In Ettie Bailey-King’s article “Disability is not a dirty word“, she reminds us that it’s okay to say the word “disability” because disabled peoples’ lives aren’t tragedies. There’s nothing to sugar-coat with euphemisms like “special needs.”

People are disabled by structures. A wheelchair user is disabled by design choices, like buildings without ramps. The problem is social systems, not people’s bodies. Disability is a mismatch between a person and the environment they’re in.

Disability is a spectrum and may be permanent, temporary or situational: From Microsoft Inclusive design Disability is the largest minority group there is and it’s the only one that we can enter at any time.

Disability is not a monolith and there is no singular disabled experience. Some areas of intersectionality with disability include: Race Gender identity Sexual orientation Size Socioeconomic status The experiences of a Black disabled person will vary from those of a trans disabled person or a poor disabled person in meaningful ways. Disability also intersects with every aspect of someone’s life: Employment School Family Community Mass incarceration

aid accessibility efforts, we can incorporate inclusive design. Inclusive design principals seek to create solutions that are usable by a wide range of people. There’s a saying in the disability community: Nothing about us without us. This means that our design process must include disabled people. We need to hire disabled people to create and build solutions. We need to pay disabled people for their feedback on how our solutions can work better for them.

Disability is never a barrier. Design is.

I’d been in therapy for decades, but I had a new psychologist helping with my anxiety who was teaching me about my young self. I talked to her about how I felt in the present day (afraid, tired, hungry, tired, angry), and she helped me draw links between those feelings and what happened when I was small.Then she encouraged me to talk to that little girl.Like, to have an actual conversation.“That’s stupid,” I said, pretending to be a rational person who’s not in constant dialogue with her cat.“Try it,” she said. “What would you tell yourself?”I tried it. From my therapist’s couch I found, in my memory, a small blond child alone on a schoolyard swing. She had been booted from class to “calm down”, so she was twisting up the chains and then letting go so they would spin her around. The air was cool. Autumn. Through the window, she could see other kids painting bright colours on to butchers paper.I imagined myself sitting next to her on the other swing. Why are you out here? I would ask, and she would say, I’m naughty, and the chains would clang as they unravelled.But what if, I would say, I knew you were trying your best?No one had ever said this to six-year-old Anna. They had only ever told her to be something different. I felt something click in my chest.After I had used up all my therapist’s tissues and gone home, I kept visiting this past self. I found her in classrooms where everything seemed too noisy. I found her hiding under the bed from people who would yell at her, panicking about report cards, forgetting her homework. I found her yelling, crying, laughing, wishing she could be somebody else. This anxious, bound-up kid fighting every single thing in her life.