Debunking 5 Assumptions about Disability & Accessibility

During my interview with Saman, a wheelchair user living in Melbourne, I summoned up my courage to ask a sensitive question: “As a person with disability, do people usually make assumptions about your intellectual capability and competence?”

Saman nodded: “All the time - every day I meet someone new, I have no other option than to prove them wrong.” He went on to tell me that these particular experiences of societal assumptions are relatively universal across the disabled community, which to me, indicates a much bigger issue to be discussed.

This is an example of the most common assumptions about disability and accessibility. Let us examine the selected top five misunderstandings, from stereotypes and expectations to familiar myths, through the lens of social theory and debunk them.

1, Wheelchair users are helpless

In clinical psychology, a “schema” is a mental framework our brain uses to interpret new information based on past experiences. Through the problematic and insufficient representation of people with disability in the general media and pop culture, our schemas often lead us to assume that disabled individuals are helpless or incapable of certain things in life.

Back to my conversation with Saman - he is anything but incapable. Born in Tehran, Iran, he has a Master in Information Technology. Assumptions are not necessarily deliberate, rooted in bad intentions or in one’s character - it is inevitable, given what the world has conditioned us to think.

If you ever catch yourself making the same assumption, you shouldn’t attach such thoughts to your morality, or label yourself as a bad person, as the workings of your subconscious mind are deterministic and out of your control. What makes you a good person, however, is being conscious of assumptions, and the external factors that enable such assumptions to persist. The moment you become aware, you are no longer just informed, you’re an activist.

2, Disabled - yes or no?

Access isn’t a single, universal experience. Meanwhile, cities often design accessibility infrastructure for one “model user,” assuming a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for a wheelchair user might not help someone with low vision or chronic fatigue. Harsh lighting and noise levels in shopping centres can exclude neurodivergent people as effectively as stairs do those with lower body paralysis. A static solution is thus incapable of solving something that is mostly situational and temporary.

Even among wheelchair users, experiences differ vastly: a manual chair versus an electric one changes how a person navigates rough pavements or steep inclines - for example, some people rely entirely on their chair for mobility, while others use it only when fatigue sets in.

This diversity reveals an essential truth - disability is not a fixed or binary condition of non-disability vs disability, it is a spectrum that interacts fluidly with the environment that one is set in, and is highly context dependent.

3, Google is adequate for accessibility information

The issue with Google Maps’ accessibility report isn’t just the absence of data, it’s bad data. Firstly, Google Maps often treats accessibility as a yes/no metric - which is extremely reductionist and overlooks the nuance of human experience. Imagine checkboxes: “Accessible: yes” for a cafe, where a ramp is available but there is no bathroom handrail; an entrance might be step-free but positioned on a steep incline.

For a tech company like Google, the reductionism versus humanism trade-off is not much of their concern. The world of developers is built upon quantitative metrics, therefore some level of nuance in human experience must be given up in exchange for optimality. In other words, a platform like Google Maps operates on economies of scale rather than ethics or care. These simplifications of data are something that Pierre Bourdieu would call symbolic violence - where numbers are used to communicate the reality of accessibility, not the reality of accessibility itself.

Most importantly, the majority of Google accessibility data is self-reported. Businesses, eager to appear inclusive, may overstate their facilities’ accessibility to align with social expectations or avoid criticism.

At EnAccess Maps, we take a different approach in developing. Understanding that accessibility data cannot be crowdsourced casually, we rely on a community-driven report approach and gather insights from people who navigate these spaces daily. Our philosophy is contextualising and filling in the information gaps with dialogue rather than heartless data. We believe that technology should go back to humanism rather than replace it.

4, Accessibility is not worth the money

Contrary to the misconception that accessibility infrastructure is a moral expense or a kind gesture, empirical evidence has shown that it is an economic investment with observable returns. Reports by the World Health Organisation and OECD state that even when standard cost-benefit analysis is used, the estimated benefits from accessibility improvements can outweigh the costs of achieving them.

A newer preprint looks at Metro C in Rome and finds that introducing the new accessible metro line leads to a statistically significant increase in economic activity in those zones. Similar findings have been observed in the UK, where inclusive transport infrastructure projects correlate with higher employment and retail growth in surrounding areas.

Economists and philosophers like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum laid out a hypothesis called “capability approach” where true prosperity is not measured by numerical scales such as GDP, but by the freedom to function - the ability of individuals to pursue lives they have reason to value.

Many of us, when talking about a good, successful society, worship GDP per capita but not the welfare that matters most for everyday people. Accessibility resists that separation: it insists that efficiency and empathy are not opposites but interdependent forces. Quoting Amartya Sen - when a city becomes more accessible, it expands the realm of what is possible for its citizens. The increased prosperity thus comes inevitably.

5, Disability is a sensitive topic

One of the biggest barriers to accessibility is not physical, but cultural. In many societies, disability remains an uncomfortable subject - something people fear discussing lest they say the “wrong thing.” This avoidance, however, reinforces ignorance and stigma. Learning about disability should be a process of empathy and awareness, yet it is often treated as a moral obligation.

As disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes, able-bodied people are socialised to avert their gaze, to perceive disability as tragedy rather than diversity. This discomfort sustains a culture of silence, where curiosity becomes shame and learning becomes taboo. The result is a social environment where conversations about accessibility are delayed until crisis demands them. To dismantle that status quo, we must reframe disability not as an individual deficit, but as a shared social reality, one that everyone has a stake in understanding.