Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)

What is Americans with Disabilities Act?

In 1990 on 26th July in United States a new law was signed in as “Americans with disabilities Act (ADA)”. The intention of this law was to make the disable people access the society easily. It is one of the most comprehensive and detailed civil rights law passed in United States and prohibits discrimination of people on the basis of their physical or mental disabilities. The passing of the law make the government realized that many Americans were not able to include themselves in major areas of life including the employment, accessing the public and governmental accommodations and also accessing the transport and telecom facilities. This law provides the disables protection of their civil rights. The

During that period of time United States Congress passed three major legislations about the Civil Rights. These three legislations were about Civil Rights of 1964, the Act of Voting rights of 1965 and lastly rights for minorities were presented in Civil Rights Act of 1968.

The scope of Civil Rights Act of 1964 was wide and covers all those receiving funds from federal government, the employers, places of public accommodations like bus stations, waiting areas and lunch counters. The Act revealed that it is prohibited to discriminate in these places on the basis of race, religion and nationality. However the discrimination on the basis was not included in this act. Later in 197 under section 504 of Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was developed as law and later in 1990 ADA was passed for disable people (MTSTCIL, 2010)

Requirements of the law:

The Americans with disabilities Act is mandatory for equality. A person who is discriminated by an employer because of his real disability or employer is regarding him or her as being disabled under the conditions included in the Act then he or she is entitled to this law protection. The major focus or requirement of this law is to eliminate those employer’s practices which make people unnecessarily different from other, also to provide equal rights and opportunities to disable people at public accommodations and other places etc. (U.S. Department of Justice,

Originally this case was filed by Access Now Inc. and a blind man named Robert Gumson. Access now is an advocacy group for disabled community. The case was about the web site of South West Airlines. They claimed that Southwest Airline website violated that ADA because the blinds cannot easily access this website. Mr. Gumson is dependent on a screen reader and voice synthesizer for navigating the website but the layout of the website is not supporting these features and it is not feasible for a blind man to purchase tickets from the website. The petitioners were looking that Southwest should redesign their site to make it convenient for blind people for navigating the site. Since the case was originally filed, Southwest has redesigned the site and made it more feasible for blinds to navigate it easily. As it is mentioned in ADA lists 12 specific “places of public accommodation” should provide access to the disable people (Sue the Airline, org,