Access is Care: Digital Accessibility as a Feminist Issue

Author’s Note: Language around disability is contested. This essay uses both identity-first language (“disabled people”, “disabled women”), commonly used in disability justice and feminist disability studies scholarship, and person-first language (“persons with disabilities”) used in international conventions such as the UNCRPD. These choices reflect differences in how disability is understood and discussed across contexts.

Digital accessibility is often spoken in the language of compliance. A policy mandate that has to be fulfilled with an existing checklist of features to be “ticked off”. This includes, but is not limited to, captions, alternative text, colour contrast, and screen-reader compatibility, which are some of the standards set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (2024). This essay acknowledges the importance of these standards, but goes further by arguing that digital accessibility is also a form of “care”. Digital accessibility also raises questions of power: whose participation is imagined, whose bodies are treated as normal, and whose exclusion is accepted.

Accessibility is therefore not simply a technical or legal matter, but a feminist issue since it shapes who can participate in the digital world and on what terms. This matters for gender-based violence too. A platform that a disabled woman cannot fully operate is also one that she may not be able to use to seek help or safeguard herself from violence. Viewing accessibility as care also creates a space for feminist and disability-rights organisations to work together to demand accessibility that responds to the needs of disabled people.

The feminist ethic of care understands “care” as more than the everyday act of looking after someone. Fisher and Tronto (1990) understand care as the work of maintaining, continuing, and repairing the world we live in. Care, here, is understood as labour and infrastructure. So, water and sanitation systems become care; public health is care; and, in the context of this essay, digital accessibility can also be an act of care. That might mean a website a blind woman can navigate, or a video a Deaf woman can follow. This essay is also not the first to claim that accessibility is care. The disability-justice literature has already established this. Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) theorises access as a form of “radical love” and advocates for “collective access”. The “care-webs” are networks which marginalised people, such as disabled people, queer people, people of colour, and other minorities, use for mutual aid and access outside their immediate networks of biological family and the State (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018).

If care is about maintaining the conditions in which people can live and participate, then digital accessibility is one way of doing the same in the virtual world. Additionally, accessibility as a feminist issue has already been discussed in feminist disability studies through the works of Garland-Thomson (2002, 2005), Kafer (2013), and Wendell (1996), who argue that disability is central to feminism since it is tied to the idea of the body, dependency, and the ethic of care, which are core to its tenets. Therefore, to ask whose participation a system facilitates is already a feminist question. This essay builds on these ideas and looks at what accessibility as care means in practice.

The stakes become more visible the moment accessibility is taken away. The dissolution of the Accessibility Experience Team at X (formerly Twitter) in late 2022 illustrates the same. Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform led to massive layoffs. Among the teams dismantled was the Accessibility Experience Team. In the months that followed, many disabled users reported increased difficulty using the accessibility features they previously relied on, such as automatic captions, which were now removed (Markey 2023; Silberling 2023). Making the blue tick (a sign of a verified profile) a paid feature made things worse, since blind users who relied on screen readers could no longer easily tell real accounts from fake ones (O’Dell 2022). This is both a safety issue and a usability issue, because impersonation becomes harder to spot. The point of the example is not simply to state that the platform made cuts. It is that the work that made the platform more accessible to disabled users was treated as expendable. Like other care work, it rarely shows up as growth or engagement, which makes it easy to neglect. This shows what happens when accessibility is not treated as essential, but something that can be cut when profit-making becomes a priority.

However, accessibility cannot be understood only through the design of a platform. A technology can be accessible in its design and remain inaccessible in practice. This is where the idea of “care” becomes useful. If care is the labour and infrastructure that allow people to live and participate, then what counts as access also depends on where people live and the material conditions they inhabit. This makes it important to think about accessibility from a Global South perspective. Around 1.3 billion people (roughly one in six people worldwide) live with a significant disability, and an estimated 80% of them live in low- and middle-income countries (World Health Organization 2022). The realities of disability here are also shaped by caste, class, race, gender, and poverty all at once (Erevelles 2011; Ghai 2003, 2015).

One also cannot assume that fast internet connections and expensive devices available in wealthy Western countries are within easy reach of the rest. Then the question “is the interface accessible?” is therefore not enough. For a disabled woman in India, what matters first is whether she owns a device or has to borrow one, whether she can afford the data cost, and whether the assistive software is in her native language. A joint report by the World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) (2022) suggests that 2.5 billion people worldwide need assistive devices. However, access varies starkly: from 3% in the poorest countries to about 90% in the richest. Furthermore, women in the poorer countries are 12% less likely than men to use the internet on mobile, with the gap reaching 26% in sub-Saharan Africa (GSMA 2026). This gender gap matters because it plays a huge role in digital exclusion.

Furthermore, borrowed or shared phones can create additional risks. A woman who depends on a partner or a relative for a device may have her messages read, her movements tracked, or her accounts controlled. These are a few examples of how technology can be used to control and facilitate abuse. Women with disabilities who do get online can also face violence there. Among 204 women with disabilities in South Africa who took part in a 2026 survey on online violence, 43% reported that they had experienced cyberbullying, 25% had faced hate speech, and 24% had their accounts hacked (Ned, Tyabashe-Phume, Tunggal and Soldatić 2026). The study also found that poorer women faced these forms of violence more heavily (Ned et al. 2026). For a disabled woman, these disadvantages (of class, caste, gender, geography, etc.) can intersect to produce multiple and overlapping forms of exclusion.

These layered exclusions make one thing clear: accessibility is never merely an add-on feature. It is part of the infrastructure of participation. A care-centred approach to technology would treat accessibility as core infrastructure, and not an afterthought to be cut for profit. It would mean disabled people are an equal part of design and decision-making. This ensures that safety tools, such as reporting, blocking, privacy settings, and helplines, work for everyone who needs them and are prioritised from the start. To conclude, accessibility and in the context of the essay, digital accessibility, asks exactly what feminism has always questioned: whose body is treated as normal, whose needs are fulfilled from the start, and whose participation is seen as expendable. In the end, digital accessibility and online safety for disabled women belong at the centre of feminist politics.

References

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This article was written by Mridula Muralidharan, member of COFEM’s TFGBV working group.