What Is Wrong With People

At the Winter Olympics of 2026 which is located in Milan this year.

(Image Description (Accessible Alt Text):

A selfie-style photo of a woman with light blonde and pink hair sitting at a public transit stop. She is looking slightly upward and away from the camera with a neutral expression. Behind her is a glass shelter and signage for a tram stop. Over the image, a large text block explains that she was verbally confronted by a stranger who criticized her for holding her phone close to her eyes. The woman explains in the text that she is visually impaired and needs to hold the phone close in order to see it. Despite this explanation, the stranger continued arguing and complained that the brightness of the phone screen hurt her own eyes. The post ends by describing how the stranger escalated the interaction by insulting the woman and claiming her poor eyesight was due to her being a “terrible person.”)

Why This Incident Is Ableist

Let’s start with the obvious: disabled people are the experts on how they navigate their own disabilities. That is not opinion. That is lived reality.

In this situation, a visually impaired person held her phone close to her eyes so she could read the screen. For people with low vision, this is a completely ordinary accessibility strategy. It is not unusual, unsafe, or inappropriate. It is simply how someone adapts to see.

The problem began when a stranger decided she knew better.

Instead of pausing to consider that there might be a reason for what she was seeing, the stranger immediately began correcting the disabled person’s behavior. Even after being told that the individual was visually impaired, the criticism continued. In other words, the explanation was not the issue. The stranger had already decided that her own assumptions mattered more than the disabled person’s reality.

That is where the ableism appears.

Ableism often shows up as a sense of entitlement: the belief that disabled people must justify how they exist in public spaces. It is the quiet assumption that accessibility strategies need to be approved, explained, and sometimes even debated by complete strangers.

And when the disabled person calmly explains the reason for the accommodation, the response is not curiosity or respect. Instead, the conversation escalates into hostility, accusations, and personal insults. Suddenly the disability itself is questioned, mocked, or framed as some kind of moral failure.

Think about how irrational that is. A person adapts so they can see, and someone else treats that adaptation like a personal inconvenience.

This is not about one awkward interaction. It reflects a broader cultural habit of policing disabled bodies and disabled behavior. People feel oddly comfortable correcting things they do not understand, as if accessibility itself requires their permission.

It does not.

Accessibility is not up for public debate. Disabled people do not owe strangers an explanation for how they use their phones, their mobility devices, their communication tools, or any other strategy that allows them to participate in the world.

Respecting disability is actually very simple. When someone explains their access needs, the correct response is not correction, argument, or moral judgment.

The correct response is to listen, accept it, and move on with your day.

Because the truth is this: the real problem in situations like this is not the disability.

It is the assumption that disabled people must perform their lives in a way that makes everyone else comfortable.

And that assumption deserves to be called out every single time.