soon after the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. I have been fortunate to conduct some very early studies on the nature of workplace accommodations, the nature of life in institutions versus community for people with disabilities. The nature of web accessibility, which was still in its infancy at the time. Actually, Tim Berners Lee the inventor of the World Wide Web was writing the 1st reports in 1990 the same time George Bush was signing the ADA into law.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  Wow
PETER BLANK:   As a result of this research, I ended up in Iowa working at the University of Iowa as a Professor of Law and Medicine and in other areas, and had the great fortune to get to know and work early on with Senator Tom Harkin, of course who was a great Iowa Senator who was one of the drafters of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and began working to understand the rights of individuals with disabilities under this law. Very quickly of course there was new litigation that was filed and I began to be asked to explain some of the research I was doing so that it would help to litigate people’s rights. I will never forget I got a call soon after the ADA was passed from then commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a guy named Paul Miller who was a great disability leader he had worked in the Clinton office. there was a case in Madison Wisconsin, it was the first of its kind that was being brought under the ADA. It involved agreat man who I have kept in touch with named Don Perkel and he had worked at this pizza chain called Chuck E. Cheese. It’s a pizza parlor with a big mouth games ball pits and all sorts of things that kids love and otherwise great place to go. And Don Perkel who is non-verbal and also has intellectual disability, at the time it was referred to as mental retardation, was hired by Chuck E. Cheese. He was doing a great job he was preparing pizzas and he was working in some janitorial modes in the staff loved him. Unfortunately, sometimes corporations we see under the ADA they get it wrong. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re totally bad actors.  But, a senior representative from the company came up to this little college town, Madison Wisconsin, saw Don Perkel working at the Chuck E. Cheese and said fire that guy basically I don’t like the way he looks. There was nothing of course it all wrong with Don or is work ethic or his work those attitudes were exactly the kind of attitudes that the ADA was meant to deal with. to their great credit,  a sign of humanity that keeps us going once in a while, the local staff at the Chuck E. Cheese said if you fire Don we’re all going to quit in protest. Unfortunately, they proceeded to fire Don. They all quit in protest, and there was a trial under the Americans With Disabilities Act, one of the first of its kind involving a person with intellectual disability and Don’s right to work.
After a multi-day trial, I had testified as an expert based on my research about the importance of work, and accommodations, and qualifications of individuals with disabilities, the jury found for Don $80,000.00 in back pay and other damages. It was a great victory, the first of its kind. And as everybody was kind of packing up, the jury foreperson asked the judge a question, and that was “so that this never happens again in our town can we award Don an additional 13 million dollars  in punitive damages to send a message that this is wrong.” The judge upheld it, there are caps on damages under the ADA. But I believe today it’s still among the largest judgments of its kind. Interestingly, as a lawyer myself, lawyers are paid to be creative, sometimes good sometimes less good. The lawyers for the defense filed the motions. They got a psychiatrist saying that there’s no way that Don, a person with an intellectual disability, could enjoy the fruits of 13 million dollars.   And the motion from the side that I was working with came back and said basically that Don would enjoy every penny of that 13 million dollars. And the judgement was upheld.
That was my introduction to this really evolving and new area and the building of an institute to study the ADA in action at the University of Iowa.  It was called the Law, Health, Policy and Disability Center.
Loving Iowa City, and raising four kids there. Kind of minding my own business and doing research.  Syracuse University came a knocking. Syracuse University has a long really exemplary tradition in the area of disability and disability rights, perhaps among one of the best in the country. Of course, I was aware of Syracuse University, and they had a new chancellor at the time. A woman named Nancy Cantor; who went on to other presidencies, had been the president of the University of Illinois, very accomplished visionary. And she began recruiting me to build a similar Institute at Syracuse University. Now Nancy Cantor, like many of us, her life was in many ways defined not by her prominence in the field and being a president of a university and really a global scholar, but by her relationship with her son Archie who has autism. And she understood what it meant to infuse disability in concepts of inclusion and integration, into all aspects of daily life. They graciously, as the saying goes, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. And it turned out that at Syracuse University a beloved Dean who had passed away unfortunately quite young, Dean of the School of Education, was named Burton Blatt. And Burton Blatt, in the 1970’s,  with his colleague Mr. Kaplan, basically got into the old institutions the Willowbrook, Penhurst, remember the old institutionalization movement? But he got into those institutions before it hit the press and they had a hidden camera on their belt and they did this photographic expose called “Christmas in Purgatory.”  It was really a portrait of the hellish life of individuals living in those institutions. And that really lit the fires of reform and was one of the earliest efforts to focus on the horrific conditions facing people with disabilities in the 1970’s
Fast forward to Nancy Cantor and myself. The family of Burton Blatt, very gracious prominent family, decided that in addition to me coming to Syracuse they’d like to honor his memory by endowing this new institute called the Burton Blatt Institute. They wanted it to be as it is a cross disciplinary, across the life course, and work with economists, lawyers, physicians, political scientists, and so forth. And so we established at Syracuse University as a university institute, which meant in reporting to the chancellor. we tried to work with all the colleges around the campus to focus basically on the social and financial inclusion of people with disabilities broadly speaking in America this was before the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. As a result of that we have been very blessed to grow quite significantly with scores of staff in Syracuse, in New York City, now in Atlanta, Lexington Kentucky, Washington D.C., soon to be in California. And we are a niche, credible think tank that does leading edge research and outreach in the area that is driven by people with disabilities and people who have experience in their families or elsewhere with disabilities to try to make a little dent universe.
That’s my long introduction Mike, I hope not too long as your simple question about Burton Blatt.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  No, I thank you so much. It’s such a great perspective and such a great overview and really appreciate. It is about individuals making a difference along the way. You mentioned that Burton Blatt Institute is a cross disciplines entity. Can you give the audience a sample of some of the current programs or initiatives that the institute is involved with?
PETER BLANK:   We take our que by leading edge issues, we hope, in the disability and broadly general quality civil rights area. To  give you an example, years ago after the ADA was passed,  probably the late 1990’s,  the Internet was just coming alive in a real sense way before e-commerce and social media and Facebook and all that. Because of my writings on inclusion and accessibility, I was very fortunate to be co-counsel with some amazing lawyers who were leading at disability rights advocate, disability rights advocates is a leading disability rights law firm based out of Oakland, we were representing the National Federation of the Blind against Target Stores. You know Target of course. And at the time Target’s website was basically not accessible to people who were blind. There were alt tags that didn’t have text and there were different navigational techniques. Litigation ensued unfortunately. Today, I believe that Target, like many corporations, probably are exemplar in this regard. But at that time, it was a very new thing. As a result of that litigation in California, we created some of the first really good law that under certain circumstances the Americans With Disabilities Act is broad enough to cover people who are blind so that they have websites accessibility. Which at the time was not such a simple question.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:   I think that’s an interesting aspect of law and policy that the ADA was enacted in 1990.  And you said parallel to that in the ninety’s the World Wide Web was being developed. But it seems like in the early ninety’s the ADA  was not able to specifically address how you make Web sites accessible. How do you ensure technology applications are going to be accessible to people with disabilities? So could you talk a little bit about how law seems to almost have to play catch up some time with what’s going on?
PETER BLANK:   Sometimes technology leads. Sometimes civil rights leads. So to complete that story, as a result of that litigation, remember the ADA doesn’t talk about specific website accessibility as you say it talks about full and equal access. How that’s defined, of course, can be the big question. But as a result of that litigation, and the work we did in that area the Burton Blatt Institute and the Iowa Institute were  fortunate to receive large grants. For example, one called ITworks. It is about  how we make, and what sort of strategies can be used to make the workplace accessible for people with disabilities. We’re still playing that out a little bit today. The ADA  gets a little bit of a bad rap, in my view, because there are some litigators out there, and every profession has people who kind of push it to the limits, litigators who are doing scores and scores of litigation almost all mass against banks and corporations and others because their websites are not accessible. Now don’t get me wrong if you’ve had 30 years to follow the law and you haven’t done it that’s a big problem. But the problem is that the business community has a backlash to that which ends up in legislatures or Congress and all the sudden there are calls for new laws about limiting the scope of the ADA. The bigger issue is that much of the institute work thrives from real world issues.
And if I may I can give you another example. We think is 7 or 8 years ago, I got a call from an amazing lawyer named Jonathan Martinis, who had a case in a little court room in Hampton Roads Virginia representing a woman named Jenny Hatch. Jenny is a woman with Down Syndrome, intellectual disability, she’s an amazing woman. Independent of that, she had her own job, she was working in the community, she lived where she wanted with friends. Unfortunately, due to a variety of circumstances, and this is not parents versus children and so forth. Jenny was about 29 at the time, so she was an adult woman. Her parents decided that they would want her to be under their complete guardianship. That would mean for Jenny that she wouldn’t get to choose where she lived. She wouldn’t get to have an iPhone and text with her friends. She wouldn’t get to volunteer and work where she wants. And basically, took away control from her for her life in those areas which she had shown that she can do just fine. So out of that little court room I went down there and testified about the importance of self-determination and independence and the principles of the Americans With Disabilities Act. And for the first time in American history, kind of like Chuckie Cheese, a court ruled that an individual like Jenny should have the right, or at least the chance to be self-determined and instead of guardianship she should be allowed this emerging concept called Supported Decision-Making. Which is essentially something we do every day all of us. If I take my car into the auto mechanic, I rely on that mechanic or banker or anybody else to help me make those sorts of decisions. The idea is that 99 percent of the cases, guardianship historically has been overly restrictive. We know this is an empirical matter. And there’s a lot of room for people to have more say in their life. We won that case. It got a lot of press. Jenny was in People magazine in the Washington Post so forth and all the advocacy groups were very supportive of it. What happened then, and this comes back to why I hope the institute can play a role in helping shape policy and research and so forth, we were funded by the Department of Health and Human Services and other organizations at the federal level, to examine what this concept of Supporting Decision-Making was, with our terrific partners in Washington D.C., one is called Quality Trust – taking the lead on this. We established a national resource center for parents and individuals and organizations to better understand why the principles in the  ADA of self-determination were so important today. We are looking at those principles both in other countries, with other types of disability, for example mental health disability, youth in transition. I go on a bit too long, but I want to illustrate to you our passion for trying to take the leading edge issues, and there are 3 or 4 other issues I can tell you about I’m not sure we’ll have time, financial literacy in other areas in which we’ve tried to do the same thing.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  I would love to learn more about Supported Decision-Making is probably an evolving concept and it’s probably individualized based on a particular individual and what his or her needs are but is that a legal concept now or is that still developing.
PETER BLANK:   This is very good question. It’s evolving.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  Okay
PETER BLANK:  In the United. States historically, the states each of the 50 states, were responsible for having laws about guardianship. And those laws typically ended up resulting in people having plenary guardianship. In other words, once you were under guardianship whether you were an older adult or an individual with a cognitive disability, all of people’s decisions were made by others. This new concept of Supported Decision-Making was kind of up partial approach – we do it all the time for example with advanced directives, with powers of attorney right, it’s just a different paradigm or way of thinking that has now been recognized in law and in state statute.  As an alternative to guardianship.  For example, I don’t know Georgia, but Virginia,  Delaware and a few other states have changed their guardianship laws so that the first priority to try to allow the individual to make their own decisions before you take away their power to make their decision.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  Right that’s part of that evolving focus on what’s best for the individual how to assert that person’s independent living rights.
PETER BLANK:  Exactly, and we hope that what we do here at the Burton Blatt Institute is helpful in policy change, in law change, and in systems change. And of course, useful when people try to vindicate their rights and legal setting as well. And that’s probably been one of the most satisfying things about what we try to do is a team. And this goes way back to our early work on deinstitutionalization when my colleagues and I for example did a very large study tracking thousands of people as they moved from institutional settings to community-based living settings after the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  If you’re just joining us, you’re listening to Capitol View and Professor Peter Blanck, University professor at Syracuse University who is discussing Disability Law and Policy. Professor Blank you just mentioned a few minutes ago that among all the many things that you are working on and studying matters of economic literacy and self-sufficiency for people with disabilities.
PETER BLANK:  Yes very important area of course, the great economic divide that we’re facing as a country today.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  Can you share some of your work in that area?
PETER BLANK:   I’d be delighted to. It’s a very good question Mike.  I have really the privilege of working with an amazing team in Washington D.C. and elsewhere. One of our leaders on our research team is a guy named Michael Morris. Michael Morris has been in Washington D.C. in our Washington office for many, many years. He has focused a large part of his career on financial empowerment for persons with disabilities. Most people with disability, as you know Mike, live in poverty and don’t have a great career trajectory and great ways for saving money and becoming economically independent. So Michael was instrumental, as of course were many others, in helping to pass President Obama signed into law in 2014 The ABLE Act, Achieving a Better Life Experience. Which could be among the most important laws passed for people with disabilities since the ADA. In a nutshell, and I should say on our website all of our materials are free. We have articles available you can download them on all the topics. I’m talking about at bbi.syr.edu.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  Okay
PETER BLANK:  Why is The ABLE Act important? Basically what it is the states will set up savings account for individuals with disabilities who qualify and they can save up to $100,000.00 tax free. You can put money into these account, or your friends or family, and there’s no taxes charged. And you can use all those funds for anything related to your disability broadly defined. That’s really good. In addition to that, the person with the disability is the owner of the account. The person in power. Nobody else owns it. The next most important thing of this trifecta is that historically many people with disabilities have been persuaded from working or from saving money for fear of this so-called income cliff. That is if you have certain amount of money in your bank account or earnings, you lose your government health insurance benefits typically through Medicaid or SSI.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  That’s a pervasive problem
PETER BLANK:  The brilliance in my mind of The ABLE Act is that this money that you’re saving tax free does not count against your income assessment for purposes of your governmental benefit. In other words because you’re doing a good job of saving, you’re not going to be penalized and lose your government benefits. The idea being that this is a terrific incentive to pull people out of poverty to provide them a venue for savings and still keep the safety net of Social Security. So that’s why I said I’d be interested in your reaction Mike. It’s an extremely important law we worked on that and as a result Burton Blatt Institute with its partner the National Disability Institute received some of the first grants to study The ABLE Act in action. Randomized control trials which is a fancy scientific medical term trying to understand causality. Basically we’re going to have people assigned to different types of account and see how their quality of life is their savings their employment and so forth. I just finished that story, by again trying to convey to you how we have taken what we hope are leading edge issues really effecting people with disabilities and turn that into a research program that furthers the effort.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  I think you answered part of my next question with regard to The ABLE Act. in the data that you can be acquired to make a determination of how successful it was. But whether we’re talking about financial empowerment Supported Decision-Making or any of these other critically important areas that Burton Blatt Institute is working on, what are the critical factors that you believe are necessary for successful advocacy on the systems change level? If you can share critical factors for successful advocacy on an individual level as well.
PETER BLANK:   On the systems level, increasingly today as we know content is king. Good data and good information that is credible in an era in which we often hear unfortunately from many people in prominent positions that nothing in the news can be trusted. Nothing in science can be trusted. My hope is that this is a period which we will eventually transcend and we’ll moderate but at the systems level the legislators and the judges and the attorneys in a small way like I have tried to do my work need hard good information. That’s how you can make policy change. The National Resource Center for Supported Decision-Making provides help for people, provide resources, provide 24-hour technical assistance on these issues. At the individual level, it’s a little more complicated because individual litigation, as you know or your listeners know if they’ve ever been involved in it, is so much emotion involved. There is so much unique circumstance ,that is so much dug in heels. And I would say that awareness of individual rights perhaps is one benefit of what we’re trying to do. The people who go to trial under the ADA and with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission we have to believe are such a small tip of the top of the iceberg of people who rightly so choose not to go back to work may choose not to go to that restaurant again, may choose to stay on governmental benefits and this is a terrific loss both economically socially and culturally, to our country. One of my best friends, who uses a wheelchair, will always say to me if I can’t get into this restaurant – this restaurant is not just losing my meal ticket they’re losing the 5 friends and family members that I’m bringing with me. And it’s so true in so many areas. And I do believe that there are many good corporate and individual actors out there that get it. And I do believe also that many of the fears companies will go out of business, that people with disabilities are not as qualified whatever you hear, they just haven’t proven true in empirical fact and those are the sorts of studies we like to do.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:   In the few minutes we have left, I had a couple other specific questions.  One going back to the Institute being at Syracuse University and Syracuse being so supportive of disability studies generally. Can you give the audience a sense of the type courses or programs that the university offers on disability related matters or studies?
PETER BLANK:  Syracuse University, to my knowledge, was the first disability studies program in the United States. It has the first disability cultural center in the United States. and there’s a whole array of courses relating from economics, to health ,social work that look at those traditional concept, not just from a disability perspective what’s of course called from an intersectional perspective that is from the experience of race, gender, age we all know that the experience of one individual from a certain cultural uses a wheelchair can be very different from a similar individual in a different culture or race or age. It is a very cross-disciplinary listing of courses that look at a whole range of things from portrayal of individuals with disabilities in film and the media. To the economics of health and environment affecting people with disabilities. And it’s been a very successful program. Now of course there are many fine universities that have disabilities studies programs. My one surprise, if I may, is that the top top universities in the country for some reason don’t seem to have gotten on the interest wagon in the area of disability studies. I don’t know the reason for that.  But I think there’s a lot of room for many fine universities certainly there are many fine universities in the Atlanta area that we work with that are engaged in this topic. Including I would say, by the way some of our great partners, that historically black colleges were delighted to work with in the Atlanta area such as Morehouse College.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  I’m glad to hear that universities in Atlanta are participating as well. The last question I had. Going back to our discussion accessible websites and the work you’ve done there. Can you give us an outline or overview of what you think best practices are for developing accessible information and communication technology for individuals who are blind or have visual or print related impairments ?
PETER BLANK:  Well we’re in such an exciting edge where we’re beginning to see not just the concept of accessibility that is often individually tailored, but a move towards more universally designed strategies. That is one size fits all and as my colleagues say one size fits one. For example, a colleague of mine named Greg Gregg Vanderheiden, central to an international organization called Raising The Floor. I happen to be president of the US chapter of Raising The Floor. One of the main products of Raising The Floor, it’s a nonprofit it’s been funded millions and millions of dollars by the United States and other government, is to create tools and systems in the cloud not on a particular device, so that you could pick up any device anywhere – your handheld your laptop phone whatever and it auto personalized to your preferences which have been preprogrammed in the cloud (big font, big contrast whatever) and I think increasingly will see this personalization of devices which will do away with some of the early battles we had. Why? It will number one make sense for everybody. For example, of this situational disability employees or noise or lights or whatever right. And number two, it’ll bring more and more users into the fold. Many people before me have said dollars are as green as anybody else’s. That’s a billion people in the world, arguably who report disability. And that economic force will not be overlooked as a result of that. So the move will be towards universal design and then of course linking that to our home market, our workplace sensors. And the book that I wrote in this area is called equality and it’s about some of the legal issues we have to think about as we move in this direction. For example, privacy, security, individualized approaches and so forth, to make sure that this really benefits the most people possible. It’s a lot of work to do.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  Professor Blanck, thank you so much for the in part of our program and really appreciate all the work that you do with that Burton Blatt Institute.
PETER BLANK:  Thank you Mike it really has been a great honor to work with you and to know you and the great work you have done in Atlnata as well and I hope we’ll speak again in the future.
MIKE GALIFIANAKIS:  We will and we look forward to it you’ve been listening to Capitol View, an original program of the Georgia Radio Reading Service Corps. This is Mike. Thank you for listening to

Peter Blanck, chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, was quoted about class action suits and the Americans with Disabilities Act in the NY Times July 19, 2019 article “Trump’s Labor Pick Has Defended Corporations, and One Killer Whale Voters.”

EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE: “Peter Blanck, a professor at Syracuse University who has written extensively about the disabilities law, said that class action suits are often critical to allowing individuals to realize their rights under the law. Absent the class certification, the plaintiffs agreed to a settlement with the company.” Continue Reading

Marten on Logue and Blanck, ‘Heavy Laden: Union Veterans, Psychological

Since Eric Dean published Shook over Hell: Post-traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (1997), historians of Civil War veterans have wrestled with the question of how to evaluate the conflict’s psychological effects on the men who fought and survived. Presented with tantalizing evidence in personal correspondence, family reminiscences, and legal and medical records, scholars are separated from their subjects by more than a century. Moreover, the gulf between modern and Victorian terminologies, values, and assumptions render it difficult to determine the usefulness of attributing veterans’ postwar difficulties to conditions like Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has only been identified as a medical condition since the 1960s and 1970s (although earlier generations of physicians had used different terms for similar symptoms). In recent years, scholarship on Civil War veterans has sparked a debate about the extent to which the “dark turn” represents an accurate accounting of the postwar lives of most veterans. Continue Reading

BBI Chairman Peter Blanck, was interviewed on July 3 on Knowledge@Wharton. Joining Dr. Blanck is Lex Frieden, Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. During this podcast Drs. Blanck and Frieden discuss companies being sued for their websites not being ADA-compliant.

Knowledge@Wharton is a daily, call-in business interview program, broadcasting live from The Wharton School’s historic Ivy League campus. Host Dan Loney goes behind the headlines with world-renowned Wharton professors, distinguished alumni and expert guests. Listen to Knowledge@Wharton Monday through Friday, 10a-12p, EST on SiriusXM channel 132.

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Transcript of Session

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HOST: Knowledge @ Wharton here on Sirius XM 132 business radio powered by the Wharton School. Our final 30 of the day. Then will you back with you on Friday with another edition of our show. Just a reminder that tomorrow is the Sirius X. business radio cookout for the 4th of July. Lots of segments all day long about food. So as you’re getting up, getting ready to maybe get that steak or that burger or hotdogs or the potato salad the mac salad or whatever it might be to get ready for your party, your cookout, whatever might be, tune into Sirius XM 132 for our 4th of July cookout special all day long. Segments on this show about a variety of different things you can eat. Even one about eating bugs. That will be part of our 4th of July special here on Sirius XM 132. Also, a reminder make sure that you go to the knowledge award website which has a variety of stories making news around the globe, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. When you get there make sure that you sign up for the newsletters which come at you every Wednesday and Friday. So the latest edition of the newsletter already in your inbox today. If you haven’t signed up for it sign up for today and you’ll get one on Friday knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu.
HOST: A group of 50 colleges and universities are being sued by a blind man who alleges their websites violate the Americans With Disabilities Act. The suit says that these websites from colleges across the U.S. does not provide, or should say, the suit says these websites do not provide the necessary access,  even for those with a screen reader. This is just the latest in hundreds of lawsuits against various companies for websites deemed non-compliant with ADA rules. Even Beyoncé was sued in January by a blind woman because her personal website was quote purely visual end quote. With more on these cases we are joined by Lex Frieden professor of biomedical informatics and physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. Also with us, Peter Blanck who is a professor at Syracuse University’s College of Law and chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute which aims to advance the participation of people with disabilities in society. He’s also author of the book Equality the Struggle for Web Accessibility by Persons with Cognitive Disabilities. Lex, Peter thanks for your time today.
LEX: Thanks for having us
PETER: Good morning
HOST: Good morning great to have both of you with us.  Lex, it feels like we’re continuing to find pockets where the compliance issues with the ADA. it seems like it is either been forgotten about or has just been lost in the process.
LEX: Well clearly this is a pocket and it’s partly due to the rapid advancement of technical improvements in web use. Everybody now has a website and we’re moving now rapidly toward more social media and it’s frankly, I think, it’s hard for some of the programmers to keep up with it. And there are there are relatively good programmers and then there are people who just use a cut and paste web site and it’s not accessible to many of us so. In a way it is kind of niche. This problem with the web development is a function of the growing use of technology.
HOST: Peter your thoughts
PETER: Well I think I hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don’t talk about the 10s of hundreds of thousands of proactive businesses and users who do create quite cost effective accessible websites for individuals who are blind, deaf, and have dexterity issues. And in any circumstance there is going to be actors that you know approach this from a more litigious point of view, which is understandable in certain circumstances.
HOST: But it makes you wonder Peter whether or not it is actually a conscious business decision or whether or not it is it is something that gets lost in the translation with some of these companies. And in this case, with these schools, where they’re not falling through and the schools, Peter, I think it is even more surprising because obviously these schools have had to do a variety of different things with their institutions themselves their buildings etc. to make sure that they are ADA compliant.
PETER: Well look, I mean it in this day and age any university or school is competing for the best students and for the for the dollars of those students and the funders of the donors. The same is true for business and it always is beside me why these institutions, whether public or private, would want to exclude tens of thousands of potential consumers whose dollars are as green as anybody else’s, as my friends always say, from this marketplace. Particularly given that the studies show that the benefits of accessibility far outweigh the costs.
HOST: Lex
LEX: I’m not certain that it’s always a matter of will either you know. These institutions, both universities and companies alike, hire people to put together websites for them and to do other work. And if they hire people who don’t understand the law and they don’t follow the law then you’re going to wind up with issues. In my own institution we have people that we train to do  web sites. And we are fully committed to 100 percent universal accessibility. But in reality we have to hire contractors to do work. And I can’t tell you the number of times that we’ve found these people who are not complying with the ADA and who are not capable of doing some of the work we expect them to do. That’s just a function of the way business gets done. And I think because of that we have to hold contractors and businesses, the universities, all a likely accountable. If I’m a university and I have a contractor do a job for me, ultimately, I think I’m accountable and it’s up to my it’s in my best interest to make sure the job is done right. That’s a point I want to make. This is not rocket science. There’s an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium W3C. And that particular group has established a defacto standard for web accessibility. It’s easy enough to do a kind of broad brush test with the validators that they have online to see if the web site accessible or not. And it’s also not illogical to think that if you have a graphic oriented display on your web that may not be accessible to people with vision impairments, and therefore you need to have an alternative way that they can tell what it is you’re trying to portray in a graphical format.
HOST: What do you think Peter? Especially potentially with the case of Beyoncé and obviously there are so many companies it is it does fall on the people that are building the website to make sure that they are following all the compliance issues that need to occur.
PETER: Yeah you know, well I mean this is part of the business world we operate in today. What CEO of a major company would want to exclude you know a huge proportion of the potential clients from their business opportunities? It’s just like any other marketing issue. What if Beyoncé decided she did not want a version of her website in Spanish and excluded Hispanic or Latino community. I mean that’s a business decision. I guess I don’t know why she would want to make that decision. The problem is that often people with disabilities are not seen as an effective market. And I think we will see in 10 years that shakeout and particularly with our aging society those companies that address this market will survive and others will not.
HOST: Is it surprising to you Lex, and I asked this of Peter seconds ago here, but is it surprising to you that universities would be involved in some of these issues especially with the website.
LEX: No, it’s not surprising. I mean the universities are like big corporations. There’s a lot of people involved in the process of putting out a product. And in this case it’s a product for the public that probably could stand more oversight, more reviews than they give it before they put it out to the public. But there’s no question that in virtually all of the universities that we’re speaking about there are people who work for that university who know very well how to make an accessible website and probably have done so. And the problem is that those people, faculty very often, and students for that matter, may not have been involved in the vetting process for the product that they put online. That happens all the time. Just because they’re trying to move so quickly to get information out.
HOST: 844WHARTON  is the number if you would like to join in 8449427866 or if you’d like to send us a comment on Twitter @BizRadio132 our my Twitter account which is @ DMLoney21. Should we have the expectation, Lex, that that these instances should not be occurring especially here in 2019?
LEX:  Well no they should not be occurring, and you know in one respect I think the lawsuits are useful in that they raise, bring attention to the question. What’s wrong is when people try to be defensive about that and try to come up with excuses or alternatives that are not sufficient to meeting the needs of people with disabilities. So, you know I  think you’re you make a very good point. You know whether we are nearly 30 years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, we should not really see these kinds of violations of the ADA. But the fact is,  here in Houston, in my city, I see every week somebody building a new addition to their building, the architect is not aware of the ADA or wasn’t trained well or for some reason has ignored it and the code checkers find them ultimately. If they don’t find them some person with a disability is going to report that. I recently did that, and the U.S. attorney’s office took it up with them. A week later, the facility that had built the inaccessible addition had it made accessible. It wasn’t that hard, it didn’t cost them that much money, they just missed it and then when it was brought to their attention, frankly by me, they weren’t too eager to go ahead and fix it up. But when they got a call from the U.S. attorney’s office they changed their mind real quickly.
HOST: But these issues surrounding, Lex, the websites of the colleges and  the Internet in general becomes I think one of the most important areas in, and correct me if I’m wrong, surrounding compliance with the ADA because of how reliant we are on the Internet, our smartphones, our computers, our tablets, you name it.
LEX: That’s the best point. We are all becoming interdependent on the web and if some of us are not able to use the web then we are therefore disadvantaged by it. And the whole point of the Americans With Disabilities Act is that people with disabilities, regardless of their impairments, should have the opportunity to do everything that people without disabilities do. That our environment, that we build, that we create, should not be made inaccessible. That there are ways to ensure that we have equality for all and that’s what we’re aiming for. You know it’s hard to justify and really hard to defend anyone who today would create a product like a website that wasn’t accessible.
HOST: Peter, your thoughts.
PETER: Well, I mean as we move towards autonomous systems, and smart homes, and artificial intelligence, we will move towards a more universally designed approach to technology. We have to. We will have an aging society. We will have a society that is all for telemedicine,  teleducation, a virtual reality. And the question’s going to be leadership. What segment of the population do you want to exclude from that future, this gig economy we’re in? And increasingly, I will I think, we will gravitate as a society towards these more universally designed approaches which will enhance issues in language, culture as well as disability.
HOST: So, you expect to see some form as well, let me rephrase it this way. How do you expect that we will move forward to not having these issues moving forward with the Internet being a core component Peter.
PETER: Well as I say, and Lex says  this as well, this concept of universal design will increasingly enable us. I’m working on projects now where you could pick up any device, anywhere, anytime, and it automatically configures to your preferences. Fror what it looks like, how it speaks to you, what size text it is, whether it uses speech technology, and so forth. And within a short period of time, we will have this sort of auto-personalization, which hopefully will make these sorts of issues moot because people will have a preference in the way they approach information. But you know by all means content is the king today. It’s not the format of the delivery. And content has the value and people want to get that content in many ways. Whether it’s banks or Target or Amazon or whatever, Wal-Mart, to those people who want to purchase that content.
HOST: Lex, your thoughts.
LEX: Well I agree with Peter to a large degree. But regardless of how much progress we make toward universal design. regardless of how the demographics change, and it’s apparent that more people will have disabilities as a result of aging in the future. We will still need a role, for there will be a role for compliance.  And I think,  you know we started this conversation about an individual who was visually impaired that sued a number of universities and one fell swoop,  I don’t agree with that. I think if the person wanted to go to school there and couldn’t, then it’s perfectly reasonable for them to assert that right. To do so at the places that they have a visited, I think is a little the extreme. Although an organization like the National Federation of the Blind that represents thousands of blind people certainly has the right and maybe even the obligation under their charter to seek these kinds of remedies and that might be a broader brush in terms of the universities that don’t have accessible websites.
HOST: But would go ahead, I’m sorry finish up.
LEX: I was just going to say that compliance, compliance really is important here, and we shouldn’t overlook that.
HOST: I would think Lex, with your background, and your work that you’ve done on the ADA, it has to be a disappointing view, on a variety of fronts, that we’re still having a lot of these conversations today.
LEX: Tt’s so frustrating, and particularly when it comes to this technology that it’s so easy to fix, and so logical. I mean we’re talking about the kinds of issues we’re talking about here are our websites that post PDF. And I think if all your listeners know what a PDF is. For many people using screen readers those PDFs are not accessible. They’re like graphics to the screen reader, and so they therefore need to be reprinted. Not necessarily showing to the people who are looking at the website, but on the secondary page where screen readers can tell what it said in the PDF. The same thing is true of graphics.
We, in my school, we teach students how to produce charts, figures, tables, and so on. But they also must have a legend for them, and they must have an interpretation that a person who cannot see that particular graph can understand that the lines are moving one way or another in relation to themselves. So, it’s perfectly logical what people need in order to be able to use the web. And it’s so frustrating that we find these sites jumping up that are just pop-up graphics and you know by building a graphical site without an underlying alternate. Nothing wrong with the graphics. I like to look at the pictures too. Blind people can’t see the pictures. So they should know what’s on the graphics. And the worst case of all is when somebody has a website that you fill out a form you get down to the bottom and you press go or enter and that little button happens to be in a graphical format, with the pretty little green on it and they cannot see what it says.
HOST: Peter your thoughts.
PETER: As a lawyer, we may be talking compliance very soon. We all like to eat pizza. Some of us like to eat Domino’s Pizza. The 9th Circuit, which is in California United States Court of Appeals, decided that websites, their Dominos app, was covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act. And now they’re petitioning, Domino’s is petitioning that ruling to the United States Supreme Court. That happened in January of 2019. So we may see in the next term some guidance about compliance with regard to the extent to which websites are covered by these disability laws.
HOST: But how disappointing is it for you Peter, similar to what I asked Lex, that we’re still having these conversations 30 years after the fact.
PETER: Well again I try to view this as a tip of the iceberg. I think there are many good organizations that have adopted accessible approaches. We study those.  I’ve written about those. Certainly, there are outliers. At the end of the day, like anything else, whether it’s in the area of race or gender or ethnicity, it’s about leadership. It’s about organizational leadership and commitment. Whether you’re a chancellor of a university or a president of the company. And if this is an important issue to you both socially and financially then it gets done. That’s really the simple truth.
HOST: Lex, when you’re talking about the university environment, the opportunity, or the lack of opportunity, for potential students when a college website is not compliant, that’s a significant loss not only to the individual but to the university as well.
LEX: It’s a significant loss to all of us frankly. I mean here’s, imagine a person that can’t use the university facilities. They’re not going to get an education. If they don’t get an education, then they’re not going to get a job. And if they don’t have a job, then they’re going to be benefiting from the social income. That is not any of our objectives and certainly not that student’s objective. We need to make an education available to all, accessible to all. It’s an ongoing challenge for many of these universities to meet the individual requirements of people with disabilities, some of whom have disabilities that are very complex and involve a lot of accommodation. None the less, it is, and it’s not only the ADA that establishes the right of students in schools, it is clearly a student’s right to have an education and disabilities should not prevent them from doing so. So, I’m very empathetic.  I was turned down for admission to a university and I’m very empathetic to students who find that they cannot get an education because the barriers in the educational environment including those on the web.
HOST: Gentlemen thanks very much for your time today. I have to end it there. We’re at the almost at the end of the show. Thank you, Lex. Thank you, Peter. All the best to you both.
PETER:  Thank you very much.
LEX:  Have a great day.
HOST: Thank you. Lex Frieden from the University of Texas Health Science Center. Peter Blanck at Syracuse University, their College of Law. That will take care of the show for the day. We will be back with you on Friday with another edition of our show. Kind of laying out what we’ve got for you on Sirius XM 132.  Just a reminder the business radio cookout special is tomorrow all day long with a variety of segments for all the different shows across the channel that will be talking about different issues about cooking, about food etc. There’s even going to be one about eating bugs. so stay tuned for all of that throughout the course of your July 4th holiday. So, as you’re getting prepared for that picnic tune us in there.  And then as you mentioned we’ll interact with you on Friday with another edition of our show. You’ll be hearing from Jill Sleshinger who you may know from her work with CBS News, she’s their business analyst. She has authored a book The Dumb Things Smart People Do With Money. She’ll be joining us as part of the show on Friday. And then also we’re going to talk about entrepreneurship in the world of education and how it is growing and how it is having a significant impact, a growing impact, every month here in America and how some of that is changing right here at the University of Pennsylvania. That will be Friday’s knowledge award 10 am Eastern Time here on Sirius XM 132. Everybody enjoy your July.4th holiday hope it is a great one. Many thanks to Patti McMann, Monique Nazareth, Danielle Bruno for putting the show together. enjoy the rest of your day. Enjoy your 4th and we will see you on Friday.

Peter Blanck, chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, was quoted about the web accessibility in the Times.com article “None of the 2020 Presidential Candidates’ Websites Are Fully Accessible to Disabled Voters.”
“Because the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990 just as the Internet was coming into existence, there are no regulations explicitly describing what private businesses must do to make their websites comply. There are rules for government websites, but it’s not necessarily clear whether presidential campaigns would count as governmental or private entities for this purpose”

By G. Wayne Miller – Providence Journal Staff Writer

Peter Blanck, who heads the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, talks with “Story in the Public Square” about his organization’s global efforts to improve the lives of people living with disabilities.

With Rhode Island recently marking the 25th anniversary of the closing of the Ladd Center, the state’s former institution for people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities, the half-hour we spent with this week’s guest on “Story in the Public Square” was particularly relevant. Not to mention informative and inspirational.

Peter Blanck is University Professor at Syracuse University and chairman of the school’s Burton Blatt Institute, arguably the foremost center of its kind in America. It is named for the man who wrote the game-changing 1966 book “Christmas in Purgatory” and went on to become a pioneer in what the center calls “humanizing services” for people living with disabilities.

Blanck is a modest man, and on our show, he described the center and its expanding missions matter-of-factly, if with pride:

“We have grown phenomenally, with offices in New York City, and Washington, and Atlanta, and Kentucky, and Syracuse, of course, and working all over the world,” Blanck said.

“Essentially, we follow Burton Blatt’s main principle, which is written about in [“Christmas in Purgatory”] that each person has value. We look cross-disability. We look over the life course, and we focus on ways in which we can help support — through policy and research — the inclusion of people with disabilities in all civic, social and economic activities.

“Most people with disabilities are poor and live in poverty. Most people with disabilities today lack employment. So we have large-scale programs, for example, on financial literacy, on economic security, on helping people be more involved, self-determined in making their own decisions about their lives to the maximum extent possible.”

Blanck spoke of the movement that led to closing Ladd and many similar institutions where abuse and neglect were common, and to the landmark law that advanced rights.

“The fires of reform were lit,” he said. “In the late 1980s, people with disabilities for the first time came together — advocates, to try to understand if disability rights could be thought of in a similar way as African-American rights, as sexual-orientation rights, as rights for women.

“Thanks to the leadership of many senators and really bipartisan efforts, the Americans with Disabilities Act was born in 1990, which was the first major comprehensive law in the world, really, that looked at employment, public services, telecommunications, living in the community.”

So where are we today?

In a better place than decades ago — but not where we should be, according to Blanck.

“It’s a very complicated question because today we have, of course, terrific issues of homelessness, terrific issues of health-care coverage, terrific issues of incarceration,” Blanck said.

He described his involvement with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent look at Alabama prisons, which found that almost half of the system’s inmates “have some form of mental disability. Prisons have become, essentially, the institutions of old.”

According to Blanck, some 60 million to 75 million people in the U.S. live with “severe disabilities,” and globally “there are about a billion people” living with disabilities. Their rights were advanced with the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities treaty, which has been signed by 177 nations — but not the U.S.

President Barack Obama signed the treaty, Blanck said, “but the Senate did not ratify it for an array of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with disability but have to do with signing of treaties in general. Personally, I think it’s a missed opportunity because we can all learn a lot together. Nonetheless, the CRPD is moving forward, and more and more countries are being involved. It guarantees human rights of employment, accessibility to information, government services, capacity before the law, and a whole host of other areas.”

Did I mention that in addition to his formal expertise, Blanck is a compelling storyteller? He is. Tune in to hear some of his uplifting experiences involving people living with disabilities.

“Story in the Public Square” airs on Rhode Island PBS in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts on Sundays at 11 a.m. and is rebroadcast Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.; the coast-to-coast broadcast schedule is at http://bit.ly/2ShlY5E An audio version airs Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., Sundays at 4:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. on SiriusXM’s P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), Channel 124.

The Hon. Tom Harkin—former Senator and Congressman, veteran, author, attorney and chief sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)—will be the featured guest on the July 3, broadcast of ADA Live! , a podcast produced by the Syracuse University Burton Blatt Institute (BBI) and Southeast ADA Center. University Professor Peter Blanck, chairman of BBI, will interview Sen. Harkin in celebration of the 29th anniversary of this historic civil rights legislation.

Harkin served Iowa in the U.S. Senate from 1984 until his retirement in January 2015, making him the longest serving Democratic senator from his state. Previously, Harkin served 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Iowa’s fifth congressional district. He is now senior advisor to the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University, Des Moines, IA. Continue Reading