Anita Silvers, a philosophy professor who was a leading voice in the interpretation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, arguing that disability rights should be viewed the same as other civil rights and not as an accommodation or as a social safety net issue, died on March 14 in San Francisco. She was 78.

San Francisco State University, where Dr. Silvers taught for half a century, said the cause was pneumonia.

Dr. Silvers was already a well-regarded scholar with an expertise in aesthetics in the 1990s when she started to focus on disability law and definitions related to it. She knew about disabilities firsthand: She had polio as a child, and the disease left her with limited mobility. The Americans With Disabilities Act had been passed in 1990, and Dr. Silvers began to examine how it was being interpreted, whether philosophically, in the courts or on her own campus.

“A critical thing for her was to understand the A.D.A. as a civil rights statute,” said Leslie P. Francis, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Utah who wrote papers and edited a book with Dr. Silvers. “Not as an approach to giving people special privileges, but as a way of giving people the rights that everyone else has.”