Disability Futures

Netflix is beginning to deliver on its audio description promise quicker than many had expected. As of this post, a total of 39 titles including Netflix original serie and movies are now available with audio description. Of note, this list includes a variety of shows that are described by third parties. A new Audio Description link is available from the Netflix home page which shows the current list, which is currently expanding raplidly. Here's the 39 shows available as of this post.

But of all the towering acts, the primary attraction for many Church-goers will be the three-foot, six-inch Denver rapper Kalyn Heffernan and her trio Wheelchair Sports Camp. Dolan rocked a show with Heffernan last year in Albuquerque, where he was impressed enough to invite her whole band along for his trip to South by Southwest. He even bailed people out when Wheelchair’s singer/sax player Abi McGaha Miller and her drummer brother Isaac were jailed in northern Texas for weed and graffiti.

It’s surprising that Heffernan avoided the arrest. Though weighing in at just 50 pounds — she has the fragile bone condition osteogenesis imperfecta — her public enemy status is heavyweight, right down to the CRIP LIFE tattoo on her stomach. Besides hip-hop extracurriculars like burning spliffs and swilling beer, Heffernan is a bandana-clad activist who rolls with hard progressive forces like Occupy Denver. On record, her incisive rhymes rail on everything from Wall Street to pollution; off the mic she pays it forward through a number of community causes.

One of the hallmarks of societal attitudes toward disabilities has been a tendency of people without disabilities, including media savvy philosophers, to overestimate the negative aspects and underestimate the positive features of the lives of those who have disabilities. The attitude of "I don't see how you can live with that" -- sometimes expressed more dramatically as "I'd rather be dead than have [X disability]" -- is one that people still shockingly profess openly in encounters with people with disabilities.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has described the "extremely extensive" negative connotations of disability: "To the fact that a [person with a disability] differs from the norm physically or mentally, people often add a value judgment that such a difference is a big and very negative one." [4] Even without evidence to support this supposition, philosophers like Singer are not immune from this bias. In fact, their views seem to emerge from it when divorced from the reality of the lives that disabled people actually live.

In contrast to Singer’s ivory tower speculations, the United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that "society's accumulated myths and fears about disability are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment." [5] Regulations and courts addressing job discrimination based on disability under the ADA and other laws have expressly identified the discrimination that results from misperceptions and unrealistically low expectations of what people with disabilities are able to do. [6] 

More than 50 disability rights activists were arrested Monday while protesting outside the White House.

Those detained were among about 200 advocates from across the country who are in Washington this week with the disability rights group ADAPT.

The demonstrators were at the White House calling on President Barack Obama to address the “critical civil rights of persons with disabilities” ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act this summer.

Specifically, ADAPT wants the president to issue an executive order implementing steps to end institutionalization of people with disabilities.

What’s more, the activists would like the administration to support legislation enhancing community-based living options.

It also adds that universal design “shall not exclude assistive devices for particular groups of persons with disabilities where this is needed.”

In terms of universal design and evacuation planning, there are a number of measures that can be implemented to ensure a building is safe for all occupants, not only when the building is being used in its normal state, but when there’s an emergency and a need for evacuation.

During an evacuation, the anatomy of a building changes, alarms are activated, passenger lifts cannot generally be used and people use egress paths that may differ from their normal path into the building. For these reasons, designing a universally accessible means of egress into the building at an early concept stage is the best approach.

Though the following is not an exhaustive list, it aims to provide some basic steps that can be adopted to provide a universally inclusive environment, with consideration to the social model of disability discussed above, and with regard to emergency planning: