ABSTRACT
Swedish institutions have tried to address accessibility through design, predominantly through the paradigm of “universal design” or “design for all.” Critical disability studies emerged from the activism of disabled people in the 1970s and took societal power relations as their point of departure, especially grounded in the lived reality of people with disabilities and their place in the world; such studies critique the normative emphasis on “independence.” More specifically, the distribution of a general environment, or the living experience of that environment, is not universal or equal; some groups still struggle to take part. The people have been working toward accessibility rights, with a focus on restaurants and bars, for quite a few years. It is a matter of enacting functional variations over the whole social and cultural spectrum, as Westgerd points out, but what unites these actions is their focus on social and political distribution of abilities-and their insistence that cultural living-forms should be accessible not only to normates.
