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Impruvon Celebrates Disability Pride Month: Spotlighting Leaders Who Define Disability Pride
- Isaiah Pittman
- Jul 21
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 27
Isaiah Pittman | Sr. Marketing Manager, Impruvon | July 2026
July is Disability Pride Month — a time rooted in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26, 1990, and a time to celebrate what that legislation affirmed: that people with disabilities have an equal right to participate fully in public life.
At Impruvon, we have spent the past several months honoring the communities whose advocacy and lived experience have shaped the world of intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). This July, we turn our full attention to Disability Pride itself — and to the individuals who have demanded, loudly and persistently, that disability be seen not as a deficit but as a dimension of human diversity worth celebrating.
Disability Pride is not a passive concept, nor the absence of shame. It is an active, political declaration that the barriers people with disabilities face are not inevitable features of the human condition, but failures of design, policy, and imagination that can be corrected. The social model of disability, which holds that people are disabled by environments that fail to accommodate them rather than by their conditions alone, is at the heart of what this month honors. For the I/DD community specifically, that means fighting for self-determination, community-based living, healthcare equity, and the right to be seen as a full, complex person whose needs and contributions matter equally. The individuals below have each dedicated their lives to making that fight real.
Voices Who Shaped the Movement
Justin Dart Jr. is one of the most consequential disability rights advocates in American history. Often called the "Godfather of the ADA," Dart spent years traveling to all fifty states holding public forums to document the discrimination and exclusion faced by people with disabilities — work that formed the evidentiary and moral backbone of the Americans with Disabilities Act. A wheelchair user himself, Dart believed deeply that disability rights were human rights, and he pushed for nothing less than full civic and economic participation for every person with a disability. The ADA did not happen by accident; it happened because people like Justin Dart refused to let Congress look away. His legacy lives in every accessible ramp, every workplace accommodation, and every community-based support system that exists today. Learn more →
Ed Roberts is widely regarded as the father of the independent living movement. In the 1960s, Roberts became one of the first students with significant physical disabilities admitted to UC Berkeley — a battle fought against institutional resistance at every level. From that foothold, he helped establish the first Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, a model that spread globally and fundamentally shifted how disability services were delivered: away from institutions and toward community-based, consumer-controlled support. Roberts used a motorized wheelchair and an iron lung, and he refused to let either define the ceiling of his ambitions or his expectations for what disabled people could achieve. His core argument — that people with disabilities are the experts on their own lives — is a cornerstone of person-centered care to this day. Learn more →
Harriet McBryde Johnson was an attorney, disability rights activist, and writer whose work challenged the philosophical and legal foundations of ableism with both intellectual rigor and fierce wit. A person with a congenital neuromuscular disease who used a power wheelchair, Johnson took on some of the most difficult arguments in bioethics — including public debates with philosopher Peter Singer over the value of disabled lives — and won them on the merits. Her 2003 New York Times Magazine essay brought disability rights into mainstream cultural conversation in a way few pieces ever had. She argued, always, that disabled lives are worth living — not despite disability but as lives that are whole and complete. For the I/DD community and the broader disability rights movement, her refusal to concede the premise of lesser value remains a model of advocacy. Learn more →
Haben Girma is a human rights lawyer and the first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School. The daughter of Eritrean and Ethiopian immigrants, Girma works at the intersection of disability rights, technology access, and inclusion, advocating for innovations that enable people with disabilities to participate fully in digital and civic life. She has advised the Obama White House, spoken at the United Nations, and written a bestselling memoir about her life and advocacy. Girma's work is particularly resonant for the I/DD and broader disability community because she demonstrates what becomes possible when technology is designed with disabled users in mind rather than as an afterthought — a principle that guides how Impruvon thinks about the tools we build. Her advocacy makes the case that accessibility is not a courtesy; it is a right. Learn more →
Carrie Ann Lucas was a disability rights attorney, advocate, and foster and adoptive parent of four children with disabilities. She spent her career fighting for the rights of disabled people to parent their own children — a battle too often ignored in mainstream disability advocacy — and founded Disabled Parents Rights, an organization dedicated to protecting families from being separated simply because a parent has a disability. Her advocacy led directly to the passage of Colorado's Family Preservation for Parents with Disability Act in 2018. Lucas herself had a progressive neuromuscular disease and used a power wheelchair, and she brought the same personal investment to her legal work that defined the best of the disability rights movement. Her death in 2019 — following an insurance company's denial of medication her doctors recommended — was a stark and painful reminder of how far the healthcare system still has to go in treating people with disabilities with equity and urgency. Learn more →
Impruvon’s Dedication
We are a healthcare technology company. Our eMAR and medication workflow management platform exists to make care safer, more efficient, and more person-centered for individuals with I/DD. But the values that drive that work — dignity, self-determination, equity, belonging — are the same values at the heart of Disability Pride Month.
When we reduce the documentation burden for Direct Support Professionals, we create space for real relationships. When we eliminate medication errors and automate compliance, we contribute to the kind of healthcare reliability that people with I/DD deserve and have fought for. And when we write posts like this one, naming these individuals and their contributions, we are participating in visibility — something the disability community has had to fight for, loudly, for decades.
We recognize that observing these months is not the same as doing the work, but it is a hallmark of an unending commitment. Understanding the history and the people who made it possible shapes how we show up as a company: in the products we build, the partnerships we pursue, and the communities we choose to center.
A Personal Note From Our Team
This Disability Pride Month, we are also proud to share a piece that is much closer to home. Amy Vitale, Customer Success Manager here at Impruvon and mother of a child with AuDHD and a PDA profile, has written a deeply personal reflection on what Disability Pride means to her — not in the abstract, but in the daily, lived reality of raising a child whose nervous system experiences the world differently. Amy writes about the social model of disability, about what she had to unlearn, and about how her son's fierce need for autonomy has changed how she thinks about innovation, leadership, and inclusion in the workplace. It is honest, specific, and worth your time.
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