Whole-Self

A concept from disability justice that frames a disabled person's identity, needs, and preferences as a rich, multidimensional whole — cultural background, lived experiences, interests, relationships, and aspirations — rather than being reduced to their disability or impairment. The whole-self framing resists narratives that treat disabled people as objects of compensation or rehabilitation and insists on their personhood, agency, and wisdom. In accessibility design, centring the whole-self means co-designing with disabled people as full partners whose identity and context shape the problem space, not simply as users whose deficits define the requirements.