Disability / Accessibility Language Choices

There is global and personal variation on what is considered acceptable and preferable. This is how I decide what language to use.

Photo by Soner Eker on Unsplash

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In the first part of this three-part article, I talked about the four different sociological models of disability. To recap, we have:

• The charitable model of disability
• The medical model of disability
• The social model of disability
• The identity model of disability. This is my creation, I think. Don’t google it just yet.

Given that you may be code-switching between these models even within the same conversation, the $64,000 question is — what language to use when referring to someone’s disability?

Language choice factors