In the last couple of weeks, I had some encounters that made me think about the state of ableism. Turns out that despite a lot of slow but meaningful progress, the world overall is still pretty much ableist.

This is not news for anyone who is disabled, of course, and it shouldn’t be for anyone who works in the field of accessibility.

In fact, cultural ableism is often the greatest obstacle to overcome – for some disabled people, quite literally. Ableism during an accessibility project can manifest in different ways, the most common are probably:

• Limited budget because accessibility is not considered that important.
• Undereducated project managers, designers, and developers because other topics are always more critical to get trained on.
• Endless discussions on what and how to implement accessibility because investing time into discussions seems more important than just doing the thing.

I think most people involved in accessibility are doing it in good faith. I think they want to change and improve and make their product better. But they are held back either by the climate of ableism or by their own internalized bias.

That’s, of course, not an excuse, but if we intend to dismantle ableism, we need to acknowledge it and its mechanism.

Accessibility doesn’t just happen in an ableist world

Often, when starting projects, clients have the expectation that they have done a good job with accessibility. But when you ask them about their quality assurance process or how they have ensured that their code is accessible, they regularly draw a blank.

The expectation is that accessibility comes automatically with a certain framework, or that smart programmers and designers will naturally come up with accessible solutions.

Sometimes, the answer is “we agreed to produce accessible code” and then you find misguided techniques in the code because the developers were asked to just learn on the job.

But accessibility doesn’t just happen in an ableist world. The mechanisms and automatisms are not tuned to produce accessible content, code, or designs. As a designer, developer, project manager, and really in any role, you have to focus on accessibility and do it intentionally. Every day of the week. Because it will not happen automatically.

You must be anti-ableist.

I see ableism in line with racism and fascism in that there is no neutral position on these topics. If you are neutral on racism, you will live in a racist society. If you are neutral on fascism, you will live in a fascist society. Only if you are anti-ableist, investigating your biases and practices, as well as seeing ableism in the world around you, you can succeed. Otherwise, the inertia of an ableist world will make your work ableist and therefor inaccessible.