2/24/25 - Trump Stuff summarized, airlines retreat, and AI implications
Americans with disabilities warn protections are vanishing in Trump's DEI rollback
April Rubin, Maya Goldman, Axios - February 23, 2025
"The Trump administration has taken actions that undermine accessibility measures — critical for leveling the playing field for people with disabilities — as part of its efforts targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts."
This Axios piece goes well beyond its headline and focus on "DEI," and provides a good summary of almost all the major Trump administration actions and initiatives affecting disabled Americans so far and in the likely near future. Breakdowns, summaries and bullet point recaps like this are probably going to be quite useful going forward. There's just so much happening, and looking like happening soon, that just keeping track is as difficult as fighting any of the policy and political battles themselves.
Airlines look to remove consumer protections for travelers who use wheelchairs
Kate Gibson, CBS News - February 20, 2025
"In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, the trade group Airlines for America and five carriers — American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest and United — argue that the mandate put in place last year by the Biden administration is unlawful. The 2024 rule made mishandling wheelchairs a violation of the federal Air Carrier Access Act."
This is another important thing to look out for – businesses, industries, and other interests outside the Trump administration seeking on their own to roll back disability rights protections, even before the administration itself has proposed anything. It seems like the major U.S. airlines have noticed the obvious shift in political power and are anxious to take as much advantage of it as possible. In a way it shouldn't be surprising – not in the least. Companies almost always oppose government requirements. It's almost their job. That's all the more reason for disability communities to stay alert to attacks from business communities on our hard-won legal protections.
In the age of AI, colleges need to rethink how students learn
David Perry, Washington Post - February 21, 2025
"When I was a child, dyslexia left me with trouble forming clear letters by hand, but with the advent of keyboards, I slowly built a new relationship with writing. Decades later, in my late 30s, I embraced speech transcription apps. For me, that was the true technological breakthrough, and in fact I drafted this review speaking into my phone and letting the program capture it. But the words you’re reading now still convey my thinking. The technology doesn’t break the chain between thought and word. ChatGPT, Warner argues, does something else entirely, and that something isn’t writing."
This is an important article for readers interested in disability, even though that's not exactly its central topic. Artificial Intelligence, (more speficially and accurately, says author David Perry, large language automation models like ChatGPT), poses both unique dangers and exciting opportunities for disabled people. These technologies can be important additions to disabled people's adaptive toolkits. They have the potential to help disabled people in any field where the work of our minds and imaginations requires physical and organizational efforts that may be impaired by our disabilities. College is a prime example, and a good place to work out the possibilities and boundaries. And Perry's review of two new books on AI in education indirectly suggests how even writing itself, or some of the more obvious aspects of it, can in a sense be adapted for disabled people. This is especially so if the purpose is to get at what really matters, our thoughts and ideas – rather than our penmanship, typing efficiency, or spelling and sentence structure.
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