A couple weeks ago, my mom said she wished she didn’t have to have a phone because of all the spam she gets.
I agreed, but for a different reason.
For me, the phone is often harder to use. Small screens, touch gestures, mobile-first layouts, and apps designed around visual scanning can all become physically and cognitively exhausting. A lot of the time, I wish I could just use my computer.
AI holds a lot of promise for disabled people. For anyone operating a body or a mind in manual mode, these systems can act as a literal cognitive prosthetic. They handle the execution logic that standard environments take for granted; they summarize mountains of dense text, automate multistep system tasks, and keep things moving forward when your own internal CPU cycles are completely saturated. If you’ve got a limited energy pool, the idea of offloading your executive function to an intelligent system isn’t just a gimmick. It’s a baseline accessibility requirement.
The productivity advice says: use a second brain. Pick a note-taking app, capture everything, link ideas, review weekly. Build a system and trust it.
I’ve tried most of the popular options. Notion collapsed under its own visual complexity. Obsidian’s graph view is a spatial nightmare for someone with topographical agnosia. Roam required too much upfront structure on days when I have nothing left for structure. Apple Notes doesn’t persist across my fragmented hardware setup.
There’s no community that accepts my whole stack. Every space I enter runs me through a filter. Sometimes I get bounced on the disability check. Sometimes on the faith. Sometimes on the AI. I built Hermes Agent because I had nowhere else to go.
I never know whether I should lead with my disability profile. The social cost is high regardless.
Sourcing Note: The examples in this article are not hypotheticals. They come from my own captured daily logs, technical sessions, and lived experiences. For a plain-language breakdown of the physical mechanics behind my diagnoses, see my Human Terms summary.
There’s a model of disability that feels mathematically tidy and is almost entirely wrong.
It goes like this: a person has Disability A and Disability B. Their overall difficulty is therefore $A + B$. If we build an accommodation for A, we’ve reduced the total load to just $B$. Progress has been made. The spreadsheet balances. Everyone goes home feeling useful.
Have you ever thought about how much of your life gets handled by background processes? For most people, basic functions like swallowing and breathing are automatic, handled by the system’s kernel without any conscious input. For me, these are manual system calls. I call this “Manual Mode.” I don’t have a background thread for swallowing. Every single swallow is a conscious execution; if I lose focus, I find myself choking or realizing I’ve stopped clearing my throat entirely. My breathing follows a similar logic. While my body technically keeps me alive, it doesn’t do it efficiently. If I’m deep in a coding problem, I forget the instruction to breathe deeply. My system starts running on shallow air, my intracranial pressure spikes, and I end up with a system crash in the form of a debilitating headache. Every breath is a manual command, and the CPU cycles required to keep my physical hardware running are cycles I can’t use for anything else.
The modern tech industry is built on a specific promise: buy into one ecosystem, and your digital life will effortlessly sync.
But that convenience is a privilege. When you live with blindness, multi-system chronic illness, neurodivergence, and topographical agnosia (a spatial processing disability that prevents my brain from forming mental maps, making it as easy to get lost in a complex software menu as it is on a physical street), brand loyalty is a luxury. You can’t choose a platform simply because it integrates well. You choose a platform because it allows you to function. You have to constantly weigh the cognitive load of one operating system against the screen reader reliability of another.
As someone with multiple disabilities, including total blindness, neurodivergence, and chronic health conditions, I’ve found that traditional education often fails to accommodate my learning needs. I’ve attempted college online four times and community college once in person. Each attempt came with major barriers that made it hard to succeed.
Barriers included rigid schedules, campuses that required physical navigation and mental mapping, fixed expectations around learning styles, a lack of understanding from educators on how to support diverse needs, and financial aid that was only available if I attended at least half-time. Those obstacles made it clear I needed a different approach to learning, one that actually fit my abilities and circumstances. That’s what pushed me toward self-paced education.
Gaming has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. From puzzles as a child to text-based adventures in school, games have always been a place of joy, challenge, and escape.
As a blind, neurodivergent, and chronically ill woman, finding games I can actually play and enjoy has become increasingly difficult. This post is for other disabled gamers, accessibility advocates, and developers who want to understand what accessibility looks like in practice, not just in theory.