My name is haben girma and i am a disability rights advocate, lawyer, speaker and author. My book is called haben girma the deaf blind woman who conquered harvard law. I haveimited vision and heing and i gre up in this world. I was born and raised in cafornia and am still living in california. Im talking to you from my living room. I dont actually work here. I work at the desk where i sat down to write m book. My deaf blindness is not what made life difficult. It was able is that made life difficult. This is the belief that disabled people are inferior compared to nondisabled people. Its not true. We are not inferior. But ableism keeps moving through society saying disabled people dont matter and therefore they dont make the services accessible, dont provide medical care and all kds of unfair biases. Wh i was younger i wasnt sure what to do. Do i just accept this inferior service . T over time, i learned to advocate. I started to demand inclusion and then i learned about the disabilities act which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. Th prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities. I learned about it when i was in college, and my book shares this ocess where i discover advocacy and turn it into a career and learn to advocate for people with disabilities. If you were to take away one message from the book, it is the concept of ableism, the belief that disabled people are inferior to nondisabled people. My book teaches people to identify ableism and join us in working to fight. I am an advocate, so i look back at my life and ask myself what are the lessons from my life that can help people with opportunities around the United States and around the world. I picked stories from my life that teach people about a realism. It intersects with sexism, racism, and it pops up in small conversations in the kitchen. So i wanted to show so people can learn to identify it and live with it in my society. My parents are from ethiopia and in parts of those countries people believe that disabilities occur from the family. It was really, really difficult to deal with that kind of oppression. My parents had to learn to resist that idea. They had to learn to redesign disability for ourselves. Disability isnt a burden on the family. Disability is an opportunity for innovation. So, we had to come up with our own definition of what disability means. When i was growing up, i would try to tell my parents i cant cook, i cant do chores, you cant ask blind kids to do chores. They were not buying it. They still insisted that i cook and do chores. And on the one hand, as a kid i was frustrated, but on the other, as an adult im grateful i got those life skills. There are lots of parents of disabled kids who tell their kids dont do chores, dont cook, its dangerous. And those kids grow up into adults whove never developed an important independent life skills. Thats frustrating. Parents need to help their kids explore their environments and develop important life skills like how to take care of ones home. The society is filled with nondisabled people and that forces disabled people to come up with solutions so everything from cooking in the kitchen to solving international challenges. One of the things i had to learn to solve is how you communicate. One of my strengths is my sense of touch. I use it more than most people. It helps me while dancing and climbing and all kinds of situations. When im walking, im feeling the different textures from pavement to carpet to hardwood floors. Looking at ways to communicate i immediately tap into that. So looking at technologies, touch is a solution. In 2010 a new piece of technology came out and supported bluetooth and braille. I will hold it up. Im holding up a little device with braille on the bottom and i run my fingers over the dots to feel the letters. When i connect this to an external keyboard, people can type on the keyboard and i can read in braille. And braille. Most people dont know braille, dont know sign language, and most people can type. So, i found that communication became much, much eaer when taed into one of my strengths, my sense of touch. My hearing is terrible, my visi is terrible but my sense of touch is excellent, so i tapped into that and way more opportunities came up for me. Disabl people do this all the time. When you increase the disabilitn your team or at your school, more innovations come in. More solutions to problems. So, it benefit all of us. It benefits all of us to increase hiring and diversity. Traditional philosophy text exclude a lot of thinkers and knowledge that exists in the world. There is a bias towards white male philosophers, excluding a lot of the wisdom by black, women of color, disabled people who exist across the different minority groups, so we need to rebuild our libraries to include diverse philosophers and traditional text that has been praised throughout western history and exclude a lot of critical voices. Why am i passionate about social justice . Because i want to stay alive. I want access and opportunities that are available to nondisabled people. Disabled black and brown people are at creative risk of Police Violence and a third to half of those killed by the police are disabled people. A lot of individuals in power police officers, tsa agents walk into situations assuming one can hear, see, move in certain ways and that is terrifying and leads to many deaths. All these injustices exist and moves me to advocate for change, to be a social justice advocate. And in my book i talk about a situation in college where all i wanted was to eat. I wanted access to food, and the food information was only available in a visual format. As a blind student, i couldnt read the menu and i asked the cafeteria please provide a menu in braille or post it online or email it to me. I have technology that allows me to access websites and emails. The cafeteria manager told me we are very busy. We have over a thousand students. We dont have time to do special things for students with special needs. Eating is not a special need. Everyone needs to eat. There is a myth that there are two types of people, dependent and independent. Everyone is interdependent. Many of you like drinking coffee. Very few of you groom your own coffee beans. You depend on other people to do that, to grow your food and build your computers. Its okay as long as we are honest about the fact we are all interdependent. The cafeteria manager didnt understand this, so for several months i tolerated the lack of access to food. I was a vegetarian back then. How do you know what station is serving vegetarian when you cannot read the menu. It was frustrating. I would go to a station at random, find a table, try the food and discover an unpleasant surprise. What was i to do, maybe disabled students should just accept inferior service. Maybe that was just going to be my life. I talked to friends and advocas and they reminded me it is my choice, it is our choice to accept unfairnes or advocate for justice. I went back to the maner and explained the americans with disabilities act and if you dont provide access to the menus im going to take legal action i had no idea how to do that. I was 19. I couldnt afford a lawyer. Now we know there are nonprofit Legal Centers tt help students with disabilities. But back then i didnt know that. All i knew is i had to try. I had to do something. The next day the manager apologized and promised to make the menus accessible. He actually did. Th next year a new blind student came to the college and d immediate access to the menus. When i advocate it helps everyone who comes after me. That experience inspired me to go to law school. I went to harvard law. They said they never had a death blind stent before. I told them id never been to Harvard Law School before. We didnt know the other solutions. Now i work as an advocate for disabled peopl and i know there is injtice and i know that there is a way to end the injustice. All of us have a choice to accept unfairness, tolerate it or advocate for justice. My book the blind deaf woman who conquered rvard law helps people identify all of the injustices againstisabled people maybe not all of them, but a lotf them and encourages people to join us in fighting to end injustice against disabled people. A lot of people dont know about access for the disabled. There are tools like the guidelines, guidelines for designing accessible. Some people say they dont know about them. So you give them the opportunity to learn about it. But if they have education and still refuse refuse to make ther services accessible, then there is consequences. People have 30 years to learn this. Theres no more excuses. This is important to all advocates. They research what they ar talking about. Books help you gain a deeper understanding of the topics. When you are facing a difficult situation, that is exactly when you need to be an advocate for justice. If you have the energy, yes, advocate for change. I do understand that sometimes those of us that advocate all the time and we need to take a break and we charge it really helps when you have a community that can step in for you to help you with the advocacy. Mmunity is a really big part of that. Theres two things. One, theres a lot of injustice against disabled people. If you can turn that off and pretend it doesnt exist and stop thinking about it, that is a privilege. Its a privilege to not think about these access issues and they have the opportunity to increase access for disabled patrons. Text and books are critical to the knowledge and expanding opportunities. Make sure digital services, library websites, digital books are accessible and for those like dyslexia and learning disabilities. Increase access to braille as well. The nationa National Library ser the blind has been a huge part of my life. Owing up i would get so many books. Harry potter books i got those from the library of congress. The libra talking Books Program is one of the few in the country where blind people can get braille books that i can actually hold and feel. This is precious and rare. Its hard to get our hands on braille books. So most of my life when i got a physical book it was through the library. We also have computer braille and devices. When a digital book is compatible with a screen reader, blind people can read it on their computers. So we also canccess braille nerally. We do need to have access to the computers. They are expensive. There are some Government Programs and nonprofits that have computers for blind individuals but its really difficult to get access to them. Good evening everyone. Welcome to scottsdale arizona. And Barbara Stevens in my