Honoring International Day of Persons with Disabilities
This year’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities spotlight is on Haben Girma, J.D. Girma is the first Deafblind student to graduate from Harvard Law School. She worked at Disability Rights Advocates (“DRA”) from 2013 to 2016 as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney. During her time at DRA, she contributed to the precedent-setting case National Federation of the Blind, et al. v. Scribd, Inc. Following the court’s denial of Scribd’s motion to dismiss the case, Scribd agreed to a settlement where Scribd redesigned its website to solve compatibility issues with specialized software for the blind.
After her time at DRA, she chose to devote her efforts full-time to education advocacy. Girma has given speeches for developer conferences, written op-eds for major newspapers, and authored a memoir entitled “Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.” In her memoir, Girma details her family’s story as refugees of the 30-year war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, as well as how she built a school in Mali and learned to salsa dance using tactile, rhythmic cues. She also describes how she developed a text-to-braille communication system, made her way to Harvard Law and became a disability rights advocate.
Girma has travelled around the world in order to give talks on accessibility and inclusion, as well as spoken with President Obama at the White House. She has argued that accessibility is important for society because it applies to all of us. “Anyone can become disabled at any time,” Girma says. “You want to still be able to access your products and services even when your body changes, and all of our bodies change as we age.”
Girma has a widely followed social media and web presence. Her website and Instagram page are a collection of important experiences and knowledge about improving accessibility, as well as pictures of her precious Seeing Eye dog, Mylo.
