People with disabilities wanted to be included in society.
The goal of the Act was to provide a more equitable society for those people.
It would absolutely be derided as "woke DEI nonsense" if proposed today.
ADA predates DEI by a couple decades. Lots of people, including Republicans, support the ADA and support expanding its protections.
This is a pretty standard tactic of partisans when their pet issue becomes unpopular - take something unrelated, or at best tangentially related, and pretend it's related or that that's what they've been advocating for all along.
I don't care if you support the ADA or you don't. I don't care if you support DEI or you don't. But they're different, they've never been related, and any attempt by partisans on the left to lump them together is just trying to reframe the issue as "against DEI == against the ADA" because of course everyone on the right hates disabled people right?
Now, sure. At the time? Same sort of bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
Both are rooted in the same concept - that people should have fair opportunity to participate in society even if different in some ways.