Not an Edge Case

I turned VoiceOver back on and my phone told me something about myself.

“Touch accommodations are inactive while VoiceOver is on.”

I’d set up touch accommodations a few days before. I wondered why my phone didn’t feel any different. Then I turned VoiceOver off for a minute to show my mom something. When I turned it back on, that’s what it said. One accessibility feature turns the other off. As if the person who needs VoiceOver and the person who needs touch accommodations can’t be the same person.

But they are. I’m both. I’m blind, so I use VoiceOver to read my phone. I also have motor and coordination issues, so touch accommodations would help me. I set one up, and the machine silently switched the other off.

Accessibility is built one disability at a time. That’s the whole problem. Every feature assumes a single user with a single need. VoiceOver is for blind people. Touch accommodations is for people with motor issues. The software never imagined one body that needs both. So it treats them as a choice. You can have this, or you can have that.

I don’t have that choice. My disabilities stack. Blindness plus autism plus chronic illness plus motor issues. Not four separate people. One person. And the tools I’m supposed to use keep splitting me into pieces.

The apps made for autistic people assume I can see. Tiimo, the time blindness app, is built on visuals. It’s meant to help with time blindness, and time blindness is one of my symptoms, but the whole interface assumes a user who can look at a screen. The people who made it understood autism. They never asked whether an autistic person might also be blind.

The apps made for chronically ill people are often the same. I tried Bearable, a health tracking app, a few years ago. I couldn’t use it. When I told their support it was inaccessible, they said they weren’t planning to make it accessible. A health app for chronically ill people, and they decided blind chronically ill people weren’t part of who they were building for. I looked again recently. Their own app listing still only claims visual accessibility features. Larger text. Dark mode. Reduced motion. Nothing for a screen reader. The answer hasn’t changed.

Then there are the developers building things for blind people. They assume more sound is the answer. Add a sound cue, a beep, a spoken label, and you’ve made it accessible. But sound can make something less accessible for me. I have auditory processing issues and sensory overload. Too much sound is its own barrier. Sometimes it’s specifically spatial sound, audio meant to show where things are in a space, a sound moving from one side to the other to indicate a door or a direction. That doesn’t help me either. I have topographical agnosia. I don’t have a mental map, so there’s no picture for the sound to fill in. Spatial audio assumes the user can turn sound into a sense of space. I can’t. The people who think they understand blindness never ask what happens when the blind person is also autistic, also easily overwhelmed by noise, also has no internal map of where things are.

Even the hardware that’s supposed to fit me assumes a life I don’t have. A Keychron mechanical keyboard sounds perfect on paper. You can choose switches, reprogram keys, make it work for your body. But the app that does the reprogramming isn’t very accessible. The switches cost as much as a whole new keyboard. And I can’t know before I buy whether it’ll actually be better than what I have. Mine is missing three or four screws, most of its rubber feet are gone, and some keys are broken from falling off hospital beds. The product was designed for a stable desk and a stable life. I have a hospital bed and a body that drops things.

None of this is about one bad app or one flawed feature. It’s a pattern. The whole industry builds accessibility for one disability at a time, and multiply disabled people fall through the gap between features. When VoiceOver turns off touch accommodations, that’s not a bug. It’s the whole model, made visible.

We exist. There are more of us than you think. Multiply disabled people aren’t a rare edge case. We’re a whole category, and we’ve been building our own workarounds in the gaps you left because the tools assumed we were someone else. We are not two users. We are one person, and we need the features to work together, not take turns.

And that’s the ask. When you build a feature for blindness, ask what happens to the person who is also autistic, also chronically ill, also motor-impaired. Test the features on the same person, not separate personas. Because that person is me. That person is a lot of us.

We’re not an edge case. You’ve just been building around us instead of for us.