Expanding Your Market: Building a Diverse Customer Base

The Look of Disability Discrimination

Discrimination against people with disabilities can take many different forms. Under the ADA, civil rights violations may look like this:

• Restaurant staff refuses to seat a family with a daughter who has cerebral palsy because they say she will make other diners uncomfortable.

• A taxi driver slows to pick up three riders until he sees that one of them uses a service animal. The driver swerves and speeds away.

• A trendy new clothes shop is built with steps to its only entrance, the equivalent of a sign telling people who use wheelchairs that they are not welcomed.

• A hospital refuses to provide a sign language interpreter when one of its physicians is ready to explain upcoming surgery to a deaf patient who uses sign language.

• A museum’s information desk staff tells a father who is blind that he cannot join a walk-in tour with his two sons. Instead, he must take a separate tour for blind people, which requires making reservations two weeks in advance.