Right now I am in the middle of accessibility work for a game that students wrote and the hardest thing about the work is managing my emotions which involves a mixture of "unstable footing" and "moral injury".
The unstable footing is working with dull tools, having to find real solutions to real problems that don't break the game but also having to find ways to clear false alarms that SiteImprove finds and hopefully document it enough that the next people to work on the project can keep it accessible. I've found that most screen readers are trash (some lock up my computer) and have to test with a specific configuration that seems to work and just not concern myself with people using other tools. There is a lot of backtracking and asking "is there a different way we can do this?", etc.
The moral injury is that the whole process of WCAG, SiteImprove and all that actually erase the voices and experiences of disabled people. We are ticking boxes but never testing that disabled people can really use something, asking what they think, etc. Sometimes I feel that my values about craftsmanship are violated and that I am being accountable and my organization is being held accountable (our customers require this) but the WCAG standards people are not held accountable, SiteImprove is not being held accountable, vendors of trash screen readers are not being held accountable, the people who make frameworks like MUI aren't being held accountable, etc.
It helps that I believe in accessibility and that I believe in my organization and that it is seen as critical in my organization and that they give me the time and space to do work that feels like working in a collapsed building but on a bad day it feels like I am working very hard and giving my all for nothing.
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As for the "invisible disabilities", I have one, they tried really hard to help me in school before there was a legal framework that enshrined the "students with a disability label can call Albany and Albany can light a fire under the ass of the superintendent and all the rest of the parents and students can just talk to the hand" regime. A good fraction of people who are fashionably autistic and ADHD and even transgender probably have what I have. 47 years after my first psych eval (all the signs and symptoms but no diagnosis) I turned it unequivocally into a superpower.
When I was an undergrad I knew a blind student who studied computer science, wrote C with a screen reader, volunteered for search and rescue and walked up a 13,000 foot mountain at night: he was asked what we could do for him and he said "i need to hold on the shoulder of someone ahead of me" and he was in the fastest group. There are two wheelchair icons in America: one of them suggests that someone is waiting passively for help in a wheelchair, the other one suggests you'd better watch out or you might get run down by someone in a wheelchair -- you know which one I like!
Many people who I would describe as "diss ability" activists would reject my story about my friend and they have a very anti-resilient attitude and what I'll say is that I do everything I can to shut those people out of my life. I feel my accessibility work is meaningless to those people, they are going to complain about everything in life and never recognize my hard work and dedication. But empowering people who will make the most of their abilities -- that gets me fired up and makes it all worth it.
I do see the class injustice. I've seen upper-middle class people with relatively little impairment get disability payments and severely impaired people not being able to get the paperwork started, even when I was personally helping them out.
So I can't accept the position of this article completely but I can't dismiss it either.
PaulHoule•1h ago
Right now I am in the middle of accessibility work for a game that students wrote and the hardest thing about the work is managing my emotions which involves a mixture of "unstable footing" and "moral injury".
The unstable footing is working with dull tools, having to find real solutions to real problems that don't break the game but also having to find ways to clear false alarms that SiteImprove finds and hopefully document it enough that the next people to work on the project can keep it accessible. I've found that most screen readers are trash (some lock up my computer) and have to test with a specific configuration that seems to work and just not concern myself with people using other tools. There is a lot of backtracking and asking "is there a different way we can do this?", etc.
The moral injury is that the whole process of WCAG, SiteImprove and all that actually erase the voices and experiences of disabled people. We are ticking boxes but never testing that disabled people can really use something, asking what they think, etc. Sometimes I feel that my values about craftsmanship are violated and that I am being accountable and my organization is being held accountable (our customers require this) but the WCAG standards people are not held accountable, SiteImprove is not being held accountable, vendors of trash screen readers are not being held accountable, the people who make frameworks like MUI aren't being held accountable, etc.
It helps that I believe in accessibility and that I believe in my organization and that it is seen as critical in my organization and that they give me the time and space to do work that feels like working in a collapsed building but on a bad day it feels like I am working very hard and giving my all for nothing.
---
As for the "invisible disabilities", I have one, they tried really hard to help me in school before there was a legal framework that enshrined the "students with a disability label can call Albany and Albany can light a fire under the ass of the superintendent and all the rest of the parents and students can just talk to the hand" regime. A good fraction of people who are fashionably autistic and ADHD and even transgender probably have what I have. 47 years after my first psych eval (all the signs and symptoms but no diagnosis) I turned it unequivocally into a superpower.
When I was an undergrad I knew a blind student who studied computer science, wrote C with a screen reader, volunteered for search and rescue and walked up a 13,000 foot mountain at night: he was asked what we could do for him and he said "i need to hold on the shoulder of someone ahead of me" and he was in the fastest group. There are two wheelchair icons in America: one of them suggests that someone is waiting passively for help in a wheelchair, the other one suggests you'd better watch out or you might get run down by someone in a wheelchair -- you know which one I like!
Many people who I would describe as "diss ability" activists would reject my story about my friend and they have a very anti-resilient attitude and what I'll say is that I do everything I can to shut those people out of my life. I feel my accessibility work is meaningless to those people, they are going to complain about everything in life and never recognize my hard work and dedication. But empowering people who will make the most of their abilities -- that gets me fired up and makes it all worth it.
I do see the class injustice. I've seen upper-middle class people with relatively little impairment get disability payments and severely impaired people not being able to get the paperwork started, even when I was personally helping them out.
So I can't accept the position of this article completely but I can't dismiss it either.