The Disability We Don’t Talk About

E-Illingworth · 33m ago

Hint: it’s not a rare disease.

It’s not an episodic or degenerative diagnosis.

It’s the thing that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.[1]

Most conversations about accessibility start with permanent disability: a wheelchair user, someone blind or Deaf, a person with a specific diagnosis... That's a very necessary conversation, but it leaves out part of the picture we rarely highlight in the accessibility industry. Disability can be temporary (a broken arm, a concussion, a recovery that lasts months instead of a lifetime). And, disability can be situational (bright sun washing out your phone screen, a loud room making it impossible to hear a call, a new parent typing one-handed with a baby on the other arm). Same barriers, wildly different causes, yet the same need for software and workplaces that adapt to the user regardless of circumstance.

Eamon McErlean, ServiceNow's VP of Accessibility and Globalization, observes that most people only grasp this once they've lived it. “It’s really unfortunate that sometimes, until somebody goes through that, they really appreciate the accessibility needs from the start,” he said in a recent conversation with a colleague who'd just spent eight months learning the temporary-disability category from the inside after a near-fatal accident.

That colleague is Monalisa Chati, ServiceNow's Platform & GenAI Strategic Operations leader. In January, she was badly injured in a car accident that left her with five pelvic fractures, a frontotemporal subdural hematoma, numerous hematomas all over her body, and other injuries severe enough that she spent the first months of recovery largely bedridden. Over the course of the year, she has moved from wheelchair to walker to cane to walking unassisted on paved / even surfaces today, and recently got cleared to drive again. She's open and generous in sharing her story, and her recovery has given her a new lens to view team culture, adaptation, work/life balance, community, and positivity. At work, a critical part of that journey has been what changed and kept changing about her needs week to week, and how little that matched the way most organizations think about accommodation as a one-time setup decided at onboarding.

That's Eamon's point, too. “Just because they didn’t need anything when they onboarded, don’t assume things haven’t changed in a year, or two years, or three,” he said in our podcast chat. It’s worth noting that he’d also likt to drop the word “accommodation” altogether, since it tends to carry a negative connotation. Instead, focus on setting someone up to do their best work, for whatever day they're having.

Of course, a near-fatal accident requires different support than executing accessible software but the intersection between the two highlights a critical piece of the workforce of the future. It’s not enough to design accessible software – it’s about embracing a culture of belonging. For a product team, it’s akin to the difference between conformance and usability. Conformance is the floor — meeting a standard, checking a box. Usability is harder but arguably more interesting: building for the huge spectrum of variability in how best to meet people where they are at scale, regardless of environment, software UI, or even language. (That’s also the governing principle to Universal Design: design for the edges and the middle takes care of itself). Monalisa's recovery is an extreme version of a pattern any team may eventually run into: needs that shift, sometimes week to week, long after a person has been checked off as “set up” with an HR or IT accommodation.

What made the difference for Monalisa wasn't a policy. It was a team that let her need for flexibility be real instead of conditional. It was remote work that flexed around good days and bad days. It was a replacement laptop expedited without her having to fight for it. And it is a manager, Jessa Lyders, who has had her back throughout. Jessa described watching Monalisa navigate recovery with what she called “remarkable strength, determination, and grace,” while making clear the support went both ways: “caring for one another is more than the work outcomes we accomplish together. It’s something we live every day.”

Monalisa's own advice to other leaders is less about grand gestures than about not assuming. “Create an environment where you can have candid and open dialogue, where members are not afraid to share what support looks like for them,” she said. Life happens — an accident, an illness, a kid's needs, something invisible entirely — and the work doesn't stop mattering, but it stops being the only thing that matters, at least for a while.

The idea that we’re all temporarily abled isn’t an exaggeration. Roughly 50% of U.S. adults 65 and older report having a disability, according to the CDC’s most recent data,[2] and those are exactly the people increasingly expected to navigate a benefits portal or a support case as an end user—our customers’ customers. And, age-related disability reaches folks in peak career more often that we realize: Guardian Life’s 2025 Caregiving in America research found that roughly 43% of adults in their 40s are now caring for an aging parent or spouse while raising their own kids, doing some of their most demanding work while also supporting a demographic in the digital divide.[3] Temporary and situational disability aren’t the edge cases you might eventually have to think about; they’re a guarantee if you’re lucky enough to age.

Eamon's closing point should resonate with any employee and leader: “Things can change pretty rapidly, and your needs can change rapidly, and even though you may not need it now, there’s a high probability you will need it someday.” That's not a reason to treat accessibility as charity or crisis response. It's a reason to treat it as infrastructure where flexibility and accommodation are build into the fabric of the work culture and into the end products. Think accessibly before anyone needs it, because eventually everyone does.

[1] Riffed from Mary Schmich’s Chicago Tribune 1997 column, Advice, like youth, is probably wasted on the young. Popularized by Baz Luhrmann’s spoken word version, Sunscreen.
https://worderist.com/2020/11/27/sunscreen/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents/disabilities-health-care-access.html

[3] https://www.guardianlife.com/news/release/number-of-full-time-workers-who-are-juggling-caregiving-re...