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, openly accommodate people with disability for example by providing ramps and accessible toilets in meeting facilities. One of the easiest ways to do this is through what is known as 'universal design'.

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 of 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, sometimes forcibly, 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 typically limited to putting a person with a disability next to typical people in the usually quite vague and unspecific hope that each will adapt to and learn about the other. Inclusion, while acknowledging the value of mainstreaming as a tool, argues that this is not enough: the whole of society, its physical accessibility, and its social attitudes, they say, should exist with universal design in mind, thus ending physical marginalization of all kinds by ending the idea that a body that is different is incapable of self-management, physical attractiveness, and so on. This all-encompassing practice, its advocates argue, ensures that people of differing abilities visibly and palpably belong to, are engaged in, and are actively connected to the goals and objectives of the whole wider society, as opposed to being a "novelty" that 'normal' people might be afraid to ask direct questions of.

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