Disability Simulations - More Harmful than Helpful

Often, well-intended educators, parents, and disability advocates use simulations to try to educate the non-disabled public about what various disabilities are like.

Unfortunately, research shows that these activities have a negative effect on the perception of disability. 

What is a disability simulation?

  • Disability-related simulations are activities where a person supposedly experiences what it’s like to have a disability by covering their eyes or maneuvering in a wheelchair, for example.

What’s the problem?

  • They promote negative stereotypes of helplessness.

  • They can only simulate an initial experience with a disability. Change is difficult for most people. However, with time and experience, what seems scary or hard, becomes routine and one adapts and learns skills.

What can be done now that you understand the problem with simulations?

We know that sometimes an activity is difficult to remove from a school culture or calendar. It may be something that’s already happened and you want to re-address the concept now that you understand the unintended effect. Please advocate and work to remove it from the curriculum/culture. However, here are some ways you can shift the impact if a simulation has already been done, or you will need to participate in one in the future in order to help the students leave the experience without fear, pity or gratitude they don’t have to “deal with that all the time”:

Go deeper and ask these questions:

  • After you participated in the simulation, how did you feel?

  • Do you think a person who actually has that disability feels that way (scared, sad, etc) most of the time?

    • Why or why not?

  • Are there things in your life that once felt scary or very hard, but as you experienced them regularly, they no longer feel that way?

  • You can then show some YouTube videos of people with the disability they were simulating who are comfortable and not scared or sad.

  • Discuss how if they were to do the simulation again (and again and again) they might know more of what to expect, so they wouldn’t be as scared.  And how things that were especially hard, might become less difficult as they practiced and had more experience.  

  • Since people go through their lives with/without ___________ every day, they are not scared.

  • Explore what can be changed to make it easier and less frustrating for someone with similar access needs.  

  • Add accommodations to the simulation to explore how frustrating it was without them and what they were able to do or communicate with the accommodations in place (communication boards, noise-canceling headphones, ramps, etc)

  • Discuss how the social model helps explain much of the frustration they might have experienced.  What is most frustrating for many with disabilities is that the things needed to participate easily and equally are not provided.  It is not the disability, impairment or difference itself.  

    The barriers, such as environmental, attitudinal and societal, are the cause of frustrations that folks experience rather than the disability or impairment itself. See our page on the social model of disability to understand more.

  • Discuss other parts of the simulation, like reading braille for example. 

    • Do the students think a blind person can get the same information in braille that they can get in print? 

    • Talk about all the books that are available and the different ways that they can be accessed.

    • Talk about how they might interact if they met a blind person. 

    • Ask students how they might redesign the experience to be more respectful.

  • Put the experience into practice

    • Have students design a classroom or event to make it more accessible

Read more about the problems with simulations: