By: Candice Stilwell, staff writer

Our world has been designed to cater toward able-bodied persons. Whether it’s the workplace or learning environments, able-bodied people have it easier than those of us who have disabilities. 

Getting accommodations can be very difficult regardless of where you are or what you need. However, during the pandemic, getting accommodations has been easier, because everyone needed them.  

Disabilities studies expert Kelly Munger, Ph.D., who works at Eastern Washington University, said, “People with disabilities have been asking for years for accommodations, for people to be allowed to work at home. And they’d say, ‘Oh no, that would change how we have to work. You can’t work at home.’ Now everybody is working at home.” This newfound largely or entirely remote way of working allows people with disabilities – including Munger, who has cerebral palsy – to be better at their jobs by allowing them to work in whatever way works best for them.  

But now, much of life may be going back to normal, and people with disabilities may be pushed back into the corner. Senior lecturer and Directory of Disability Studies at Eastern Washington University Ryan Parrey, who is legally blind, told me that this step backwards is “because the system is designed that way… to forget [people with disabilities].”  

Before the pandemic, people with disabilities struggled with their jobs for a variety of reasons. For Munger, it was the issue of transportation. Parrey explained, “Prior to the pandemic we would just get a Lyft 20 minutes in advance and be wherever [we] need to be on time. It was fine. It was something we relied on and then that stopped.” But then again, with the shift toward working remotely, Munger didn’t have to worry about transportation to work remaining accessible.  

The accommodations available for people with disabilities help them be more productive, but this could be true for lots of people working from home. According to the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, 10,000 University of Chicago employees believe they are just as productive at home as they are in their offices, and 30% of them believed they were actually more productive at home. Stanford University did a similar study on a Chinese travel agency and found that remote working “led to a 13% performance increase.”  

Munger also explained that during the pandemic, people with disabilities didn’t have to worry about accessibility in their social lives either. Instead of worrying about public transport and venue access, you could simply go in the living room to watch a live performance of your favorite band. 

In the past, attending concerts, going to the mall or eating at certain restaurants may not have been accessible, which prevented people with certain disabilities from being able to spend time with friends or family. The problem, Parrey says, is that “returning to some pre-pandemic way, where [virtual spaces] aren’t provided anymore because [many] don’t need them is leaving out the fact that disabled people are part of the world who needed them before the pandemic, enjoyed them during the pandemic and are worried about losing them again afterwards.”  

We have made so much progress in providing people with accommodations this past year. But we need to keep these accommodations in place, so we can keep people with disabilities connected the world around them.