HYBRID ACCESS FROM THE BEGINNING.

Let my people in.

Hybrid access, meaning access to include all people including virtual and online access, is a way of thinking that we in the United States may not be used to.? Hybrid access aims to include all people, whether they are people with disabilities, or people with caregiving responsibilities, or people who have limited transportation.

??????? Here's a thought from Ron Buliung, Professor at the University of Toronto, that Despite Legislative Progress, Accessible Cities Remain Elusive:

??????? "Disability as an afterthought?makes platform and vehicle retrofit an inconvenient, costly necessity. The technical part of this problem can likely be solved with existing technology, like platform gap fillers and bridge plates. Waiting around for disabled passengers to engage in class-action litigation is not an effective strategy."

Buliung, who specializes in disability studies and transport geography, was specifically commenting on subway platforms and trains that are too high in the air for many disabled people to access, such that "platform gap fillers and bridge plates" exist to literally fill the gaps and bridge the heights.? Whether that is enough will depend on how you react to reading the rest of his article.

??????? There's a lot here that I would like to unpack, as they say.

??????? Some people attend meetings on how to implement access for all people with the attitude that access belongs to the able-bodied, and that people who are not able-bodied have to accommodate themselves to the way things are.? The first thing I draw from the quote above, is that the law has already been written and it says the opposite.

??????? One such law among many is the Americans With Disabilities Act.? What the ADA says is that reasonable accommodations have to be made for disabled persons by the people and businesses covered by the Act.? People who are not able-bodied do not have to accommodate themselves to the world built by able-bodied people for themselves.

??????? Rather, the world we live in, our country, the United States of America, must reasonably accommodate the disabled, not the other way around, by including disabled people in making the decisions that rule our lives including but not limited to decisions involving accessibility.

??????? And the emphasis of the ADA, it must always be remembered, is on reasonable accommodations, not just accommodations for accommodations' sake.? This is not what you would call a zero-sum game in which some win and many lose.? When reasonable accommodations are made, everybody wins – and that's the first point.

??????? Without being unkind to people who still demand that everyone else must accommodate themselves to things as they are, it is often the right thing to say that the law has already been written, and they lost.? A neutral way to mention this when you are in a meeting where some people express these views is to say that the reason we are in these meetings is to help implement what the law requires.? The law requires reasonable accommodations.? The law certainly does not require anything like preferential treatment (let alone the preferential treatment they are advocating for themselves, still).?? (You may not want to add that last part if you want to be completely neutral about it.)

??????? But as a lawyer I have seen first-hand that litigation is a poor way to make policy.? "Waiting around for disabled passengers" to solve the gaps and scale the heights at subway platforms by any kind of litigation, including the "class-action litigation" Professor Buliung specifically mentions, is as he so rightly says, "not an effective strategy."

??????? ?Litigation usually depends on one case at a time.? It is rare for litigation to affect the outcomes of many cases all at once.

? ????? Moreover, lawyers in litigation owe their loyalties to their clients, not to society as a whole.? They work to obtain the result that is best for their client, not the result that is best for, say, America.

??????? ?That is why the results of individual cases are not very satisfactory to large groups of people.?? Sometimes, though, litigation is the only option to make policy.? That is a great sadness of our time.

??????? Now to return to this quote I have input, above.? The second thing it brings to my mind is it reminds me that there are consequences to blocking input and the consequences include cost.? There is usually if not always a greater cost to fix something after it was implemented without input, than by encouraging, even inviting input from the beginning.

??????? Third, those same consequences can also get in the way even from the start. ??When the costs of fixing something are really high, we tend not to fix them because the costs are so high.? It is a pretty well-known feature of group dynamics that if the costs will be too great to fix an activity or a decision later, then doing the activity or taking the decision now will effectively kill all opposition now or in the future.

??????? To be aware of this tactic is to be able to recognize it if and when it occurs.? Here are some suggestions on how to politely counter this tactic.

·???? Do not engage.

·???? Raise your own issues.? For example, where the discussion is focused on the general issue of the costs of accessibility to public places,? you can raise the more specific issue of accessibility to restaurants, hotels, and other businesses that depend on the public for their existence.

·???? People with disabilities also have money.? They can either spend their money in public places that make it possible for them to be there and spend their money, or they can withhold their money and go somewhere else that is actually accessible.

? In the end, issues of accessibility are often decided by issues of money.? The purveyors of inaccessibility are not the only ones with money, and likely they do not even have most of the money involved in a given situation, something which we would all do well to remind them.

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I began this article with a quote from an article by Ron Buliung which was published in an online magazine called The Conversation on January 22, 2024.? Buliung is a Professor at the University of Toronto and The Conversation describes itself as a nonprofit, independent news organization that draws on academics, researchers and other experts to write on topics of interest to the general public, in language that the general public can understand and not in academic jargon:? "We publish trustworthy and informative articles written by academic experts for the general public and edited by our team of journalists."? I am really pleased to have found this site, and by going to the link to the Buliung article above, I hope that you are pleased to find it, too.

Copyright 2024 Dennis J. Wall.? All rights reserved. This article is also available on Substack, at https://open.substack.com/pub/dennisjwall/p/hybrid-access-from-the-beginning?r=dxcx1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.