Lack of Accessibility Can Create Long Term Impact on People with Disabilities
By Rick Hoel
Published December 18, 2020
During the course of our lives, we all encounter challenges and hardships, sometimes severe. People with disabilities, however, can experience these difficulties on a more frequent basis and find that these challenges have much greater short and long term impact. As highlighted by the World Health Organization (WHO), the challenges faced by people with disabilities do not just involve physical obstacles. Here is the WHO definition of these barriers on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) site:
“Factors in a person’s environment that, through their absence or presence, limit functioning and create disability. These include aspects such as:
- a physical environment that is not accessible;
- lack of relevant assistive technology (assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices);
- negative attitudes of people towards disability; and
- services, systems and policies that are either nonexistent or that hinder the involvement of all people with a health condition in all areas of life.”
There are certain areas of life where this [...]