The Disablement Of Spacetime
At the end of a long and trying day that did not go in any way that especially resembled how I’d hoped it would go, disability access designer Nick Colley posted some thoughts to Mastodon about an overlooked aspect of designing for disability.
When considering accessibility we should be considering the energy levels of our disabled users alongside the traditional idea of hard barriers.
It is a very common experience among disabled people to be able to navigate a barrier if they have the energy to do so.
But we have to ask, if someone uses that energy to navigate that barrier, what do they trade that for elsewhere?
Our services and products shouldn’t be deemed accessible if disabled people have to forfeit the rest of their day to get something done.
More than anything else and despite being wildly beside the point it honestly made me realize that on this count sometimes the very nature of spacetime itself cannot be deemed accessible, or at least that’s how the day felt.
12:34 PM:
The way my resources have been fluctuating lately it’s a dicey decision but I’m getting my things together to hop transit across town to the zoo, because I need to get the hell out of my several square block radius, and maybe I’ll be lucky and the baby rhino will be out.
Proof of survival after a zoo trip where I had a resources crash less than an hour after arriving.
4:48 PM:
In less than an hour after arriving at the zoo, I ran almost completely out of steam, and it took me a half an hour or so just make my way back out again, and the transit schedule back wasn’t great so I stopped on the way home for The Whole Bowl, which is as close to a sure thing for getting me through until I get home as there exists in the world.
5:51 PM:
Within half an hour of getting home, my mood has taken a dive, I can barely leave my chair, and I’m orbiting a potential sobbing fit. Tell me again, Social Security Administration, that I am not disabled.
7:17 PM:
One nice thing about living in an ADU is that there’s no one to react when in the throes of resources striped bare I can’t open a container no matter how hard I try and so I let out a wordless scream at the very top of my lungs because that’s what happens when in the throes of resources stripped bare I can’t open a container no matter how hard I try.
That last especially is telling. Unmentioned is the preamble of profane invective after which I lost even those words and had only volume with which to work. None of this is the day of an unimpaired, undisabled human being, contrary to everything the Social Security Administration ever has said about me.
There are reasons I say that it’s all downhill from here, and there’s a reason, too, that I recently added this post about bootstrapping to my featured posts widget: I was told the other day that when my parental financial support departs the world, I can take their place in a spare room in Western Massachusetts.
Read that post to see what that prospect does to me, even absent (thanks to the aphantasia and SDAM) truly being able to mentally time travel prospectively into the future to imagine it.