GEOGRAPHY AND THE DISABLED - A SURVEY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO VISION IMPAIRED AND BLIND POPULATIONS

Traditionally, geography has paid relatively little attention to disabled or disadvantaged populations. As society has concerned itself more with problems of dealing with the blind, the physically handicapped, the retarded, the deaf, the socio-economically destitute and homeless, and other special populations, the discipline of geography has dragged its feet in terms of examining how its expertise can be used to help understand and solve the many problems these special populations encounter in normal commerce with physical and built environments. In this paper I outline some general and some specific suggestions regarding the way geographers can invoke their skills and knowledge to deal with sets of problems faced by these special populations. The paper is designed to make suggestions both for instructional purposes (i.e., providing a sufficiently wide topical coverage for potential course-work in the area), and to identify specific future research challenges. The combined effect is to suggest that geographical study of the disabled could represent a new systematic area of geographic concentration that would combine micro and macro approaches, and facilitate the development of new geographic theory, methods, and applications.