New View of Disability

Throughout history, disability has been viewed as a deficit. Still today in much of our popular culture and in our common approaches to access, disabled individuals are seen as “tragic”, “broken”, and “inferior”; our goal for them is that they work to become as “normal” as possible. We retrofit our systems and provide “special” services to meet our obligations for access under the law.

For more than two decades, disability activists and scholars have been working to reframe this negative view of disability. They assert that disability is a social construct: the product of the interaction between an individual difference and the environment in which the person exists. Viewing disability from this lens allows us to embrace the diversity that individuals with disabilities bring to our campus and encourages us to look for design options that will offer sustainable, inclusive access for people with a wide variety of individual differences.

The change from the medical, or deficit, model of disability to the new sociopolitical model of disability is represented in the following chart created by Carol J. Gill, Chicago Institute of Disability Research:

Medical Model	Sociopolitical Model
Disability is a deficiency or abnormality	Disability is a difference
Being disabled is negative	Being disabled, in itself, is neutral
Disability resides in the individual	Disability derives from interaction between individual and society
The remedy for disability-related problems is cure or normalization of the individual	The remedy for disability-related problems is a change in the interaction between the individual and society
The agent of remedy is the professional who affects the arrangements between the individual and society	The agent of remedy can be the individual, an advocate, or anyone who affects the arrangements between the individual and society