The Ability Project aim is to show that quality of life is related to how free a person is to make their own choices and for a significant number of disabled people computer technology and the Internet holds the keys to those choices.

Articles that deal with issues relating to the lives of people with disabilities

The first section of the chapter looks at the concept of 'disability', and discusses the ways in which the words 'disability', 'impairment' and 'handicap' are used. The second section of the chapter looks at attitudes to disability. It considers attitudes over history and across cultures, as well as some contemporary attitudes in Australian culture. The third section of the chapter provides some statistics about people with disabilities, and some information about their situation in Australian society.

Advocating the Legal Rights of Texans with Disabilities

A large majority of the public (82%) believes that life has gotten better for people with disabilities in the last fifty years. However, six in ten adults say that people with disabilities have too little influence in our society today, compared with about a third (34%) who say these people have the right amount of influence, and 3% who say they have too much influence. In addition, about two-thirds (65%) say there is a lot or some discrimination against people with disabilities in this country today, and four in ten say that our health care system very or somewhat often treats people unfairly based on physical disability.

National organization of and for people with mental retardation and related developmental disabilities and their families.

A society that increasingly believes in individualism, in self reliance and in less government indeed has no other option then to think about disability in a negative way.

Presents data and other information to inform decisions related to the provision of programs and to serve as a reference for public and community-based organizations.

The dialogue about quality of life � the objective and subjective views cannot be answered quickly. A review, however, is essential to understanding the complexity and the richness of those lives, those which are disabled. We must do this because we are all..."worth" it.

A four hour documentary radio series about the shared experience of people with disabilities and their families since the beginning of the 19th century.

Blessed are you that never bids us hurry up and more blessed are you that do not snatch our tasks from our hands to do them for us, for often we need time rather than help�

Information about services and programs for children and adults with developmental disabilities in California

Until the medical model of disability is divorced from a disabled child's right to equal educational opportunity, children with disabilities will continue to be relegated to a system of separate and unequal education where they are defined by their medical labels. This situation must be changed - the identity and self-worth of children with disabilities can no longer be sacrificed in the name of curtailing costs.

Syracuse University based policy, research, and advocacy organization involved in the national movement to insure the rights of people with disabilities.

As a starting point, disability issues should be considered explicitly as human rights and social development issues. In practice, this means that the disability dimension has to be included and considered in all development co-operation initiatives to ensure equal rights for disabled persons to participate and benefit from all development undertakings. It also means that poverty alleviation activities must take into account the poorest of the poor -- often people with disabilities, by making every effort to include disabled people in the development agenda of the United Nations, its specialized agencies and development finance institutions

i'm studying what it means to be able-bodied because i need to continue doing my work. part of this is realizing how i walk with privilege and oppression tightly bound at the root inside my skin.

A number of approaches to explain the responses of parents to the negative impact of their child's disability can be identified in the literature. The dominant view is a time-bound model of grief, which contends that grieving occurs over a period of time, and that successful resolution of this process implies an acceptance of the child's disability. (Did any of you write down that you would "need to grieve before you could accept"?) Another approach which until recently has not commanded the same degree of professional recognition, is the concept of chronic sorrow, which contends that parents adapt, in a functional sense, to their child's condition, but do NOT ultimately accept it.

Disabled people are fighting for a society which celebrates difference, a society which does not react to physical, sensory or intellectual impairments, or emotional distress, with fear and with prejudice. We want a society that recognises the difficulties we face, but which also values us for what we are.

Universal design means products and buildings that are accessible and usable by everyone, including people with disabilities... giving attention to needs of older people as well as young, women as well as men, left handed as well as right handed persons.

Coalition advocating for national public policy that ensures the self determination, independence, empowerment, integration and inclusion of children and adults with disabilities in all aspects of society.

Advancing rights and enhancing lives of people with disabilities.

The largest international professional organization dedicated to improving educational outcomes for individuals with exceptionalities, students with disabilities, and/or the gifted.

Who's worse? Nike, for producing the ad, or Backpacker magazine, for running it? Before the anti-PC crowd starts calling crips 'thin-skinned,' try substituting some racist or homophobic description in place of the 'drooling, misshappen' stuff.

The price of distancing oneself from a stereotype is to reinforce that stereotype, and the related injustice, for those who cannot likewise distance themselves. It saddens me to watch. A disability movement -- disability rights or independent living -- which stresses "the able disabled" and overlooks "the unable" is less than it could be. Less than it should be.

The social, perceptual and intellectual world inhabited by people with severe intellectual disabilities does not generally conform to such normative ways of behaving and interacting.

I went to a meeting today. One of the officers or something was already blind. Now he's going deaf. The way this was handled by the other officers was something like, "His hearing loss may be permanent this time. He can't hear voices at a normal volume at all anymore. It's too bad. We always benefited a lot from his contributions, but now he's not here. We'll miss him. Send him a card or something, he can still read a little bit." I was not aware that being deaf-blind was supposed to mean exclusion...

Seven areas of functional limitation in the federal developmental disabilities definition: self-care, expressive or receptive language, learning, mobility, self-direction, capacity for independent living, and economic self-sufficiency.

Nonprofit organization dedicated to meeting the needs of those working with children who have developmental delays in sensory motor, language, social, and emotional areas.

Large, slow page.

...the medicalization of disability casts human variation as deviance from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy.

We believe that a cautious approach to biotechnology is the only prudent response. Disabled people, from whatever region, can and do cite numerous examples of regular, often institutionalised, abuse of even the most basic human rights. Such evidence ensures that the disabled community will be wary of further medical and state intervention in their lives. Perhaps more worrying still is the extent to which policy-makers, civil servants and 'expert' panels have been indifferent to, or perhaps simply ignorant of, the disabled community's calls to be included in the numerous bioethics debates going on around the world. Having campaigned for, and often won, the right to be included in other debates that concern us, we are now finding that the same institutions to which we had finally gained limited access are forgetting us all over again.

Even as we watched the stunning spectacle of people dying of starvation and thirst in the streets of an American city that seemed to have been abandoned by every form of government, I was struck time and again at the fact that while race had become "visible," disability had not -- even though we were watching the deaths of so many people with disabilities.

The purpose of this website is to give a brief, but interesting, overview of the emergence and evolvement of the disabled culture. Disability culture has existed since the first recorded notations of disability in 3500 BC. Yes, since then and probably before that. Humans were not created as perfect beings.

Discover the best periodicals on the internet about the Autism Spectrum as well as disabilities in general.

In reality, much disability discrimination is the overt expression of hostility and the conscious effort to subordinate members of a group with less power and social standing than the majority.

Our mission is to promote understanding about the historical experience of people with disabilities by recovering, chronicling, and interpreting their stories.

DLC provides legal advocacy on disability issues that promote the fundamental rights of all people with disabilities to participate fully and equally in the social and economic life of Massachusetts.

UK-focused link base

Monitors, reviews, and reports on disability resources every day. We disseminate information about them to libraries, disability organizations, health and social service professionals, consumers and family members

General information site.

If one thinks for even a moment about the history of our society's treatment of people with disabilities, it is not difficult to appreciate why people identified with the disability rights movement might regard such testing as dangerous. For the members of this movement, including people with and without disabilities and both issue-focused and disability-focused groups, living with disabling traits need not be detrimental either to an individual's prospects of leading a worthwhile life, or to the families in which they grow up, or to society at large.

The disability rights movement shares many similarities with other 20th-century civil rights struggles by those who have been denied equality, independence, autonomy, and full access to society.

I slip right into the cracks, and I grow stronger with every doctor who sees disability as deficit, every therapist who clucks disapproval and never seems happy, and every disabled person who says things like, "You think the world owes you a living because you are disabled." A flick of the wrist, and that one-dimensional focus becomes my habitat. And everyone else's habit.

A community history project

Print and online newsletter providing free of charge, information that is useful, sensitive, and current to everyone concerned with developmental disabilities: parents, families, self-advocates, and professionals.

Promoting the Human Rights of People with Disabilities through full participation, equalization of opportunity and development

Both the PC types who want us all to be extra careful with our words and the wacky comedians who think it's funny to toss around the word retard are missing the mark. I would encourage folks to get a little closer and take some time to get to know these people before you try to help them or have a laugh at their expense. Their world is only depressing and pitiful when viewed from afar.

Outlines five ways in which disability has been removed unhelpfully from educational debate in the recent past. All five may reduce the capacity of people with marked disabilities to attract additional and appropriate support when this is required.

Rantings and musings from your Ragged Edge Online editor.

The devaluation of disability results in societal attitudes that uncritically assert that it is better for a child to walk than roll, speak than sign, read print than read Braille... and hang out with nondisabled kids as opposed to other disabled kids.

This manual effectively describes how consumer-directed personal assistant services break down a significant barrier to independent living. Rejecting the medical model, the team of writers at Services for Independent Living (SIL) and their colleagues have captured the essential elements of successful consumer-directed personal assistant services.

The ERIC Clearinghouse for Disabilities and Gifted Education was disbanded by the US Government as of December 19, 2003. This is an archive of the material available on that site at that time created by Hoagies' Gifted Education Page.

Offers information, support, ideas, encouragement and outreach for parents and families of children with disabilities and the professionals who work with them.

A global community that integrates information, resources, and communication opportunities on the Internet for persons with cognitive and other disabilities, for their families, and for those that provide them services and support.

Provides information, support, and assistance to parents of children with disabilities, their professional partners, and their communities. Emphasis on Massachusetts.

The five models are Human Capacity, Public Studies, Cultural Studies, Ethical and Philosophical Studies, and Technology Studies.

General Information Regarding Disability in the UK

It is difficult to raise objections to something like the telethon; people are reluctant to disparage, or even entertain questions about, an effort which they perceive as fundamentally good, or at least well-meaning. That is understandable. It is an uncomfortable truth, in social work, in government activity, and in charitable endeavors, that actions which are intended to help a certain group of people may actually harm them. By harm, I mean -- among other things -- that these actions may reinforce the already devalued status of people with disabilities in this society. Looking closely and critically at the telethon, as some of us have started to do, brings up a number of issues which I feel are essential to understanding the status of people with disabilities as an oppressed minority group in America. These issues include: charity versus civil rights; cure versus accommodation; self-expression and self-determination; and the relationship between pity and bigotry.

There is a need for people to get involved in the policy-making process (disability policy change agents) to ensure that our laws foster the inclusion, independence and empowerment of people with disabilities and their families.

In which Nike urges you to buy their shoe lest you become 'a drooling misshapen non-extreme-trail-running husk of my former self, forced to roam the earth in a motorized wheelchair with my name embossed on one of those cute little license plates...'

Yesterday I finally figured out what other wheelchair users mean when they say the wheelchair is part of them or at least as much part of them as clothing... I perceived the chair as an extension of my body rather than a vehicle. Because where it went, I went. People don't grab people's bicycles and cars with them in them, and haul them around like that.

For the first time in human experience persons with developmental disabilities are living longer. The average life span of an individual with Down Syndrome has increased from 9 years in the 1920s to 65 years or greater as of the end of the 1990s. In large part, this increase in life span is directly attributable to a general improvement in overall health care throughout American society. Even more crucial to persons with developmental disabilities has been the near-abolition of institutionalization. Individuals who would formerly have died from substandard health care, substandard personal care, poor food, overcrowded conditions, and invidious benign neglect, can now avail themselves of resources in the general community, along with all the supports which those resources provide.

DOE letter reminding schools, colleges and universities that prompt action must be taken if harassment of a student based on disability interferes with the student's ability to participate in or benefit from the school's program.

Throughout the ages people with disabilities have been depicted in positive and negative ways in films, paintings and in literature. In the Bible, for example, in Samuel-2 5:8, we read, "Wherefore they said, the blind and the lame shall not come into the house." Not too positive an image. Yet, in Exodus 4:10, we find a very positive image concerning Moses. Biblical scholars believe Moses had a disability, namely, a cleft palate. When God asked him to lead His people out of Egypt, Moses replied, "I am not eloquent... I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." Yet Moses becomes a leader despite his disability.

At the level of our physical existence, diversity is a natural condition and the need is for us to welcome and embrace diversity outside of a hierarchical classification of difference. Yet, at another level, difference is simply a construction of ideology, not a state of reality - since we are all interconnected and have flowing through each of us the same life force. According to Sarkar, "the force that guides the stars you too". Yet, the history of disability has been a history of seeking to construct hierarchical difference out of an essential reality of oneness. The challenge is to create the reverse.

Not all people with disabilities are children, but we all tend to be treated as if we are Tiny Tims. This Tiny Tim sentimentality stereotypes people with disabilities and contributes to our oppression.

Disabled people do not oppose medical research and genetic testing if is part of an ameliorative therapy or treatment for illnesses or genetic conditions. What we do oppose is eugenic cleansing carried out in the name of treatment. The price is too high -- for us and for everyone else. Today disabled people, tomorrow, who knows?

Amici curiae are over 100 historians and scholars who want to ensure that the well-documented evidence of widespread state discrimination against persons with disabilities is not forgotten by this Court.

Defends the rights and interests of people with intellectual disability, their families and their organisations in the European Union and other European countries.

Challenges Europe and its nations to make the Information Society fully accessible to people with disabilities

General information site.

The current presentation of disability, predominantly in rehabilitation and in special education, individualizes disability -- the curriculum fosters the idea that disability is the individual's or at most the family's problem.

A social movement becomes a movement when things that were previously viewed as unfortunate become unacceptable, and in terms of disability issues in America, we're a long way from that. We're even behind where we were 30 years ago in some respects, because now we have proliferated an educated elite of uncle toms with disabilities who now have resources who've been bought by the system and can parade around and tell everybody that "it's not really that bad."

Works to enable communities to support, appreciate, and engage diverse members.

Not diagnostic labels or degree of impairment, but social exclusion coupled with disempowerment casts some into marginalized, socially oppressed 'eternal childhood' roles; inclusive processes coupled with adequate and flexible support counteract this.

Current activities include: research, student training, publication, and selected clinical services for children and adults with mental retardation and other disorders that affect learning and originate in the childhood.

Information and referral office, providing technical assistance on civil rights and legislative issues

Organizers of the annual Kids Together Day festival in Quakertown, PA, dedicated to helping communities become accessible and better able to meet a diversity of needs.

This chapter considers the impact of institutional discrimination on the leisure and social activities of disabled people. It shows that disabled people's ability to participate in mainstream recreational pursuits and establish 'normal' social contacts and relationships is severely restricted as a result of the economic, environmental and social barriers discussed in previous chapters.

During the debate over Terri Schiavo last fall, disability activists and scholars groused about both right-to-life and right-to-die advocates not understanding disability rights issues. It was just the latest round of a recurring tune: activists say progressives and conservatives are equally dense when it comes to understanding, much less embracing, disability rights. Liberals, in particular, came in for a drubbing. Whether called progressives, leftists, or liberals, these are folks who should understand and support disability rights issues and make them part of the liberal rights agenda, said almost everyone we talked to. But they don't.

Derived from "friend of the court" briefs filed by more than 100 scholars "who want to ensure that the well-documented evidence of widespread state discrimination against persons with disabilities is not forgotten by this Court."

News, advocacy and lifestyle zine for people with disabilities

Medicalizing a product stigmatizes it, signals it as being for "sick" people, "failed normals." People resist things they perceive as looking as though they are for "the disabled."

An information and training center dedicated to the mental health needs of people with developmental disabilities. Joint project of the UCLA University Affiliated Program (UAP) and the California State Council on Developmental Disabilities.

Accessible computers and software programs can make it possible for everyone, including people with varying degrees of disabilities, to use these technologies successfully in work, education, and recreation.

In this article, I suggest that much of the larger disagreement over the Americans with Disabilities Act can be characterized as a clash of perspectives about the meaning of disability. I do not address the specifics of statutory interpretation dealt with elsewhere in this special issue; rather, I suggest how underlying assumptions about disability frame the current debate over the ADA.

Offers support to persons with serious brain disorders and to their families; advocacy, research and education.

Online informational and advocacy organization dedicated to working towards gaining equal rights for the disAbled in all areas of life.

An organization committed to the full participation in parks, recreation and tourism by people with disabilities.

Provides a wide variety of disability related training resources.

Independent federal agency making recommendations to the President and Congress on issues affecting 54 million Americans with disabilities.

Created by a group of people with disabilities and people who care for people with disabilities that wanted a change in the political system.

Easter Seals provides services to children and adults with disabilities and other special needs, and support to their families.

National information and referral center that provides information on disabilities and disability-related issues for families, educators, and other professionals.

Federation of more than 140 not-for-profit voluntary health organizations serving people with rare disorders and disabilities.

Promotes full and equal participation of America's 54 million men, women and children with disabilities in all aspects of life.

Provides a presence and national voice for all families of children, youth and adults with disabilities.

Funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. Collects and disseminates results of federally funded research projects.

Inexpensive alternatives to daily living aids and ideas.

Tolerance is an ethical objective most of us would support as a broadly informing principle of literary and language studies. The question of how to achieve tolerance is, of course, more challenging, requiring as it does strategies and approaches that both engage students and produce results. Although the teaching of tolerance often takes place in a classroom setting in interactions among individual teachers and students, broader institutional structures and developments inform what we might imagine as a tolerant academic community. My intent here is to describe the emergence and the content of what I call the new disability studies, an emerging field of critical inquiry in literary and language studies that is contributing to forging a more tolerant academic community. By considering the development and goals of this new field, we can better understand what actually constitutes tolerance and how it might operate in academe.

Since the Old Testament times people with disabilities have been seen as having done something that displeased God. Fictional characters, such as Tiny Tim in the Christmas Carol always needed a cure or care from an able-bodied adult.

As for "I'd rather die than be like..." I've heard that. I've heard it a lot. I have no more patience for it. I've heard it too many times about things that are everyday life for me. And yet it's not supposed to be personal. It's not supposed to be a reflection on their view of me. But somehow "I'd rather die than be like you" strikes me as pretty damn personal. "I'd rather die than be like you" shapes policy. "I'd rather die than be like you" absolves and encourages murderers (some serial killers actually go to work in institutions because it provides them with an easy excuse if they get caught, just as one example)... Ableism comes in a lot of forms. Yes, losing certain abilities can scare people shitless, can make them question if they'd truly still be alive or real people. But disabled people's lives are sacrificed on the altar of that fear. That price is too high.

As a disabled person, you come to realize just how far you are from the norm at a very early age. Even if you feel normal in your house, or at school among other disabled friends, or among your family, all of that changes in front of the doctors.

Four relatively distinct traditions in work with people with intellectual disability are identified: ordinary living/normalisation, functional, behavioural, and developmental. These approaches are analysed as paradigms which could be compatible or not.

Over the last thirty years we've come an awful long way. I think, particularly amongst some of the younger people now, that few will know the kind of difficulties we faced when disability was totally viewed as a medical problem. Anyone suggesting that maybe it was more to do with social rights was regarded as kind of bananas. So, when we look at what we have today, we should not lose sight of the awful long way we have come in this time.

I am here to say, "Living with a severe physical disability is academically, socially, and career challenging. HOWEVER, SO WHAT! One may have to work ten times harder than the average able-bodied person to reach her or his goals. SO, WHAT! Rome was not built in a day!"

Society associates disability with physiological, anatomical, or mental "defects," and holds these conditions responsible for the disabled person's lack of full participation in the economic life of our society...

Language such as defect, abnormality and congenital malformation is sometimes used to describe fetuses in which a disability has been detected... disability is being framed in the context of individual pathology, rather than in a social context.

We have different and unique characteristics. Often we are silent, or nearly so. Our bodies are unusually shaped. We are often fragile and frail. We live in intimate connection with other people's bodies, minds and hearts. Our ways are not inferior.

We cover the disability experience in America -- what it means to be a crip living at the start of the 21st century.

This lawsuit has a lot to do with the notions I talked about in my last post, about other people's notions of what disabled people need at any given time. In particular, about the notion that people who need a certain kind or level of assistance belong in a certain kind of building.

This may be one of the last of the minority groups to be recognized as having a history... the overwhelming majority of people with disabilities are still segregated in our society and are therefore socially invisible.

Technology being developed now will ultimately allow for repairing, replacing, or reprogramming specific brain functions that will provide individuals with cognitive disabilities greatly improved ability to learn, live, work, and play more independently.

For Parents and Caregivers of Children with Special Needs. Success Stories, Horror Stories, Family Issues, Legal Files, Information Avenue, Disorder Zone, Archives, Diagnosis Search, Tips, Bulletin Board, Marketplace, Parent Matching

This article presents a study of teacher language theories and their classroom practices for students identified as English learners who have moderate to severe disabilities. Fifteen special education teachers located in southern California were interviewed regarding their classroom practices and language decisions for their second language learning students. Qualitative analysis of the coded transcripts revealed that most parents were not included in the language of instruction decision. Implicit language development theories, teacher's perceived future life roles for their students, and a nationality theory contributed to the language of instruction decision made by the teachers. These beliefs interacted with resource availability and teacher understandings of state and federal law influencing classroom practice.

On this site, psychologist, author, and parent Robert Naseef, Ph.D., shares his insights and experiences on family life.

The core virtue of a broadly inclusive statute, focused on stigma rather than impairment, is that it would not rely on biomedical classification to determine who should be protected from discrimination.

"If it's pity we'll get money. I'm just giving you facts. Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!" Jerry Lewis

Someone asked me my favorite question the other day in an elevator: "So what happened to you?". I was feeling rather charitable that day so I said, "Life...it happens." Then after he laughed I said I had a muscular disease. He just said, oh. How do you respond to such a question? It's so ridiculous and insulting that it's hard to believe that a complete stranger would say that to a person in a wheelchair, but they do more often than one would imagine. I never know what to say, I'm always so blown away by the audacity of it. What to say? Anyone have any snappy comebacks? Sometimes I say, "I'm really lazy" but I didn't think of it that day.

My concern about Portland State University is all the greater once I realized that many of its disabled students come from local community colleges and other two year institutions where the quality of disabled student service support is vastly superior to their much larger relative, PSU. On the one hand, the community colleges and feeder institutions prepare their disabled students for full independence with accommodations and appropriate access and assistive technology. On the other, disabled student counselors at those feeder institutions see the receiving institution--PSU--ignoring student needs, providing clear signals that it is only a "sink or swim" environment that offers no support and providing no program of faculty and staff education and sensitivity to disabilities and to the different learning styles and reasonable accommodations and educational alternatives possible for an increasingly diverse student body.

An international association of people with disabilities, their family members, other advocates, and professionals fighting for a society in which inclusion of all people in all aspects of society is the norm.

Forum for personal-experience stories about disability awareness, rights, inspiration

(R)ather than seeing my disability as a deficiency, I began to see it as part of the inherent differentness among people; it was simply a characteristic. I came to understand that it really was no different from any other characteristic like height or weight or race or gender.

It is so easy to feel condescendingly pitying of persons with disabilities that to have that uncompromising sense of self-worth expressed - with all the irony and anger that it naturally draws with it - and to accept it on its own terms, without judgment or defensiveness, is a difficult challenge. It brings up all the times I have allowed myself to fall into that condescending form of thinking about disability, and forces me to confront the paradoxical-seeming need to accept everyone on their own terms - not just the photogenic, the articulate, the skilled, the presentable, the expressive, or those who otherwise draw sympathy by being the way others want or expect them to be, but also the withdrawn, the quient, the angry, the unskilled, the unattractive, and all the others whose disability - or merely whose personality - makes it impossible for them to push others' buttons the right way, but who are no less moral persons for all that.

Classroom Management, Communication, Comprehending, Composing, and Organizing, Mechanics of Writing, Numeracy, Physical and/or Cognitive Access, Reading/Decoding Access, Student Self-Management, Technology Management, Visual Access (Low Vision to Blind)

The methods used for mass extermination in the Nazi death camps originated and were perfected in earlier use against people with physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities. This article describes the historical context of attitudes toward people with disabilities in Germany and how this context produced mass murder of people with disabilities prior to and during the early years of-World War II.

No one is claiming that raising a child with disabilities does not have its incredible difficulties, both for the child and the family, however, does this gives us the basis for denying these individuals the right to enter into the world?

I have mixed feelings about talking about people who "suffer" from what are offically classified as disorders or might also be considered deviations from the norm. Yes, it is often difficult for these individuals and their families to function "normally" in our society. But it makes it sound like the condition itself is the source of the suffering, as opposed to the barriers society places in our path. Yes, I said "our" path because as an autistic adult I do consider myself to be well outside that norm. Better at some things than others, and no stranger to discomfort and despair, nonetheless most of my life I was suffering much more from the way people treated me than from any inherent disability.

(Quoting Baynton:) "The attribution of disease or disability to racial minorities has a long history. Yet, while many have pointed out the injustice and perniciousness of attributing these qualities to a racial or ethnic group, little has been written about why these attributions are such powerful weapons for inequality, why they were so furiously denied and condemned by their targets, and what htis tells us about our attitudes toward disability."

(Quoting Baynton:) "While historians have not overlooked the use of disability to deny women's rights, they have given their attention entirely to gender inequality and not at all to the construction and maintenance of cultural hierarchies based on disability. . . . [J]ust as it was left unchallenged at the time, historians today leave unchallenged the notion that weakness, nervousness, or proneness to fainting might legitimately disqualify one for suffrage."

As more and more kids live with labels, diagnoses and disorders, a growing number of experts are beginning to use antiquated terms like 'eccentric' and 'odd'.

Information, products and services for disabled people