The 1973 Rehabilitation Act prohibited discrimination based on disability on a national basis for all Americans, covering employment, education, removal of architectural barriers, and civil rights for people with disabilities. As the story goes, the law remained stagnant for years after Nixon signed the bill into law and wasn’t actually implemented until 1977, thanks to a broad-based coalition of disabled people protesting their right to access.

Section 502 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 established the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (ATBCB), which eventually evolved into the current Access Board. Section 502 followed the Architectural Barriers Act (ABA) of 1968, which didn’t effectively mandate compliance to new federal guidelines. Initially composed of the heads of ten federal agencies, the board was developed to address transportation barriers impeding mobility for people with disabilities and understand how these barriers affected their quality of life.

By 1978, compliance to ABA was still not actualized and in response Congress passed several amendments to the ’73 Rehabilitation Act, one of which said that eleven public members were to join the Board, appointed by the President of the United States. Five of these public members were to be members of the disability community. In 1979, Hale Zukas joined the Board after establishing the BART Accessibility Task Force and working on mobility equity in the Bay Area by taking on AC Transit. The 1978 amendments also determined that the Board needed to create minimum accessibility standards to enforce the Architectural Barriers Act.

Section 502 was an important legislative step towards recognizing discrimination caused by the built environment at the federal level, but it’s important to consider interventions and standards already being enacted in cities and states. Take, for example, the official curb ramps established by the city of Berkeley in the early ’70s, thanks to the direct action of the CIL, and the less visible rogue ramping conducted by attendants around the same time.