Disability Rights Movement

The disability rights movement is the movement to secure equal opportunities and equal rights for people with disabilities. The specific goals and demands of the movement are: accessibility and safety in transportation, architecture, and the physical environment, equal opportunities in independent living, employment, education, and housing, and freedom from abuse, neglect, and violations of patients' rights. Effective civil rights legislation is sought in order to secure these opportunities and rights.

For people with physical disabilities accessibility and safety are primary issues that this movement works to reform. Access to public areas such as city streets and public buildings and restrooms are some of the more visible changes brought about in recent decades. A noticeable change in some parts of the world is the installation of elevators, automatic doors, wide doors and corridors, transit lifts, wheelchair ramps, curb cuts, and the elimination of unnecessary steps where ramps and elevators are not available, allowing people in wheelchairs and with other mobility impairments to use public sidewalks and public transit more easily and more safely.

Read more about Disability Rights Movement:  Overview, History, Exhibitions and Collections

Famous quotes containing the words rights and/or movement:

    In our governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of government contrary to the sense of the constituents, but from the acts in which government is the mere instrument of the majority.
    James Madison (1751–1836)

    Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves,
    So that they become an impalpable town, full of
    Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound,
    Sounding in the transparent dwellings of the self,
    Impalpable habitations that seem to move
    In the movement of the colors of the mind....
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)