Disability Issues

Senator Tom Harkin has introduced two bills that would mandate captioning and audio descriptions in movie theaters and on planes, while advocates push for greater accessibility on the web.

Recently passed legislation offers new tools to better protect Social Security disability beneficiaries from representative payees who abuse their position.

A bill that would allow retired military service members to name special needs trusts as beneficiaries of their Survivor Benefit Plans has been reintroduced in Congress.

A 29-year-old Virginia woman with Down syndrome is fighting her mother's attempt to obtain guardianship in a case that has drawn attention to the tenuous balance between laws that seek to protect people with special needs while affording them maximum...

Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) introduced the Special Needs Trust Fairness Act of 2013, a bill that would allow people with disabilities to create first-party special needs trusts to hold their assets without interfering with their access to Supplemental Security Income...

A new bill introduced for the third straight session of Congress hopes to phase out the two year waiting period before SSDI beneficiaries receive Medicare.

In a first-of-its-kind case, a special court recently ruled against families who claimed that childhood vaccinations contributed to their children's autism.

After a successful effort by the 14-year-old brother of a girl with intellectual disabilities to remove the word "retarded" from Maryland law, US Senator Barbara Mikulski has proposed a bill that would do the same thing in all federal programs.

After the Government Accountability Office found numerous instances of abuse and neglect when schools employed restraints and seclusion to "control" children with special needs, legislation was introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate aimed at reducing the use of...