Sometimes, when she’s out shopping or running errands, Shelby Hintze of Salt Lake City finds places where she simply cannot go. Hintze, 32, was born with a progressive neuromuscular disorder called spinal muscular atrophy and has used a wheelchair her whole life. Housing is especially pesky. She said she has exactly two friends who live in homes that she can enter with her wheelchair.
Linda Disney, 72, was born blind in one eye and with retinopathy of prematurity disease. She’s always had low vision, though she didn’t know it as she had no way to compare what she was seeing to what others saw as she was growing up.
In 2018 she graduated from a nine-month course offered through the Utah Division of Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired and the following year, while on a cruise, her retina detached, and she effectively lost most of the rest of her vision, although she retains excruciating light sensitivity. She now has a guide dog, Brook, a 5-year-old golden lab that’s been her mobility tool for the past two years.
Neither Hintze nor Disney navigated their disability before passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is turning 35 this weekend — a milestone for the hard-won civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in all areas of public life. The act was designed to include those with disabilities in every aspect of society, ensuring they have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else…