[ID: The thumbnail from this artical. It contains a photo of a page from the Wings of Fire Comic, featuring Starflight and Fatespeaker, two black dragons with starry wings flying with a larger group of multicoloured dragons. Fatespeaker is holding Starflight's claw as they fly. A speech bubble from starflight says "...and lots and lots of scrolls... I wish-" and a bubble from fatespeaker saying "We'll find a way to make scrolls you can read, Starflight." Over the photo is text that reads "Disability in Worldbuilding: Thinking beyond your character". /End ID]

When you're writing a story in a fictional setting, worldbuilding is essential, but one area of worldbuilding I see repeatedly ignored is disability. Specifically, how disability is accommodated in a setting. Even when a character in the story is disabled, this stuff is often overlooked, so much so that A LOT of stories simply take the approach of "nothing existed before this character, they (or their allies) invented the accommodation/mobility device/assistive technology themselves".

But just like with any other aspect of worldbuilding, you need to think outside of just your characters if you want your world to feel alive and not like a flat backdrop to your story.

So if your story contains a disabled character, or a character becomes disabled during the plot, here are some things to consider about the accommodations and assistive technology they might or might not have:

1. What kind of accommodations and assistive technology already exists in your world for your character's disability?

It can be easy just to think about your character in a vacuum but unless they have a super-setting-specific disability that only exists in that world, there will almost definitely be others in their position (and even if it is specific to your setting, unless there's a specific reason why their disability is unique, there will likely be others), so think about what these other people might have come up with. What came before the modern era? How do designs vary from person-to-person? How dose the solution to the same kind of inaccessibility change based on environment? Their cultural values? How individualistic their society is? How much your character's wider community value individuality vs conformity? For example, A more conformist community might sacrifice functionality to make the mobility aid or accommodation less noticeable, whereas the individualistic society might not care as much about the appearance, or might even sacrifice functionality to make the mobility aid stand out even more in more extreme cases.

2. If something is an issue for your character, it will usually be an issue for others too

If your character has an issue with the existing technology or accommodations and requires something new to be made, there's almost definitely others with that same problem too.

This doesn't always mean that problem will be solved, mind you. In real life, things like prosthetics and wheelchairs are custom made, but a lot of their components are mass-produced, which makes it harder to deviate from the base design if a small portion of the users don't find it suitable.

In a situation where mass-production doesn't apply though, it's worth taking some time to think how different people might address the same short-comings of the existing assistive technology and accommodations in your setting. If your character makes a big innovation or change, will they share it? How do others in their community (disabled and non-disabled) react to the change? Will people who see them try to copy what they did? this is especially important to consider if your setting has some kind of widely-accessible way of getting information out, like TV's or the internet.

3. Disability aids will often mimic and reference other technology of the culture it's creator comes from

There's a reason why a lot of "invalid chairs" (the predecessor to self-propelled wheelchairs) tended to look like the popular styles of regular chairs of their era with high backs and big, padded seats, even if it wasn't the most practical design. Either that, or they looked like mini-buggies or carriages which also had their drawbacks. It's because people will draw from what they know and what already exists for inspiration, and it's much easier to convince people to use something that they can already kind of understand because it references the shape of something they already know how to use. There's also the fact that it can make sourcing parts easier, especially in time periods and settings where budget would be a serious issue. The more sleek, active frame wheelchairs we have today often use racing bike wheels with small modifications to add the push rims - one of the biggest suppliers for wheelchair wheels in the world, is actually a bike company for this reason.

4. Make sure it fits with the rest of the setting

This is a continuation from 5, and also something I mentioned in my "perfect prosthetic" video a while ago, but make sure the assistive technology matches the technological level in the rest of the setting. For example, you tend to see prosthetics that are way more technologically advanced than everything else in a lot of different genres, but I've also seen sci-fi settings with faster-than-light travel that are still using hospital wheelchairs straight out of the 1950's.

Now, the caveat here is that you can create a mis-match, just make sure there is a reason behind it. For example, if your society shuns disabled people or views disability as divine punishment, they're probably not going to put much effort collectively into innovating the technology they need. This doesn't mean individuals won't, but that will have a ripple effect on how people react to seeing that kind of invention in the world, they might look down at people who use them, or maybe even see their creation and use as heresy for defying the will of the gods, which will impact how people react to the character who needs it.

5. If there really is no existing accommodation in your setting yet, why?

...And don't just stop at "because not many people in my setting are disabled".

I mean, you *can*, but I think it's way more interesting to dig deeper than that!

It only takes one or two people to invent a solution to a problem. Keep in mind, they don't have to be the most efficient or practical solutions, especially if you're thinking about this in the context of what was available before your character, nor does it need to be in wide-spread use. It just needs to work for that person and their community. But if there genuinely is no existing assistive technology or accommodations for that disability, think about what stopped people from creating them.

Maybe it was a technical barrier that just made it too hard, maybe there's a social stigma against disability, so people don't want to associate with them or help them, or maybe some kind of legal red-tape meant something could be created, but it was banned from use (at least in public). These are all things that happened in the real world!

For example, you didn't really see self-propelled wheelchairs until the 1600's when Stephen Farfler designed his own, called the "manumotive carriage". A big part of why this was the case, was because there was very little in the way of accessibility in wider public spaces, meaning a wheelchair, even a modern one, couldn't go many places unless it was able to handle a lot more than it's modern counterparts would need to, and technology (and society) wasn't really there yet. So, for a lot of people, it was simply more efficient to be pushed or carried by someone else, or pulled by an animal in a kind of carriage or chariot. The manumotive carriage worked for Farfler, but it's design didn't really catch on as a personal "wheelchair" and if I had to guess why, it would probably be because it was quite big and bulky in order to get him over unpaved roads and grass, but this doesn't make it especially practical for getting around tight, enclosed spaces. So for most people, the older methods were simply a better fit. It is, however, thought to have influenced the design of the tricycle and bicycle, which is a great example of how innovations for disabled people often do help non-disabled folks too! (which I'll talk more about in a moment!)

[ID: a black and white drawing of a man sitting in a small car-like device with three wheels, one at the front and two at the back. Above the front wheel is a large box with two hand-cranks, one on either side, that the man is turning /End ID]

In many European cultures, morality was also often tied to disability and specifically attributed it to either being a punishment by gods, or the work of the devil in more Christian regions. "If you were disabled, you or your parents did something to deserve it" is an attitude that has unfortunately, always existed. So when you tie the existence of a vulnerable population to the displeasure of gods or the work of the devil, you get people not wanting anything to do with them at best, resulting in them being shunned from society and their existence becoming a taboo subject. Even into modern times, stigma like this persists, but when a whole culture believes it, it's going to result in a lot of disabled people getting left behind or actively shunned, like what happened in the US with Ugly Laws, or people outright killing them. In this case, disability was not necessarily associated with divine punishment on a cultural level, but rather it was associated with beggars and the poor. The ugly laws aimed to make any displays of such things illegal in public, and unfortunately in many cases, that included the bodies of disabled people themselves. The stigma pushed disabled people out of the public eye, and as a result, the development of anything that would make their quality of life better was not exactly a high priority.

finally, sign languages have been used by d/Deaf people for thousands of years, but in 1880, their use was internationally banned in schools for the Deaf thanks to The Milan Conference in favour of oralist teaching methods, so things like lip-reading and verbal speech, which isn't practical for many people. This had wide-spread impacts on the d/Deaf community. Deaf teachers who primarily used signing to communicate were fired on mass, causing unemployment of d/Deaf people to rise and students caught signing had their hands beaten and caned. As you would expect when you deprive people of language and a way to communicate, the quality of their education globally declined, which further isolated them from the wider community. So in this case, an accommodation was available and widely-used, but it's use was banned in favour of making the population who needed it conform to be more "normal".

So like I said before, you certainly CAN just stop at "This disability just isn't common" but it's so much more interesting to dig deeper than that and actually think about why. The only thing is, if you're going to use any of these kinds of reasonings for why no other examples exist, make sure you actually make it clear why within your story, not just in your world-building document.

6. Consider the Curb Cut Effect

Nothing ever happens in a vacuum in real-life, developments in one kind of technology will often have run-on effects and impact other aspects of life, and this includes disability accommodations and assistive technology.

When something created for disabled people helps others, we call it the curb cut effect. Curb cuts, the little ramps you see cut out of some footpaths and sidewalks that lead onto the road, were originally a disability accommodation for wheelchair users so they could cross the street and get onto side-walks easier, but it also helped so many other people, such as mothers with prams, cyclists (if you live somewhere where cyclists are allowed on the footpath), shoppers pushing trollies (carts) and so many others. But curb cuts are not the only example of this.

Captions were created for d/Deaf people, and are widely used by non-disabled people, especially if there is a TV in a public place such as gyms and bars. As I mentioned before, Stephen Farfler's manumotive carriage, a mobility aid he made for himself, was the predecessor and inspiration for bicycles and tricycles. A lot of search engines like google use alt-text to help you find image search results, but alt-text's primary job is to describe images and videos to people with screen-readers. Even the screen-reader itself, which works by reading on-screen text and alt-text aloud to a user who is blind, was the origin of modern text-to-speech tools, including the ones you see used on apps like Tik Tok. In my high school, we also had a program called "pathways" where you could opt to spread your classes over two years, so you would only have a few classes every day. It was designed to help disabled students who had to travel for medical treatment, so they wouldn't have as much to catch up on when they came back, but it was also very popular with athlete students who had to travel for sporting commitments, students who worked while studying, or students who's home lives weren't great, and so studying after school wasn't really an option. Even those really corny TV ads you see, selling oddly specific tools to help around the house? most of those were accessibility tools first that found a market in the wider public!

All of these are just a few examples of disability accommodations and assistive tech helping other people!

So think about how the assistive technology in your setting has helped to change the world your characters inhabit, beyond just the direct disability applications.

Conclusion

Now, none of these are rules, it's your setting, you can do what you want with it, but they are just some examples of things to think about to get the cogs turning!