Inclusion (disability rights)

Inclusion is a term used by people with disabilities and other disability rights advocates for the idea that all people should take action to freely accommodate people with a physical, mental, cognitive, and or developmental disability. For example, providing ramps and accessible toilets in meeting facilities or providing additional intervention and resources in the education system are known as 'universal design' or efforts towards the goal of inclusion. The education system has a more specific definition for disability. An individual who exhibits challenges that substantially limits one or more major life activities is disabled. The interpretation of what is considered a major life activity has been recently expanded to include all barriers to reading, writing, concentrating, and thinking. For example, individuals with Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, are now included as a disability in the education system. This allows educational resources to be used for a wider population of individuals with barriers to learning. Inclusion is a term used by people with disabilities and other disability rights advocates for the idea that all people should take action to freely accommodate people with a physical, mental, cognitive, and or developmental disability. For example, providing ramps and accessible toilets in meeting facilities or providing additional intervention and resources in the education system are known as 'universal design' or efforts towards the goal of inclusion. The education system has a more specific definition for disability. An individual who exhibits challenges that substantially limits one or more major life activities is disabled. The interpretation of what is considered a major life activity has been recently expanded to include all barriers to reading, writing, concentrating, and thinking. For example, individuals with Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, are now included as a disability in the education system. This allows educational resources to be used for a wider population of individuals with barriers to learning. The concept of inclusion emphasizes universal design for policy-oriented physical accessibility issues, such as ease-of-use of physical structures and elimination of barriers to ease movement in the world, but the largest part of its purpose is on being culturally transformational. Inclusion typically promotes disability studies as an intellectual movement and stresses the need for disabled people—the inclusion-rights community usually uses the reclaimed word 'cripple' or 'crip' instead—to immerse themselves into mainstream culture through various modes of artistic expression. Inclusion advocates argue that melding what they term 'disability-art' or 'dis/art' into mainstream art makes integration of different body types unavoidable, direct, and thus positive. They argue it helps able-bodied people deal with their fears of being or becoming disabled, which, unbeknownst to the person, is usually what underlies both the feelings of 'inspiration' and feelings of pity s/he may have when watching a disabled person moving in his or her unusual way(s), or in participating in activities that obviously draw attention to the person's condition(s). Inclusion advocates often specifically encourage disabled people who choose to subscribe to this set of ideas to take it upon themselves to involve themselves in activities that give them the widest public audience possible, such as becoming professional dancers, actors, visual artists, front-line political activists, filmmakers, orators, and similar professions. Mainstreaming is allowing for a person with a disability to be a member of a 'mainstream' environment without added difficulty by creating inclusive settings. For example, education acts such as IDEA or No Child Left Behind promotes inclusive schooling or mainstreaming for children with disabilities (such as Autism) so that they can be a part of the larger 'typical' community.