A Primer on Disability
A small crash course for people new to disability discussions.
What Counts As Disabled?
With that said, any long term condition that significantly impacts your ability to live your life could be considered a disability. It can be subtle or even unnoticeable to people who aren’t experiencing it. Disabilities that can’t be seen from the outside are called invisible disabilities.
When we talk about disability, a lot of people have a specific and narrow picture in their minds of disabled people. In truth, disability is complex and diverse. The life of someone who relies on carers 24/7 is very different to the life of a person who is able to function independently and hold down a full time job. It's important to keep this in mind.
People often don’t think of conditions like diabetes or colour-blindness as disabilities, but both can cause a significant disruption to your life and change how you live. Not everyone with diabetes or colour blindness identifies as disabled, but some do. If you want to understand more about how we define disability, I suggest looking into the social model of disability and medical model of disability. Both have their pros and cons.
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Language: Person First vs Identity First
Person First language (PFL) means putting the disability after the person and is usually phrased as "a person with [...]", eg "a person with autism." There are some disabilities that are almost exclusively described with PFL, such as Down Syndrome.
Identity First Language (IFL) means stating the disability first, eg. "an autistic person."
This blog will always use identity first language unless talking about a person who has specifically requested otherwise, or a disability that uses PFL (such as Down Syndrome). This post explains why.
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Writing Disabled Characters
Why you should
Five simple tips
Writing Strong Disabled Characters
Writing Disabled Antagonists
Tropes to Avoid
Tropes to Avoid pt2
@cripplecharacters is a great place to ask questions about writing disabled characters
Spoon theory is a central part of so much of the disabled experience. The post that began it is here.
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How to Make Your Posts Accessible
Use image descriptions. Image descriptions make the post accessible to people using screen readers and also other people who might struggle to understand images, such as dyslexics or people with colour-blindness. If you're not sure where to start with writing them, my post here might be a good place to start.
Tag your posts properly. Tag for common triggers and add other warnings if your asked to, even if they seem absurd to you. It costs you nothing, and people don't have to explain their triggers or squicks to deserve being taken seriously.
Avoid alternating caps or spaced out words. Alternating caps look like this: aLtErNaTiNg cApS. Spaced out words look like this; s p a c e d o u t. Most screen readers will read these out letter by letter, making it difficult for users to understand what the text is saying. This website explains how screen readers read content.
Coloured fonts and unusual scripts are also often inaccessible
It's a good idea to use /s and /j when your intentions might not be clear. Writing /s at the end of a sentence tells the reader that the sentence is sarcastic. /j means that the sentence is a joke.
Break up walls of text. This makes it more readable! I'm going to make another post about making text easy to read. This website has good tips for where to start.
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But overall, remember that the disabled community is diverse and complicated, and that other disabled people might disagree with things I say on this blog. That’s perfectly okay, and I’ll try to share those viewpoints here too! The thing about life is that so often, there is no right answer.
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This post is a continuous work in progress.
