Abstract
In 1980, World Health Organization defined handicap as a condition of disadvantage. Instead, since 2001, WHO considers handicap as a form of diversity, embedded in a society where anybody is diverse in his/her own way. This change in definition signals a cultural transformation both in the society at large and in its part that is composed by the “handicapped” people. Such a change in the attitudes is rooted in the fact that the assistive technologies let people to overcome limitations and allow to build an intelligent ambient that permits all to exploit their diverse potentialities. In Italy, this process of social change has been accompanied, for more than twenty years, by a Foundation (ASPHI), whose mission has been to favour the education and the inclusion in the labour market of people with disability through the use, at the beginning, of the computer-based, and, then, of the communication technologies. In the following contribution, the main characteristics, and activities, and the evolution processes of ASPHI will be presented, together with the outcomes of a survey on how the process of cultural transformation has taken place. The survey was conducted on a sample of the people that directly (they have attended course in ASPHI) or indirectly (they at least once asked ASPHI for information or help) had to do with 6h9s Foundation. The quantitative and qualitative information show a clear shift in the self-perception of “people with disability” from exclusion to inclusion, from the limitations of the handicap to the value of diversity.
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Bagnara, S., Failla, A. (2007). From Handicap to Diversity. In: Stephanidis, C. (eds) Universal Acess in Human Computer Interaction. Coping with Diversity. UAHCI 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4554. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73279-2_68
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73279-2_68
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