This is a post that is based around a French advertisement that flips the script. It shows an able-bodied person trying to access their world when their world was made for people with disabilities.
A World Made for Disabilities
Flipping the script on disability, EDF’s 2004 French TV ad brilliantly takes the social model of disability and runs with it, showing us a world where non-disabled people are the minority. Suddenly, they’re the ones constantly bumping into environmental barriers. The message is pretty clear that it’s not disabled people’s bodies that are the issue—it’s the way society is built around them.
Think about it: the challenge isn’t that Deaf people can’t hear; it’s that most of us haven’t bothered to learn how to sign. The problem isn’t that wheelchair users can’t walk; it’s that doorways, sidewalks, and counters weren’t designed with them in mind (or at the right height). Access isn’t universal yet.
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This ad is also a gentle nudge to rethink who’s really responsible for making the world more accessible: all of us.
A busy city scene, but the crosswalks and sidewalks are build for wheelchair users and people with disabilities. A woman struggles to walk with the crossings full of wheelchair users, she seems to feel in the way. The next scene is a woman in a bank, trying to tell the teller that she’d like to open an account, but the teller is speaking in sign language and she looks unsure of what to do. The bank floor has many wheelchair users waiting. The next scene is a man trying to walk down a steep wheelchair ramp in the rain while the wheelchair users go down the same ramp easily. Then a mother and her son, both wheelchair users, see an able bodied man using a public phone mounted at a level for wheelchair users – the son points at the man and the mother pushes the sons arm down, as if to say not to point, it’s rude to stare. Then there is a crosswalk signal, but instead of a lighted walking figure, the icon is a person in a wheelchair and the street is full of wheelchair users. Lastly, there is a scene in a library where an able bodied man is looking for a book, a blind girl using a cane walks confidently past him. He pulls a book off the shelf and realizes it’s all in braille and he can’t read it. The video ends with a message displayed in braille, access for all. A world designed for you. EDF.Â
Meriah Nichols is a mental health therapist. AuDHD + profoundly deaf, she's a gardening nerd who loves cats, Star Trek, and takes her coffee hot and black. She parents 3 kids - 2 also AuDHD and one with Down syndrome - along with 6 cats and one dog.
