Skip to content

Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month. It’s a time to recognise, celebrate, and reflect on what inclusion really looks like in practice — not just in what we say, but in what we build and share every day.

What Is Disability Pride Month?

Disability Pride Month is celebrated every July, and the date isn’t arbitrary.

 

On March 12, 1990, over 1,000 people marched from the White House to the U.S. Capitol to demand that Congress pass the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). When they arrived, around 60 activists left their wheelchairs and mobility aids behind to crawl up the Capitol steps, physically demonstrating just how inaccessible public spaces were. It became known as the Capitol Crawl. On July 26, 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the ADA into law.

 

Disability Pride Day followed that same year in Boston, and by the ADA’s 25th anniversary in 2015, the celebration had grown from a single day into a widely recognised month.

 

At its core, Disability Pride Month is about a shift in framing: away from disability as something to hide or apologise for, and towards disability as a natural, valuable part of human diversity. It remains a movement built by disabled people and advocacy organisations, continuing to grow through visibility, participation, and shared effort.

The Disability Pride Flag

Designed by Ann Magill, an American disability advocate, the flag uses colour to represent the breadth of the disability community:

 

  • Red – physical disabilities.
  • Gold – cognitive and neurodivergent disabilities.
  • White – non-visible and undiagnosed conditions.
  • Blue – mental health and psychiatric conditions.
  • Green – sensory disabilities, including blindness and deafness.
  • Charcoal background – mourning those affected by ableist violence and neglect, and a symbol of protest.

 

The diagonal stripes are deliberate too: they represent how disabled people are so often required to navigate around barriers that society has built, rather than those barriers being designed out from the start.

The Disability Pride Flag: five diagonal stripes in red, gold, white, blue, and green on a charcoal background.

Where Accessibility Fits In

Disability Pride Month is about visibility, advocacy, and recognising the value of lived experience. Showing that support matters, but it also raises a practical question: are the spaces people are being invited into genuinely accessible?

It’s one thing to promote inclusion. It’s another to make sure there are no barriers in the way.

 

Digital accessibility is a big part of that. When content isn’t designed to be accessible — whether it’s missing captions, poorly structured documents, or non-descriptive links — it makes things harder for everyone. For disabled users, those barriers can carry additional weight.

 

What looks like a small inconvenience to one person can feel like a signal to another that the space wasn’t built with them in mind. It may mean needing to ask for help or find a workaround just to complete something that should be straightforward.

Over time, those moments add up. They can create friction, slow progress, and make it harder for anyone to fully participate or succeed — not because of individual ability, but because the content itself isn’t designed to be accessible.

 

We’ve written about exactly these decisions and how to fix them:

 

Each of those is a small, specific choice that determines whether a piece of content actually works for the person trying to use it. Multiply that across a Moodle site with thousands of resources, and the gap between “we support inclusion” and “our content is actually usable” gets very wide, very fast.

Three Things to Check This Month

If you want a practical place to start today, here are three quick checks that take minutes, not weeks:

  • Check your videos. Do they include accurate, reviewed captions, or are they relying on auto-generated ones that haven’t been checked?
  • Review your links. Are they descriptive (“Download the accessibility guide”), or do they still say “click here” and “read more”?
  • Look at your document formatting. Are you using clear headings and consistent structure, or is everything styled visually with bold text and spacing instead?

 

These are just a few small examples of the kinds of checks that make content more usable straight away. You can find more quick, practical tips like these in our accessibility tips collection. 

Beyond July

Disability Pride Month is a moment to reflect and start conversations — but it was never meant to be contained to a single month.

 

Creating accessible content isn’t a one-time effort. It’s part of how content is designed, created, and shared every day. The more it becomes a habit — built in from the start rather than revisited later — the more natural it becomes.

 

Disability Pride Month is a good opportunity to pause and ask how inclusive your content and processes really are. But the impact comes from what happens beyond July.

Because inclusion isn’t something you recognise once a year — it’s something you carry forward.

 

Moodle Accessibility Toolkit

Recent Posts