February 22, 2026 - 19:10
After these readings, I started thinking about how accessibility in language and communication is paramount to a movement and idea to be conveyed correctly. Elizabeth Grace makes the point in her article that if something is written about disabled people or anyone really, in an inaccessible way (medical jargon, highly scientific words, even unnecessarily advanced vocabulary), then it is excluding the very person it should be geared towards. To me, this related heavily to the interview with Gérman Parodi. He made me think about essential services like emergency plans or disaster preparedness plans, climate policy conversations, and recovery frameworks that are written in exclusionary language or designed without disabled input. In these cases, the principle of "nothing about us without us" is violated at every turn. As well as this exclusionary language, disabled people are often seen as “vulnerable populations,” which strips them of their agency. In many cases, disabled people are more well-versed in scenarios where the system that was built without them in mind collapses than non-disabled people. Gérman Parodi shows this with his expertise in disaster relief and also explains that even with this preparedness and wisdom, disabled individuals are ignored and pushed away during the rebuilding after these disasters. I found similar themes across the writings about Covid-19, where once there was a threat to their own lives, people began to wear masks and normalize online, stay at home, work. This is seemingly ironic given how hard disabled people have fought for the ability and recognition to work from home and have their mask-wearing respected (out of necessity!!!).