When businesses realized that they must compete for our business or lose us - that is when the story got interesting to me.
I believe that the travel industry, not governments or social entrepreneurial agencies will make the next revolutionary contribution to the rights of people with disabilities.
The travel industry will become promoters of our human rights because we have spent more than 30 years tirelessly forcing governments to treat us as real human beings and have created social and non-profit agencies to work for us. These laws and educational resources make it possible for something new to happen. The travel industry will find partners in government because tourism by people with disabilities can partially pay for the infrastructure changes needed to treat disabled citizens justly - and meet the coming challenge of our aging populations. The travel industry will do this - and is already doing this - because it can profit from us.
As air travel expanded in the last 15 - 20 years there were also strong movements for the rights of people with disabilities around the world. You probably have all heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA. It protects the civil rights of people with disabilities in the USA and allows them to participate freely in society. In the air however it is the Air Carrier Access Act, the ACAA, that regulates the industry and makes accessible tourism possible. In the airport and in hotels it is the ADA Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities (ADAAG). These regulations are made concrete through the work of designers like Coco Raynes and researchers like Kate Hunter-Zaworski who evaluates airline seating or Harry Wolfe who advises airport managers on the needs of older travelers. These pioneers use a design philosophy called Universal Design that seeks to include people with the broadest range of capacities and abilities in everything that it built.
So, what history teaches us when we start the story of accessible tourism from the airline industry, is that at a certain point the industry needed new customers. It was pressured by law to allow people with disabilities to become customers and it found technically competent individuals who understood the physical needs of people with disabilities. These technically competent individuals used Universal Design to make human rights real in our day-to-day life. They opened up new parts of the world to travelers with disabilities. Finally, we became treated as customers not patients or obstacles.
