While I do not speak for the HSA, I have to adress some of Diver0001's comments. I was trained as an HSA Instructor several years ago and so my opinions are based on what I was taught in the course and in what I have done since then.
First, the HSA does NOT exist as the sole arbiter of how a person with disabilities should dive. In fact, I was taught that if someone had a disability, you encourage them to meet the physical requirements of whatever agency you teach for (HSA Instructors, at least when I became one, must be a scuba instructor for another agency, PADI, NAUI, SSI, etc, before becoming an HSA Instructor) and if they can meet them, you certify them through your primary agency.
Second, the HSA does not teach disabled people to be victims. In fact, they encourage independence as much as possible (again, see my first point above). I would also add that the sort of disabled person who would attempt scuba isn't generally the type that would put up with being treated like a victim. They are typically the kind of people that won't let their disability get in the way of their goals.
Third, yes, it's nice if a disabled person would tell us what they want, but they don't always know what their needs might be when they are taking their open water course, or you as a buddy or instructor might not consider, equalizing your ears for example (try pinching your nose without the use of your hands). As an instructor, I am there to teach my students. Students come to me to learn. As you know, it is actually incredibly easy to scuba dive, you put on the gear and you swim around, big deal. It's how to do it safely that we teach in a Scuba course. We talk about decompression sickness and how to avoid it, out of air emergencies, cramps, nitrogen narcosis, how to equalize your ears, regulator free flows, all those things that most scuba students never even thought about. So a disabled person is looking to their instructor to help them identify what things they might need help with BEFORE they get in the water. If you are a quadriplegic you don't want to discover you need help equalizing your ears three feet below the surface with no way to communicate with the guy that is dragging you to the bottom of the lake, or pool.
Finally, the HSA does exist because there are close minded divers and instructors out there who think a lake or an ocean is no place for someone who is paralyzed or blind or missing a leg or has some other form of disability or they (the diver or instructor) simply don't know how to deal with some of these issues and so they are afraid to even try to tackle them. The HSA exists to provide instructors with the training they need to identify the issues a handicapped diver might have and how to deal with them so that, if possible that handicapped person can get a standard agency certification (NAUI, PADI, etc), and if that person cannot meet the physical requirements of those agencies, then there are guidelines for the kind of certification the instructor can issue so that person can dive with whatever assistance they need. The HSA also exists to help able bodied divers understand that handicapped divers have special needs that they might not think about, so that if they are diving with a handicapped diver, they can ask if something might be an issue in case the handicapped diver forgets to mention it. Different disabilities have different needs.
To be fair, I have not certified many handicapped divers. I've had maybe four handicapped students, and all of them, despite their disabilities, were able to meet the performance requirements for Open Water Scuba certification (we had to get an exception for the paraplegic to skip the giant stride entry and use webbed gloves instead of kicking with fins - and she's a better diver than a number of the able-bodied divers I've seen in the Caribbean).
