# Simulate the Barrier Not the Disability ## Claim An accessibility exercise teaches design when it makes the learner hit the barrier, and teaches stereotype when it makes the learner perform the disability. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Holds for training and onboarding aimed at people who build things — the goal is locating the defect in the artifact, so the exercise has to put the defect in the artifact. - Breaks where the objective is genuinely about lived experience rather than design judgment; first-person accounts from disabled people do that work, and a simulation cannot substitute for one. - Some conditions cannot be simulated at all — chronic pain, fatigue that accumulates over hours — so an exercise built on simulation silently scopes itself to what is easy to fake. - Does not claim simulations are always harmful. It claims they teach the wrong lesson by default, because they locate the problem in the person. ## Evidence > [!quote] > Simulations can reduce disabilities to stereotypes like, "All blind people use Braille," or more relevant to this talk, "All blind people use a Screen Reader." Olivia Richter's alternative is the useful part: rather than blindfolding a designer, her Barrieria escape game (WordPress plus Bricks, eight challenges, playable by keyboard and screen reader) hands the learner an interface that breaks — an app that works on narrow viewports and fails on widescreen. The learner experiences an obstacle produced by a design decision, which is the thing they can actually change. Her diagnosis of why the gap exists is the same move: "Exclusion isn't malice, mostly. It's ignorance on autopilot" — you don't question a broken tab order you never encounter. ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Universalizing Disability Language Risks Erasing Specific Hardship]] — because extends; both are about empathy devices that flatten distinct realities into one imagined experience - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Disability Inclusion Is a Design-Authority Question]] — because evidence-for; locating the problem in the design rather than the person is the same relocation of authority - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Being Anticipated Beats Being Tolerated - Visible Inclusion Shifts the Burden]] — because applies-in; an exercise that anticipates the barrier shifts the burden off the disabled participant - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Accessibility & Disability Inclusion MOC]] — education practice, adjacent to the cognitive-accessibility gap the MOC names ## Tests / falsifiers - Run both exercise types with matched cohorts and measure defects found in a later code review, not self-reported empathy. If simulation cohorts find as many real defects, the design-teaching claim weakens. - Survey disabled practitioners on which exercise type they would want a colleague to have done. A preference for simulation would be direct counter-evidence. ## Maintenance - Last tended: 2026-09-08 - Next review: 2026-12-08 ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/A Game-Changing Approach to Accessibility Education]] — Olivia Richter, WordPress Accessibility Day 2025.