July is Disability Pride Month: a time to celebrate disability identity, challenge the assumptions that hold disabled people back, and recognise that disability is not something to be overcome or hidden. It is part of who people are.
This year’s theme is “The World Works Better With Us.” We think that’s exactly right. And it’s a theme that means something particular to us, because the last eight years have taught us precisely that.
What is Disability Pride Month?
Disability Pride Month has been observed every July in the UK since 2017, growing from an American civil rights tradition that began in 1990, the same year the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. In the UK, around 16.8 million people live with a disability; one in four of the population. Despite this, disabled people continue to face significant barriers: to employment, to technology, to public life, to the basic expectation that the world was built with them in mind.
Disability Pride Month doesn’t ask disabled people to be inspirational. It asks the rest of the world to catch up.
It is, in the words of disability charity Scope, a time to celebrate creativity, resilience and achievement, and to challenge the negative attitudes that still hold people back. The green stripe on the Disability Pride flag specifically represents sensory disabilities, including blindness and all other visual impairments. That stripe is close to our hearts.
What Eight Years in This Community Have Taught Us
RealSAM was founded in the UK in 2018, in partnership with RNIB. In the years since, we’ve had thousands of conversations with blind and partially sighted people — and with the family members, carers, and support workers who stand alongside them.
We want to share some of what we’ve learned. Not as a company speaking about a community, but as a company that has been shaped by one.
Independence doesn’t mean doing everything alone. This is the thing we hear most often, and the thing we got wrong, early on, in how we thought about our own product. Independence isn’t the absence of support. It’s the presence of choice. It’s being able to call your daughter because you want to, not because you need to. It’s being able to ask for help without feeling like you’ve given something up. The people who use RealSAM don’t want to be self-sufficient in some impossible way — they want to manage their daily lives on their own terms. That’s a different thing.
Complexity is a form of exclusion. Every unnecessary step in a piece of technology is a barrier. Every visual menu that could have been a voice command is a closed door. Every update that changes how something works is a relationship broken with a user who had learned to trust it. We have heard, many times, from people who stopped using their phones entirely — not because they couldn’t learn, but because the learning never stopped. Technology that demands constant re-learning from people who already have enough to manage is not accessible. It is just complicated.
Pride is not the opposite of struggle. Some of the people we’ve spoken to over eight years are thriving. Some are in the early stages of sight loss and frightened. Some are managing multiple conditions at once. Some are older adults who hadn’t used a smartphone before and found the whole category of technology intimidating. Disability Pride doesn’t erase any of that. What it does is insist that every person’s experience — whether triumphant or difficult or somewhere in the vast middle — deserves dignity. We have tried, imperfectly and with much guidance from our community, to build that belief into what we do.
The green stripe matters. We are aware, every day, that sight loss doesn’t arrive alone for many people. Hearing loss and sight loss frequently occur together. Dexterity challenges often accompany the conditions that cause vision loss in older adults. Mental health is deeply entwined with the experience of losing a sense that the world assumes you have. We have built for one community, but the people in that community are whole people with complex lives. We try to remember that.
What We’re Still Learning
We don’t get everything right. Technology designed for a specific community still requires ongoing conversation with that community to remain relevant, useful, and genuinely respectful.
What we ask of ourselves, every year, is to keep listening. To bring the same curiosity to the next eight years that we brought to the first eight. To remain a company that is shaped by the people it serves, rather than one that simply delivers to them.
That is what Disability Pride Month means to us, in practice. Not a logo update. A commitment.
How to Mark Disability Pride Month
If you’d like to get involved this July, here are a few places worth knowing about:
Scope’s Disability Pride Month page has resources and events across the UK.
RNIB — 0303 123 9999 — is the best starting point for anyone navigating sight loss who is looking for community and support.
Deafblind UK supports people living with combined sight and hearing loss and is running the #SeeHearUs campaign this month, celebrating the unique strengths of every deafblind person.
For our own community: RealSAM BookClub is open to all blind and partially sighted people—our July pick, Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova, is available as an unabridged 11-hour audiobook narrated by Kirsty Strain. The discussion opens on the 25th of July, and everyone is welcome. Learn more about BookClub on our website.
The world works better with us. It always has. Happy Disability Pride Month.
