The devil's in the details, as they say. And that goes double if you're disabled. Some obstacles are large and obvious, but I find that the tiny annoyances can be just as limiting. Take, for example, typing with an on-screen keyboard. It's slow, unwieldy, and always blocking some essential part of a window.
It works, though. In theory, I can communicate through chat and email just fine, if a bit slowly.
In practice, those tiny annoyances sap energy. It completely breaks my workflow when I select a piece of text I want to correct, or I finally get the cursor where I want it to be with the precision of a veritable trackball marksman; Only to discover that I closed my keyboard earlier because it was in the way. Of course, opening the keyboard steals the focus, and then I have to start over.
The result of which is that I stopped communicating digitally altogether. I did not have the energy to deal with that. Being unable to leave my house, I lost 90% of my social network in one go. Not because I was unable to use adaptive input devices and software; Because the inconvenience of their use killed my motivation to even try.
When I crawled my way out of the depression pit, I had a few more spoons in reserve, so I could stomach the irritation when inspiration hit. I still have a strong aversion to chat and email, though, because social anxiety means that those small hassles become insurmountable obstacles.
Unlike the obvious obstacles, these are much more difficult for others to understand and respect. No one expects me to climb a flight of stairs. But when I try to explain why I haven't responded to an email in 6 months, it barely makes sense in my own head, let alone to anyone else.
