Everyone's probably struggled with finding the right language to describe disability at some point: here's the advice from the H810 module entitled 'Talking About Disability and Accessibility'.
[T]he language regarding disabilities must be carefully chosen. We have used the term ‘disabled people’ (or students) rather than, for example, ‘people with disabilities’, as it very much changes the emphasis of ownership or cause of the disability. The term ‘people with disabilities’ implies that the person’s impairment or condition causes them to be ‘disabled’ (and consequently that it is their responsibility to overcome it), whereas ‘disabled person’ implies that the person is disabled not necessarily by their condition or impairment, but by society and its inability or reluctance to cater effectively for that person (and consequently that society must effect change to remove that disability).
Following this logically it is acceptable to refer to a ‘person with an impairment’ because the ownership lies with the person (a deaf person is unable to hear, that is their impairment, whereas the fact that they experience barriers to functioning normally within society is a societal problem and hence they become disabled by those barriers, not by their impairment directly).
I can fully appreciate the pragmatic point here: to really engage with disability in a meaningful way we need to understand that dealing with disability is something that can only be done at a social level. But at the same time, there is something uncomfortably authoritarian about the imperative 'society must change'. Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure that the individual vs society paradigms even make sense in the context of something like accommodating disability. What is meant, for example, by 'outside society'? Maybe what is intended here is some kind of private/public distinction. But presumably we are always 'within' society, and at the very least we are always the result of socialisation.
I would prefer to refer to these issues of disability and identity as intersubjective. But if we do that, then we seem to give up on the public/private (or individual/social) distinction that made the H810 language policy possible in the first place.
Then again, this seems to be largely a matter of accepted etiquette rather than the accurate portrayal of reality in language: terms which were once seen as progressive (e.g. 'coloured people') often end up being seen as anachronistic and offensive. This seems to beg a further question about the relationship between changing language use and the relationship to disability.
Refs:
APA Guidelines for Reporting & Writing About Disabled Students
Suggested Terminology Comunicating with Disabled Students
Phipps, L., Sutherland, A. and Seale, J. (eds) (2002) Access All Areas: Disability, Technology and Learning TechDis/Association for Learning Technology
http://www.techdis.ac.uk/accessallareas/