Be Prepared To Offer Accommodations

The internal expertise of emergency service organizations can be augmented by utilizing external qualified advisors with disabilities. Qualified advisors are those who understand and can think through issues from a disability perspective. These advisors can help an organization: take advantage of the wealth, depth and breadth of information available from the disability community, and effectively plan to include people with disabilities and activity limitations as well as prevent making a variety of sometimes-costly mistakes. Unfortunately, the history of including people with disabilities has been, in large part, one of paternalism. Entire professions of "experts, " have emerged who have taken control over basic life decisions away from people with disabilities. However, experience repeatedly demonstrates that, given the proper tools, people with many different types of disabilities can devise creative approaches to eradicate barriers that have stumped the so-called experts. For example, the newer, more popular and functional lightweight "sports " wheelchairs that are now widely used wer