Disability

Christian ministries for the chronically ill keep building events and platforms that exclude the very people they exist to serve. Live-only conferences, video-based content, paywalled recordings, and inaccessible websites aren’t just oversights. They’re choices.

Fatigue from chronic illness doesn’t respond to rest. I picture it as a wave coming toward me. Caffeine, music, a splash of water on my face are my surfboard. Sometimes they hold. Sometimes the wave flings me off anyway.

I spent thirty years believing I hated writing. The problem was never writing. It was the barrier between my thoughts and the finished words, and the mom who saw that before I did.

The ultimate goal is an organization for multiply disabled people. But most of us were taught we can’t contribute before we ever got the chance to try. The school rebuilds what the systems took.

Apple disables touch accommodations when VoiceOver is active. Disability services prescribes dictation for someone who can’t use it. Both come from the same assumption: that disabled people have one condition, one accommodation, one box to check.

The federal government created ABLE accounts so disabled people could receive funds without losing benefits. No fundraising platform will deposit to them. That’s not how this is supposed to work.

NVDA doesn’t tell you whether a window is maximized when you query the title. JAWS does. I built a small add-on that adds this feature, with a dedicated command and an optional NVDA+T enhancement that matches the JAWS behavior.

I’ve been sitting with a vision for months. A learning program designed for multiply disabled people from the ground up. Not accommodations bolted onto a broken system, but something built for us as the default case. This isn’t a launch. It’s a ramp.

A reflection on seven months of loss, change, and becoming. How my plans fell away so something else could take shape, and how I found peace with who I’m becoming, even while some questions remain unanswered.

The existing word prediction tools don’t work with NVDA. So I built my own add-on that predicts words using n-gram analysis, announces them through NVDA’s speech engine, and works inside the screen reader instead of against it.