COVID-19 exposes hypocrisy over lack of disability accommodations

By Abrar Al-Heeti for CNET

People with disabilities have long been asking for — and denied — accommodations that quickly rolled out to the masses once lockdown began.

Earlier this year, Kate McWilliams was looking into disability studies programs across Canada, but none offered a fully online curriculum. She reached out, asking to participate virtually because she has a physical disability that makes leaving the house difficult.

“It was a resounding ‘no’ from every program,” McWilliams said.

About a month later, the effects of the coronavirus pandemic hit with full force. Businesses around the world closed. Telecommuting became the norm across many industries. Countless events were canceled. Schools and universities, including the same programs that had denied McWilliams’ request, went fully online.

“When the able-bodied population needed these accommodations, it happened right away,” she says. “You wonder, ‘Why is it so easy to do for the able-bodied population, but not for disabled people, who have been asking for decades?'”

McWilliams — a disability rights advocate who has complex regional pain syndrome, a chronic condition characterized by prolonged severe pain that can be constant — is one of many people within the disability community feeling frustrated about the ongoing lack of accommodations. Many of their requests, including livestreaming of conferences, remote work and telemedicine, have been deemed too complex, but in the age of COVID-19 are now available to the masses.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights both what accommodations are already possible and how far society is from fully supporting the needs of people with disabilities, who make up around 15% of the global population. As society grapples with how to carry on with everyday life during the outbreak, people with disabilities are often left behind.

Everyday tasks like buying groceries are particularly challenging for people who can’t leave the house or need assistance at the store. Much of the data on the spread of COVID-19 isn’t accessible to people who are blind. Home care is difficult to arrange in the age of physical distancing and lockdown orders. Access to proper medical care for all patients, regardless of disability, is an ongoing battle, and the digital divide continues to take a toll on many in the community.

Although tech companies have rolled out more accessibility features in their products, there’s still plenty of work to be done. Today’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) aims to shed light on these issues and to promote digital accessibility and inclusion.

Added challenges

COVID-19 and efforts to curb the disease’s spread have created new challenges for people with disabilities. Grocery and food delivery services, on which many disabled people rely, are experiencing a spike in demand, making them more difficult to access and leading to major delays in delivery. Home care has also become complicated because it can be dangerous to a person’s health to have a caretaker coming in and out of the house.

Yet another hurdle is that much of the data on COVID-19, such as graphs and PDFs, aren’t accessible to people with certain disabilities. To help tackle the issue, Tyler Littlefield, a software developer who is blind, created an accessible COVID-19 statistics tracker that presents data in properly formatted text that’s compatible with a screen reader.

“At a time when there’s a lot of disparity anyway for people with disabilities, this helps deal with some of that anxiety of not having access to the numbers and not knowing what’s going on in your state,” Littlefield said.

“I’m hoping that after this collective thing we’re all going through, people might see that there’s no negative to accessibility.”

Kate McWilliams, disability rights advocate