Confessions of a reformed disability simulation enthusiast

Many years ago, before I knew any better, I single handedly conducted a disability simulation exercise in my workplace. It did not go well. I watched with increasing horror as my lovely workmates struggled to use their computers or move around their office wearing glasses designed to simulate various serious eye conditions or blindness. 

I quickly realised that I was causing harm by creating an artificial situation, making people’s perceptions of the impacts of blindness and low vision worse by placing them in a situation rare in real life. Depending on how they processed the experience, those participants could believe that the utter helplessness, disempowerment, confusion, embarrassment, vulnerability, and lack of capability they felt in such an unfamiliar situation is the everyday experience of all disabled people. That is counterproductive and false. Such unintended consequences and emotional reactions can cause lasting damage, even with a comprehensive debrief.

Even someone who suddenly lost their sight, never mind someone who faced a slow deterioration, would not be expected to do their everyday tasks without support. They would have coaching in orientation and mobility to safely navigate their homes and communities. They might learn to use accessible technology to enter or return to the workforce, perhaps learn Braille. They could then join the sighted world, to work and participate in the community as they chose.

What I was doing felt dishonest and exploitative. Never again. But these simulations still take place, despite opposition from disabled people. I was disappointed to find that Blind Low Vision New Zealand is still doing them.

What disability simulation exercises do not, and cannot include, is the social context of disability which does affect the way we navigate the world, and the depression, sometimes chronic pain and exhaustion, and internalised ableism which can be the result of living with impairment and disability over time. Nor do they acknowledge the ingenuity, problem solving skills, and dark humour developed out of necessity in community.

Disability simulation exercises are widely considered misguided and bad practice for a variety of reasons, with some supporting research.

Research from the US supports the findings of negative outcomes and lack of benefits from disability simulation training. The only New Zealand research I found was a Dunedin study that found little evidence of change from vision simulation exercises and concluded that a framework for cultural competence can be used to understand how vision simulation can be used as part of an educational experience. Sometimes it depends on who is driving the research.

It is impossible to simulate the experience of impairment and disability in all its complexity, nuance and richness. Simulations come from a culture of a power imbalance, of fixing individual problems, caused by individual deficit. They do not necessarily encourage empathy or imagination. The exercises are inauthentic because it is impossible to replicate the deeply human experience of disabled people in such a crude way. Reducing disability to superficial physicality does little for real change. 

Politicians and other high profile people taking part in simulations is gimmicky, patronising and publicity seeking for them rather than for the issue. Little or no change results from them, because real change is not usually a quick fix. Taking an individualistic approach to fixing common environmental problems by simulation exercises does not lead to lasting change. Involving disabled experts as equals in planning, design and implementation will. 

By participating in such exercises, as many of us have done, we are colluding in our own disempowerment and the appropriation of our voices. 

No other group in society would tolerate such exercises, although I have seen a video of a brave man undergoing an electrically simulated labour amid much hilarity from female observers. But no one would seriously dare to try to simulate the experience of another race or culture in the 21st century. It would be as insulting, superficial and demeaning as it is for disabled people. In the US, disability simulations have been likened to blackface. We should not be the only group expected to allow this. No one should have to physically undergo such an experience to believe it. Listening to us and working with us is the way forward.

Neither is disability a game. Taking part in a very limited simulation exercise is one non-disabled person’s finite experience, soon forgotten. 

Making the world work for everyone should be a challenge to human ingenuity and creativity; a co-operative and innovative endeavour with equal partners. Listening to disabled people as equals means accepting that we will challenge accepted norms, reflect different experiences and know what needs to change.

The intention to show non-disabled people the barriers we face, and to engage empathy is good, but the methodology is wrong. Finding quality local learning resources that go beyond simulation and “awareness” to action and change, is not easy. We can look for learning resources developed, led, and controlled by disabled people and our own organisations to recommend. People who really want to learn can read, watch and listen to a variety of disabled voices, beyond the inspirational and the self- focused. Disability is wonderfully complicated, so there is no one quick, easy resource that can teach someone all they need to know in an afternoon.

If non-disabled people really want to make a difference to the lives of disabled people in a disabling world they could look for and listen to those voices and act on what they learn from disabled people’s experience, rather than trying to appropriate and reflect it through a non-disabled world view.

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