The End of Disability Pride Month

(Local View from 4'2, Lake County Press, July 25, 2025 - guest author, Jaime Head)

Hello there and thank you for having me in this week’s edition of A View from 4’2! My name is Jaime Head and I have the privilege of guest writing while our dear friend Jenna is temporarily out on leave. I come to you as a fellow outdoor enthusiast, traveler, cat mama, wheelchair user & an advocate for people with disabilities. While I’ve experienced living in different parts of the country, my heart has & will always belong to Lake Superior and the North Shore. How can it not, right? But enough about me, how did you come to be here today? What tales can you share about experiences that have shaped who you are? I really love a good story, especially told while hanging out around a campfire! 

Ahh the campfire, it’s such a wonderful tool! It brings friends together, provides light & warmth after the sun goes down and cooks those delicious s’mores, banana boats & pudgy pies! Yum… now we might need to have a campfire tonight but I digress. I realized I’ve never really thought of the campfire intentionally as a tool before now. I mean, I knew I used it for all of these wonderful things but it was just there always available to build at the ready. But it wasn’t always so. We’ve all been taught that it was originally discovered out of necessity all those million years or so ago. It is said that, that was the turning point in human evolution as it ultimately affected diet, protection & social development. 

It got me thinking, especially as we are still in the month of Disability Pride, about what other tools are out there that are “just there” that were once developed out of necessity. If you’re still following me on this winding path, it’s about to get really interesting!  You might be surprised to learn that many of our current tools were once created as an accommodation for people with disabilities. “Hey Siri©, what inventions were made…” oh wait! Did you know that Siri came from speech to text and voice recognition software that was originally created for people who have difficulty writing because of disabilities such blindness, visual impairments and other disabilities like quadriplegia? It’s true! And now it’s a tool that has become part of our everyday life commonly used by everyone with and without disabilities. 

How about the curb cut, those graded ramps from the sidewalk to the street and parking lots? Originally created for wheelchair users but used now by anyone with or without disabilities. Some of those benefiting from curb cuts also include people pushing strollers with children, using dollies with heavy loads, pulling luggage and so many more. Other inventions originally made to assist people with disabilities include the typewriter, audiobooks, the electric toothbrush, TTY (teletypewriter) that later paved the way for text messaging and the list goes on. All of these items once invented to assist someone to meet the needs of everyday life are now part of everyone’s daily life. I don’t know about you, but I often take these things for granted without much thought about how they came to be. 

So, as we celebrate Disability Pride during this month of July, pause for a moment and think about how many of the access features out there for people with disabilities ultimately benefit all of us. This creates more inclusion, a richer community and a higher return on investment. And one day, not in the too distant future, people will use these features without ever realizing that it wasn’t always so - much like that campfire.