Services for the disabled

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Services for the disabled are those government or other institutional services specifically provided to enable people who are disabled to participate on equal grounds in society. Some such services are mandated or required by law, some are assisted by technologies that have made it easier to provide the service, and others are commercially available not only to disabled people, but to everyone who might make use of them.

A complete list of such services would be difficult to assemble, especially as new ones are being invented all the time, and as old services are being delivered in new ways. It may be easier to divide the services by the disability that they help overcome:

• Services for the blind:
  • Guide dogs being admitted to buildings, buses, trains and other locations that pets are not allowed.
  • Reserving the use of a white cane to blind individuals only.
  • Using mobile phone cameras to take pictures of change after a transaction, so that it can be counted by a sighted person who verifies by tone or voice that the change is correct.
  • Translation of new works into braille or talking books, or the use of text-to-speech translators.
    • Availability of these in a public library and other public institutions, and in a boot image configured for use for a disabled person.
• Services for the visually-impaired:
  • Large font books
  • Basic operating system and boot image configuration utilities that set computers up with large bold fonts and high-contrast colour combination desktop schemes.
• Services for the hearing-impaired:
  • Admission of hearing aids to locations where recording and transmitting devices are not normally permitted.
  • TTY terminals for telephones.
  • Closed captioning on television.
  • Simultaneous sign language translation
• Services for the mobility-impaired:

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was a landmark U.S. federal government move towards providing services for the disabled in a uniform way all across the country. That legislation has been widely copied in other countries.