Section 1: Disability awareness

Section 1: Disability awareness

Definitions of disability

• The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) defines a disabled person as someone who has a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his or her ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities (this is taken from the direct.gov.uk website).

• For the purposes of the Disability Discrimination Act:

• Substantial means neither minor nor trivial
• Long term means that the effect of the impairment has lasted or is likely to last for at least 12 months
• Normal day-to-day activities include everyday things like eating, washing, walking and going shopping
• A normal day-to-day activity must affect one of the 'capacities' listed in the Act which include mobility, manual dexterity, speech, hearing, seeing and memory
• Some conditions, such as a tendency to set fires and hay fever, are specifically excluded
• The DDA 2005 Act amended the definition of disability. It ensured that people with HIV, cancer and multiple sclerosis are deemed to be covered by the DDA effectively from the point of diagnosis, rather than from the point when the condition has some adverse effect on their ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.

In the next part of this module, we will look at various forms of disability and tackle some myths and popular misconceptions. We will also look at some of the coping strategies that students with some of these disabilities may use.

Support for disabled students in Higher Education (HE) is based around developing effective coping strategies: e.g. a dyslexic student who reads slowly can use text-to-speech software to listen to their research material. In this example the use of the software forms the strategy.