The Questions Tax

Every time a new app shows up, I pay a tax before I can use it.

A sighted person opens an app and it works or it doesn’t. They find out in ten seconds. I find out after an hour. Is every button labeled? Does the screen reader read the headings? Can I reach everything with the keyboard? Is the thing I need even text, or is it buried in an icon I can’t see?

That checking is the tax. I pay it on everything.

I’ve lost count of how many games I’ve bought and couldn’t play. Every button read as “Canvas.” Not Play, not Settings, not Save. Just Canvas, over and over. The game might have been good. I’ll never know.

What makes it worse is the money. Often I can’t get a refund for something that’s inaccessible. I pay for it, I can’t play it, and the money’s just gone. I can’t afford that. My income is low and irregular. Some months there’s enough and some months there isn’t, and I can’t let money leak out on things I can’t use.

So I’ve gotten hesitant to even try paid games. Not because I don’t want to play. Because I might spend money on something I can’t use and not get it back. And the only thing I usually have to go on is whether other blind people can play it. That doesn’t tell me anything about me. Just because they can play it doesn’t mean I can. My disabilities don’t stack the way theirs do. But their word is all I’ve got, and it’s not enough to risk the money on.

It’s not just games. It’s apps and websites and the new tool someone recommends because it changed their workflow. They mean well. They saw the thing and it looked useful and they sent it to me. What they don’t see is the hour I’ll spend deciding whether I can use it at all.

A sighted person gets to skip that hour. That’s the part that’s hard to explain. The tax isn’t the disability. It’s the evaluation of everything against the disability, every time, before I ever get to do the thing I wanted to do.

I did it today. I spent part of my day checking whether a new publishing tool would work with my screen reader, whether the fields had labels, whether I could reach everything with a keyboard. Not writing. Not publishing. Checking. That’s the tax. It’s paid in hours and in energy I don’t get back, and it comes out of the same reserve I need for everything else.

It compounds. The more tools the world expects you to juggle, the more taxes you pay. Every new app, every new service, every platform that updates and breaks the thing that used to work. The updates are the worst, because the tax isn’t a one-time cost. You pay it, you get the tool working, and then it updates and you pay it again.

There’s a name for this. It’s not new. Every disabled person I know has their own version of it. You can’t just try a new thing. You have to evaluate the thing first, and the evaluation is work, and nobody sees it because it happens before the thing is even in your hands.

I don’t have a fix for it. I have a way of noticing it. The question isn’t “can a disabled person use this.” It’s “how much does it cost them to find out.” And that cost is something we’re supposed to pay quietly, out of the same energy we were trying to save by using the tool in the first place.