I do not follow football closely. I have never followed tennis. But I follow what happens when accessibility gets built into a major broadcast properly, from the start, rather than bolted on after complaints. This summer that happened twice, at two of the biggest sporting events on the planet, within a few weeks of each other. I wrote about both.

Then Disability Pride Month arrived, and The Arc’s National Council of Self-Advocates announced this year’s theme: The World Works Better With Us. Reading it, I realised I had already spent June and July writing the evidence for it.

A Theme With a Track Record

Disability Pride Month began in Boston in 1990, tied to the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Each year, The Arc’s National Council of Self-Advocates (NCSA), a disabled-led national council, selects a theme. Last year’s was “We Belong Here, and We’re Here to Stay.” The year before, “We Want a Life Like Yours.” Both were about claiming space. This year’s theme claims something different: not just a place at the table, but a better outcome for everyone sitting at it.

When people with disabilities are included, respected, and supported, communities work better for everyone. That includes schools, workplaces, healthcare, transportation, and public life.

The Arc’s National Council of Self-Advocates

That is not a hopeful slogan. It is a testable claim. This summer gave us two large, public tests. It also gave us a clear counter-example.

Exhibit One: Sport Got It Right

I wrote about what FIFA built for the World Cup 2026: audio-descriptive commentary for every match, sign language interpretation in three languages, haptic devices, sensory rooms in every stadium. Weeks later I wrote about what Wimbledon built with HawkAR: a live 3D soundscape of Centre Court tennis, alongside a Visual Story, a Quiet Room, sunflower lanyards and a step-free route across the Grounds. HawkAR was not designed for blind and low-vision fans in a boardroom and then handed to them. It was co-designed with the Royal National Institute of Blind People, working alongside the engineers from the first sketch.

Neither event is finished. HawkAR only covers Centre Court singles, only on BBC iPlayer. FIFA’s audio description app does not always sync with broadcast delay. But both organisations put disabled people into the process itself, not just the output. That is the difference between designing for someone and building with them.

Exhibit Two: The Web Disagrees

Now put that next to the rest of the internet.

The WebAIM Million 2026 report found that 95.9% of the top one million home pages still have detectable accessibility failures. That is worse than 2025. It is the first reversal after six straight years of small gains. The same six failure types have topped the list every year since 2019: low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, missing document language. The report names AI-assisted “vibe coding” as part of why 2026 got worse instead of better.

That gap is not an accident. I wrote about the “ramping automation effect”, a term coined by Jonathan Zong and Frank Elavsky: disabled people fight for infrastructure for decades and get ignored, then an AI system needs the same thing and the web reorganises overnight. Better road markings help everyone who drives at night, but action only came once autonomous vehicles needed them. The same pattern, again.

So the theme holds when organisations choose it. It stays optional when they have no commercial reason to.

Why the Gap Exists

Good intentions and daily practice keep drifting apart, and I have written about why. Purple washing is what the Business Disability Forum calls it when a company’s accessibility statement says one thing and its actual content, products and hiring say another. An accessibility statement is not accessibility, in the same way a sustainability page is not a sustainable supply chain. FIFA and Wimbledon closed that gap this summer. Most of the web has not even measured it.

This Is Not New

None of this is a 2026 invention. Disabled people have been building the world that works better for everyone for a very long time, usually without credit.

In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter for Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, who was blind, so she could write her own letters instead of dictating them. He invented carbon paper alongside it, so she could feel what she had written. That specific machine was not the ancestor of the QWERTY keyboard I am typing this on: that lineage came later, from a separate inventor. But Turri had proven something the rest of the world had not yet considered: that a machine could put independent, private, personal writing into the hands of someone who could not hold a pen the usual way. Within a century, that idea had become the typewriter industry, and the typewriter changed how the entire world communicated. It put personal letters within reach of anyone, not just the literate elite with fine handwriting. It opened business and publishing to millions of women who became the first professional typists. It let authors write faster than they could ever write by hand. None of that was the point when Turri built his machine for one blind woman in Italy. All of it followed anyway.

In 1964, Robert Weitbrecht, a deaf physicist, built the first teletypewriter (TTY): a device that converted phone signals into text, so deaf people could use the telephone network for the first time in history. For nearly three decades, the Deaf community was the one part of the population that lived and worked fluently in real-time text conversation, tapping out messages back and forth the way the rest of us assumed only a phone call could work. When mobile text messaging reached everyone else in the 1990s, it landed on a world that had to learn a new habit. It landed on the Deaf community as something they had been doing for a generation already. SMS is a different technology to TTY, built independently. But the world that made texting an instant, universal habit was a world the Deaf community had already normalised, years ahead of the rest of us.

In 1954, Dr Philippe-Guy Woog built the Broxodent, the first electric toothbrush, in Switzerland. He built it for people with limited motor skills: arthritis, disability, the physical difficulty of gripping and moving a manual brush effectively. It was not built for the general population at all. Seventy years later, dentists recommend electric toothbrushes to everyone, and the evidence backs them up: people who use one keep their teeth longer and have healthier gums than people who do not. Nobody chooses an electric toothbrush today because they cannot grip a manual one. Almost everyone chooses it because it turned out to be better for all of us.

A typewriter, a phone network, a toothbrush. None of them were built with the general population in mind. All of them ended up serving it better than anything built for the general population in the first place. That did not happen because someone drew up a specification for “accessible design.” It happened because a disabled person was close enough to the actual problem to see a solution nobody else could see. Curb cuts. Captioning. Now spatial audio at Wimbledon, co-designed with blind fans rather than guessed at on their behalf. The pattern has never been about adding a feature. It has been about who is in the room doing the routine work: the design reviews, the product testing, the everyday decisions that never make a press release. That is where disabled people’s different perspective actually changes what gets built.

My Take

I do not think Disability Pride Month needs a slogan that asks permission. “The World Works Better With Us” does not ask. It states a fact and dares you to check the evidence. This summer, I checked it twice, at two of the biggest sporting events on the planet, and it held up both times because disabled people were in the process, not just in the audience. I checked it a third time against the rest of the web, and it did not hold up. Not because the theme is wrong. Because most organisations still keep disabled people out of the room where the routine work happens.

Takeaway: If you run a website, a product, a service or an event, the fix is not another accessibility checklist. It is disabled colleagues, testers and advisors inside your actual process: in the design reviews, the user research, the everyday decisions that never make a press release. FIFA and Wimbledon did not get this right by consulting disabled people at the end. They got it right by including them from the first sketch. That is the difference between a statement and the theme actually holding true.

Source: Disability Pride Month 2026: Theme, History, How to Celebrate, The Arc, updated 8 July 2026.

Related Reading (all BBEB, Tim Dixon):

The World Cup 2026 Shows What Inclusion Actually Looks Like

Wimbledon 2026 Proves Accessibility and Innovation Play on the Same Team

95% of Websites Fail Disabled Users. The Same Six Reasons. Seven Years Running.

The Web Is Being Redesigned. Just Not for Us.

Purple Washing, Purple Hushing, and the Gap in Between