Tiffany Yu is making disability advocacy accessible for all

Audiobooks, electric toothbrushes, the text-to-speak feature on our phones, sloped curbs, and luggage on wheels. What do all of these things have in common?

They’re all things that were designed and created for people with disabilities. “We are expert life hackers because we've been forced to be, but that makes us incredibly creative and innovative and adaptive,” says disability advocate Tiffany Yu about the community.

And while these access features were initially thought up for people with disabilities, non-disabled people have also benefited from this creativity, innovation, and adaptability. But Yu says there’s still a disconnect between their consumption and linking them back to their origin.

She wants to change that. 

“The way that discrimination shows up uniquely in the disability community is through the guise of kindness. It says ‘I'll help you, but I won't hire you.’ It says, ‘I'll donate to this nonprofit and let me share these really feel-good stories about disability, but I still don't view you as my peer,’” she says. “‘I’m still going to feel sorry for you every time I think about the challenges you have to navigate, and yet I won't go out and champion accessibility, even though I love audiobooks and electric toothbrushes.’”

The 36-year-old Bethesda, Maryland native, who now lives in Los Angeles, acquired her disability at the age of 9, when she was in a car accident. She sustained a brachial plexus injury, which left one of her arms paralyzed. Her father, who was driving at the time, died in the accident, while two of her siblings who were also in the car didn’t sustain any apparent disabilities. Yu was also diagnosed with PTSD in 2019, 22 years after the accident.

Accessible advocacy

Yu founded Diversability, an organization whose mission is to elevate disability pride, 15 years ago. Initially a student club at Georgetown University, Diversability has since grown to have 80,000 members in its “digital ecosystem,” as Yu describes their followers and others who have opted into their community. “For the last 15 years, I have just met so many incredible people in our community. I see us as magic,” she says.

Yu has also recently published a book, The Anti-Ableist Manifesto. Inspired by her anti-ableism series on TikTok the book examines disability “for any ally to go beyond mere awareness to be an active anti-ableist and help form a more equitable society for all.”

In other words, she wants to make disability advocacy accessible (pun intended) for all—approachable, relatable, and actionable, so no matter who you are, you have a starting point into the work. “My dream for this book is I wanted to reach as many people as possible,” she tells me. “And the target audience for this book is people who are passionate about equity and inclusion, but might be newer or intimidated, or not sure how to approach the disability community.”

The importance of storytelling

Yu says she never could have imagined getting a book deal, let alone through a traditional publisher like Hachette Book Group—known as one of the Big Five companies in publishing that control about 80 percent of the U.S. book market. Because if ableism has taught her anything, it’s to think that as someone who is disabled, her story doesn’t matter. “We were always flying under the radar,” she says.

And it took a long time for Yu to share her story. For 12 years after the car accident, Yu wore long-sleeved tops, and told everyone her father was away on a trip. The first time she publicly shared the story of her car accident was Oct. 22, 2009. 

“That was the first time that I believed that story might matter to someone else—that I validated to myself and to other people, that my dad did, in fact, pass away. He was not away on a very prolonged trip,” Yu says. “It was my first acknowledgement that I have to make so many micro decisions that someone else would not even think about, when you can't use one of your arms: How do I drop a letter off in this mailbox? How do I put my luggage in the overhead compartment? How do I button this jumpsuit that has the buttons on the back? How do I clasp a bra? How do I put up my hair?”

As Yu ticks off her list, I can’t help but think how easy it is for non-disabled folks to take these everyday tasks for granted—which aren’t always easy even when you’ve got the use of both arms (I can’t be the only one who’s passed on buying a cute jumpsuit just because I couldn’t button it up).

A better world for our younger selves

Whenever people talk about any type of advocacy or social justice work, intersectionality inevitably comes up. And my conversation with Yu is no different and I ask her how being AA+PI has influenced how she viewed her disability and the fact that she didn’t acknowledge it for so long. “My understanding, although it was never explicitly said, was to just not share anything that might make our whole family look bad, right?” says Yu, whose father emigrated from Taiwan, and mother was a refugee of the Vietnam War. “Because everything was viewed in terms of the collective and the household.”

Yu also references the film The Farewell, in which a Chinese family avoids telling their grandmother that she has a terminal illness, and how that helped put things into perspective for her. It was how she began to learn how death, illness, and disability are viewed in certain cultural contexts. “Because when I tell people who don't share my ethnicity that I told people that my dad was away on a trip. It's unfathomable to them,” she says. “Yet, when I understand that a death in the immediate family, or the fact that my mother was a widow, could potentially signal that she was bad luck, or cursed, that made me start to understand why this 9-year-old Tiffany started telling these lies.”