Sharing Posts for Blindness Awareness Month Might Make You Feel Good, But Where is the Meaningful Change?

October is blindness awareness month, or so countless posts over on Facebook tell me. I forget about it for the most part, until I’m reminded by organisations who want me to support their campaigns, and friends and family who ask me to share their posts. I have come to the conclusion, after years of sharing and supporting and even posting, that the whole thing is rather pointless. We don’t need awareness, we need meaningful change.

When you share an awareness raising post on Facebook you feel good about yourself. You feel like you’re making a difference because you are helping to educate the masses. The problem is, you chose to take the easy route. Sharing something on the Internet requires minimal effort. With a single click you’ve told the world that you care about blind people but you haven’t actually done anything that will improve our lives in any meaningful way.

Nevertheless, your brain tells you that you’ve taken action and rewards you with happy and comforting feelings. These feelings are likely to be further enforced by your friends who like and share the post, or comment on it to also show their support. You feel validated that the work you’ve done is good and that it’s made a difference.

I’m going to tell you right now that it hasn’t. Maybe one more person knows that blindness is a low incidence disability. Maybe they know that most blind people aren’t totally blind, don’t read braille or use guide dogs. But these facts make absolutely no difference to me, an actual living blind person, and how I interact with the world. The problem with disability awareness overall is that it focusses far more on our disabled bodies and how they deviate from the norm than it does on the environment around us and how it is still incredibly inaccessible. Once again, we are centred as the problem, even when the words are kind and well intended.

I am going to demonstrate this using a real world example. If I take a class at university and I email the professor in advance to tell them I am blind, this doesn’t tell them anything about how they can make the materials accessible to me. Perhaps they print off all the presentations in large print and hand them to me as I arrive. I still can’t read them, I’ve never been a print reader and no matter how large the text is, I’m not going to be able to read it. Equally, another blind student might benefit from this adaptation, but their professor chooses to request braille copies of the material for them. Knowing a persons disability, how many people in the world have the disability, and several generic causes of it tell us nothing about their access needs.

I require text descriptions of photos in order to understand the content. Some people with cognitive disabilities would also benefit from image descriptions. We don’t have the same disability, but we can benefit from the same adaptation in this situation. Many Deaf people make use of video transcripts, these are also helpful for people with auditory processing disabilities, sensory processing disorder and people who find that auditory learning doesn’t work well for them. The disability doesn’t particularly matter, what matters are the resources that are on offer and the ways in which content is displayed.

All of these adaptations require other people to put in some effort. It might only be five minutes, but it is five minutes, with often little reward. You don’t get the same fuzzy feelings from writing a description. You don’t get them from attempting to audio describe a video and being gently told that your description could do with some work. You don’t get them from converting a scanned pdf into word, so that a blind student can access it. And so your brain tells you that doing these things really isn’t that great after all. So you stick to shares on Facebook. The true irony is that many of the posts aren’t accessible to me. They contain photos with no alt text, or videos that consist only of music, pictures and text. Raising awareness, and being viewed as someone who cares, is far more important to the person than actually building an accessible world for people like me. This, more than anything tells me that your awareness is truly selfish. I have watched countless blind people gently educate those who share these posts, explaining that without text descriptions, the pictures aren’t accessible. And in return they got told that the person posting “just forgot,” or “didn’t have the time,” or that it was “really for other people who don’t know about blindness.” The message all of those responses send is that we aren’t worth the time it takes to give us equal access. It tells me that you are more concerned with performative gestures than you are with taking meaningful action. But still you feel good.

Meanwhile I must contend with a hopelessly inaccessible world. A world in which I still argue with the NHS day after day to receive accessible communication regarding my own health. I send countless emails fighting for the support I need at university. I download a game to give myself a break from the fight, only to discover that it too isn’t accessible. So forgive me if I snap at you and tell you to make your posts accessible. Understand why no, I don’t want to add my voice to yet another video sharing my story in thirty seconds. Until you want to put in the work and commit to real world action, you can keep your awareness and I’ll keep on demanding equality and making do with the scraps I get thrown.