To look at it a different way, isn't a person with healthy eyes as equally disabled as a blind person when they're in a completely dark room? The source of the disability is not as important as the outcome.
This seems valid to me.
The prefix "dis-" is a negation prefix[1], and "abled" means to have a range of abilities[2], so it is equivalent to not-abled. Not having a range of abilities.
There's nothing in this most basic description that suggests being disabled is an abnormal or permanent state.
In the context of getting to the grocery store in the winter, I am quite literally disabled by the cold temperatures, unless I have some natural occurrence or form of technology that en-ables me–el nino, clothing, vehicles, underground tunnels.
I am disabled from reading this screen if I don't have my glasses on. This is a permanent disability, but I can correct it by either putting on my glasses, or by making the text bigger.
Our set of abilities is not immutable, and technology is just meant to add to this set. Microsoft's document is just about making designers aware that not everyone always has the same set of abilities as the designers themselves. Recognizing this allows us to design technology that helps more people in more situations.
WHO did not change _the_ definition of "disabled", they _corrected their own_ definition to recognize that whether or not a person is disabled is a contextually dependent question.
[1] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis- [2] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled
Yes, the standard is vague and poorly defined. And I agree that disability doesn't need to be permanent or easily visible or significant, that it is context dependent, and it obviously isn't binary. I have no qualms with the idea that everyone or nearly everyone is, at some point and in some ways, disabled. And perhaps most importantly, we should disentangle the concept of disability with moral/value judgments.
Still, I think all of the examples I've seen on this thread are implicitly comparing against a standard but explicitly pretending they are not. You mention that you are disabled from reading your screen. Because many humans would have that ability. You didn't say you were disabled because you don't have the x-ray vision needed to see through walls. Just like nobody would say a person is disabled because their body doesn't produce enough fur or whale blubber to survive a new england winter.
In the sense of being fully aware of our environment then yes, all humans are disabled in that regard.
Furthermore, disability is not a binary categorisation where you're either disabled or you're not, it's a scale, but crucially it's a scale based on your abilities to engage in the world around you and inside of you. We only use typical human behavior as a measuring point so that we can categorise people in a binary fashion. In other words, you can look at disability through the lens of human society in order to class a person as disabled, but disability can be thought of in much more general terms, which is where the WHO definition comes in.
If you expect to be pressured into making special considerations for disabled people you will fight to keep the scope of the definition as small as possible, whereas if your goal is to force people to make these changes then you will argue for it to be very broad. If your goal is to prevent people with disabilities from being seen as different then you will try and convince people that the definition should be broad and consider ourselves situationaly disabled.
E.g. If you're not allowed to discriminate against people with disabilities; whether obese people are disabled or not makes a big difference to, say, airlines, who require them to buy two seats. Or if tall people are disabled, then not upgrading them to business class for free could be considered discrimination.
To give another example, consider the definitions we use to describe sexual preference. This article on sexual fluidity gives some good examples of how the way we describe sexual preferences may be fine for many, but misses the bigger picture:
http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/beyond-sexual-orientatio...
I found this passage about bisexuality from the article particularly interesting, describing how openness to bisexuality was suppressed because it didn't fit into the more limited but easier to understand narratives that reflected mainstream thinking about sexual preference at the time:
"Robyn Ochs, who came out as bisexual in 1982 and has been campaigning for bisexual rights ever since, remembers some gay marches before the mid-1990s as unwelcoming. “Lesbian women thought that we were sleeping with the enemy,” says Ochs. Dawne Moon, a sociologist at Marquette University, explains that some gay people felt that bisexuals were watering down their message. Any kind of sexual variability outside of homosexuality would threaten the narrative of the gay movement, says Moon. That narrative revolved around same-sex attraction being as authentic and fixed an orientation as heterosexuality.
The scientific practice of the 1960s through the early 1990s reinforced this message. Some researchers blatantly denied the existence of bisexuals. In 1956, the American psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler described bisexuality as “a state that has no existence beyond the word itself” and an “out-and-out fraud.” Other researchers used terms like “true homosexuals” in their studies. It was common for academics to lump bisexuals and homosexuals together.
Even many school and college textbooks did not quite recognize bisexuality as a possible sexual orientation until about a decade ago. Bisexuality was seen to be a phase some people go through before identifying as heterosexual or homosexual. Kenji Yoshino, professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law famously called this phenomenon “bisexual erasure” in an essay he wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2000. “It is as if self-identified straights and self-identified gays have concluded that whatever their other disagreements, they will agree that bisexuals do not exist,” Yoshino says."
Why do I bring this up? It's to point out that broader understanding of human variability has its place, even if it makes people who prefer neater definitions uncomfortable. It's the same with disability, it takes on many forms, and although shortcuts/simpler definitions have their place it's worth recognising that variability, even if that makes reasoning about it harder to do.
