Category: Articles

Americans With Disabilities: Giving Back and Growing at the Same Time

People with disabilities serve for the same reasons as anyone else: to give back to their communities, and to become more active and engaged. Many find that service offers real-life work experience, allowing opportunities to test career paths, sharpen skills, and define employment goals and interests. The individuals profiled here represent a small sampling of the many people with disabilities engaged in national and community service. These stories illustrate the diversity of members with disabilities and their service experiences, and show how a national service experience can contribute to employment.

Dwight Owens AmeriCorps State: Linking Individuals to Neighborhoods and Communities (LINC) Collins, Mississippi

Dwight Owens won the 2010 Spirit of Service Award given to an outstanding AmeriCorps member. Dwight served as a member of LINC, where he helped connect people with disabilities with resources and supports to facilitate independence. Dwight remarks that he was proud to help others to gain independence while working to gain independence himself. In 2005, Dwight was a teacher and football coach when he sustained a spinal-cord injury after being struck by a drunk driver. He says that service increased his self-confidence and taught him he could inspire others through his own struggle for independence. Since his accident, Dwight has used his teaching experience to conduct many presentations in schools, churches, and prisons to discourage drinking and driving. Reflecting on his national service experience, Dwight says, “You can’t help but feel good when you are helping other people smile.” He says his national service experience has helped to develop his own self-awareness that he now uses in his public speaking and advocacy.

Frank Meyer Volunteer St. Louis, Missouri

Frank Meyer is a senior who engages in service for organizations across his community, including the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, a local charter school, and the Ronald McDonald House. Frank describes how volunteering has not only given him an opportunity to serve his community, but has also increased his sense of self-worth. Service has even helped his physical wellbeing by keeping him active. Frank’s limited mobility has not curtailed his service to the community. In his many different volunteer positions, he serves as an usher, answers phones, helps to plan community events, and evaluates accessibility for people with disabilities. He was also one of he first bell ringers in St. Louis for the Salvation Army. Frank says he has always been interested in service because he finds it “difficult to spend all [his] time doing nothing…There are really so many things to get into.”

Lise Pace AmeriCorps VISTA Service: Bosma Enterprises Indianapolis, Indiana

During her service year, Lise Pace volunteered for Bosma Enterprises, an organization that supports individuals with visual disabilities. Lise, who has retinitis pigmentosa, trained and recruited many volunteers herself. Lise talks about being very shy and uncertain when she began her VISTA service. She thought that her newly acquired disability precluded her from employment entirely. In spite of this, Lise went on to design and implement a volunteer program that allowed people with disabilities to serve in programs such as Habitat for Humanity. After her service year, Lise was hired as a full-time employee for an AmeriCorps program. She is now very comfortable with public speaking. In fact, through the corporate volunteering program, Lise trained volunteers from all levels within the 150- employee company. Lise said of her VISTA experience, “I really was just like a flower that hadn’t been watered…Once I got watered, I just really blossomed and started standing up straighter.” Her service experience improved her confidence and provided an opportunity for her to rejoin the workforce.

Jennifer Wayne Byerly AmeriCorps State: GRADD Senior Connections Owensboro, Kentucky

Jennifer Wayne Byerly never imagined that joining AmeriCorps would turn into what she calls “the catalyst to change my life.” Jennifer used her professional experience and the training she received in AmeriCorps to work with organizations including the Red Cross, the Medical Reserve Corps, and the Community Emergency Response Team to help seniors and people with disabilities prepare for disasters and other emergencies. Jennifer became one of the first Red Cross Disaster Response Team members to self-identify as a person with a disability. As a result, she became the first person with a mental health-related disability to serve as a consumer representative on a psychiatric response team. Jennifer credits her experiences in AmeriCorps as contributing to her being awarded a grant that will enable her to, as she says, “do even more service in my rural community.”

Oyo Fummilayo AmeriCorps State: 21st Century Program Danville, Kentucky

Oyo Fummilayo was unemployed before she served as a literacy specialist at a middle school. Having previous experience working with teenagers, she specifically chose a middle school because of her passionate belief that pre-teens are at a particularly critical point in their education, when they either become excited about learning or lose interest. Oyo taught the students how to write a newsletter, which they continued after her term of service. She says that her service was a steppingstone to everything she has done subsequently. Her service experience confirmed what she already suspected: She would find her true career in helping others. After her service, Oyo was appointed to the Kentucky Council on Developmental Disabilities. Her interest in supporting people with disabilities is not because she has a disability but because, she says, “I believe that everybody needs to be included in everything…Everything we do should be available to everybody. It doesn’t matter if you have a disability or not.”

Source: National Service.Gov

Definition: Defining the Meaning of Computer Software Accessibility

Latest Computer Devices and Software Publications – Click Here for Full List (146 Items)

Source: Disabled World

Isn’t Just the Right Thing to Do—It’s Good for Business

Surveys reveal that people with disabilities consistently report a good quality of life, says Tom Shakespeare. So why is it often assumed they are unhappy?

Have you ever thought to yourself: “I’d rather be dead than disabled?” It’s not an unusual reflection. Disability, in everyday thought, is associated with failure, with dependency and with not being able to do things. We feel sorry for disabled people, because we imagine it must be miserable to be disabled.

But in fact we’re wrong. It’s sometimes called the “disability paradox”. Surveys reveal people with disabilities consistently report a quality of life as good as, or sometimes even better than, that of non-disabled people.

Impairment usually makes little difference to quality of life. Research shows, for example, that overall levels of life satisfaction for people with spinal cord injury are not affected by their physical ability.

Even the clinical facts of whether their spinal lesion is high or low, complete or incomplete – all aspects that affect functioning – don’t seem to make much difference. Human flourishing is possible even if you lack a major sense, like sight, or you can’t walk, or you’re totally physically dependent on others.

So what’s going on?

If you think about it for a moment, you realise that people born with an impairment have nothing to which they can compare their current existence. Someone lacking hearing or sight has never experienced music or birdsong, visual art or a sublime landscape. Someone with an intellectual disability may not consider themselves different at all. Someone like me, born with restricted growth, has always been that way. Even if life is sometimes hard, we are used to being the way we are.

For people who become disabled, there’s a typical trajectory. I can say this from personal experience, having become paralysed in 2008. Immediately after the onset of injury or disease, one can feel profoundly depressed, and even contemplate suicide. Yet after a period of time, people adapt to their new situation, re-evaluate their attitude to the disability, and start making the most of it. Sometimes, they are driven to greater achievements than before. Remember those amazing Paralympic athletes…

Maybe you are sceptical about the subjective nature of quality-of-life data. Bioethicists sometimes describe these self-reports in terms of the “happy slave” concept, in other words, people think they are happy because they do not know any better. Perhaps these cheerful people with disabilities are deluding themselves. Or, perhaps they are fooling others. Maybe in private they admit to misery, while in public they put on a brave face. Either way, it’s said these folk must be in some kind of denial.

But these explanations are patronising, not to say insulting. More importantly, they’re wrong. Research in a field called hedonic psychology has supported disabled people’s self-reports of good quality of life. Scientists such as Daniel Gilbert have done very thorough testing of what people say and how they think. They’ve come up with the concept of hedonic adaptation – which refers to the way in which after trauma, quality of life eventually returns to approximately what it was before the trauma struck. Amazing, eh? Unfortunately this also happens in reverse – so, if you are lucky enough to win the lottery, you’ll feel like £10m for a year or two, but then you’ll go back to being as miserable or cheerful as you were before your stroke of luck.

So if these self-reports are true, we will need to find better ways of understanding the disability paradox.

To start with, we can offer more nuanced accounts of the psychological processes that go on in the mind of a person with disability. Adaptation means finding another way to do something. For example, the paralysed person might wheel, rather than walk, to, places. Coping is when people gradually re-define their expectations about functioning. They decide that a stroll of half a mile is fine, whereas previously they would only have been content with a 10-mile ramble. Accommodation is when someone learns to value other things – they decide that rather than going for walks in the country with friends, it’s far more important to be able to go to great restaurants with them. This teaches us an important lesson – human beings are capable of adapting to almost any situation, finding satisfaction in the smaller things they can achieve, and deriving happiness from their relationships with family and friends, even in the absence of other triumphs.

Our appraisal of life with impairment may have less to do with reality than with fear and ignorance and prejudice. We wrongly assume that difficulties for people result in misery for people.

Even to the extent that impairments do entail suffering and limitation, other factors in life can more than compensate for them. Take the recent French box office sensation Les Intouchables, in which the protagonist, Philippe has tetraplegia, but despite this, he is able to have a good quality of life because he has money. Even people who aren’t lucky enough to be wealthy Parisian aristocrats can enjoy the benefits of friendship or culture, despite the restrictions that impairment places on them. By contrast, it is plain to see that someone can have a fully functioning body or mind and yet lack the social networks or the personality necessary for living a happy and fulfilled existence.

This highlights the importance of the environment in determining the happiness of disabled people. As in most areas of life, it’s structural factors that make the real difference. Participation, not impairment is key. Do access barriers stop you going to school with your friends? Do you have a job? Does society meet the extra costs of having an impairment through a welfare system which is fair and non-sti

gmatising? Do you face hostility and hate crime? Unfortunately, in most of these respects the situation for disabled people has been getting worse, not better, in recent years. According to the Centre for Welfare Reform, this government’s spending cuts have had a hugely disproportionate impact on the lives of disabled people in poverty.

In arguing that social barriers are more of a problem than the impairment itself, I am not suggesting that fear is completely irrational. For a start, disability is very diverse in ways that mean we have to soften the claim that “disability is no tragedy”. Some illnesses and impairments undoubtedly involve greater degrees of misery or suffering than the average human should have to endure. I’m thinking of depression, for example, which biologist Lewis Wolpert memorably labelled “malignant sadness”. There are some nasty and painful degenerative diseases. Impairments that involve considerable pain, whether physical or mental, are obviously less compatible with a good quality of life.

It’s also true that in general, disabled people usually have fewer choices than non-disabled people. Most societies still have limited accessibility. Even in a barrier-free world, the disabled person is more likely to rely on mechanical devices that periodically malfunction, rendering the individual excluded or dependent. I have been stranded thanks to a flat tyre on my wheelchair or a broken lift numerous times. Most disabled people become inured to the frustrations of inaccessibility or breakdown, but it certainly makes life less predictable and less free than it is for the non-disabled.

But my point is that while disability is not simply an irrelevant difference, like the colour of your skin, neither need it be a tragedy.

And remember: Mere existence entails problems. Hamlet, listing reasons why death is to be preferred, highlights “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. To be born is to be vulnerable, to fall prey to disease and suffering, and ultimately to die. Sometimes, the part of life that is difficult brings other benefits, such as a sense of perspective or true value that people who lead easier lives can miss out on. If we always remembered this, perhaps we would turn out to be more accepting of disability and less prejudiced against disabled people.

Source: A Point of View is broadcast on Friday on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated on Sunday at 08:50 BST. Catch up on BBC iPlayer