3 ms·

Such as not enough leg room on a plane, a chair with not enough padding or ventilation -- every possible discomfort, including most trivial ones, even to a full

by blfr 10y ago

Such as not enough leg room on a plane, a chair with not enough padding or ventilation -- every possible discomfort, including most trivial ones, even to a fully-abled, mint-condition, picture-of-health human is some mismatch between them and their environment. (If I wanted to be snide, I'd include "using Windows".)

ZenoArrow 10y ago
Using your leg room example, if it's inhibiting your potential range of motion whilst sitting then you are disabled. To look at it a different way, isn't a person with healthy eyes as equally disabled as a blind person when they're in a completely dark room? The source of the disability is not as important as the outcome.
- kevhito 10y ago
  No. Because you (and WHO) are consistently leaving out the obvious -- all of this is in comparison to "typical" human abilities. According to that definition, everyone living in a northern climate becomes disabled each winter, since none of us can survive outside without special clothing. And if humans could see magnetic lines, we'd all certainly be better matched to our earth environment, so does that mean all humans disabled?
  - ncphillips 10y ago
    > According to that definition, everyone living in a northern climate becomes disabled each winter This seems valid to me. The prefix "dis-" is a negation prefix[1], and "abled" means to have a range of abilities[2], so it is equivalent to not-abled. Not having a range of abilities. There's nothing in this most basic description that suggests being disabled is an abnormal or permanent state. In the context of getting to the grocery store in the winter, I am quite literally disabled by the cold temperatures, unless I have some natural occurrence or form of technology that en-ables me–el nino, clothing, vehicles, underground tunnels. I am disabled from reading this screen if I don't have my glasses on. This is a permanent disability, but I can correct it by either putting on my glasses, or by making the text bigger. Our set of abilities is not immutable, and technology is just meant to add to this set. Microsoft's document is just about making designers aware that not everyone always has the same set of abilities as the designers themselves. Recognizing this allows us to design technology that helps more people in more situations. WHO did not change _the_ definition of "disabled", they _corrected their own_ definition to recognize that whether or not a person is disabled is a contextually dependent question. [1] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis- http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis- [2] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled
    - kevhito 10y ago
      I think my comment rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and for that I apologize. Actually, I agree with almost everything the replies argue. My point -- which I did didn't make well -- was that I think using the word "disabled" in the WHO sense is either disingenuous or silly. Silly, because if everyone is disabled at all times, then the word becomes meaningless. Disingenuous in the sense that "not having a range of ability" implicitly really means having an unusually or unexpectedly limited or different (but not strictly larger) range of abilities as compared to some poorly-defined range for a "typical" human, without actually admitting that we are comparing against some standard. Yes, the standard is vague and poorly defined. And I agree that disability doesn't need to be permanent or easily visible or significant, that it is context dependent, and it obviously isn't binary. I have no qualms with the idea that everyone or nearly everyone is, at some point and in some ways, disabled. And perhaps most importantly, we should disentangle the concept of disability with moral/value judgments. Still, I think all of the examples I've seen on this thread are implicitly comparing against a standard but explicitly pretending they are not. You mention that you are disabled from reading your screen. Because many humans would have that ability. You didn't say you were disabled because you don't have the x-ray vision needed to see through walls. Just like nobody would say a person is disabled because their body doesn't produce enough fur or whale blubber to survive a new england winter.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    > "And if humans could see magnetic lines, we'd all certainly be better matched to our earth environment, so does that mean all humans disabled?" In the sense of being fully aware of our environment then yes, all humans are disabled in that regard. Furthermore, disability is not a binary categorisation where you're either disabled or you're not, it's a scale, but crucially it's a scale based on your abilities to engage in the world around you and inside of you. We only use typical human behavior as a measuring point so that we can categorise people in a binary fashion. In other words, you can look at disability through the lens of human society in order to class a person as disabled, but disability can be thought of in much more general terms, which is where the WHO definition comes in.
  - spdustin 10y ago
    That would be true if the environment in which they lived was the natural, outside environment, but it's not. It's indoors, warm, and decidedly not disabling.
  - adisinom 10y ago
    In some sense, yes. But more importantly, the problem with designing for a typical human is that they don't exist. So I see accessible design as robust designs -- ones that can handle variation in abilities as easily as we handle variations in browser window sizes.
    - kevhito 10y ago
      I apologize. I didn't mean to suggest we should design for a "typical human" (even if such a thing existed or could be well defined), and I agree that we should design for a range of user abilities. I was trying (poorly) to discuss their definition "disabled", which seems unhelpful as it seems to be synonymous with "human".
      - adisinom 10y ago
        The definition suggests we should focus on the context that disables people -- the mismatch between abilities and affordances, because as you point out, disability being part of humanity isn't a useful result. For example, until the mid 20th century, deaf people in Martha's Vineyard might have been atypical (0.7% of population) but because islanders used MVSL, deaf islanders were not disabled. Later conditions changed, sign fell out of use, and deafness became a communication barrier. Sure, if more people were deaf, Martha's Vineyard would still use sign. But deafness itself is not a sufficient condition to be disabled... rather the direct cause is society.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  I think it's useful to ask what the point of this definition is. If you expect to be pressured into making special considerations for disabled people you will fight to keep the scope of the definition as small as possible, whereas if your goal is to force people to make these changes then you will argue for it to be very broad. If your goal is to prevent people with disabilities from being seen as different then you will try and convince people that the definition should be broad and consider ourselves situationaly disabled. E.g. If you're not allowed to discriminate against people with disabilities; whether obese people are disabled or not makes a big difference to, say, airlines, who require them to buy two seats. Or if tall people are disabled, then not upgrading them to business class for free could be considered discrimination.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    As with many definitions, there are tradeoffs to be made between utility and accuracy. The more limited form of definition has uses as a shortcut to describe a certain subset of people, but if you look at disability more broadly you can get a fuller sense of what disability is. To give another example, consider the definitions we use to describe sexual preference. This article on sexual fluidity gives some good examples of how the way we describe sexual preferences may be fine for many, but misses the bigger picture: http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/beyond-sexual-orientation http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/beyond-sexual-orientatio... I found this passage about bisexuality from the article particularly interesting, describing how openness to bisexuality was suppressed because it didn't fit into the more limited but easier to understand narratives that reflected mainstream thinking about sexual preference at the time: "Robyn Ochs, who came out as bisexual in 1982 and has been campaigning for bisexual rights ever since, remembers some gay marches before the mid-1990s as unwelcoming. “Lesbian women thought that we were sleeping with the enemy,” says Ochs. Dawne Moon, a sociologist at Marquette University, explains that some gay people felt that bisexuals were watering down their message. Any kind of sexual variability outside of homosexuality would threaten the narrative of the gay movement, says Moon. That narrative revolved around same-sex attraction being as authentic and fixed an orientation as heterosexuality. The scientific practice of the 1960s through the early 1990s reinforced this message. Some researchers blatantly denied the existence of bisexuals. In 1956, the American psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler described bisexuality as “a state that has no existence beyond the word itself” and an “out-and-out fraud.” Other researchers used terms like “true homosexuals” in their studies. It was common for academics to lump bisexuals and homosexuals together. Even many school and college textbooks did not quite recognize bisexuality as a possible sexual orientation until about a decade ago. Bisexuality was seen to be a phase some people go through before identifying as heterosexual or homosexual. Kenji Yoshino, professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law famously called this phenomenon “bisexual erasure” in an essay he wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2000. “It is as if self-identified straights and self-identified gays have concluded that whatever their other disagreements, they will agree that bisexuals do not exist,” Yoshino says." Why do I bring this up? It's to point out that broader understanding of human variability has its place, even if it makes people who prefer neater definitions uncomfortable. It's the same with disability, it takes on many forms, and although shortcuts/simpler definitions have their place it's worth recognising that variability, even if that makes reasoning about it harder to do.
geoffpado 10y ago
There is such a thing as a "situational disability"—one that causes you to be unable to be able to interact with things normally due to the current situation. Microsoft's documents on this page go over a few of these: using something that relies on audible feedback in a loud room, for example. Under the WHO's definition, these situational disabilities are included.

by blfr 10y ago

ZenoArrow 10y ago

Using your leg room example, if it's inhibiting your potential range of motion whilst sitting then you are disabled. To look at it a different way, isn't a person with healthy eyes as equally disabled as a blind person when they're in a completely dark room? The source of the disability is not as important as the outcome.

kevhito 10y ago
No. Because you (and WHO) are consistently leaving out the obvious -- all of this is in comparison to "typical" human abilities. According to that definition, everyone living in a northern climate becomes disabled each winter, since none of us can survive outside without special clothing. And if humans could see magnetic lines, we'd all certainly be better matched to our earth environment, so does that mean all humans disabled?
- ncphillips 10y ago
  > According to that definition, everyone living in a northern climate becomes disabled each winter This seems valid to me. The prefix "dis-" is a negation prefix[1], and "abled" means to have a range of abilities[2], so it is equivalent to not-abled. Not having a range of abilities. There's nothing in this most basic description that suggests being disabled is an abnormal or permanent state. In the context of getting to the grocery store in the winter, I am quite literally disabled by the cold temperatures, unless I have some natural occurrence or form of technology that en-ables me–el nino, clothing, vehicles, underground tunnels. I am disabled from reading this screen if I don't have my glasses on. This is a permanent disability, but I can correct it by either putting on my glasses, or by making the text bigger. Our set of abilities is not immutable, and technology is just meant to add to this set. Microsoft's document is just about making designers aware that not everyone always has the same set of abilities as the designers themselves. Recognizing this allows us to design technology that helps more people in more situations. WHO did not change _the_ definition of "disabled", they _corrected their own_ definition to recognize that whether or not a person is disabled is a contextually dependent question. [1] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis- http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis- [2] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled
  - kevhito 10y ago
    I think my comment rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and for that I apologize. Actually, I agree with almost everything the replies argue. My point -- which I did didn't make well -- was that I think using the word "disabled" in the WHO sense is either disingenuous or silly. Silly, because if everyone is disabled at all times, then the word becomes meaningless. Disingenuous in the sense that "not having a range of ability" implicitly really means having an unusually or unexpectedly limited or different (but not strictly larger) range of abilities as compared to some poorly-defined range for a "typical" human, without actually admitting that we are comparing against some standard. Yes, the standard is vague and poorly defined. And I agree that disability doesn't need to be permanent or easily visible or significant, that it is context dependent, and it obviously isn't binary. I have no qualms with the idea that everyone or nearly everyone is, at some point and in some ways, disabled. And perhaps most importantly, we should disentangle the concept of disability with moral/value judgments. Still, I think all of the examples I've seen on this thread are implicitly comparing against a standard but explicitly pretending they are not. You mention that you are disabled from reading your screen. Because many humans would have that ability. You didn't say you were disabled because you don't have the x-ray vision needed to see through walls. Just like nobody would say a person is disabled because their body doesn't produce enough fur or whale blubber to survive a new england winter.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "And if humans could see magnetic lines, we'd all certainly be better matched to our earth environment, so does that mean all humans disabled?" In the sense of being fully aware of our environment then yes, all humans are disabled in that regard. Furthermore, disability is not a binary categorisation where you're either disabled or you're not, it's a scale, but crucially it's a scale based on your abilities to engage in the world around you and inside of you. We only use typical human behavior as a measuring point so that we can categorise people in a binary fashion. In other words, you can look at disability through the lens of human society in order to class a person as disabled, but disability can be thought of in much more general terms, which is where the WHO definition comes in.
- spdustin 10y ago
  That would be true if the environment in which they lived was the natural, outside environment, but it's not. It's indoors, warm, and decidedly not disabling.
- adisinom 10y ago
  In some sense, yes. But more importantly, the problem with designing for a typical human is that they don't exist. So I see accessible design as robust designs -- ones that can handle variation in abilities as easily as we handle variations in browser window sizes.
  - kevhito 10y ago
    I apologize. I didn't mean to suggest we should design for a "typical human" (even if such a thing existed or could be well defined), and I agree that we should design for a range of user abilities. I was trying (poorly) to discuss their definition "disabled", which seems unhelpful as it seems to be synonymous with "human".
    - adisinom 10y ago
      The definition suggests we should focus on the context that disables people -- the mismatch between abilities and affordances, because as you point out, disability being part of humanity isn't a useful result. For example, until the mid 20th century, deaf people in Martha's Vineyard might have been atypical (0.7% of population) but because islanders used MVSL, deaf islanders were not disabled. Later conditions changed, sign fell out of use, and deafness became a communication barrier. Sure, if more people were deaf, Martha's Vineyard would still use sign. But deafness itself is not a sufficient condition to be disabled... rather the direct cause is society.
Eridrus 10y ago
I think it's useful to ask what the point of this definition is. If you expect to be pressured into making special considerations for disabled people you will fight to keep the scope of the definition as small as possible, whereas if your goal is to force people to make these changes then you will argue for it to be very broad. If your goal is to prevent people with disabilities from being seen as different then you will try and convince people that the definition should be broad and consider ourselves situationaly disabled. E.g. If you're not allowed to discriminate against people with disabilities; whether obese people are disabled or not makes a big difference to, say, airlines, who require them to buy two seats. Or if tall people are disabled, then not upgrading them to business class for free could be considered discrimination.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  As with many definitions, there are tradeoffs to be made between utility and accuracy. The more limited form of definition has uses as a shortcut to describe a certain subset of people, but if you look at disability more broadly you can get a fuller sense of what disability is. To give another example, consider the definitions we use to describe sexual preference. This article on sexual fluidity gives some good examples of how the way we describe sexual preferences may be fine for many, but misses the bigger picture: http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/beyond-sexual-orientation http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/beyond-sexual-orientatio... I found this passage about bisexuality from the article particularly interesting, describing how openness to bisexuality was suppressed because it didn't fit into the more limited but easier to understand narratives that reflected mainstream thinking about sexual preference at the time: "Robyn Ochs, who came out as bisexual in 1982 and has been campaigning for bisexual rights ever since, remembers some gay marches before the mid-1990s as unwelcoming. “Lesbian women thought that we were sleeping with the enemy,” says Ochs. Dawne Moon, a sociologist at Marquette University, explains that some gay people felt that bisexuals were watering down their message. Any kind of sexual variability outside of homosexuality would threaten the narrative of the gay movement, says Moon. That narrative revolved around same-sex attraction being as authentic and fixed an orientation as heterosexuality. The scientific practice of the 1960s through the early 1990s reinforced this message. Some researchers blatantly denied the existence of bisexuals. In 1956, the American psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler described bisexuality as “a state that has no existence beyond the word itself” and an “out-and-out fraud.” Other researchers used terms like “true homosexuals” in their studies. It was common for academics to lump bisexuals and homosexuals together. Even many school and college textbooks did not quite recognize bisexuality as a possible sexual orientation until about a decade ago. Bisexuality was seen to be a phase some people go through before identifying as heterosexual or homosexual. Kenji Yoshino, professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law famously called this phenomenon “bisexual erasure” in an essay he wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2000. “It is as if self-identified straights and self-identified gays have concluded that whatever their other disagreements, they will agree that bisexuals do not exist,” Yoshino says." Why do I bring this up? It's to point out that broader understanding of human variability has its place, even if it makes people who prefer neater definitions uncomfortable. It's the same with disability, it takes on many forms, and although shortcuts/simpler definitions have their place it's worth recognising that variability, even if that makes reasoning about it harder to do.

geoffpado 10y ago

There is such a thing as a "situational disability"—one that causes you to be unable to be able to interact with things normally due to the current situation. Microsoft's documents on this page go over a few of these: using something that relies on audible feedback in a loud room, for example. Under the WHO's definition, these situational disabilities are included.