Despite recent advances, many people with disabilities remain socially and economically marginalized, a situation reinforced by assumptions about disability built into many public policies. Program eligibility may reflect the moral stigmatization of many disabling conditions or may assume that an individual either has a disability and is unable to work, or is able to work and therefore does not have a disability. Further, programs define disability solely in terms of individual impairment rather than the capacity of social environments to accommodate human variation, and they typically disregard the tremendous variability in disability and its consequences.
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