Three Personal Accessibility Failure Stories
TL;DR: Accessibility is deeply intertwined with disability, and disability exists within historical, cultural, and political contexts. Without understanding these contexts, accessibility research can face significant challenges.
Navigating accessibility research isn’t always straightforward — especially for newcomers, those from different cultural backgrounds, or those still learning the nuances of disability discourse. This is where mentorship can make a difference. Have you considered becoming a mentor or mentee in accessibility research but weren’t sure why it matters?
As an accessibility researcher based in the U.S., most of my work has been published in U.S.-based venues. However, I grew up in Egypt and moved to the U.S. for graduate studies in my late twenties. Along the way, I faced challenges— many stemming from my position as a newcomer to the field, a non-native English speaker, and someone shaped by a different cultural perspective. In this blog, I share three personal stories that highlight how mentoring could have helped me — and may help others — navigate accessibility research.
Story 1: Being a Newcomer — Not Understanding the Historical Context
During my Ph.D., I worked on an exciting research project aimed at making digital reading on a tablet more accessible for blind students. This was around the time when the first iPad was released, and my goal was to design a reading experience that mirrored reading a textbook, where the user could physically follow tactile lines over the tablet screen and read word by word or line by line using spatial access. Using touch and text-to-speech, users could navigate the page freely — skipping to the end of the page, or jumping back two paragraphs back, or moving line by line — similar to the way Braille readers use the spatial layout of a tactile page.
When I worked on this research with blind people during the design and usability testing phases, the work was met with great enthusiasm. However, when I submitted it to accessibility conferences, the reviewers critiqued the motivation of the work, arguing that it seemed like an attempt to replace Braille rather than complement it. Some even suggested that blind people would not be interested in the system. I was confused because the system had been co-designed and tested by blind people.
Looking back, I realize that my writing focused heavily on the technical aspects and failed to adequately address the historical and cultural significance of Braille. The blind community has long fought for Braille literacy, accessible textbooks, and affordable Braille displays. Without acknowledging this broader context, my work appeared misaligned with the community’s values. This experience taught me the importance of situating technical contributions within the historical and cultural norms and values of the disability community.
Story 2: Being a Non-Native English Speaker — Navigating Language Nuances
It is almost impossible to write about accessibility without writing about disability. While writing about accessibility can be mostly technical, writing about disability is not and requires a good understanding of the latest disability language preferences.
One example that stood out in my journey was the difference between “empathy” and “sympathy.” These two English words have identical translations in Arabic. Here are two screenshots from google translate showing both words and their translation.
If you are a seasoned accessibility researcher, you know that this is problematic. While similar, empathy and sympathy are not the same. Empathy is about understanding other people’s perspectives and needs, while sympathy is more about feelings, usually of pity or sorrow, for others. In writing about accessibility and disability, empathy is preferred, while sympathy is generally discouraged.
It took me a while to realize the difference between the two words. To me, thanks to my dictionary, I treated them as synonyms. I thought that when accessibility researchers used the word empathy, it was just their personal word of choice. I did not realize that it was the whole community’s choice. Luckily, I was eventually able to decipher the meaning and understand the nuanced difference between the two words.
While I did not get in trouble for using the wrong language, the cognitive effort required to read and fully understand language around disability can be taxing. This experience has made me cautious about what I write. The challenge lies in balancing careful word choice with authentic self-expression, especially when the fear of causing harm lingers in the background.
Navigating language nuances can be easier with a mentor — but finding the right one can be tricky. I received the wrong advice from a native English speaker who was not an accessibility expert. He insisted on editing my manuscript to replace “people with disabilities” with “people with special needs”, which is outdated language. Thankfully, the preferred language to describe disability is well documented in the ACM Accessible Writing Guides. These guidelines made it easier to dodge the misguided advice I received.
I hope that this story sheds light on the need for greater patience and mentorship in academic publishing, particularly for non-native English speakers who are still navigating the nuances of disability discourse.
Story 3: Being a Non-Deaf Person — Realizing of Disability As a Social Construct
I was lucky to work at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) for several years, where my understanding of disability as a social construct took shape. RIT has one of the largest populations of deaf students in the U.S. and is home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). There, I experienced Deaf culture firsthand and interacted daily with deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students and colleagues.
One of the first things that surprised me was how DHH individuals described me — and other hearing people — as “hearing individuals.” I paused and thought to myself: I’ve never described myself this way before, but they aren’t wrong. I can hear, and in this environment, that distinction matters — especially when people ask whether you need an ASL (American Sign Language) interpreter. As a hearing professor teaching mostly hearing students, but also some DHH students, my classes had an ASL interpreter to facilitate communication between me, the DHH students, and their hearing peers.
One day, I attended an event at NTID where the speaker was DHH and presenting in ASL. The majority of the audience understood ASL, but for hearing attendees like me who did not, interpretation was available through headsets. An ASL interpreter translated the talk into English and whispered into a microphone, which was transmitted to our headphones.
I put on a pair of over-ear headphones and watched as the audience followed the speaker, fully engaged. But I didn’t hear anything. There was no sound coming through my headphones. I felt confused and left out. For the first time, I felt “disabled” in that space — not because of my hearing, but because I didn’t know ASL and couldn’t access the talk. After a few minutes, I found another headset — apparently, my first one was faulty. Once I put it on, I could finally follow along and enjoyed the rest of the talk.
Determined to be more effective in communicating with my DHH community, I signed up for an introductory ASL course. I was excited and attended class religiously. My instructor was Deaf and communicated only in ASL or in writing. In the first class, we had an ASL interpreter, but in later sessions, it was just us — the students and the instructor. At first, I kept up well, learning the alphabet, numbers, and basic words. But as the course progressed and we moved to full sentences, I found many gestures and expressions to be unrelatable, and I often signed sentences incorrectly.
One day, my instructor paused and asked me: “Is your native language written from right to left?”
I was surprised by the question, but then I realized — all my mistakes were because I was signing from right to left! I had never noticed before how much my gestural patterns were shaped by my linguistic background.
I’m still not sure how to retrain myself to sign from left to right, but the experience stayed with me. Beyond just learning ASL, it taught me how accessibility, disability, and culture intersect in deeply embodied ways.
Final Thoughts
My journey in accessibility research has been as much about understanding different perspectives as it has been about technical innovation. Each of these experiences has shown me how accessibility interacts with language, history, and culture.
I hope these stories help other accessibility researchers — whether by helping them avoid similar pitfalls or by offering insight as they navigate their own research journeys in a field rich with opportunities for impact.
