Disability is Universal.
Well, this is interesting. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently changed their language about disability on the introduction to the disability section of their website. They used to say the following:
Disability is more than a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting he interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.
The latter part of that is known as the social model of disability, in which the environment (i.e., the design of things) is pointed to as the reason that people are disabled rather than enabled. The WHO has scrubbed this from the intro, replacing it with the following:
More than a billion people in the world today experience disability. These people generally have poorer health, lower education achievements, fewer economic opportunities and higher rates of poverty. This is largely due to the barriers they face in their everyday lives, rather than their disability. Disability is not only a public health issue, but also a human rights and development issue.
What’s positive about this is that it’s more to the point. Disability is a “thing” that people deal with. If you dig just a little and read the WHO’s global disability action plan, there’s a statement on page 5 of the PDF that states:
Disability is universal. Everybody is likely to experience disability directly or to have a family member who experiences difficulties in functioning at some point in his or her life, particularly when they grow older. Following the International Classification of Functioning (ICF), Disability and Health and its derivative version for children and youth, this action plan uses “disability” as an umbrella term for impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions, denoting the negative aspects of the interaction between an individual (with a health condition) and that individual’s contextual (environmental and personal) factors. Disability is neither simply a biological nor a social phenomenon.
It’s important to note the way the WHO references how the ICF draws attention to mismatched interactions between individuals with health conditions with the design of things. That’s not going to change, and thus there’s good reason to focus on universal design.
Now, look back at the last quote, at the first two sentences.
“Disability is universal.”
Why is it universal? They answer that question: “Because everybody is likely to experience disability directly or to have a family member who experiences difficulties in functioning at some point in his or her life, particularly when they grow older.”
Can anyone argue against that?
Please, stop tiptoeing around disability when talking about universal design. I know the mainstream market doesn’t want to acknowledge that it’s applicable to everyone, but it is. If you keep treating disability as something to avoid in conversation, and thus not really trying to understand what needs to be considered for true universal design, you’re doing a disservice to a lot of your neighbors, whether you realize it or not.
