Disability & Access
The Problem Isn't Your Body — It's the Stairs
For most of recorded history, the question 'what is disability?' has been answered entirely backwards.
The Idea
There are two dominant ways of thinking about disability, and which one you hold quietly shapes almost everything — how societies are designed, how resources are allocated, and how disabled people understand themselves. The older framework is the medical model. It locates the problem inside the person. You have a condition; the condition limits you; the goal is to fix, manage, or cure. This feels like common sense because medicine is powerful and genuinely helps. But it carries a hidden assumption: that the 'normal' body is the standard, and deviation from it is the problem to be solved. The social model, developed by disabled scholars and activists in the 1970s — most notably Mike Oliver and the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation in the UK — makes a sharp distinction. Impairment is the physical or cognitive difference. Disability is what happens when the world is built to exclude that difference. A wheelchair user isn't disabled by their legs; they're disabled by the step at the entrance. A dyslexic reader isn't disabled by their brain; they're disabled by the assumption that text is the only legitimate way to receive information. This isn't just a semantic shift. It moves the locus of the problem — and therefore the responsibility for fixing it — from the individual to the environment. The question stops being 'how do we treat this person?' and starts being 'what did we build, and who did we forget when we built it?'
In the World
In 1990, the United States passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. The legislation was significant — but what drove it into being was something more visceral: a protest on the steps of the Capitol building in March of that year, where dozens of disabled activists abandoned their wheelchairs and crawled, one by one, up the marble steps that led to the building's entrance. The action was called the Capitol Crawl. Jennifer Keelan, an eight-year-old with cerebral palsy, made it to the top in about half an hour. A photograph of her — determined, arms working against the stone — became one of the defining images of the disability rights movement. The Capitol Crawl was a masterpiece of social model thinking made physical. The activists weren't demonstrating that their bodies were limited. They were demonstrating that the building was. The steps were not a neutral architectural feature — they were a statement about whose presence was expected and whose was not. By crawling up them in full public view, the protesters forced a question: if we wouldn't make lawmakers crawl to do their jobs, why are we making anyone else? The ADA passed four months later. Its central logic — that inaccessibility is a form of discrimination, not an unfortunate side effect of having a disability — is the social model in law. The building became the problem. The building had to change.
Why It Matters
You might not identify as disabled, and you might not think about disability policy very often. But the social model offers something much broader: a way of noticing when any kind of human difference is being treated as a defect rather than a design gap. Think about how often the framing 'this person struggles' quietly means 'this person struggles with the system we built for a different kind of person.' That applies to neurodivergence, to mental health, to ageing, to caring responsibilities, to language. The moment you learn to ask 'who was the default user when this was designed?' you start seeing it everywhere — in open-plan offices that assume extroversion, in healthcare forms that assume a particular family structure, in education systems that assume a particular kind of attention. The medical model isn't wrong, exactly — medicine matters. But as the only lens, it puts the entire burden of adaptation on the person who already has the most to navigate. The social model redistributes that burden. It asks the rest of us to look at what we've built and ask whether we built it well — or just built it for ourselves.
A Question to Ponder
Where in your own life — at work, at home, in the communities you're part of — have you assumed that a person's difficulty was theirs to solve, when it might actually be a flaw in the design?
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