Over on Microassist’s Accessibility in the News, Jack McElaney published his regular weekly newsletter of 9 October 2025. I encourage readers of Special Education Today to scoot on over there to read it. In this post, though, I want to underscore for readers the first paragraphs in Mr. McElaney’s cover letter from his announcement of the newsletter for 25 September 2025. Here those paragraphs are:
Hello Everyone: I am a fervent believer in observing numbers because they tell stories. For example, there are ~8.2 billion people in the world, ~ 2 billion Muslims, ~1.4 billion people in India, ~1.4 billion people in China, and ~1.4 billion Catholics in the world. The 2023 WHO report estimated there were ~1.3 billion people with significant disabilities and the Return on Disability 2024 Annual Report estimated there were 1.6 billion people in the world with disabilities.
People with Disabilities (PWDs) are the largest minority community in the world but all too often that is not evident because PWDs are left out of countless conversations and global considerations and decisions. I have posed the question many times when talking to CEOs, CFOs, CROs, VPs of HR/Product/Engineering, “Would you ever exclude people from China or India, Muslims, or Catholics in your sales and marketing efforts, product development, or employment considerations, and the resounding answer is always “Why would we ever do that?” But when asked the same question about why they exclude PWDs from their websites, mobile apps, product design, and employment, the resounding answer is, “We do not do that, do we?!”
The perspective that Mr. McElaney’s notes offered should be valuable to we special educators. Individuals with disabilities represent a minority, but it is a significant minority. That disability ranks right dang close to other frequently discussed minority groups is worth keeping in mind when one discusses diversity and inclusion.
Mr. McElaney has offered other savvy observations as well. For example, in “Two Americas of Accessibility: Where Local Wins Meet Federal Setbacks,” he describes “wins” (e.g., the Target stores unveiled self-checkout that is accessible for individuals who are blind and efforts by an advocate in New Mexico to make legal proceedings more accessible) and “losses” (e.g., a US government decision not to enforce protections in air travel for people who use wheelchairs). There’s just a lot to know, and Mr. McElaney brings lots of it to his readers’ attention.
Microassisst, the company for which Mr. McElnaney works, is a real business. It sells its expertise in training and accessibility to other companies. I admire its efforts to promote accessibility to its clients and, especially, Mr. McElaney’s sharing of what he and Microassist know about accessibility. I receive no compensation for running this story, mentioning the company, etc.
As a tag along point here—and definitely not to take anything away for the work of Mr. McElnaney—let me return to an old saw: Access to effective instruction. Access is a critical feature in the disability world. In common parlance, “access” frequently refers to the ability to gain physical entrance to something or have opportunity to sense something, but we should also think of access in the sense of cognitive learning. In contemporary educational situations, students often have access to the general curriculum by that curriculum and its delivery is not accessible. I spend a lot of cycles thinking about designing instruction so that it is cognitively accessible. I hope you’ll join me in promoting it.