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> the Social Model of disability

The best way I’ve heard this articulated is:

Under the medical model, disabled individuals are expected to change their behavior to accommodate (fit on with) society. We ask people whose lives are already more difficult than average to do additional work.

Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead. Further, the social model says that any policy that affects disabled people should be crafted by or with disabled people who are affected by that policy. Nothing about us without us.

I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.

I support the social model. It’s the one where I get to have agency.

> I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.

For what it is worth, I'm probably in different countries to you, and "me too". I fractured T8 and spent some time unable to walk at all and in a wheelchair -- I can now use a crutch some of the time and have a fairly complex medical history.

You never notice how much [en-gb] pavements / [en-us] sidewalks camber towards the road for drainage until moving your pelvis is excruciating, or driving a manual wheelchair on a camber means that you're constantly working twice as hard with one hand compared to the other. Nor do you notice what a bin on the street does when kerbs are difficult. Low hanging vegetation, normally pretty, over a neighbour's wall becomes incredibly annoying if you literally cannot move yourself to avoid it inevitably hitting your eyes. So many minor annoyances, from booked assistance on train travel forgetting you exist halfway through, right the way through to outright discrimination from your colleagues. And don't get me started on the bladder management!

Everyone could be disabled, and as said earlier at some point in life everyone probably would be. Inclusive design is just that -- inclusive -- and done correctly it costs nothing to little extra. I don't really understand why we don't build it into society, rather than try to get people to (as I increasingly want to) fork out thousands to tens of thousands for electric wheelchairs. Sure, they're great, but sometimes I miss taking long walks or cycling ('normally').

I am so thankful that I just deal with chronic pain and not mobility issues as well. I’m sorry.

Even though it doesn’t affect me directly I’ve started to notice places where mobility accommodation sucks. In a sense it’s a canary: mobility is the most visible category disability to able-bodied folks and if our society can’t be bothered to help folks like you, god help us who have “invisible” illnesses.

Those both skirt around the correct way to think about it, which is the costs way.there are extra costs associated with having a disability. the two models you propose are the disabled person pays or everyone else pays. Everyone else pays is not the correct model because it coerces people into mazsive costs that dont necessarily make sense for them. Disabled person pays isnt correct either because there are many near zero cost things we could do if we just thought about it at design phase. There should be ahealthier middle ground that routinely gets the cheap stuff done and leaves an easy path for the expensive stuff without coercing spending

> Disabled person pays isnt correct either because there are many near zero cost things we could do if we just thought about it at design phase.

??? This is the social model on a nutshell.

No it isn't because it isn't cast in cost/opportunity cost/etc. The reality of implementation is top down dictation without apparent consideration of cost (For example, I redid the front door of our office and I now have two buttons to open the automatic door that look like crap and are at waist height and at the floor. This was dictated in the code in my region as a new concession that I never would have done because it is broadly stupid in my context.) Maybe highly cost sensitive and more optional social model would be a better description.

Are you the disabled person using these automatic door buttons? If not, have you asked someone with a mobility-related disability what they think of it?

It’s absolutely possible for laws around accommodations to be stupid. Once again, that’s the medical model, when able-bodied people write policy for disabled people, there are stupid outcomes. The social model says that there should always be a person with a relevant disability involved with designing accommodations unless it’s absolutely impossible to do. The saying commonly used in the community is “nothing about us without us.”

So perhaps your implementation sucks, but if it does, there’s a good chance it’s because of the medical model.

lets say I think the correct model is the social model which then has every change priced vs the cost of not changing it (cost incurred changing it > cost incurred to disabled persons). That's probably a reasonable approximation you can internalize. I am also skeptical of your second paragraph. I think that's just how government works except in a very few spots with some characteristic that drives better behaviour (I think social cohesion or very limited government being the main qualities that can drive better outcomes but I'm not willing to outline why because this is already too long) Everybody ass covers and you get an explosion of stuff in favour of the loud people that harm the majority more than the loud people benefit, which is deadweight loss to society and everyone is worse off. Loud people being the place holder for people complaining, of which disabled people are a tiny minority.

> Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead.

This sounds good in the abstract, but the devil is in the details. What specific accommodation is being asked for? What counts as a disability? For example, should I simply have to ignore angry outbursts directed at me and my coworkers from someone with oppositional defiance disorder[1]? Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD or can I request proof from a medical professional?

There are real tradeoffs here. You see it in how these kinds of accommodations are abused at elite universities[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder

[2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/8/harvard-undergr...

I mean you kinda are just expected to ignore angry outbursts directed at you from anyone. That's not even about disability, it's just part of the social contract that you don't start throwing blows when people yell at you.

This is really ignorant. That’s not an insult exactly, I mean that you’re asking questions that all have answers if you cared to look them up.

The reason why people call that sort of attitude “ableist” is that you’re requiring me, the disabled person, to prove that I’m not a liar.

> What specific accommodation is being asked for?

There is a whole field of study called “Disability Theory” that includes this topic. It is well-defined with thousands of pages written on the topic. It is not nebulous, you just aren’t familiar with it.

> What counts as a disability?

Words have definitions:

“the condition of being unable to perform as a consequence of physical or mental unfitness”

> Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD

Yes, but a person with ODD is still expected to be a decent human. They may make more often mistakes but they should recognize and apologize for those mistakes. They should be in therapy to help learn self-regulation techniques.

Likewise, you should give them some extra grace because, in spite of all that extremely hard work, it’s hard to ignore what your body is telling you (push back against authority) and sometimes they will slip up.

> can I request proof from a medical professional?

I dunno, can I get a video of your last colonoscopy? Can you tell the public internet if you take take viagra? Can you list your mental health disorders for me please? How’s your gut, had any diarrhea lately?

Medical information is private.

> There are real tradeoffs here.

Yes, the tradeoffs are that things are a bit less convenient for able-bodied people and disabled people get to actually have agency on their lives.

This is a bit of fallacy of relative privation. No need to fix it all. We can all be considerate in the areas we have control over and as a society have basics like ramps etc.

I support the medical model then, disabled people who can't work should, ought, to be among the poorest in society, just above the people that can work but don't. Because some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest (in absolute terms though: you are richer than almost anyone alive in year 800 CE so not starving poor nor barely surviving poor) and so, who should be? Should the able working be poorer than a disabled person doing less work? The same work?

And why should disabled people be able to craft policy that will be funded largely by the abled? In order to have legitimacy of a policy, you need to involve the people that will pay for it.

The social model is non-sensical, it's unfair, and it cloaks its unfairness in the language of social justice which it doesn't deserve to. There are better forms of advocacy.

May you someday experience the same lack of empathy you're broadcasting here.

> some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest

Why? And not why in terms of a trivial statistical tautology, where a bell curve has to have a left tail. Why, in terms of, what downstream causal effect of deliberately maintaining large cohorts of poor people accomplishes something desirable?

The cynic in me says that the visible presence of people dying on the street is very much intended to send a message, "work hard or this will be your fate".

I wouldn't entirely call that cynicism considering a lot of people just come out and say it.

A great deal of changes proposed to make disabled peoples' lives easier end up having many fringe benefits for the non-disabled. The classic example is strollers or hand trucks going up the little dip on the sidewalk rather than having to lug them over an enormous curb.

The cost argument starts looking weak when you observe there's always billions of dollars shaken from magical couch cushions whenever it's time to wage another losing war.

In terms of the web two of the greatest things we could do for accessibility: (1) eliminate GDPR pop-ups (and all pop-ups and senseless modal dialogs) and (2) eliminate cloudflare harassment, ReCAPTCHA harassment and anubis harassment. Any of those things should be an immediate F rank for WCAG.

For 1: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/

The cost argument is a cover for institutional cruelty. Some people really really want to be cruel. Usually those folks are the most emotionally damaged people IME.

Another way to look at the social model is kids playing in neighborhoods. It's not unsafe to walk from one place to another because of lousy sidewalks or excessive leaves: it's the roads we put between any place they want to go. This might've been tolerable when each household only had 1 car and it was gone all day, but not now that everybody has a RAM Child-squasher 2500. In my neighborhood the sidewalks also just... end randomly, would be awful to live here and be blind. Would be a lot better to be blind if you weren't a misstep away from getting run over.

But don't you see how the fact that many cases are individual makes it harder? You mention doorknobs, and it's easy to declare (which is why the US government has declared) that lever style door handles are more accessible and should be preferred. It's hard, impossibly so, to construct a world where nobody with wrist mobility problems will ever encounter a round doorknob they'd like to open.

It seems like the implication here is “if we can’t do anything, we shouldn’t do anything at all” under the social model.

Not every doorknob will be disability friendly. If pressure from the social model fixes 20% of doorknobs, now there is a group of people can open 20% of doors where they could open 0% before.

My intended implication is that pressure from the social model has achieved as much as it can, and the left over problems must be resolved through other means. The vast majority of doorknobs I personally interact with, including 100% of the ones at my house and workplace, are lever-style.

As a disabled person, my experience indicates that we’re not even close to what the social model could achieve.

Example:

I have a chronic pain disorder. I have substantial difficulty working in an office. WFH was an absolute blessing, and RTO has been a curse.

RTO is a regressive policy for disabled people who found they were finally able to participate in their industry for the first time in ages. Now they are expected to take on extra burden to function in an able-bodied world. Many, whose bodies do not allow that option simply have to go back on SSDI.

That is an example of progress in the social model that has regressed back to the medical model.

I'm sympathetic to your problems, but I don't think this has anything to do with the social model or medical model. Even the strongest advocates of the social model of disability wouldn't argue, I don't think, that construction site supervisors must be allowed to work from home after setting up some cameras and microphones to monitor what's happening. The dispute here is that RTO employers think working together in an office is similarly important, but you think they're wrong and WFH is just as good.

> Even the strongest advocates of the social model of disability wouldn't argue, I don't think, that construction site supervisors must be allowed to work from home after setting up some cameras and microphones to monitor what's happening.

That is a man of straw! I’m talking about desk jobs, here, and I think that’s pretty clear from my comment above.

I don’t know how RTO could be seen as anything but the medical model —

Medical model: it is the disabled person’s responsibility to figure out how to function in society.

Social model: it is society’s responsibility to accommodate people with disabilities.

In any case, I’m actively involved in the disability community and this is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — conversations in the community recent years. WFH/RTO has become the poster-child for the conflict between the medical and social model. This is why I chose it as an example.

You think (and I do acknowledge that this perspective is very common in the disability community) that desk work is completely different and can be done remotely with no loss. There are many businesses in the US who agree with you; the numbers I've seen are that at least 10-15% of Americans (some sources say 22%) work fully remote jobs. It's good that these opportunities exist, and I would support creating them if they didn't.

Other businesses don't agree. Managers at these businesses want people chitchatting with each other, grabbing lunch together, having hallway talks, etc. They think that desk work is at its best when it's a social activity, and often have specific points where they feel their business didn't work as well when Covid forced everyone to stay home.

Why does the social model of disability imply that the second group of businesses is wrong, or that we have to override their judgment?

“ Why does the social model of disability imply that the second group of businesses is wrong, or that we have to override their judgment?”

It doesn’t, it claims that WFH is a reasonable accommodation for desk workers and employers need to adapt if they want their disabled employees to be as productive.

Don’t worry, though, companies loathe providing WFH accommodation; WFH is my only option and I’ve been unemployed and hunting for months. The arrangement that is most comfortable for able-bodied people is not in danger.

> it's hard, impossibly so, to construct a world where nobody with wrist mobility problems will ever encounter a round doorknob they'd like to open.

its not that hard to get to 99.999% though.

stop selling door knobs, or doors that accept round knobs. add incentives to swap or return round knobs. include checks for round knobs both for building inspections and insurance.

you wont wont get the last couple people that build their own doors and machine their own knobs, but thats gonna be a really small segment

You can't talk about things from a social model perspective without modeling the political realities of the policies you're proposing. A national ban on the sale of round doorknobs would not pass, and local bans would create an enormous backlash which might well ruin the longstanding consensus that ADA compliance requires levers.

> stop selling door knobs, or doors that accept round knobs.

Ok, but that's not a "Silicon Valley" thing.

Go talk to politicians or Home Depot and Lowe's and the home builders conventions.

That's why the post screams of mis-placed anger.

Silicon Valley probably would invent FaceID / NFC / Passkeys / WIFI authentication for doors - but that doesn't mean they'll get installed anywhere.

> The vast majority of cases are individual; owned by myriad businesses, charities, foundations.

Agreed, but the solution is more general. If you want handicapped people to have more access, that probably means widespread societal change through regulations, like the ADA (which obviously didn't fix everything, but was at least a big step forward).