When You Ask for the Wrong Accommodation

AWP's puzzling answer to the promise of "inclusiveity"

One of my professors recently handed out a flurry of printed pages while exclaiming, “I’ve just attended this seminar on inclusivity! So now I’m all about making sure EVERYTHING is on paper!” This statement burst open with confidence. Where there are reams of dead trees, there is access. It all happened in such a blur of motion that I didn’t have time to state that — speaking as the only physically disabled person in the room — all piles of paper do is make my life more difficult. They necessitate a bigger backpack than the one I routinely carry, they force me to find physical spaces for things I’ve made no prior space for. Even more to the point, digital technology has always made my academic life possible. Now it makes my teaching life possible.

When I was in 6th grade, I was failing three classes because the disability that I was born with renders it difficult for me to handwrite speedily. I wasn’t finishing in-class assignments and I wasn’t answering my homework questions as fully as I needed to. My teachers decided I was “lazy,” but my parents, who knew better, suggested that I get an accommodation to be able to type my assignments. Laptops were monumental affairs in the mid-90’s, clunky but portable, and not something that any of my classmates were used to seeing. But they existed, and, after several tests assured that my typing flew at speeds my fingers could never begin to aspire to on their own, I was granted the use of a school-district-owned laptop. No more failing grades!

Cut to AWP 2025, where a panel I’ve proposed has garnered a place on the Tentative Schedule of Events. In a tone that reads with the same excited assurance that the secret to universal accessibility has been discovered, one of the Moderator’s newly minted responsibilities reads to me like a waking anxiety dream:

I have a lot of questions about this mandate, starting with what I understand about accommodations for people who are visually impaired, one being that 16-18-point font is considered the ideal, not 14-16 as this states. I also understand that screen readers have done for countless visually impaired people what laptops have done for me, and of course, paper excludes screen readers.

I find it fascinating, too, that, while it’s generally understood that at-home printers have become something of a rarity for people under a certain age, we’re directed to print these at home “to avoid the cost of onsite printing.” This is an organization that charges $325 for nonmember “early-bird registration,” $435 for member registration on-site, and $540 for nonmember onsite registration. Authors who wish to sell books at this literary conference can only do so through the Bookfair, whose early-bird discount rate for exhibit space is $975, going for over $1,000 at later dates. And they promise that they’ll still charge you up the ass for printing.

Large-print accommodations for visual impairments, by the way, can’t be usefully achieved with regular paper. Are we all supposed to have thick matte card stock lying around?

No matter the case, I spent months convinced I wouldn’t require an accommodation for AWP because, while cerebral palsy is a mobility impairment, it doesn’t impair my movement all that much. What it does impair is my ability to run from the copy machine to the printers to the classroom and tote reams of paper without wrinkling them against my crutch-handles. Many profs in my department extoll the virtues of paper, but I have not, so far, had a single student complaint about the digital materials I rely on. I give students the option to work on paper, and had one who, having filled up multiple notebooks as a requirement for her major, was wearing down so many pencils and feeling such cramps in her fingers that she asked if she could switch and turn her work in exclusively in our class online portal.

It would appear that a lot of people in the MFA world went to the same inclusivity seminar and left ecstatic that their “tech is evil, paper is benevolence itself” narratives don’t render them ableist, or so they’d all love to believe. My research so far yields nothing about a relationship between visual impairments and a necessity for reading on paper at all times, and I implore you to let me know if any data or even first-hand anecdotal evidence can back up this link. I’m concerned that “screens are annoying” is taking on a gravity that should be reserved for documented disabilities, and that wouldn’t rankle me so hard if it weren’t actively making more difficult the indisputable disability with which I came into this world (on this day, as it happens, October 6th!)

Writing the necessary email to the Accommodations faction of the AWP committee felt like being 7 or 8 years old, resignedly taking a handful of quarters from the well-intentioned parent at a birthday party who assures me that I can have plenty of fun playing arcade games while the rest of the kids roller skate. I did not have fun. I’d like to say that my workouts and hikes in the intervening years healed the wound of roller rink birthday parties, and until I had to write that damn email I really thought they had.

This brings me back to an issue I haven’t had to contend with in over a year because, if you’ve been following along, you know that, due to the funding I was offered to get my MFA in this particular program, I am now in my second year in a red state, with continually hilarious results. My norms and politics differ mightily from what’s generally expected around here, and I sure wish Milledgeville believed in sidewalks. But people who’ve been with me for a bit also know that I’ve had the chance to branch out into wider cultural topics this past summer because nobody in Milledgeville stops me on the street to say a bullshit disability-related thing. That happened all the time when I lived in San Francisco and Seattle, two proudly progressive blue cities. It does not happen here. The last time it was even brought up was when I grabbed some nuts from the vending machine as a desperate post-workout-pre-class-quick-protein move, and an undergraduate at the adjacent vending machine asked, “Is it a challenge to bend down?”

Her voice was genuine, warm, and only an appropriate level of concerned. She was more than amenable to help if I needed it, but, as it happens, it wasn’t a challenge, not these days. It might have been. I had a student ask if I needed help carrying a backpack. That’s it. Those are the disability-related remarks I receive. The question they never ask me is whether I “identify” as disabled, and if I’m in general agreement with the population of this Georgia town on anything it’s probably this: “identifying” as disabled is ridiculous. I’ve had these crutches since I was 9 years old. Prior to the operation that necessitated them I was a toe-walker, walking strictly on my tip-toes, and years before that, I was born a two-pound blue baby, 3 months premature. These are just the facts.

Now that I’m back to dealing with proud progressives, I’m forced to remember how alienating the doctrines can be, how closed-off the approaches “inclusion.” Conservative politics hold no lure for me whatsoever, but in moments like this, I see why certain people have faith in them: they don’t experience the feeling of alienation at their hands that I’m describing here. Some will immediately argue that conservative politics themselves are alienating, which of course they are. But right now, I’m alienated specifically from a disability/accessibility policy. A rule implemented to improve the lives of disabled people is specifically excluding me, while, as far as I can tell, not actually helping anyone with visual impairments with its under-16-18-print font.

I have not yet received a response to my email about the accommodation I require. I’m moving past fury and despair into morbid curiosity, and with a good night’s sleep, should I achieve one, I might wake up into regular curiosity tomorrow.

Or I might have to figure out what to do with the fury.