International Day of Persons with Disabilities: A Q&A with Camp Digital speaker Claire Dellar

Today marks International Day of Persons with Disabilities, a day which reinforces the importance of “ securing the rights of people with disabilities, so they can participate fully, equally and effectively in society with others, and face no barriers in all aspects of their lives”.

It’s been a busy month for us at Nexer as we gear up for the second of our series of accessibility roundtable events, focused on engaging leaders in the accessibility space to discuss challenges facing their organisations, and strategies to achieve success. 

In the course of planning our first roundtable session, we’d been chatting with Claire Dellar, accessibility strategist and founder of Wheelchair Tango Foxtrot consulting, and Camp Digital 2025 speaker. We talked about International Day of Persons with Disabilities and wanted to mark it with something collaborative. 

We had some great, in-depth conversations, and in the end, felt they were best suited to a Q&A-style chat. So, here’s a writeup of the important topics we covered. A huge thank you to Claire for sharing her time and experience with us!

Q1: The social model of disability is a worldview that says that people are disabled by barriers presented by societies, as opposed to impairments or differences. Claire, in our conversations about attitudes to accessibility, you’ve used the phrase 'just build a ramp!' as a practical call to action. Could you explain more about what that means?

Is accessibility and inclusion your first thought or an afterthought? "Just build a ramp" is about who you are designing for. It’s about turning the 80:20 rule on its head. Design for the 20%, not the 80%. Some people face significant barriers in the world. Make life easy for them, and you will almost always make it easier for everyone else as well.

Architects talk about the curb cut effect. Curb cuts, or drop curbs, are where the pavement slopes down to the road, so there is no step to get on or off the pavement. As a wheelchair user, I get really frustrated with drivers who stop in front of curb cuts. I can’t just go around them by stepping down off the pavement. We are the 20%.

Curb cuts don’t just benefit people like myself. They help people with prams. People pulling suitcases. People on crutches because they sprained their ankle. Even just someone who is distracted and might trip up a step. The curb cut helps them as well as me. Very few people would find it easier to step up onto a pavement than walk up the curb cut. They are the 80%.

In digital products and services, I tend to talk about ‘designing for the 20%’. A mobile phone app that has clear, easy to read text helps a dyslexic like me or someone with a visual impairment. We are the 20%. It also helps someone who is trying to glance at directions in a busy crowd. Maybe they are trying to read their phone on a jam-packed train. They are the 80%.

So what does this have to do with the social model of disability? The medical model sees me as someone who is broken, who has a condition that needs to be fixed. That makes me the problem. The social model says that I have a condition that impairs my ability to interact with the world. But if every pavement had a curb cut at the end of it, it would matter less that I use wheels instead of legs to move around. If every IT system had clear, easy to read text, it would matter less that I am dyslexic.

I’m not arguing that I wouldn’t like to have a fully working heart. But, I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I were able-bodied. I would have less empathy. I would probably be in a different career. I might not have formed the deep friendships that come from needing other people and doing my utmost to be a great friend to them in return.

Indeed, my dyslexia has its drawbacks. It is also why I can see how everything is interconnected. In my work, that enables me to see how change in one part of a complex system has a knock-on effect somewhere else. In my personal life it has given me a deep spirituality.

Digital product teams have a tendency to design the app they think the 80% would like and then try to adapt it for the 20%. My argument is, design the app for the 20%, it will still work for the 80%. In other words, “just build the damn ramp!”.

Q2. In your blog post ‘Accessibility is a choice’, you write “Accessibility is a choice, sometimes an unconscious one. We choose how to communicate. But every accessibility issue in this blog is the result of a choice someone made.”. Could you elaborate on this point?

Yes, that phrase has made a lot of people uncomfortable. People argue that they chose to use a PDF because they are ignorant. They don't know Word documents are more accessible. I’d argue there are two levels of choices: the individual and the societal.

Some individuals are aware that PDFs are less accessible than Word documents. Some are aware that pale grey text on a pale yellow background is not readable for many people. They’ve made a choice to put aesthetics or convenience above accessibility.

More difficult to tackle is the problem of societal choices. Society has chosen not to value me the way it values someone able-bodied. Society has chosen not to educate children like me alongside neurotypical children. Society has chosen not to represent us on television, in the media, in books.

Society has chosen to portray us as less than, as benefit scroungers, as a drain on the public purse. Society does not see us as not valuable members. Ableism is so widespread in our society. disabled people are even biased against ourselves. We grow up with it. It’s in healthcare, education, the workplace, media, online and in our built environment. The world around me is telling me that I don’t matter, because they don’t choose to create a society without barriers. They choose to design for the 80%.

We all absorb the constant negativity about disabled and neurodiverse people. Is it a wonder some people make a choice to put ascetics or convenience above accessibility? When society has chosen not to expose the 80% to people like me, is it any wonder that, in their ignorance, they choose to use a PDF instead of a Word document?

If we start designing for the 20%, we will become seen. We will be valued. We will change the story of what it means to be disabled and neurodiverse. We will be revolutionaries.

Q3: At Nexer we’ve been building out Employee Resource Groups, and the Neurodiversity Ways of Working Guide has emerged from the Access at Nexer ERG, which focuses on creating a more inclusive work environment. What piece of advice would you share with organisations wanting to start the process of being more inclusive?

We must recognise the importance of leadership in creating an inclusive work environment. Our senior leaders must model the behaviour they want to see. They should set an example and they need to talk about what they are doing.

For example, I recently worked with a team on their presentations. They needed to improve the accessibility and inclusiveness. This is not just about using the accessibility checker in Microsoft PowerPoint. That only gets us so far.

It’s describing yourself when you introduce yourself. You cannot assume that everyone in the audience can see you. It’s making sure images reflect the diversity of humans. It’s describing those images, because not everyone can take in the content of the picture. It’s using live captions and providing transcripts. It’s designing for the 20%.

I also do a lot of public speaking about my lived experience. It is not my responsibility to educate the people around me about disability. In the same way, it is not the responsibility of my partner, who is black, to educate people about racism. What we can do is tell our stories in the hope we spark empathy that leads other people to go educate themselves. That’s when true culture change happens.

Q4: We talked a bit about how emerging technologies like Copilot can support employees with access needs, and it’s something we’re also exploring within our own team. How do you see these technologies enhancing accessibility in the workplace, and how do they fit in with a wider drive to embed inclusion?

AI is going to have a massive impact on all our workplaces. 

This morning I asked one of my favourite AI tools to create an outline for a benefits management framework. Is that cheating, or is that levelling the playing field? It didn’t produce anything I disagreed with . It consulted all the same sources that I would have – after all, I wrote some of them!

I remember when calculators were first introduced in schools back in the 1980s . There were lots of arguments about whether they would stop children learning maths. But I still had to understand the calculation and have a rough idea what the answer should be. How else could I trust that I had correctly used the calculator?

It’s the same with AI. It is going to be the norm in our workplaces within a few years. By using AI, I get to level up with my neurotypical, able-bodied peers. They have the energy and clarity of thought to be able to start with a blank sheet of paper and write a benefits strategy. I still must have the expertise to check my AI’s work.

There are other advantages to AI. It makes it easier to produce clearly written documents. I use it to create easy read versions of things I publish. Machine translation has been around for a long time. AI will boost that to another level so we can cheaply translate materials.

My favourite AI command helps me write this blog. “Simplify the following text. Keep all the meaning, just break it up into shorter sentences. Use simpler vocabulary and write in the active voice. Use bullet points where there are lists, to break up the text.” Using that command, I have rewritten documents that originally scored at postgraduate reading level. with the AI, I turn them into something a 12 year old can understand, without losing any of the meaning. There needs to be a culture change, that being professional is being a clear communicator. Unfortunately, we seem to think being a professional means sounding like you’ve swallowed a dictionary.

AI also has the potential to help us design better accessibility tools. The wildly successful Be My Eyes app supports thousands of visually impaired people. It relied on volunteers being online. The volunteer would look at the image and describe it to the visually impaired person. The latest version, Be My AI, doesn’t need to rely on the availability of volunteers. it provides instantaneous descriptions at any time.

I’m often asked how to make documents, presentations or events more accessible. I thought I would ask Perplexity.AI that very question. It produced a great guide that covers all of the points I would have included. There is no longer an excuse for not having the knowledge of how to make a document accessible. You can ask the Internet for help.

Rather than worrying about its impact on the workplace, let’s educate ourselves how to safely and effectively use AI. Employers get more productivity and workers get a better working environment. I’d call that a win for everyone.

Q5: How do you think society would change if it truly valued people with disabilities? What differences would we see in everyday life and in organisational practices?

Society would be a kinder and happier place if it valued people with disabilities.

Yes, as a disabled person, I would love it to be easy for me to go out for a meal, go on holiday, work, see my family and friends or just manage daily life. I think the bigger change would be that people would be kinder to themselves. Have compassion for themselves. Let themselves be happier.

Society chooses to see dependence on other people or things as a weakness. Actually, no. Society chooses to see some forms of dependence as a weakness. A parent depending on a nursery to provide childcare is acceptable. A parent depending on other people to help them wash and dress is not.

I see a beauty in dependence. An opportunity to feel good by making someone else’s life better. And I’m not just some passive recipient of support. I give back to those I depend on. Sometimes that’s financial. Sometimes that’s friendship.

I’d also love not to experience hate. I’ve had people shout “cripple” at me out of car windows. In my career, I’ve been told I will never achieve what an able-bodied person could achieve. I’ve been told “the world doesn’t revolve around you” when asking to do reports in Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint.

But why do people behave that way? I believe it is fear. Fear of becoming disabled. Fear of their life changing. Fear of being seen as weak because you depend on someone else. If we truly valued people with disabilities, becoming disabled would no longer be a fearful experience. In lashing out at disabled people, we are pushing away the fear that one day we might also have a disability. That we might also be seen as weak.

All this focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than people strengths.

What would I see in this kinder, happier world? Better mental health. People being welcome and included rather than feared for what they represent. A workplace that works with me to use my strengths and skills rather than trying to force everyone to work the same way. Productivity would be higher, unemployment would be lower, profits would increase.

Everything would be different. Our clothes, our environment, our technology, our healthcare and our education system. But underlying that is happiness.

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As disability and disabled peoples' experiences are often intersectional, we really liked this format of people pairing up, to reflect on the clashes and overlaps not always covered by WCAG checklists and personas focused solely on conditions and the medical model.

If anyone else would like to join forces and share their experience, we'd love to hear from you, so we can surface this learning throughout the year.