Disability Rights & History

The social model of disability, named by disabled people themselves, says disability is what happens when society imposes barriers on people with impairments, not the impairments themselves. the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) in 1976 put it plainly: the disabling part isn't the impairment. It's the inaccessible bus, the unlabelled form field, the stairs without a ramp. The contrast is with the medical model, which locates disability in the body and treats it as something to be fixed.

Disability rights weren't handed down. They were fought for. The 1977 504 sit-in in San Francisco, led by Judy Heumann, Kitty Cone, Brad Lomax and others, occupied a federal building until Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act was implemented. It laid the groundwork for the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). In the UK, activists from the Disabled People's Direct Action Network chained themselves to inaccessible buses through the 1990s to win the Disability Discrimination Act. Laws like the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and Equality Act recognise rights people had to demand. Stella Young's critique of inspiration porn is worth naming too: framing disabled people's ordinary lives as exceptional crowds out the structural conversation.

Coverage that works centres disabled activists and disabled-led organisations, uses the social model as a default frame, names the people and movements behind specific changes, and avoids treating accessibility as charity.