When nondisabled people consider freedom of movement or travel, they tend to associate it with border-crossings or being deprived of freedom by incarceration, because mobility seems so natural for them that they are only able to conceive of it through its absence. This conceptual presence-via-negation is incarnated in sites of deprivation of freedom such as prisons, detention centres, and re-education camps. For many disabled people, this fundamental right is violated daily, leading to a conception of unfettered mobility as a ‘sweet dream’. In this dream, independent mobility takes a variety of forms but generally includes moving without assistance that is often made necessary by inaccessible physical environments. Another common feature of this dream is spontaneous mobility (‘whenever I want’) unlike the advance planning often required by adapted transportation services – and mobility at the same transportation cost as that afforded by nondisabled people (unlike when one needs to take a taxi for lack of availability of accessible public transportation). This dream may also include being able to move about like others and benefiting from non-segregated public transportation.

For disabled people, this still unrealized fundamental freedom imposes important limitations on access to employment, leisure activities, and numerous other forms of social participation. This disparity in access to features of life that many nondisabled people take for granted is deeply revealing of the social status of disabled people. Beginning in the 1980s, their demands to increase their freedom of movement occupied a central role in the actions of advocacy associations that quickly came to be represented by a single word: accessibility (Mor 2018). For disabled people to be able to enjoy unobstructed, spontaneous mobility, the physical environment must be rendered fully accessible. This key axiom of the disability movement has gradually gained some influence over public policy.