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 ![[Horizontal Rule]](/webart/nav_rule.gif){kind=small}            Click here to learn about |
 ![[----------------Horizontal Rule----------------]](/webart/hrule.gif){kind=small}  3. The Importance of Going OutThree major impediments hinder people who use AAC from becoming effective members of society:
Of this trio of barriers, perhaps the first is easiest to fix if there is the will to do it. It’s easy to put in ramps, elevators and grab bars, especially when a building is under construction. But will it get done? Some people say, "Why go to all that extra expense for access when there aren’t any disabled people in our town?" I find this most curious. How do they know this? Have they taken a survey of the entire town? Perhaps the civic leaders possess x-ray vision and can see through walls. "Nope, no people with disabilities in here, Floyd." "None over there either, Charlie." Most curious indeed. Are we like those trees in the forest that make no sound when they fall because nobody is there to hear them? Just because people don’t see us on the streets, doesn’t mean we aren’t living in the community. Berkeley, California is often referred to as the Mecca of the disability movement. Overblown? Sure it is. This is what happens twenty years after the start of a revolution when the backbone of truth gets covered with more than its share of myth and hype. Today Berkeley is a most accessible city. It is small and compact and easily traversed by a person in a motorized wheelchair. Berkeley’s disabled population is viewed as just another segment of the community. It wasn’t this way twenty years ago. Berkeley was like any other city. There were no curb cuts or ramps and a general attitude of hostility hung in the air like a pall. Then something happened. The University of California admitted a physically disabled student to its Berkeley campus. This didn’t happen without a struggle, but it did happen. Soon after the first student was admitted, another one came and then another one. All these people had motorized wheelchairs, and they started to use them to explore the community at large. They were greeted with a mixture of curiosity, annoyance and outright hostility. But these people didn’t let a few dirty looks, muttered comments or demands they leave a store get them down. They were back on the streets the next day, mingling with the community, serving notice that they couldn’t be scared away. Twenty years later Berkeley has become a city that is relaxed about people with disabilities – even about people who use AAC. Every day people who use letterboards, head pointers and speech output devices go into stores and get treated like ordinary mortals wanting to buy stuff. Clerks even seem to know enough about people with speech disabilities to immediately get in the proper position to read a person’s letterboard and to stick with the task until the task is completed. Can the outcome of the Berkeley experience be re-created elsewhere in the country and the world? Yes and no. Berkeley had some unique geographical and political factors that could never be replicated in another place. But the Berkeley experience was also one of the mind, spirit and heart. Every day disabled people woke up and confronted the barriers erected by their own fears and then went out to confront the barriers to people with disabilities erected by public attitudes. When people take charge of their own outcomes, good things may happen. That is the lesson of Berkeley. We in the field of AAC should try to learn from it. This article appears in AS Volume 2, # 1. You may order this issue by clicking on Ordering Home Page Online Ordering 
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