The fact that affected persons often know the ups and downs of their disability best, is something the peer counseling method takes advantage of. The principle is easily explained: people with disabilities counsel others who share the same disability. Like Dagmar Marth for example. For the past ten years, she has counseled new amputees within the scope of the Hospital Peers (PiK) project.
The same is true for Claudia Breidbach: the prosthetic user counsels and teaches new users of her type of prosthetic how to optimally use this technical device. Since she has been a user herself for many years, she is able to give many helpful tips based on her personal experience, helping to speed up the process of acclimatization on the use of prosthetics.
Blind person Katja Eichhorn also used a similar principle until the summer of 2016: for many years, she offered Apple product training courses for blind and visually impaired persons. Since she was able to gain a lot of practical experience in using various end devices, she taught this knowledge on a professional basis. However, her homepage states that Katja Eichhorn suddenly and unexpectedly died in July 2016.
Having said that, the combined skills and abilities of people with disabilities should not just be in great demand and attract interest on a private scale. For instance, if texts by public authorities are published in Easy Language, they also need to be checked beforehand – by those people for whom this information is actually intended. After all, who better to check these texts on how understandable and accessible in terms of contents they are than people who have learning disabilities (so-called "intellectual disabilities")? The assessment is also based on a set of standard rules prepared by the Netzwerk Leichte Sprache (Easy Language Network) in Münster, Germany. It states that technical and foreign words, as well as abbreviations must be avoided. Sentences need to be short and should only contain one statement.
Incidentally, these criteria are not just useful for the actual intended target audience: persons with dementia or a migration background also benefit from Easy Language. And let’s face it, given the typical business jargon used by German public authorities, most people are also grateful when contents are prepared in a way that’s easier to understand.
Generally, more and more people with disabilities seem to come out in public with biographies or media contributions and deliver insights into their actions, their way of thinking and their everyday lives. The primary goal is ultimately always to be recognized and taken seriously as experts when it comes to their own lives – based on the principle: nothing about us without us.