Category Archives: Accessibility + Dis/ability

Accessibility + Dis/ability

When the Door Opens for Everyone but You

Imagine a new friend invites you to a party at their house. When you arrive, you knock on the door, but nobody answers. You try the door but it won’t open. You step over to the sidewalk to check that you have the address correct. From the sidewalk, you notice other people arriving and having no trouble getting in, but when you return to the door, it won’t budge for you. You text your friend, but they are probably busy greeting guests and don’t respond to your message. Finally, you decide to ask the next person arriving to hold the door open for you but when you do, they say, “Well aren’t you high maintenance?” They were probably joking, you tell yourself, but before you can respond, the door has swung shut again. By this time, you feel very dejected, not to mention worn out from pulling and pushing on the door. You are now in no mood to socialize. You go home, wondering what just happened.

The next day your friend texts you, apologizing for not seeing your message the night before. You are still too confused and exhausted from the experience to have a conversation about it, but the next time you see your friend, you explain that you tried to get in but couldn’t open the door. They look at you with confusion. “Nobody else had any trouble,” they say. “Why didn’t you ask for help?” You want to explain that you did, but you’re already feeling a bit foolish, so you just let it go.

You might laugh off this odd occurrence if it happened only once. Now imagine that this happens every day, everywhere you go: at work, at the grocery store, at restaurants, at school, at church, at the homes of every friend and family member. Nobody else seems to have trouble getting in. It’s just you.

This is what it’s like for a disabled person trying to access spaces that are designed with only non-disabled people in mind. You can take this basic metaphor and extend it in different ways to understand the experience of a disabled person. For example, as a vision-impaired person, I can usually get into a space but then I often can’t access what’s happening in the space because the signs, slides, handouts, etc. aren’t visible to me. A neurodivergent person may, like me, be able to physically enter the space, but then may find the social cues others notice to be invisible to them.

It’s frustrating and confusing. When I first can’t see what others see, I often don’t even know they see something I don’t. I sometimes wonder how everyone else knows where to go for a meeting—it often turns out there are signs that I don’t see. Asking for help is often unproductive because I don’t know what I’m missing so I don’t know what to ask for. Or, like the person who asks for help getting into the party and is met with a sarcastic response, my requests for help are greeted with snide comments because my disability isn’t apparent. (I am so tired of people pointing at signs I can’t read when I ask for help!)

As my hypothetical scenario shows, there’s no malice on the part of the friend who throws the party or even the people who don’t help. They are just oblivious to the plight of the person who can’t get in. But the lack of malice doesn’t make the situation easier for the person who can’t get in.

Last week I spent a few days in Washington, DC, doing research related to disability at several national sites. I saw lots of gestures toward accessibility that I appreciated—and yet, the doors still don’t open easily for everyone.

The National Mall: I was surprised to learn that the FDR memorial is the only one of the 100+ memorials and monuments on the National Mall to include Braille on some of its exhibits. All of the memorials and monuments have brochures in Braille available and are wheelchair accessible. A park ranger explained that the FDR memorial includes Braille as a nod to FDR being disabled himself. (I was surprised at how powerful it was to see the statues depicting FDR using his wheelchair—I’ve seen wheelchairs in photos, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in a statue.)

As much as I appreciated the availability of Braille brochures at the sites, every time a disabled person has to ask for accommodations, they are the person trying to get into the party at the house where the door seems to open for everyone but them. That feeling of not being able to get into the house where the party is compounds over time. Asking for a brochure isn’t a big deal. Having to ask for a brochure constantly, day after day, wears a person out. Annika Konrad calls this being worn out feeling access fatigue.

Gallaudet University: Another day I went to Gallaudet University’s National Deaf Life Museum. The museum itself was very thought-provoking, especially the exhibit on HIV/AIDS and the Deaf community. The title of the exhibit was “Left Behind” and it focused on how Deaf people didn’t have access to information about HIV/AIDS during the epidemic.

The museum is in a beautiful campus building that exhibits the traditional academic architecture Jay Dolmage talks about in Academic Ableism. From the front, it appears the only way in is up a foreboding set of stone steps. I walked around the building looking for a wheelchair accessible entrance out of curiosity and did find one, but there was no indication at the front of the building where to find the accessible entrance. A person using a wheelchair would likely need to ask a random passerby for help finding it.

I want a world in which the doors open for everyone, but I wonder if it’s even possible. Surely it would be possible to put an attractive and high contrast sign in front of a building indicating where the accessible entrance is—or better yet, make the main entrance accessible. Design Braille into the next monument. Find ways to prop the doors open.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, caregiving, grieving

What Being a Caregiver Taught Me About Gracefully Receiving Help

I’ve talked before about how accepting help from others benefits those who give the help as well as those who receive it. When I was my late husband’s caregiver, I was giving help on a large scale—and I was receiving the benefits of that on a large scale, too.

I spent most of the last year of my husband’s life taking care of him. The entire left side of his body was paralyzed. Without use of the left side of his body, he couldn’t roll over in bed or get dressed or undressed. I woke up several times during the night to reposition him in bed, I dressed and undressed him every day, I helped him sit up, get out of bed, go to the bathroom, and move from his wheelchair to the bed or vice versa.

I also had to take into account the cognitive impacts of his stroke. His speech was slower than before the stroke and his memory was undependable. He also had a mysterious condition called left neglect in which his brain didn’t process anything that happened to the left of his midline. He would start reading from the middle of a line of text because his brain didn’t process the left side of the page. He would eat all the food on the right side of his plate and ask for more, even though the left side his plate hadn’t been touched. I had to constantly remind him to look to his left.

It was a lot of work. Caregiving is never ending. Those facts are true, but what they don’t capture is that it can also be intensely connecting. I was exhausted AND I savored every moment that I got to care for him.

Many people have said to me since my husband died “I’m sure you miss him but don’t miss the caregiving,” but in his last year, the two were inseparable. Being with Tom meant always being on alert for him dropping his phone, losing track of something that was right in front of him because it was slightly to his left, having a sudden urgent need for the bathroom, becoming disoriented and anxious. It was hard for both of us. But when I remember him, my mind goes first to those memories—because it wasn’t only hard for both of us. It was also incredibly intimate and connecting.

Our communication skills got gold-medal good. We really learned what it means to ask for what you want, to not take each other for granted, and to not expect your partner to be a mind reader.

I recently read a book by Sarah Smith Rainey called Love, Sex, and Disability: The Pleasures of Care that moves beyond the exhaustion and exploitation of (mostly female) caregivers and addresses how much true pleasure can be involved. Rainey studied married couples in which one partner was the caregiver for the other. Rainey’s research is groundbreaking because her research looks at the experience of the cared for as well as the caregiver. Typically caregiving relationships are assumed to be one-sided, with the caregiver doing all the work and the cared for doing all the receiving. In fact, many of the couples Rainey interviewed reported that their relationships were reciprocal, which is what I found with my late husband.

He allowed me to take care of him, which is much more complicated than it sounds. As you can imagine, going from his pre-stroke state of being fiercely independent to his post-stroke state of needing the level of care I described above was a huge adjustment for him. I was amazed at the grace he exhibited in accepting the shift. Rather than stubbornly resisting my caregiving—which, frankly, is what I expected him to do—he put his energy into showing appreciation all day every day for my caregiving. That was how he took care of me.

The experience helped me make a commitment to my daughter: if/when I need caregiving at some point in my life, I will be as graceful and accepting of it as Tom was. I got to practice that commitment last fall when I had brain surgery and my daughter took care of me for a week. She had to remind me a few times of my commitment, but I did ok overall, and it actually got easier each day.

Most of us who live long enough will find ourselves in need of caregiving at some point. We can make it a nightmare for everyone by being stubborn and refusing to accept help or we can receive the help gracefully.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety, grieving

Recognizing Internalized Ableism on My Anniversary

Today would have been my anniversary with Tom. Today IS my anniversary with Tom. My inclination is to write the first sentence because I am no longer his wife, but I realize that whether he’s dead or alive, today IS the date we got married in 2011. There is much that was and much that still is. My love for him and the life we had together is just as strong as it was when he was here to celebrate with me. But that life is a memory now, and as much as I love the life I am living now, it is not a life with Tom.

I was at a conference last week and knew my anniversary was coming up, but lost track of which day it was. My return flight yesterday got significantly delayed and I ended up not getting home until after midnight. After crawling into bed, I was almost asleep when suddenly I realized that because it was after midnight, it was my anniversary.

That realization, on the heels of a long travel day, kicked off my anxiety and big tears. My mind kept going back to our last anniversary together, after his stroke and just a few months before he died. We went to one of our favorite restaurants and they were woefully unprepared to greet a guest using a wheelchair. The next morning over brunch, Tom took my hand and apologized for not having understood the challenges of my being disabled.

It was an incredible acknowledgment. The last few years, he had been incredibly supportive but when I first started mentioning that my vision didn’t seem right, he was skeptical. Like many people in my life, he wondered if I was exaggerating things or just not trying hard enough to see. Especially when my disability inconvenienced him, he would ask me if I was really trying. It was maddening for both of us.

I finally understood at some point that he hadn’t not believed me but that he hadn’t been ready to accept that I was going to have to deal with the challenges of a disability for the rest of my life. I noticed a similar resistance in myself when Tom’s doctor told me there was a high likelihood that Tom would never walk again. My immediate response was that of course Tom would walk again because I knew he would work hard in physical therapy.

But no matter how hard he worked, walking unassisted was out of his reach. I kept thinking he just had to work a little harder, but even as I had that thought, I knew it wasn’t accurate. All of his physical therapists were astounded at how much progress he made and how hard he did work. It wasn’t about hard work—it was about the stroke having knocked offline the part of his brain that handled his left side. I saw the MRI images and the massive infarct, the technical term for the brain tissue killed by the stroke. Two-thirds of one hemisphere of his brain just didn’t exist anymore.

Even knowing it wasn’t about how hard he worked, my own brain kept grasping at the idea that if he just worked a little harder, maybe, maybe, he would walk again. I realize now that that’s the line of thinking he followed when he wondered if I was trying hard enough to see.

This is what internalized ableism looks like: me wishing my husband would work hard enough to walk again, him wishing I would try hard enough to see what he saw. The line of thinking might originate with optimism and hoping for a “positive” outcome, but there are at least two big problems with that rationalization. First, it attributes the desired outcome with hard work and less than the desired outcome with not enough work, and second, it assumes that walking, in my husband’s case, and what is considered normal vision, in my case, are the only outcomes that can be judged successful.

On this anniversary, I miss everything about that man who used a wheelchair, including his wheelchair. His physical and occupational therapy sessions were often team efforts, with both of us working together to get him somewhere or accomplish a task together. It helped us realize in a concrete way that we were always on the same team. We hated the stroke and the pain it caused Tom, but it opened up some opportunities for us to communicate better and become closer.

I celebrated this anniversary by sleeping in, being gentle with myself, and sharing memories with my daughter. I went to Tom’s bench and talked to him for a bit. I got a few emails and texts from loved ones, acknowledging the anniversary, which I appreciated. I felt lucky to have had such a great love and proud of the life I am living now, which was shaped in so many ways by my relationship with Tom.  

Accessibility + Dis/ability

The Real Reason Why Going to Conferences Is So Exhausting to Me

I came home this weekend from two back-to-back conferences in Chicago that left me exhausted. I only spent one full day at each conference, so I shouldn’t be that tired, but navigating conferences as a disabled person takes a lot of stamina. This is true even though accessibility gets talked about a lot more now than just a few years ago and academic conferences seem to all have accessibility guides.

The accessibility issues I ran into happened even though everyone I interacted with was kind and meant well. Many people helped me in different ways. But people’s good intentions and my positive attitude don’t make the world more accessible. As Stella Young put it in this fantastic TED Talk, “No amount of smiling radiantly is going to make a staircase turn into a ramp.”

Things started off a bit tricky, with a flight delay that caused me to arrive at my hotel after dark. With no natural light coming in, I bumbled around my hotel room, having to rely on the inadequate lamps. I have described before what I like to do when I first arrive in a hotel room to make it accessible; with it being dark outside, I wasn’t able to do everything I like to do until the next morning. Luckily, the room did have better-than-I’ve-come-to-expect lighting by the bed, but much of the room was just a shadow to me until morning and I have the bruises on my hip where I walked into the dresser to prove it.

The bigger challenge was navigating the conferences themselves. The first conference was an International Writing Centers Association event at DePaul University in a space that was well-lit, but the room numbers were tiny and hard to find. I had to walk up to each room’s door, locate the sign, and put my face an inch or two from the sign to find the room number. Luckily, other conference participants were kind about noticing my trouble and helping me find the rooms I needed; but the stress of frantically trying to find presentation rooms made me feel worn out by the time I got into the right rooms.

 The conference session themselves were excellent, but the accessibility was not. Despite the IWCA having a top-notch accessibility guide, speakers used the microphone and provided printed scripts in only one of the three sessions I attended. In the other two sessions, presenters had no handouts and did not use the microphone. One of these sessions was a roundtable in an auditorium, so the sound just disappeared into the ether. Normally I would have asked the speakers to use a microphone, but there was some confusion at the beginning of the session and by the time I realized speakers weren’t going to use the microphone, I would have had to interrupt the proceedings quite awkwardly. In hindsight, I wish I had done just that, but in the moment, I was discombobulated.

The second conference was the Conference on College Composition and Communication at the Hilton Chicago. I encountered so many unexpected steps and tripping hazards there that by the time I headed home, my neck hurt from looking down to watch my step. The room numbers were just as challenging to find as they had been at DePaul, with the added twist of seemingly random placement of room number plaques. At least at DePaul, all the room number plaques were to the right or left of the doors and looked similar; at the Hilton, some were to the left, some to the right, some above, and some I never found. Some plaques were electronic and others were not. Some had high contrast and some did not. Plus instead of room numbers, the rooms had names, so there was no internal logic; while I know room 5 is likely to be beyond room 4, where might the Lake Ontario room be in relation to the Buckingham room?

Finding room numbers was frustrating, but the surprise elevation changes with unmarked steps were truly treacherous. In one of the conference spaces, there were at least two little sets of 2-3 steps that almost killed me. Both were carpeted and blended in with the surrounding flooring. After almost tripping down each one, I turned to get a good look at them. One set did have a gray stair marker that I could see after the fact; the carpet was blue and gray, so the gray stair marker didn’t stand out and thus, didn’t really do the job it was supposed to do. This is a great example of focusing on legal compliance without considering the real purpose of accessibility: to make a space safe and navigable by a person with a disability.

I entered each room completely frazzled. Like the IWCA conference sessions, the Cs conference sessions were a mixed bag in terms of accessibility. Cs also has an excellent accessibility guide; still, speakers in only three of the four sessions I attended used the microphone and speakers offered scripts in only two of the four sessions. Slides in all the sessions were illegible to me, but I suspect part of that is because the projection screens were smaller than speakers may have anticipated and often positioned awkwardly so that not everyone in the room had a clear view of them.

Both of these conferences relate to literacy and the teaching of writing. The presenters are people who value reading and communication, and yet, clearly, a large proportion of them have not read the wonderful accessibility guides available to them.

My plea to people who give presentations:

  1. Read the accessibility guide. If the conference planners have created an accessibility guide, read it and follow the guidelines in it. If you don’t know how to do something the accessibility guide recommends that you do, learn how.
  2. Use a microphone. I understand why people don’t use a microphone. If you’re not used to speaking into one, it can feel awkward. But in 2023, if making presentations is part of your job, then you need to get comfortable using a microphone. Consider it part of your professional development.
  3. Create accessible slides. When you create your slides, assume that the presentation situation will be less than ideal: the room’s lighting won’t be great, the screen will be smaller than you’d like and farther away from participants than you’d like. And for the love of whatever you hold dear, please observe the rule of 5. Again, if you are not good at creating accessible slides, consider it part of your professional development to get good at it.
  4. Make a script available to participants. Yes, I know, it uses paper and is a bummer to have to have your presentation written up in advance rather than writing it feverishly the night before. Again, part of being an academic professional these days means making your materials accessible.
  5. Advocate for accessible conference spaces. If you have anything to do with planning a conference, ask pointed questions of the host facility about accessibility. How will folks who use wheelchairs access spaces? How will vision-impaired folks find rooms? How will hearing-impaired folks hear presentations? Where can folks go for a quiet space if they are over-stimulated? And have a back-up plan in case ASL interpreters call in sick or get stuck in traffic (this is another great reason for presenters to have scripts available).
Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety

Stop Shaming People Who Use Accommodations to Work Remotely

“Please make an effort.” “It would mean a lot to me if you were there in person.” “Make every effort to be there in person.” These are a few examples of the ablest and shaming rhetoric I’ve heard lately on campus about using accommodations to attend meetings remotely. My colleagues and I who have accommodations to attend meetings remotely are regularly asked to “make an effort” to attend face-to-face. The implication is clear: if you use your accommodation, you are not making an effort.

Campus leaders routinely engage in ableism, framing accommodations as attempts to not put in effort. I was recently in a meeting in which a colleague showed a video; as it began without subtitles, an attendee asked, “Can you turn the subtitles on?” The colleague said, “Can you just make an effort?”

Or using accommodations is framed as ruining everyone else’s fun, as in this example: A colleague described an icebreaker they had planned for a meeting that involved attendees doing some silly activities with a tight time limit. I asked, “What if some folks have accommodations for anxiety? Wouldn’t this ice breaker cause anxiety?” My colleague argued that the icebreaker was just for fun. For me, being humiliated by having an anxiety attack in from of my peers is not my idea of fun.

When people do use their accommodations, the culture of shaming can show up in disgruntled whispers of colleagues who ask incredulously, “What’s their disability?!” or comment, “I wish I didn’t have to attend in person!” or “It’s inconvenient for me, too, but I manage it.” These whispers are encouraged when the leader begins the meeting by saying, “That you all for making the effort to be here,” implying that folks who aren’t there didn’t make an effort.

I’ve written before about the challenges of getting documentation of a disability so I can get accommodations  and about why I don’t always ask for accommodations I am entitled to. The entire process of justifying accommodations is disempowering, humiliating, and time-consuming. Then, once a person goes through that process, they are shamed for using the accommodations.

On my campus, leaders regularly shame people who use their accommodations to attend meetings remotely instead of in person. Here are some examples of the shaming language I have heard lately:

What leaders say: “people are tired of remote meetings” or “staring at a screen is exhausting”

Translation: it’s your fault that people still have to attend remote meetings and be exhausted

But here’s the truth: many people dislike meetings whether they are remote or in person.

Here’s another truth: many people prefer remote meetings and are better able to engage when they can be home with their pets and/or children or in an environment they can control.

What leaders say: “I expect you to be there in person”

Translation: If you are not there in person, you are not meeting expectations. This echoes the language of evaluation in which people who are evaluated as doing their jobs poorly are rated “does not meet expectations.” Not meeting expectations is bad and shameful.

The truth: The expectations of leaders are often unreasonable and not grounded in the reality of workloads, bandwidths, and structural inequities.

What leaders say: “This is a reasonable expectation”

Translation: I have not done any research into this, but I strongly prefer in-person meetings and this is how we did things in the before-times and everyone was fine with it.

The truth: No, everyone was not actually fine with it. You didn’t ask or you weren’t listening or people didn’t feel empowered to speak up. Parents and other caregivers, people with disabilities and/or unreasonable workloads were not fine with it. I have never been fine with most in-person meetings, which are typically run badly and take me away from doing the meaningful work of teaching and research.

What leaders say: “The benefit of face-to-face meetings outweigh the convenience of attending from home via Zoom”

Translation: attending via Zoom is a mere convenience for people who are lazy, unmotivated, disengaged, and/or not prioritizing the important work that will happen at this meeting.

The truth: Accommodations are not about convenience, laziness, motivation, engagement, or priorities. Accommodations acknowledge differences in bodies and neurology. My glasses are technically an accommodation, not something I use because they are convenient or I am lazy. Glasses are commonplace enough that we don’t typically recognize them as an accommodation. Surely, a supervisor wouldn’t ban people from wearing glasses to a meeting. But if I ask for special lighting, I am likely to be told that there are others who will be bothered by that lighting. Why not let me attend remotely, then, so that I can control the lighting in my workspace without impacting others?

An anti-ableist alternative to all of these examples is to acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all mode for meetings. We might even begin by evaluating whether a meeting we are planning is necessary. Once the specific purposes of the meeting are identified, a reasonable judgment can be made about whether the purposes will be undermined by remote attendance.

Any time a leader questions the legitimacy of an accommodation, they create a culture of ableism in which disability is seen as evidence that someone is “broken.”

Accessibility + Dis/ability

Disability = Normal. Disability ≠ Brokenness.

I’ve been very public with my vision issues and my recent experiences with anxiety. I do this to normalize disability. Living with disability is totally normal for me and for lots of other people. The most recent statistic I saw is that one in four adults in the U.S. has a disability at any given moment. The longer you live, the more likely it is that you will acquire a disability. My late husband is a great example: he lived without disability for decades and then when he was 60, he had a massive stroke that left him with multiple disabilities. He went from completely able-bodied to disabled in a split second.

Despite the fact that so many people are or will be disabled, we have a hard time as a culture understanding disability without judgment. The assumption that everyone is or should be able-bodied is called ableism and it is everywhere. I wrote about the challenges my late husband and I faced trying to get around downtown Denver when he was using a wheelchair last year. The restaurant that required wheelchair users to send a companion in to ask for help, wait for the right employee to materialize, get escorted around the building, and then traverse a large space in front of an audience had designed its entrance with the assumption that all patrons would be able-bodied.

I recently listened to a fantastic podcast on ableism. Glennon Doyle featured Carson Tueller on the July 27 episode of her podcast We Can Do Hard Things. The episode was titled “How to Love Your Body Now,” which is an idea that can apply to anyone, able-bodied or disabled. Carson Tueller, who was paralyzed from the chest down in an accident in 2013, told the story of how he came to accept, love, and feel at home in his body, recognizing it as “complete and enough.”

Tueller explains ableism as “the idea that there is such a thing as a good body and a disabled body is a broken version of a good body.” I like this explanation because of its use of the word “broken.” Something that is broken is damaged or ruined. We throw out things that are broken. When we understand some bodies as broken, we bring with us into that understanding the connotations of “broken”—that the body is ruined, it should be thrown out. The person living in the disabled body is seen as disposable. Unlovable. Unworthy.

Tueller shares that after his accident, he found a new way of thinking about his body. Instead of thinking of his body as broken, he thought, “My body now works differently.” That may seem like a small shift, but as Tueller explains, there is “no drama, no brokenness there” and that thinking of the accident as something that changed his life rather than as “a disaster that ruined my life” made it possible for him to see his body in its current state as complete rather than broken.

Notice that it’s not the injury or disability itself that causes the feelings of disposability or unworthiness—it’s the ableism that assumes a disabled body is broken. As Tueller says, “I can survive being paralyzed. I can’t survive feeling unlovable.” Tueller has found that living in a disabled body is quite wonderful (and I was thrilled to hear him disrupt the notion that disabled bodies aren’t sexy or that disabled people are asexual—he is having great sex).

When we assume that disability needs fixing, we convey that disability is a de facto problem, that something is wrong with people who have disabilities. There is nothing wrong with my eyes. My eyes can’t be wrong. Yes, my eyes function differently from lots of other eyes. But my frustrations with my vision are usually connected to something outside of me that could be fixed. For example, one of my most common challenges is not being able to read signs. Why is the assumption that my eyes are the problem rather than the poorly designed signs? I meet people all the time who can’t read street name signs, street numbers on buildings, and the like. Why not just make bigger signs or use a different font and make everything easier for everyone?

This idea that the problem is located in the person with the disability is ableism and it sneaks into our lives in insidious ways. In “Unlearning the Ableism of Cookbooks and Kitchen Wisdom,” Gabrielle Drolet brings attention to what she calls small-scale disability—”the little things that add up to make a life. Things like tying your shoelaces or braiding your hair or lighting a candle. Like turning on the faucets to wash your hands. Texting your friends. Cooking with ease.” The type of ableism Drolet identifies in cookbooks is less about brokenness and more about laziness. The cook who buys pre-ground pepper or uses paper plates is assumed to be lazy or wasteful. I was called wasteful when I bought two identical cutting boards, one in white and one in green, but with low vision, I can’t see the onion I’m cutting on a white board or the basil I’m cutting on a green board. The person who called me wasteful didn’t ask why I wanted two boards—they jumped straight to calling me wasteful.

Ableism is so deeply baked into our culture that during Disability Pride Month (July), someone asked me why anyone would take pride in being disabled. This was a person I know to be kind and generous. The question was a genuine one and grew out of the idea that being disabled equals being broken. Why take pride in being broken? To grasp taking pride in being disabled, you have to reject the idea that disability equals brokenness.

I am not broken. I do not need fixing. I love myself, my eyes, and even my anxiety. My low vision and anxiety are natural and normal. I refuse to be ashamed of them.

Accessibility + Dis/ability

How I Make Hotel Rooms Accessible for My Low Vision

I’ve done some traveling this summer and stayed in a variety of hotels in both the U.S. and Europe. I’ve always loved traveling and am excited that travel feels doable now that so many people have been vaccinated against COVID. With my vision impairments, I run into some issues in hotels, so I have come up with a routine I use to maximize my ability to see and be comfortable and safe in my room and the public areas of the hotel.

Room numbers not always visible to me, so I’m now used to putting my face right up to a door to try to find the room number. I can often see that there is a room number on the room doors or right next to them, but I can’t read the numbers because of the artistic font used. I sometimes take a picture of the number with my phone and then make the picture big enough for me to read. The first number I take a picture of is never my room number, but having that one number down helps orient me a bit.

Accessible hotel rooms are typically designed with wheelchair users in mind. Accessible rooms usually have doorways wide enough for a wheelchair, wheelchair access on both sides of the bed, enough room for a wheelchair user to make a U-turn, light switches and thermostats low enough for someone in a wheelchair to reach them, and a wheelchair accessible sink and shower. I have yet to find a room that is really accessible for someone with my kind of low vision without some tweaks.

Every hotel room I’ve stayed in during the past five years has been too dark for me once the sun goes down. I now routinely move lamps around, it they are available, and I’ve even called the front desk to ask if another lamp could be brought to me (it could). I’ve learned the hard way to move lamps around before the sun goes down, when I can still see where the cords are plugged in and where the outlets are in the spot I want to move the lamp to. Sometimes hotel rooms have a writing desk that doesn’t have a lamp on it; that’s the first place I move a lamp to. Hotel rooms often have a comfortable reading chair but no light source near that chair. If I can move a table lamp to a nightstand or dresser that is near that chair, I do, but sometimes that isn’t possible and I have to either call the front desk to see if a floor lamp is available (sometimes one is) or I just have to not use the reading chair.

The next thing I do is find every light switch in the room and figure out which light it operates. Light switches are often the same color as the wall, so I sometimes have to guess where a light switch might be and run my hands along the wall until I find it. Typical places are right inside the door, at the joint of two walls, and near a door frame. Occasionally I have to call the front desk to ask where a light switch is. Usually, the person who answers my call initially says something unhelpful like, “It’s there, I promise.” When I explain that I am vision-impaired, they usually send someone to the room to show me where the switch is. Once, the person who was sent had to admit defeat and say, “I don’t know where the switch for that light is!” Nobody ever found it.

I then walk around to each light in the room and figure out how to turn it on. Many modern light fixtures have switches that are designed to not be obtrusive, which means they are hard to see. I often have to run my hands all over a lamp to find the switch. When that fails, I start running my hands down the cord to see if the switch is on the cord. A few times I’ve had to call the front desk to ask how a particular light works.

I try to do all this before the sun goes down, because when I come back to my room after dark, it’s nice to have some familiarity with how the lights turn on. This isn’t possible if I check in after dark, and then I rely on my cell phone’s flashlight to help me navigate the light switches.

The next thing I do is scan the room for contrast issues. This usually means making sure there’s a light-colored surface for me to put my own dark-colored things and a dark-colored surface for me to put my own light-colored things. I can easily lose a white keycard on a white or light-colored surface, so it’s important to scope out a place to put my keycard where it will be visible to me. I can put down a white washcloth from the bathroom on a dark surface, like a dresser or TV console, and then put dark things on top of it to make them visible. Hotel bathrooms are often white, so I use a black bag for my toiletries. Many rooms have a white tissue box holder in a white bathroom, so I move the tissue box holder to a dark piece of furniture in the room.

Another place where contrast issues can come up is with clever drawer or cabinet pulls that are designed to blend seamlessly into the furniture. I spend a lot of time when I first in a room running my hands over surfaces, looking for pulls.

In one room recently, I accidentally swept something I hadn’t seen off a dark wood desk. I heard the object clatter to the floor and dropped to my hands and knees to pick it up. It was a big dark room phone.

I can’t tweak the public areas of a hotel, so I have to move through them very carefully. Dim lighting is everywhere and I’ve tripped over coffee tables, walked into glass panes, and spent way too long trying to decipher which restroom is for women (in a few places, I never was certain and figured in the age of gender neutral bathrooms, it shouldn’t matter if I go into the wrong one).

If possible, I look at photos of the hotel’s lobby and outdoor spaces online before I go to scope out potential danger for myself. I can enlarge the photos and get a sense of what to look for. For example, I noticed ahead of time that one hotel I was staying in had a very large water feature that blended into a surrounding patio. When I got to that hotel, I walked very carefully over to where I knew from the photos the water feature was and found some cues to help me avoid tumbling into it during my stay.

Once I’ve done all that, I can commence the part of staying in a hotel room that I’m really good at: relaxing.

Accessibility + Dis/ability

Disabled Folks Aren’t Always Looking for a Cure and You Should be OK with That

I’m actually pretty ok most of the time with my impaired vision. I gave up driving in 2019. I read with my eyes a lot less than I used to. I write with my eyes a bit less than I used to. I’ve been not driving for long enough that it feels completely normal to me to rely on public transportation and rideshares. Not being able to make sustained eye contact with people in conversation is trickier, and while adapting to reading and writing less with my eyes has been challenging, I am getting better, which makes me think it will eventually feel comfortable to me.

My impaired vision seems to matter much more to other people than to me. Many people ask about my vision when they greet me, which I take as a way to acknowledge that they remember I have impaired vision and they hope it isn’t negatively impacting me. These inquiries don’t bother me at all. I am also not bothered at all when people don’t ask about my vision, which to me acknowledges that impaired vision is part of who I am, the same way being short or having big hair is part of who I am and doesn’t need to be commented on.

What does bother me:

  1. When that inquiry turns into a grilling about what I’ve tried or researched to “fix” my vision, or someone aggressively suggesting I contact the doctor they know. I spent years getting my diagnosis and I spend a lot more time than the average person with vision specialists just to maintain the vision I do have. I don’t want to put more time and energy into it. I have made a deliberate choice about how much time and energy to put into my vision issues and I don’t appreciate having that choice challenged by someone who has not experienced disability—and it seems to always be able-bodied folks who do the grilling.

Establishing boundaries around the time and energy I put into this is not “giving up.” It’s not weakness. It’s not laziness. It’s a deliberate choice I’ve made that takes strength to defend on a regular basis. The vast majority of the time, my vision issues don’t keep me from doing what I want to do. For example, in early June, I traveled by myself to a country I had never been to before that is not very accommodating to folks with disabilities. My vision issues made the trip a bit more complicated than it might have been for someone with “normal vision,” but it was absolutely doable for me. I am very happy with my life and don’t feel like my vision impairment makes my life worse.

What does make my life worse is being judged by others for not “doing everything possible” to fix my vision. When I tell someone who is grilling me to back off, they often respond with, “Well, I just thought you’d want to do everything possible.” Everything possible seems to be a euphemism for making my vision impairment the sole focus of my life. No, I would like to spend my limited time on earth doing much more interesting and satisfying things.

  • When the news that my vision has not improved at all is received ruefully. I’ve seen people be visibly deflated when they hear my vision hasn’t improved. Because I’ve stopped hoping for improvement, the lack of improvement doesn’t bother me, and it seems to me, that if it doesn’t bother me, it shouldn’t significantly bother someone else. But neoliberal culture values constant improvement, which means a lack of improvement must be cause for disappointment.

These two types of responses put the focus on fixing a problem and render invisible the work that matters to me: my adapting to my impaired vision, learning to work through and around the barriers in the world, and living the best life I can with the vision I have.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, grieving

Panic Attacks, Grief, and Fear

I’m still experiencing double vision and unable to read or write very much. Because of the dismissive attitude I’ve encountered about my vision from most eye doctors, I don’t want to see anyone but my favorite eye doctor, and she’s booked out for 3-4 months, so I haven’t seen anyone about this latest development. I’m making do for now by minimizing time spent reading and using Google’s voice dictation for writing.

I think this latest vision issue, along with the fact that the upcoming two-year anniversary of my dead husband’s stroke is on June 7 and the one-year anniversary of his death is on June 19, is contributing to a new wrinkle in my grieving: panic attacks. I had panic attacks for some time 20-30 years ago, always connected to interactions with a particular person. They were bad enough that I would hyperventilate, but because they were so clearly connected to interactions with a particular person, I could predict and prepare for them. What has started happening in the past week is different.

I’ve had two, one during the day and one at night. They were very dramatic, disruptive, and unexpected. Both times, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by a feeling of impending doom, heaviness in my chest, and trouble breathing. That quickly escalated to hyperventilating. I was in a Zoom meeting with very understanding colleagues the first time. The second time, my daughter, who has experienced panic attacks, was with me.

I attended a grief support group meeting over the weekend in which we talked about how the lead-up to difficult anniversaries and milestones is often much more difficult than the anniversary and its aftermath. That was my experience with my wedding anniversary and my dead husband’s birthday. With the stroke and death anniversaries coming up and the added stress of my double vision, I think my brain was overwhelmed and started sending distress signals out.

This TED Talk gives a succinct explanation of the current theory and understanding of panic attacks. Most interesting to me is that the fear of another attack can actually bring on more attacks. After having one at night, which woke me up and made it difficult to go to sleep again, I spent much of the following day dreading what would happen when I tried to go to sleep again. This is exactly the cycle that can cause another one. Once I realized what was happening, I was able to take preventive measures: I did yoga, had a cup of herbal tea, practiced box breathing, and listened to soothing children’s audiobooks.

Meditation made things worse, which surprised me. I’ve been meditating for 30 years and it’s been my go-to method for stress relief for decades. It turns out that emptying my mind just created space for panic. For me, engaging my physical body through movement, breathing, and the sensory experiences of drinking tea and listening to audiobooks seems to help assure my brain that I am not in danger.

I’m experimenting with giving myself permission to have big feelings of fear. That feels scary and overwhelming sometimes, but I think that pushing those feelings away when they come up builds up my panic response to them. Perhaps refusing to allow myself to think about losing my vision completely or being unable to read and write again has trained my brain that those thoughts are dangerous, so when they start to rise up, even in small ways, my brain reacts by panicking. I’m trying to allow those feelings, like I’ve leaned into my feelings of grief. This means engaging very consciously again with meditation teacher Doug Kraft’s “three essential moves”: turning toward, relaxing into, and savoring peace. It’s hard. I don’t want to turn toward my fears about my vision. I want to push them away, but inviting them in and getting to know them is what will make them feel more familiar and less terrifying.

I don’t usually acknowledge my fears about my vision. Before my husband died, it was easy to tell myself that if I went blind, he would take care of me. But I’m on my own now. I don’t think I’ve ever admitted on this blog that I do worry about going blind. Writing that sentence and leaving it there for you to read feels like some major turning toward. I’m not ready to relax into it. Maybe next week.  

Accessibility + Dis/ability

Wondering When & How to Disclose Disability with Colleagues

I have now gone 19 days with double vision. There was one day in there where my vision was double for only an hour or so, but the rest of the days, I’ve been lucky to have a solid hour of time when my eyes are really functioning normally.

Double vision makes it much harder for me to pass as not disabled, so the question of whether and how to disclose my disability has been more pressing the last few weeks. I mentioned last week that I added a disclosure to my email signature. This week I wondered whether I should disclose to a group of 23 colleagues who participated in a two-day workshop I facilitated.

The decision of whether or not to disclose to a group of people is never a simple one. I’ve mentioned before Annika Konrad’s concept of access fatigue, which is the exhaustion disabled people experience from having to constantly educate others about their disabilities and needs, enable others to feel helpful even when they are doing the very barest minimum to make something accessible and/or doing it very grouchily, and balance the costs of asking for access with the benefits of actually getting it. I hear often hear people disparage folks who disclose as “making excuses” or “looking for attention.” Even though I know I am not doing those things, it weighs on me that I will likely be seen as doing those things by some people.

I have gotten into the habit of disclosing my disabilities to my students on the first day of class. When I did that for the first time years ago, I received an outpouring of positive support and gratitude from my students. Many of them told me that seeing an authority figure disclose a disability helped them feel more welcomed and included in the class. Some of those students had disabilities themselves, but many didn’t and simply felt that having a professor who was open about being disabled created a culture of acceptance. In all the years I’ve been disclosing to my classes, I’ve never had any negative reactions, so for me, it’s a no brainer to disclose to students. I’ve had similar positive responses in the Writing Center I direct from the staff. In both these cases, though, I have a lot of privilege: in the classroom, I’m a tenured professor. In the Writing Center, I’m the boss.

My position is different with colleagues. We are peers in a sector in which being overworked and burned out or close to it is almost valorized. If it looks like I am making excuses and doing less work than they are, they could see me as someone who isn’t pulling their weight and therefore creating more work for them. Before the workshop, I had communicated by email with the participants several times, so they had all seen my email disclosure, although I don’t know how many people actually read my signature or remembered it by the time the workshop began on Monday. I decided not to make any additional announcements about my impaired vision, but several times on Monday and Tuesday morning, I found myself awkwardly trying to pass for someone with unimpaired vision. Then I did a presentation on Tuesday around midday, and that’s when I very much regretted trying to pass.

I got to a part of my presentation where I had planned to read a dense paragraph of text. It simply wasn’t possible—the words and letters swam before my eyes and nothing would come into focus. I said to the audience, “I’m sorry, I’m experiencing double vision that is making it impossible to read this,” and a participant immediately said, “I’ll read it” and did so.

I got no sense of any negative judgment from anyone about this incident, but I wish I had not apologized for my double vision. It is very important to me to not apologize for my disability because it is not mine to apologize for. I prefer to thank people for helping me rather than apologize. I also prefer to disclose in ways that frame disability as normal, and I’m not sure that the way I handled the situation did that, although I do really like that my colleague jumping in to help positioned accommodating on the fly as normal.

Although I’m not happy with how I handled this situation, I’m not sure what I would do differently if I could have a do-over. Maybe simply deleting the “I’m sorry” from what I said, since that’s the part that bothers me. I’m not sorry for having a vision impairment. Or perhaps I could have asked at the outset of my presentation for a volunteer to read the text when I got to that part of the presentation.

Ideally, I’d like to have a default way of handling this type of situation with colleagues so I don’t have to think about it whenever it happens. My default with students and the Writing Center staff is to disclose explicitly and immediately, which eliminates the need for me to make a decision about when and how to disclose. I want that same simplicity with colleagues.