Construction of the man-made environment is based on the assumption that there exists an "average" person. However, there is no standardised person. Every individual deviates from the norm in one way or another: age, height, width, weight, strength, speed, sight, hearing, stamina, mental faculties, etc. Consequently, facilities built for the average person are not necessarily equally accessible for everybody.
Croatians are proud of their disability policy. A disability ombudsman who has a disability has been appointed and accessibility and legislation are on the right track. A law on personal assistance will take effect in 2010.
6.1 The objective is to make reasonable provision within the boundary or the plot of the dwelling or a disabled person to approach and gain access into the dwelling from the point of alighting from a vehicle which may be within C outside the plot. In most circumstances it should be possible to provide a level or ramped approach.
The courts of Michigan are preparing to send a worldwide message about the euthanasia of people with disabilities. Will Jack Kevorkian be convicted and imprisoned? Or will he be acquitted once more, never to be charged again?
Could it happen? A serial killer of disabled people, out on the streets, free to kill again?
Yes. It’s happened before. Kevorkian has only been prosecuted in connection with the deaths of six of his estimated 130 victims.
What connections can be made between loggers and drag queens, between environmentalists and paraplegics? Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, a new book by Eli Clare, explores the landscape of disability, class, queerness, and child abuse, telling stories that echo with the sounds of an Oregon logging and fishing town, and with the lively political debates of crip crusaders and transgender warriors.
Det är en glädje att få öppna den här konferensen som är ett samarbete mellan Independent living Sverige och handikappombudsmannen. Vi har valt ett tema som är centralt för människor med funktionsnedsättningar; hur de mänskliga rättigheterna ska kunna lagfästas och upprätthållas också för människor med funktionsnedsättningar.
We are disabled people who want to live as independently as possible in the community with staff to support us. In spite of all our campaigning efforts directed toward the government and the society in general to make independent living possible for people with disabilities, we are still a long way from our goal. We need more support to reach our goal.
To get support for independent living for disabled people is difficult because our requirements are not understood easily by society in general and the national government and other official sectors are not working earnestly enough towards fulfilling our requirements.
[Spanska slagord från demonstrationen]
[Franska slagord från demonstrationen]
Joe Bollard: Sista veckan i september 2003 samlades människor med funktionshinder från hela Europa i Strasbourg. Avsikten var att marschera till EU-parlamentets byggnad. Demonstrationen var en del av kampanjen för Independent Living för människor med funktionshinder och fick namnet "Strasbourg Freedom Drive", frihetsresan till Strasbourg. Aldrig tidigare hade så många människor med funktionshinder slutit upp för en manifestation utanför EU-parlamentet
by Art Campos
Bee Staff Writer, May 13, 1993, Davis, California
John Hessler's spirit could have been destroyed along with his spinal cord that day in 1957 when he dove into a swimming hole. But the 6-foot-7 inch Hessler wasn't one who wanted to spend the rest of his life in hospitals or sitting in a wheelchair at home.
He went on to help revolutionize the nation's attitudes toward disabled people - first by entering the University of California, Berkeley, and later by helping create the Center for Independent Living, a program now run in 27 cities.
It's time to talk about death. Not only the sad and unexpected deaths of our heroes, role models and friends like Ed Roberts, Irv Zola, or others of the currently aging crip generation, but the messy reality of living with disabling conditions that lead to the inexorable reality of life's end.
Two years ago we entered a very quiet Tucson, Arizona house. A hospital bed dominated the living room. On it lay a gaunt, dying man. Steve knew him only as Lew, the partner of Lillian's friend, Dan. We spent a couple of hours with Lew and Dan and then went on about our lives. Days later Lew was dead--another casualty of the AIDS virus.
"Friday, April 25th, 1997, a ceremony in downtown Berkeley commemorated the 25th anniversary of the first curb ramp for the disabled. "It's the slab of concrete heard round the world," according to Gerald Baptiste, Associate Director of Berkeley's Center for Independent Living, noting that the curb ramp is believed to be the predecessor of millions of similar ramps that have been built throughout the world to enable wheelchair users to utilize sidewalks, businesses, parks and other public facilities."
Americans learn from a very early age that our nation began with certain inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is this reality or is this rhetoric?
I lie here in my universe of the mat, my bed. I always have been here lying in my universe forever, forever. My mat, my pillow, my sheet, my blanket...for countless force-fed meals, enemas, baths, shaves, haircuts, pissed-on sheets...many many harsh-lighted days, many, many semi-dark nights. Outside my universe there are bony fingers, blotch-skin creatures. Sometimes they invaded my universe...the sickly-sweet smelling ones. They "take care of me"...they handle me like they handle my pillow.
Frank Moore, an underground performance artist from Berkeley, California, who has significant cerebral palsy and for much of his life has been labeled non-verbal, is a beacon of possibilities in life and art.
They thought we'd keep on smiling for years to come
They thought we'd just be helpless and mild
Without our own opinion they could just cash in on
Their image of the crippled child.
But Timmy and Tammy are rebelling
Their Easter seals have come unglued
They won't be apathetic; they refuse to look pathetic
They're changing their point of view.
They're poster kids no more,
Poster kids no more!
Reprinted with permission from DISABILITY & REHABILITATION, Biomedicine & Bioscience Journals Publisher, Taylor & Francis Limited, P.O. Box 25, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 3UE United Kingdom. WWW: www.tandf.co.uk/
(Page numbers are given in round brackets and footnotes in square brackets.)
"The fishing is free with your disability
You don't need a license like the rest.
Movies are half the price, well isn't that nice?
And the parking spots are nothing but the best.
Language can be a bane of human rights movements. What do we call ourselves? What do others call us? Do labels intersect with models of freedom? Can descriptions of who we are liberate us from yolks of oppression? Do we automatically imprison ourselves as soon as we turn to classifications?
For many years I have been writing, talking, and thinking about language. Like my colleagues across the world in the disability rights movement I have described myself as an individual with a disability, using the preferred term "disability" for a myriad of conditions in combination with "people first" language where the condition of "disability" is an adjective describing one aspect of a person.
Valentine's Day, 1992. It rained harder that day in Oakland, California, than it had for fifty years. Sheets of water cascaded onto the ground. Visibility was laughable. You couldn't inch outside without getting drenched.
About a year ago, Christopher Reeve became paralyzed in an horse-riding accident. A respirator-using quadriplegic Reeve has suddenly become the most well-known, best-loved person with a disability in the world (as opposed to someone like Muhammad Ali, who is probably the most well-known, but not the best-loved - an important distinction). President Clinton invited Reeve to speak at the Democratic National Convention in late August.
This invitation led to a most interesting electronic mail conversation. It began with a challenge from historian Paul Longmore:
"Deviants, Invalids, and Anthropologists*: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Conditions of Disability in One Academic Discipline: A Review of DISABILITY AND CULTURE. Edited by BENEDICTE INGSTAD and SUSAN REYNOLDS WHYTE (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) [Pp. 307]
* A play on the title of Chapter One, "Deviants, Invalids, and Freedom Fighters: Historical Perceptions of People with Disabilities in the United States," in my recent manuscript, "Investigating a Culture of Disability."
Saturday morning. The sun is shining. I sit contentedly in my living room chair fulfilling a volunteer commitment. Baking pleasantly in the warmth, and the light, I am energized. I finish the volunteer work; I complete some light reading; I retrieve my pile of disability culture notecards waiting to be organized and filed. I feel productive. I am contemplative. Before I can stop myself my brain is racing into an approach and definition of disability culture I think might be livable.
How many cultural definitions or characteristics might one find in the above paragraph? Sun-worshipper? Volunteer? Workaholic? Reader? Philosopher?
What would make any of the above words cultures? What would make me a member of such a culture?
The modern disability rights movement began more than thirty years ago during the 1960s. People with disabilities around the world successfully challenged dominant social stereotypes. In the United States, Ed Roberts, a post-polio, ventilator-using quadriplegic, broke American educational barriers when he became the first person with such a significant disability to attend college. Roberts entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1962. During a lifetime of fighting for equality for people with disabilities he became an international representative of human rights and overthrowing oppression.
by Steven E. Brown
Institute on Disability Culture
2260 Sunrise Point Rd.
Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA 88011
This article is based on a speech written when I served as Training Director for the Research and Training Center on Public Policy in Independent Living at the World Institute on Disability funded by National Institute on Disability Rehabilitation and Research grant #H133B00006-90. The address was delivered to the Region VI Independent Living Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas on November 11, 1991.
"...the folk heroes of disability and chronic disease have not been the millions who came to terms with their problems but those few who were so successful that they passed: the polio victim who broke track records, the one-legged pitcher who played major league baseball, the great composer who was deaf, the famous singer who had a colostomy. They were all so successful that no one knew of their disability, and therein lay their glory." (Zola, MISSING PIECES, 204)
“Independent Living is the emancipatory philosophy and practice which
empowers disabled people and enables them to exert influence, choice
and control in every aspect of their life.”
Lots of people have made definitions of independent living. They all
focus on a few key concepts: choice, control, freedom, equality.
One aim of independent living is to equalise the opportunities available
to disabled people. Philip Mason expresses it as an ideal:
För dig som på grund av fysisk eller psykisk funktionsnedsättning behöver vård, stöd eller behandling hemma under en period som överstiger tre månader finns två lösningar: antingen kan du få i natura tjänster eller en egen budget för vård och ordna vård/assistans själv.
If, as a result of a physical or mental disability, you need nursing, care, counselling, support or treatment for longer than three months at home, there are two solutions: help in kind, or the Client Linked Budget.
Allt fler länder stiftar lagar mot diskriminering av funktionshindrade. På konferensen presenteras erfarenheter från flera länder. Den traditionella svenska handikappolitiken har varit inriktad mot individuellt stöd och att kompensera brister genom särlösningar.
A few years ago, it became practically impossible for Nicole and Bernard, Stéphane's parents, to keep on hiking with their son.
His illness had progressed, and Stéphane had grown up: he was heavier and more fragile.
This situation led me to devise a wheelchair which could be used on any path or terrain, but which would be comfortable for the passenger, without too much pain for the two assistants handling the wheelchair.
A definition of the Joëlette by its inventor, Joël Claudel:
Artikel från AVISEN lördag 5 september 1998
av Eva Janzon Guttmann
Diskriminering försvinner inte av sig själv. Sveriges handikappade måste kämpa för skärpta lagar, anser biträdande minister
Sociala skyddsnät och omsorg om alla grupper i samhället. Så vill vi gärna tro att det är i Sverige. Men för många människor med funktionshinder ser verkligheten annorlunda ut.
- Insikten om att vi diskrirmineras är liten i Sverige. Men se på
våra otillgänliga bussar och tåg det skulle inte vara lagligt
i USA!
Portugal became the fourth country in the world to officially promote web accessibility for people with disabilities, after the United States, Australia and Canada.
On July 29, 1999 the Portuguese Government, through its Council of Ministers, approved a resolution making mandatory the adoption of accessibility features for people with disabilities in the Web design of the information made available by the General Directorates and similar agencies, departments or services, as well as that rendered available by any public corporation (State Corporations, State Universities, etc.). Concretely, the design must ensure that:
