Disabled by Design Annotated Bibliography by Alex Reid and Kittiya Chaiyachati

Miller, Clark, and Claire Gordon. “Disabled by Design.” Slate 26 Feb. 2015. Slate. Web. 9 Feb. 2016.

This article discusses social attitudes about the inclusion/exclusion of disabled people based on the characteristics of the built environment around them. It references the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as instrumental in the shift of perceived blame from the disabled person to their environment for not accommodating them, saying “This cultural perspective pits people with disabilities … in a competitive race against those with greater abilities.” This article would be somewhat useful for someone attempting to discuss the effects of the built environment on people with disabilities and the changing attitudes to whether or not we should alter the built environment to include them and how deep these alterations should run. This article does have a few hang ups though. One of the main examples used in this articles is that the size of a Black Hawk attack helicopter excludes people of certain body shapes and sizes. This may be indicative of my own opinion, but it doesn’t seem defensible to claim that every person of every shape and size has a right to drive a multi-million dollar killing machine. The much more glaring objective error in the study about Black Hawks referenced in the article is that it did not include data of the shapes and sizes of men who would have been eligible to pilot these helicopters. These two holes in the primary example presented here greatly detract from the value of this article to be referenced or quoted without exposing these errors in the text that is using it as a source.