On May 31, 2011, the Justice Department’s Disability Rights Section and Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California entered into a comprehensive settlement agreement with Wells Fargo & Company. Under the Agreement, Wells Fargo will pay up to $16 million to compensate individuals who experienced discrimination in violation of Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) when trying to call Wells Fargo, access Wells Fargo’s services, or visit one of Wells Fargo’s retail stores.

• How to file a claim for compensation from Wells Fargo
• Settlement Agreement between United States and Wells Fargo
• Fact Sheet about Agreement

Wells Fargo owns or operates almost 10,000 retail stores and 12,000 ATMs located throughout the United States. Wells Fargo offers a wide variety of financial services, including personal and commercial banking, mortgages, brokerage, insurance, and investments. The Department initiated its investigation after receiving complaints under Title III of the ADA filed by numerous individuals who are deaf, are hard of hearing, or have speech disabilities. The complainants alleged that Wells Fargo would not do business with them over the phone using a telecommunications relay service. Instead, the individuals were directed to call a TTY/TDD line that asked them to leave a message, which went unanswered. The Department determined that these actions violated the ADA. The Department also received a variety of other complaints alleging ADA violations by Wells Fargo, including the failure to provide financial documents to people who are blind or have low vision in alternate formats (e.g., Braille or large print), the failure to provide appropriate auxiliary aids and services upon request for in-person meetings between Wells Fargo staff and individuals who are deaf, and the failure to remove barriers to access for individuals with mobility disabilities. The settlement agreement provides for resolution of all complaints alleging violation of the ADA in connection with Wells Fargo’s financial services and retail facilities based on events occurring before May 31, 2011.

The settlement agreement requires Wells Fargo to accept calls made through a relay service by customers who are deaf, are hard of hearing, or have speech disabilities; remove physical barriers to access identified at its retail stores; provide appropriate auxiliary aids and services, including qualified sign language or oral interpreters, computer-assisted real-time transcription, qualified readers, and documents in alternate formats (Braille, large print, audio format, accessible electronic format) to persons with disabilities when necessary to ensure effective communication throughout its financial services and programs; ensure that its ATMs and websites are accessible to individuals with disabilities; and remedy all other instances of discrimination – including architectural barriers and operational issues — under Title III of the ADA that are identified during the claims process. In addition, the agreement requires Wells Fargo to make $1 million in charitable donations to non-profit organizations that will assist veterans with disabilities caused by injuries sustained while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan to live independently in the community. Wells Fargo will also pay a $55,000 civil penalty to the United States Treasury.

By fortressdayton

The original author of the ADA, a man confined to a wheelchair, lamented what the ADA has become. He said that, had he known what abuses of personal and property rights would take place in the name of the act, he would never have written the Act. How’s that for a commentary on the ADA? Society had a responsibility to TRY to accomodate its less-gifted citizens, but it is not obliged to do so. The ADA is a legal boondoggle used by attorneys to generate lucrative lawsuits. It needs to go away. Look around Dayton and see how this works out: every corner nearly has a sight-impaired plastic plate. How many sight impaired folks walk around Dayton? The cost is criminal. Braille buttons on drive-thru (!) ATMs. Gimme a break. Thye ADA has put more small restaurants out of business than the Mafia and the economy combined. Why does a mom and pop restaurant need a ramp and a handicapped accessible bathroom for EACH sex? Nonsense. Every welfare recipient seems to have a power chair now, so the problem is epidemic. I say, stop over-regulating in the private sector. If I don’t want to spend 200,000 to make my restaurant handicap-accessible, then that should be my decision. If you accomodate one, then you must, by rights accomodate all. Why do we get to bring assistance animals in food service establishments? What happened to hygiene? Oh, that’s right…the blind have more of a right to bring Fido in than I have a right to maintain food safety. BS!

After reading that, I was ready to reply in kind – but didn’t. Other commenters jumped into the fray, renewing my conviction in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s assertion that the best remedy for speech that we hate is not its proscription, but more speech. Read what they wrote.

The libertarian argument (I’ve got mine, and I’ll step on your neck to keep it) advanced by “fortressdayton” reminded me of Rand Paul’s remarks about the Americans with Disabilities Act after his primary election victory last May in Kentucky. His language sounded reasonable compared to “fortressdayton”, but it conveyed the same sense of paternalism and noblesse oblige: the disabled  don’t need burdensome laws to help them, we know what is best for them. Here is what Rand Paul said on NPR:

I think a lot of things could be handled locally. For example, I think that we should try to do everything we can to allow for people with disabilities and handicaps. You know, we do it in our office with wheelchair ramps and things like that. I think if you have a two-story office and you hire someone who’s handicapped, it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator. And I think when you get to solutions like that, the more local the better, and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having a federal government make those decisions.

President Obama and others speak at an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. [Source: whitehose.gov].  This video is in the public domain. Read the transcript.

Thanks to Ellen Belcher for publishing this piece today on the Dayton Daily News opinion page (PDF) and Matter of Opinion blog.

Disabilities Act Still A Work In Progress

by Mark Willis

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Twenty years is significant, not because it’s a round number, but rather, because it represents a generation of experience gained since the law was passed.

Many of us who lobbied for the ADA believed at the time that it could take a generation or more, as it had with the Civil Rights Act before it, to fulfill the ADA’s promise of equal opportunity for Americans with disabilities.

I remember the day 20 years ago tomorrow, July 26, when I went to the White House to watch President George H. W. Bush sign the legislation. The event was held outside on the South Lawn, between the White House and the Ellipse. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors to enter. The Secret Service surely had a crash course in disability awareness, because it was the smoothest security check I ever had.

As I walked through the wrought-iron gate, I looked around and marveled, “Wow, they let me in here!” They let me in, and a thousand other people. We had every kind of disability in the human condition, and we used every kind of assistive device available at the time. I like to think we were the most diverse group of citizens ever gathered together at the White House.

The ADA signing ceremony was held outside, not because it was a beautiful summer day, but because the White House itself was not fully accessible. Many in our diverse group of citizens could not have entered the building. Long gone were the wooden ramps installed five decades earlier to accommodate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair.

On its anniversary, pundits will debate what the ADA has accomplished since then. I am no pundit, but I still believe what I said in a TV interview after the signing ceremony. “The ADA will not end disability discrimination overnight. But in a nation governed by the rule of law, getting it in writing is the place to start.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act was an unfinished project at the moment it was signed into law, and it remains an unfinished project today. It depends on all of us, and the work we will do, to carry it to completion.

My own work has been greatly influenced by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher of liberation. He taught non-literate poor people how to read by first convincing them that, through the daily work they did with their hands, they had culture and made culture. He believed culture to be an unfinished project that he called “the struggle for human completion.”

Listen to that expansive phrase again. “The struggle for human completion.” That is a worldview large enough to include all of us, whether we have disabilities or not. That is a project in which all of us are engaged. That struggle makes us human.

In the years since the ADA became law, we’ve begun to talk about something called “the culture of disability.” I do not think that disability is a fully evolved culture in the same sense that we speak of Mayan culture or even Deaf Culture. But I do believe that the work of disability is a significant form of cultural production.

By “work of disability,” I mean the daily problem-solving involved in living with a disability — making adaptations and negotiating accommodations — according to principles set forth in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The work of disability is creative work. It’s work that addresses the impairments of individuals, to be sure, but it’s also work that strives to make society more flexible and tolerant. Many of us, disabled and non-disabled, have significant experience with this work, but it seldom shows up on a job resume.

Recently I was invited to talk about the ADA with graduating students with disabilities at Wright State University. I told them, “As you venture forth in the world, you will have to negotiate with people who see the disability, not the person. Some will look at you and see one more hassle, one more problem added to their plate. When I look at you, I don’t see problems. I see problem-solvers.

“So go out there and get it done, this unfinished project called the struggle for human completion. Claim your rightful place in the public sphere. The Americans with Disabilities Act has got your back.”

[This op-ed began as a talk given to graduating students and scholarship winners at the Office of Disability Services reception at Wright State University.]