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Hello and welcome to the Disability Law Lowdown ASL Podcast. My name is Lori Mallory and I am one of your hosts for this ASL podcast. We're happy you found us and we hope you enjoy this podcast series.

Today's podcast is about the ADA Amendments Act or ADAAA. On January 1, 2009, the new law went into effect. Laws can be chanegd or ammended because sometimes when courts decide cases, their decisions either limit the law or expand it in ways Congress never intended. In the case of the ADA, the Supreme Court had made several decisions that limited the number of people who were covered by the ADA. They narrowed the definition of disability in two important ways, one of which impacted the Deaf and hard of hearing community.

The definition of disability in the ADA is "a physical impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities." In one case, the Supreme Court focused on the word "substantially". Only being Deaf or hard of hearing might not be enough if it doesn't "substantially" limit a life activity. The definition of "substantially" was "significantly restricts". So often, courts might decide there was an impairment, but it wasn't severe enough to "significantly restrict" a major life activity. So in that case, the person might not be covered by the ADA.

The other way that the ADA definition changed was that the Supreme Court said that when deciding if a person has a disability, the court must look at how bad the impairment is by looking at "mitigating measures". Mitigating measures are anything that makes the person's disability appear less severe. For example, if a hard of hearing person can't really hear without their hearing aid, but when they wear their hearing aid can hear well, that changes their measure of disability. The courts would look at that person and the difference their hearing aid makes and not consider them to have a disability under the ADA.

Congress thought the same think you are probably thinking right now. That doesn't make sense! So last year, Congress decided to amend the ADA by passing the ADA Amendments Act, the ADAAA. It says that from now on, the courts must interpret the definition of disability more broadly to include more people. For example, anyone with a disability, Deaf, hard of hearing, a hard of hearing person with hearing aids, without hearing aids, under the ADA the counts may not consider mitigating measures when deciding if a person has a disability under the ADA. That means the courts must decide if a person has a disability based on the disability alone and not how the characteristics of the disability can be improved by using things like hearing aids or glasses.

The ADA was first passed in 1990 and was a comprehensive civil rights la for people with disabilities. But after a while, most cases were just about whether the person met the definition of disability rather than access, accommodation, or effective communication. Now with the ADA Amendments Act, Congress has returned the ADA to how it was always intended to be.

I hope you enjoyed watching this ASL video podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can subscribe for free through iTunes or by going to ASL.DisabilityLawLowdown.com

The Disability Law Lowdown is sponsored by a network of ten ADA Centers around the country. The ADA Centers provide training and technical assistance on the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability-related laws. You can call us at 1-800-949-4232 (V/TTY). The ADA Centers are supported by NIDRR.