NOBLE AIMS, MIXED RESULTS

By Jill Smolowe

As any disabled person knows, it is often the small gesture that can make an inhospitable world seem welcoming. After a sunglasses vendor in Palatine, Illinois, advertised her sign-language skills, people with hearing impairments flocked to her stand to discuss frame shapes and lens tints. At the Chicago Botanic Garden, shelves and pulley systems enable wheelchair users to inspect a special exhibit. In the rest rooms there, a cheap innovation safeguards the disabled from the nasty scaldings their legs routinely endure in public places: the hot-water pipes beneath the sinks are wrapped with insulation. When a business takes the time to consider such obstacles, says Sue Brogdon, the garden's program supervisor, "this can become a part of an institution's culture."

That, in large measure, is what the disabled had in mind five years ago when they successfully pressed for passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which this week marks the third anniversary of its enactment. While the specific aim of the landmark legislation was to provide America's 49 million physically and mentally disabled people with access to public areas and workplaces, the larger spirit of the law was to puncture the stifling isolation of the disabled and draw them into the mainstream of civic life. Noble in design but threadbare on specific guidelines that spell out what improvements are required in places as varied as public courthouses, private business offices and local bowling alleys, the ADA has proved a mixed blessing for the disabled.

On the one hand, the law's mandate requiring universal access to public buildings, transit systems and communications networks has made a once daunting world more navigable. Curb ramps, lift-equipped buses and extrawide rest-room stalls for wheelchair users are now as common a feature of the American landscape as are closed-captioned TV titles. A phone relay system called Text Telephone enables the deaf to order pizza. "There's a guy in Georgia who has a job for the first time because his bus has a lift, and a woman in Kentucky who's seen her brother play baseball for the first time because the stadium was made wheelchair accessible," says Speed Davis, acting executive director of the National Council on Disability. "The ADA has got people's attention."

But much of that attention is proving hostile. Local and state officials are often at a loss to interpret a law that demands "reasonable accommodation" of the disabled yet allows that compliance need not incur "undue hardship." At a time when voters are feverishly opposed to more regulations and higher taxes, the country's 85,000 state and local government agencies bump up against public resistance when they want to spend money to benefit a relative few. "That's taking time and resources that could have been used in a lot of other ways," says Wally Douthwaite, city manager of Des Plaines, Illinois, which spent $2 million to improve sidewalks and curbs. "The ADA is a pain in the butt."

Moreover, the very concept of "disability" has become clouded. While few would dispute that those who are blind, deaf or in wheelchairs have special needs, the law's vague definition of a disability as "a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities" has provoked an outcropping of frivolous lawsuits. In Indiana a customer filed a complaint against a restaurant because a waiter refused to carve the meat for the man's ailing mother. A Louisiana television anchorwoman sued for time off to receive fertility treatments. In each case, the charges were thrown out. What infuriates ADA advocates is that most of the 45,000 complaints filed over the past three years with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission have been brought by people citing types of disabilities--back problems, depression, neurological disorders--that received scant mention when the ADA was crafted.

Those suits in turn have spawned a common and misplaced perception that compliance invites astronomical costs and potentially bankrupting litigation. In fact, a new Louis Harris & Associates survey of 404 corporate executives, 81% of whom have modified their offices since the law went into effect, found that the median cost of making the workplace more accessible is just $223 per disabled person. Two-thirds said the ADA had not invited any increase in lawsuits. Even so, hiring of the disabled by large corporations has barely nudged forward over the past decade. More dismally, the percentage of small businesses that have hired disabled employees has slipped from 54% to 48% since the ada's enactment. "They're fearful that if it doesn't work out, they can't fire them," says Wendy Lechner, a legislative representative for the National Federation of Independent Business.

Thus two-thirds of all working-age disabled people are still unemployed--the same portion that was jobless when the law was passed. True, many of the 7 million Americans with severe impairments are reluctant to take jobs, knowing they risk losing government subsidies and, more crucially, health benefits. Still, for those who want to work, the obstacles remain formidable. Says Jo Holzer of the Council for Disability Rights: "Many employers hear our name and decide they simply aren't going to talk to our clients."

In Holzer's view, the best accommodations are often the least costly. She speaks from experience. Her daughter Margaret, 29, is a quadriplegic who makes her living selling reservations for a large hotel chain. All Margaret needs to perform her job is an inexpensive wooden dowel, which she uses to tap the computer keyboard. "That," says Holzer, "is not putting an undue burden on anyone."

--Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington and Mark Shuman/Chicago