Intellectual disability and accessible communication

To approach people in the form of a definition is always to view them from the outside. This is especially true of a definitional approach to the question of the criteria of so-called “intellectual disabilities”. Inherently, such tentative definitions are marked as attempts of external ascriptions: “There are people who we associate with a certain group of people on the basis of our perception of their human activities and how we see them reflected in social standards. We describe this group of people as ‘intellectually disabled’” (Feuser 1996: 18; emphasis in original; English translation of the German original).