[Disability as a restriction on social participation: challenges in evaluation since the Brazilian Inclusion of People with Disabilities Act].

This article discusses the main advances and challenges for understanding and evaluating disability as a restriction for social participation. This new understanding has its origins in the 2006 WHO International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health - ICF, the 2001 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and more recently, the July 2015 Brazilian Inclusion of People with Disabilities Act (IPDA), also known as the Statute on Persons with Disabilities. The change in the understanding of disability from a merely biomedical perspective, to an understanding that is based on oppression and social inequality reinforces the idea that disability is not an individual attribute, but the result of a society that is not prepared for human diversity. Based on a legislative analysis of the many documents on policies regarding persons with disabilities, notably the IPDA and the evaluations of disability that the ICF already uses in Brazil, the main contention proposed is that classifying and valuing disability is challenging for professional evaluators as well as for Brazilian public policy. This is mainly due to the challenges of recognizing the barriers and environmental factors that hamper the full participation in society of people with disabilities.