Category: (Dis)ability

On 27 November 2025

Hidden Inclusion Is Everywhere

Today in “things that are inclusive and you didn’t realise they are”:

the International Code of Signals (ICS)

From the INTERNATIONAL CODE OF SIGNALS UNITED STATES EDITION 1969 Edition (Revised 2003)

We tend to think of inclusion as something modern — a recent design concern introduced in the last decade or two. But hidden throughout history are whole systems that ended up being quietly, unintentionally inclusive because they had to work for everyone, under every condition.

One of the best examples?
The International Code of Signals (ICS).

What is the ICS?

The International Code of Signals is a global communication system used by ships at sea. Long before radios were reliable, vessels relied on flags, lights, shapes, and sound signals to communicate essential information between ships, between ship and shore, or during emergencies.

The modern ICS alphabet was standardised in the mid-19th century, gradually refined by the British Board of Trade, and formally internationalised in the 20th century. The point was simple: every ship in the world, regardless of language, must be able to understand the same messages.

How the system works

The ICS includes:

26 alphabetical flags (A–Z)
10 numeral pennants (0–9)
3 repeaters (1st, 2nd, 3rd) to repeat letters in hoists
Special flags for code groups and signalling conditions

Each flag has a distinctive combination of shapes, stripes, blocks, and layout. Crucially: each flag also carries a meaning beyond its letter.

Examples include:

A – Alfa: “I have a diver down; keep well clear.”
B – Bravo: “I am carrying dangerous cargo.”
O – Oscar: “Man overboard.”
V – Victor: “I require assistance.”

It is an entire international language, designed to cut through uncertainty, weather, and linguistic barriers.
Victor means “I require assistance.” or ” Ich benötige Hilfe” or “Je demande assistance.” or “Ég þarfnast aðstoðar.”…you get the idea.
In an emergency even an old times sailor (who historically often couldn’t write or read, as opposed to officers) could raise a “I require medical assistance.” flag (Whiskey) with know how to spell any of that.

So where does inclusion come in?

The ICS had to work:

In fog
In storm conditions
When flags faded in the sun
From long distances
On ships crewed by people from all over the world
And crucially: without relying solely on colour

This last point is where the hidden accessibility appears.

Historically, navies and merchant fleets were overwhelmingly male environments — and roughly 8% of men have some form of colour-blindness. For most of history, there was no colour-vision testing for sailors. You simply took whoever could work a deck, haul a line, or man a watch. (Or in the earlier days of the Royal Navy, any drunk bastard who could make three xxx on a piece of paper and was too drunk to run away…)

If the flag system had depended on exact colour discrimination, it would have failed immediately in real-world use.

So the system was designed to be recognised through pattern, geometry, and contrast, not colour alone.

Why ICS is inherently colour-blind inclusive

Even though the flags are coloured, what actually makes them identifiable is:

Horizontal vs. vertical stripes
Diagonal bars
Chequered patterns
Centre squares or blocks
Unique proportions
Strong dark–light contrast (important in greyscale vision)
Shapes that still read correctly when bleached by sun or salt

This means a sailor with red–green colour-blindness (by far the most common) can distinguish “Oscar” from “Zulu”, or “Bravo” from “Hotel”, from the pattern alone.

The ICS is, unintentionally, a great example of pre-modern universal design.

It is inclusion by necessity — because you cannot run a global system that depends on perfect colour perception, perfect weather, or perfect conditions.

A lesson from maritime history

The ICS shows something important:

When a system is designed to succeed under pressure, uncertainty, and real-world conditions, it often ends up being more inclusive.

Accessibility isn’t always a modern invention.
Sometimes, it’s baked into the oldest tools we have — quietly doing its job, unnoticed, because it had to serve everyone long before inclusion became a buzzword.

Hidden inclusion really is everywhere.

Everyone Wins

That’s the heart of it: inclusive design never creates a burden — it creates clarity.
Even with perfect colour vision, I find it far easier to read what the ship in front of me wants because the system was built to work for everyone. Inclusion doesn’t make things easier for disabled people and harder for everyone else; inclusion makes things easier, safer, and more reliable for all of us.

Nov 27, 2025

Universal Design vs Individual Tailoring

On 26 November 2025

In (Dis)ability, Policy Research, Training and Coaching

Today: Both Is Good!

Universal Design and Individual Tailoring: Why We Need Both

People often frame accessibility as a choice: do we build universally, or do we tailor individually?
The reality is—of course—we need both.

Universal Design: dignity, efficiency, and reduced labour of inclusion.

Universal Design (UD) is often sold as a magic solution that will “catch everyone.”
It won’t. It never will. And that’s fine, because UD isn’t about perfection—it’s about coverage.

When we design materials, systems, spaces, and processes so they work for as many people as possible, several good things happen:

Fewer people have to declare their disability, which protects dignity and reduces the emotional admin of constantly explaining your needs, it reduces Labour of Inclusion.
Time and money are freed up to support the people who do require tailored adjustments.
Workload becomes manageable, because you’re not reinventing the wheel for every individual request.

A simple teaching example:

I have 120 students in a lecture.
Out of them:

10 are dyslexic
1 has visual issues (I don’t use impairment anymore, the Blind community feels strongly about this!)
1 needs large print

If I make inaccessible slides (e.g., Times New Roman, poor contrast, cluttered layout), I now have to respond to 12 individual adjustment schedules and produce multiple versions.

That is not a good use of my labour or institutional resources.

If I instead make one fully accessible slide deck from the start—clear font, high contrast, good structure—
I immediately meet the needs of 11 students.
Now there is only one student who requires a tailored version, and I actually have time and energy to give them what they need.

UD actually is a resource management tool.

Universal Design is not universal

There’s a myth that UD, if done well enough, will cover everybody.
It won’t. Human variation is vast and always will be.

UD doesn’t replace individual adjustments.
UD creates capacity for individual adjustments.

Think of it like triage in reverse: cover the majority up front, so you can do justice to the minority who require something different.

That is what real equity looks like.

Why both approaches matter

UD preserves dignity by removing the need for constant declarations.
Tailoring preserves equity by responding meaningfully to those whom UD cannot help.

Both matter.

And both are required.

But we also need systems to support this balance—for example:

Digital adjustment records that follow a person across departments or institutions
Reduction of repetitive disclosure
Consistent accessible design standards

The point is simple:
Universal Design is not a replacement for individual adjustment.
It is the foundation that makes genuine equity possible—by freeing up resources to respond well, respectfully, and promptly to those whose needs fall outside the majority design.

Dual approaches aren’t a compromise.
They’re the only way forward.

Nov 26, 2025

In (Dis)ability, Policy Research

How Policy Must Be Built to Work for Disabled Staff

[cross-posted from my work in WhoCares, https://whocares.ed.ac.uk/]

Work Package One, part of WhoCares, starts with the most fundamental question in disability governance:

How does policy need to be designed, structured, and embedded so that it actually works for disabled staff — not just on paper, but in everyday practice?

Universities often assume that writing a good disability or reasonable-adjustments policy is enough. WP1 shows why this isn’t true. A policy is only one component in a much larger system of recruitment, onboarding, HR procedures, line management, IT access, estates, health & safety, culture, and communication. If any part of that system fails, the policy fails with it.

What WP1 Does

WP1 maps this whole system — the “policy machine” — using approaches borrowed from systems engineering, aviation safety, and human factors. It looks at:

The policy itself: clarity, structure, responsibilities.
The policy network: how related policies reinforce or contradict it.
Implementation chains: who needs to know the policy and who actually does.
Human factors: workload, communication breakdowns, unconscious bias, norms, and the predictable ways people misinterpret, forget, or avoid policy.
The labour of inclusion: the hidden work disabled staff do because the system hasn’t been designed around them.

The aim is to diagnose where disability policy collapses: not at the level of legal compliance, but at the point of lived experience.

Why This Matters

Disabled staff do not experience “a disability policy.”
They experience the entire ecosystem around it.

A policy will only work if:

it is known,
it is understood,
it fits coherently into the wider policy environment,
it can be implemented by staff with the time, training, and resources to do so,
it accounts for human fallibility,
and it does not rely on disabled staff to constantly self-advocate, educate, chase, or correct the system.

Most UK universities currently fail at several of these points, creating a wide implementation gap: the difference between what the policy promises and what disabled staff actually experience. WP1 analyses why that gap exists — and how to close it.

What WP1 Contributes

1. A systems-based blueprint for policy that works.

Policies must be written and embedded like engineering systems: with defined subcomponents, interdependent parts, and checks that each part is installed and functional.

2. Human-factors insight into implementation failure.

Policy collapses not because people are malicious, but because they are overloaded, undertrained, distracted, or following local norms. WP1 uses human-factors models (including aviation’s Dirty Dozen) to analyse these predictable failure points.

3. Practical strategies to reduce the labour of inclusion.

WP1 identifies how policies must be designed to shift the workload off disabled staff — through better communication, automatic prompts, universal design, resource allocation, and built-in accountability.

In Summary

Work Package One provides the evidence base for building disability policy that actually works.
Not symbolic. Not aspirational. Operational.

It shows that effective disability policy isn’t one document — it is a functioning system, explicitly designed to overcome human factors and implementation gaps. And when that system works, disabled staff don’t just get support: they get equity, dignity, and the chance to do their work without carrying the extra labour that the system should carry for them.

Nov 20, 2025

Social Model 2.0

[cross posted from my work on WhoCares https://whocares.ed.ac.uk/blog]

Why We Need a Social Model 2.0

For decades, the social model of disability has been one of the most transformative frameworks in disability rights. It offered a radical, empowering shift: people are disabled not by their bodies, but by barriers created by society. Stairs disable wheelchair users, not paralysis. Small print disables visually-impaired readers, not impaired vision. The problem lies not in the person, but in the environment.

This was a necessary and powerful counter to the medical model, which treated disability as an individual defect to be cured, controlled, or pathologised. The social model exposed the injustice of designing a world around a narrow idea of the “normal” body. It said: we can build something better. And it changed law, activism, and everyday access in ways that can’t be overstated.

But that doesn’t mean the social model is complete.

Where the Social Model Hits Its Limits

The social model works brilliantly when barriers are environmental or attitudinal. But it struggles — really struggles — in scenarios where pain, fatigue, neurological overload, or deterioration are intrinsic to a person’s condition, not results of external barriers.

Someone with:

chronic nerve pain
ME/CFS
sickle-cell disease
inflammatory conditions
degenerative disorders
complex neurological conditions
or severe migraines

…doesn’t stop suffering just because a ramp exists, or a workplace is accessible. No manager, however inclusive, can magically remove a pain flare or a seizure cluster. And the classical social-model line of “the disability is only in the environment” can begin to feel gaslighting for people whose daily experience is hardship.

This leads to two significant limitations:

1. It assumes suffering is always externally imposed.

This erases the lived reality of people whose bodies do cause real pain, unpredictability, or limitations.

2. It overburdens disabled people with the job of “advocating for access”.

Under the classic social model, if barriers disable you, you must identify them, explain them, request adjustments, negotiate them, and sometimes fight for them.
The result: the hidden labour of navigating disability remains on the disabled person.

This hidden labour includes:

managing symptoms
managing energy
coordinating care
managing medication logistics
constantly self-advocating
endlessly explaining
covering for inaccessible systems
translating policy into reality

The social model removed some burdens, but it left too many where they were.

We need something better — something that acknowledges bodies as real, and societies as responsible.
We need Social Model 2.0.

What Social Model 2.0 Looks Like

Social Model 2.0 keeps the best of the original — the focus on removing barriers — but adds a crucial layer of collective responsibility. It recognises two truths simultaneously:

Some suffering comes from disabling barriers.
Some suffering comes from the condition itself — and society must still help carry that load.

In Social Model 2.0, inclusion means more than ramps, captions, and flexible work.
It means society intentionally takes on the labour that disability otherwise forces onto the individual.

Instead of saying:

“Tell us what you need, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Social Model 2.0 says:

“We assume you carry invisible labour. We proactively share that workload, because pain and symptoms aren’t a personal failing — they’re a collective responsibility.”

This model recognises that access is not just the built environment; access is the entire ecosystem of living with a condition.

What this looks like in practice:

1. Collective responsibility for accessibility basics

This part is classic social model:

ramps
clear signage
lighting
flexible deadlines
hybrid meetings
quiet rooms
sensory-friendly events
non-hostile HR processes
inclusive policymaking
accessible digital systems

But unlike the original model, Social Model 2.0 treats these not as optional extras but as organisational duties — automatically deployed, not dependent on disabled people asking for them.

2. Collective responsibility for health-related labour

This is the new layer.
It says: even when a condition’s pain or instability is intrinsic, society has a duty to help.

Examples:

Ensuring someone with a painful condition has secure, reliable access to medication
Giving extra recovery time without guilt or performance penalties
Creating predictable routines so symptom management becomes easier
Making sure someone doesn’t have to fight insurance, HR, or scheduling while in pain
Assigning support workers or admin assistance to reduce cognitive and logistical load
Designing systems where disabled people are not required to “prove” their condition repeatedly
Building organisational cultures where illness and pain are assumed, not doubted
Proactively checking that people in flare or decline have their practical needs covered

In other words:

We stop pretending that inclusion ends at “remove the barrier”

and start recognising that many barriers are internal to the body — and still not the disabled person’s burden to carry alone.

Why Social Model 2.0 Matters

Because the world has changed.
Because we understand more about chronic illness, neurodiversity, pain science, fatigue, and fluctuating conditions than we did in the 1980s.
Because “inclusion” can no longer stop at architecture and attitudes.

And because we now know that:

Pain is real.
Fatigue is real.
Overload is real.
Recovery time is real.
Admin is labour.
Self-advocacy is labour.
Navigating inaccessible systems is labour.
Managing medication is labour.
And all of this is work disabled people are doing every single day that nobody sees.

Social Model 2.0 says:
If society disables us, society must fix it.
If the body disables us, society must help carry that weight too.

It isn’t about pity.
It isn’t about protection.
It’s about justice, dignity, and shared responsibility.

Conclusion: A Model That Finally Fits Reality

The original social model liberated us from a worldview that blamed disabled people for existing. But like any model, it reflects the era it was born in. Today, we face different challenges: long-term conditions, fluctuating illnesses, invisible disabilities, complex pain conditions, and the enormous hidden labour that comes with them.

Social Model 2.0 is not a replacement — it’s an upgrade.
It keeps the political strength of the original while updating it for the world disabled people actually live in.

Because inclusion isn’t just removing barriers.
It’s removing burdens.

Because disability isn’t just a policy problem.
It’s a shared societal responsibility.

And because no one should have to carry their pain — or their access needs — alone.

Nov 20, 2025

Autistic folk vs language

“Autistic people struggle with language. They don’t understand when you say the horse has bolted.”

No. It’s a bit different from this.
(Also, at least say the horse has sailed, make it interesting)

What Autistic people and people who don’t speak your English struggle with is hidden meaning. Like in this post.

What do you mean “your English”, Claire? There is only one English.
*Linguist mode activated*
There are hundreds of thousands of Englishes.
Regional variation.
Class variation.
Education.
Neurotype.
Age.
Gender.
Health.
Oh, and that is just the native speakers.

And, did I mention everyone has more than one English?
You don’t speak to your granny like to the lads in the pub. Hopefully…

Okay, now where does your autistic colleague or student struggle?
Hidden meaning you can’t look up.
Let’s take email sign offs…

Kind regards: My default setting. Like a Roomba with manners. I did not put effort in. Not really kind.
Regards: I’m very cross with you.
Warm regards: Something is afoot. You will discover it in Act III.
Best regards: I want something. I likely don’t know you and I’m just hoping for the best.
With regards: I don’t speak English well and Google suggested this.
Best: The salted crisp of sign-offs. Acceptable. Emotionally vacant.
Thanks: I’m polite, but make no mistake — the clock is ticking.
Thanks again: Please read the subtext before things escalate. My patience is now as thin as a UK bin bag.
Thanks in advance: Emotional extortion in professional font. You are now forced to do what I asked for.
All the best: I’m about to retire or I think you are/should be.
Appreciate it: I absolutely do not. In fact, I’m annoyed you didn’t already do this.
Yours truly: Romantic. Does not belong here.

Now, “regards” does not always “I’m angry with you”, it means that depending on who said it. And if you don’t know the person you have to learn to guess correctly from their role, age, skin colour, name, and the rest of the email.
That’s a lot of work and really complicated and requires a strong theory of mind (thinking yourself into someone else’s shoes).

Now what?

So, if my student/colleague doesn’t get my hint they are autistic?
Maybe. Or not a native speaker. Or from a different English speaking part where things are phrased differently. Or not that gifted with social antennae.
But, good news! You don’t have to know. Just use these 3 tips on everyone and you’re sorted:

1. No hints!
⛔ “Maybe Bauer 2012 is worth a look…”
✅ “Read Bauer 2012 please.”

2. Clear language
⛔ “This is quite good, you might want to do a little editing…”
✅ “This has potential but it is not there, yet. You will have to make substantive edits.”

3. Assume no malice:
⛔ “Bob was rude to me, I have HR on speed dial!!!”
✅ “Okay, what Bob said sounded a bit rude to me. What is the best possible interpretation of what he just said? It’ll roll with that until proven otherwise.”

Nov 20, 2025

Auditory Processing and Radios