CURRENT LEGISLATION AND POLICES ON DISABILITY

Current Legislation And Polices On Disability Support The Social Mode

Introduction

It is difficult to understand the significance of the term universal design without first examining how people who are physically different have been treated socially, legally, and politically in the United Kingdom over the course of this century. While designers may not view this history as having bearing on their creativity or being of their making, their work has been instrumental in perpetuating the norms that exclude some people from using buildings, landscapes, and products.(Fleischer,1998,52)

Disability has been made visible in British life primarily as an outcome of military engagement and, therefore, was managed by the federal government in the War Department and, later, at the Veterans Administration. Civilians with disabilities were largely invisible and unaccounted for by the government until the latter half of the twentieth century when the social and physical isolation of people with physical and mental disability became the focus of civil rights legislation. Until that time, society managed to keep people who were different out of sight by building institutions such as nursing homes, asylums, and homeless shelters and using statutes such as ugly laws to prohibit from public places people whose different appearance might offend the citizenry.

Discussion

In spite of significant changes providing people with disabilities greater independence and opportunities for greater participation in American life—federal legislation, medical advances, and developments in assistive technology—changes in public attitudes have followed slowly and primarily in response to educational efforts that have accompanied new laws. The critical factor to real change, according to Harlan Hahn, a professor of political science at the University of London, was that the definition of disability shifted from medical and economic perspectives, which view disabilities from the standpoint of functional and vocational limitations, to a socio-political perspective that focuses rather on the disabling qualities of the environment that limit the possible interactions of people with disabilities.

In this shift, people with disabilities have emerged as a "minority group," oppressed not by their disabilities but by circumstances that can be changed through legislation and political action. A principal dimension of oppression of a minority group is the assumption of biological inferiority by the majority. While other minority groups have managed to disprove this assumption, the visible, physical differences of people with disabilities evoke fearful reactions that perpetuate the notion of subordinate status. Citing Stigma, in which Erving Goffman describes people with disabilities as being viewed by society as not quite human, Hahn argues that it is this failure to meet the twentieth-century Western values of physical attractiveness and individual autonomy that permits society to set disabled people apart. For public-policy changes to be effective, the attitudes that lead to the marginalization of people with disabilities must be addressed equally along with functional changes in the physical environment. (Miller,2005,23)

National Council for Coordinating the Work of Disability Organizations

There had been in existence from 1989 a "National Council for Coordinating the Work of Disability Organizations" appointed by the Minister of Social ...