Challenge to candidates: adapt campaigns, activities to accommodate people with disabilities

MARLBORO — If you are a person with disabilities or someone who cares about disability issues, please let all 2016 Vermont statewide candidates know that the need for accessible and inclusive campaigns is very real. Tell them what makes something accessible for you and helps you feel included!

As a person who has a 50-year interest and involvement in the concerns of people with disabilities, and now as a person with disabilities myself, I am contacting statewide candidates with a request and a challenge.

Often true leadership is not about what laws are proposed or passed, it is about how lawmakers conduct themselves, what they show the public is important to them, and solutions they develop, promote, and implement outside of their government service.

Therefore, I request all candidates, without regard to party politics, accept my challenge: conduct your campaigns in a manner that makes them accessible to people with disabilities.

Some of the key components include:

• Holding all campaign events in easily accessible locations;

• ensuring headquarters and any campaign offices are accessible;

• providing American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters when requested;

• using fonts, graphics, etc. that meet the standards and guidelines of the Americans with Disabilities Act;

• offering alternative formats of materials if requested; and

• training volunteers/staff to be sensitive to the concerns of people with disabilities.

Let's work toward the day when Vermont can say that people with disabilities no longer have to endure conditions such as these that exclude or discriminate:

• either no entrances, or separate and inferior entrances;

• communications that cannot be understood; and

• interactions that are rude, condescending, or full of pity.

While the political and public needs, opinions, ideas, and wants of people with disabilities are as varied as the rest of the population, generally we just want to be included and treated respectfully and fairly.

We have an amazing array of abilities as well as challenges; no different from those of other people.

We are each, every human being, uniquely abled. And that includes our lawmakers.