| 123 | NCD Issues ADA Compliance Report |
ADA News |
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The National Council on Disability (NCD) released a report on the status of ADA enforcement 10 years after enactment of the civil rights law. The NCD acknowledges that the ADA has taken the issue of disability rights to mainstream America by bringing the issues of discrimination and exclusion to the attention of the general public. The report states that the ADA has permanently changed the architectural and telecommunications landscape of the United States. It has created increased recognition and understanding of the manner in which the physical and social environment can pose discriminatory barriers to people with disabilities. It is a vehicle through which people with disabilities have made their political influence felt, and it continues to be a unifying focus of the disability rights movement. The NCD report points out that the Congress, upon enactment of the law, intended, as with earlier civil rights legislation, that the agencies charged with enforcement takes proactive approach to ADA enforcement. The report charges, however, that the agencies with enforcement responsibilities under the law have been overly reactive, cautious, and lacking any national unifying strategy. Enforcements efforts are largely shaped by a case-by-case approach based on individual complaints rather than an approach based on compliance monitoring and a cohesive, proactive enforcement strategy. In addition, enforcement agencies have not consistently taken leadership roles in clarifying frontier or emergent issues—issues that, even after nearly 10 years of enforcement experience, continue to be controversial, complex, unexpected, and challenging. Some of the leadership and enforcement deficiencies noted in this report appear to be related to the “culture” of particular bureaucracies and how these agencies have hewed to their traditional mission and circumspectly defined their constituency. In other cases, there has been a demonstrated fear of taking positions on new or controversial issues, or too great a concern for potential backlash if a strong position is taken. Critically, many of the shortcomings of federal enforcement of ADA identified in this report are inexorably tied to chronic underfunding and understaffing of the responsible agencies. These factors combined with undue caution and lack of coherent strategy, have undermined the federal enforcement of ADA in its first decade. The complete text of the report is available at www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/promises_1.html
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