From accessibility to inclusion: awareness, participation, well-being.
Elena Di Giovanni |
TEDxMacerata
• July 2021
Since 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has established the importance of the rights of all people, with their different abilities: physical, cognitive, linguistic, and cultural. In the last decades of the past century, there has been an international explosion of interest in accessibility, aimed at ensuring one or more forms of access to services, places, and events that would otherwise be unavailable due to various types of barriers. In the last decade, however, we have witnessed a happy and proper shift from accessibility to inclusion: abandoning privative connotations, setting aside the albeit proper attention to permanent or temporary disabilities, we have gradually shifted to thinking and designing in inclusive terms. Indeed, accessibility fixes one or more deficiencies; inclusion puts all people and their different abilities on the same level, in order to build a world on the basis of diversity that is fit for all.