David Dame, in a LinkedIn post, said, “We are all going to be disabled one day. Some of us just beat you to it.” While he is correct, that is not the full story.
I said, quoting his post, “I do not think of myself as ‘disabled.’ Instead, I think of myself as having ‘insufficient abilities’ to navigate the default world.”
David does use a wheelchair all the time. I do not—I use a rollator. I suspect my rollator offers me more ease than his wheelchair might.
But we don’t always have visible handicaps. For example, no one can see my single-sided deafness. (I am totally deaf in my right ear.) I can manage my tinnitus.
But my deafness creates a barrier in loud places. I can see other people’s mouths moving, but I cannot hear a damn thing they say. I have to turn my hearing ear to them and cup my left hand behind my ear. When that does not work, I try to move to their right if they are giving me directions. Then, we often do this little do-si-do dance until I say, “Stop. I can’t hear you. Let me move to a place I can hear you.”
My single-sided deafness interferes with my ability to navigate the world easily.
Yet, our default image of disability is that of a person in a wheelchair. While people in wheelchairs are often disabled, that is a very narrow view of our abilities to navigate the world.
How Do Your Abilities Allow You to Navigate the World?
Here’s a scenario from my long-ago early-parent days: I had a four-year-old who, seemingly overnight, grew so much that all of her clothes were too small. I also had a three-month-old baby. How do you go shopping as a single parent with these two children? Carefully.
I installed the baby into the stroller that lived in the back of the car. I took the older child by one hand and pushed the stroller with the other hand. That all works until you arrive at the door to the mall. How did I open the door? There was a handicapped door that opened with a button on the side. The existence of that door allowed me to ask the older child to push the button so we could all sail through.
I was not handicapped at that time. Instead, I was a single parent with too few hands.
My parenting experience says that as soon as we have more than one child, we have too few hands. Parents need more hands to easily navigate the world. That’s why I prefer we design and build for inclusivity. That inclusivity allows everyone—even temporarily handicapped people—to navigate the world.
Even now, with all my handicaps, I am not disabled. But I need handicapped access to many places because I lack sufficient abilities to navigate the default world. That’s the real problem. That’s why I do not like calling people who lack these abilities “Disabled.” Disabled is way too encompassing and not nuanced enough.
Is It Worth Discriminating Between Disabled and Our Ability to Navigate the World?
I still think it’s worth our time to discriminate between full disability and our various inabilities. When we design for ramps instead of stairs, we allow more people with all kinds of abilities to navigate the world. That includes people in wheelchairs, people with strollers, and people like me, who use rollators.
Ramps are an example of inclusive design, where we do not have to clarify our abilities or disabilities. Because David Dame was right when he said, “We are all going to be disabled one day. Some of us just beat you to it.”
Very few of us live in perfect health our entire lives. Most of us develop temporary handicaps, such as being on crutches for a broken leg. If we’re lucky, these are temporary. And, if we live a long, long time, we might become disabled.
Disabled has a specific meaning. While many of us lack sufficient abilities to navigate the default world, we are not disabled. Instead of assuming all disabilities are the same, let’s consider which abilities we want to design for. That will allow more of us to navigate the world successfully.