disabled ingenuity.

Note: text in red is clickable.

The brazen inequalities faced by people, depending on where in the world they were born, never seem more confronting than when thinking about the disabled community. The lottery of life presents many instances where a person with a disability faces extremely different prospects depending on their nationality. If born in the UK, they’ll have access to welfare, adapted social housing, medical devices, cars via the Motability scheme, and custom-made mobility equipment — all either free or paid for via sacrificing part of their welfare. However, if that same person were born in the likes of India, Brazil, or rural China, just to name a few, they’d likely face a huge uphill battle throughout their life, just trying to get by.

What unifies us, the global disabled community, is that no matter our background, our ingenuity prevails. And though one person’s challenges may pale in comparison to another's, they are still challenges to overcome, nevertheless, and challenges require solutions.

The beauty of these solutions is that they can and should be shared amongst other members of the community, creating a central database of information. Because, after all, who holds the key to unlocking even the most complex accessibility and assistive technology challenges? It’s not your typical architect, system designers, or engineers; it’s those who can call upon a wealth of lived experience — the disabled community.

In the video below, Sayomdeb Mukherjee (a.k.a Den), Senior Manager at EnAble India, shows us ‘a day in the life of Den’, where we’re shown many of the daily difficulties he faces, as well as how he and his caregiver have found remedies.

It got me thinking about my situation and how I have adapted to many problems and situations over the years, finding workarounds for inabilities and/or a lack of access.

When I was young, my mum once referred to me as ‘an OT’s worst nightmare’, because often my workarounds were unorthodox. For example, my mum’s bathtub has a permanent transfer shelf attached to it, built for me to sit on before getting into the bath. And whilst I can transfer from my wheelchair to the shelf, I can’t lift my legs and swing them around into the bath, which meant the only way I could make it work was to get on my knees, place my hands on either side of the bath, and vault myself into the tub.

Actionable. Solution-orientated.

Just making things work is a mantra that I, and most others with disabilities, have lived by all our lives. For me, this has never been truer than in the present, as where I live now — Brazil — challenges present themselves very often.

When my wife and I moved to our current home, it felt like every day new issues would arise, forcing us to find workarounds. One immediate quick-fix solution we implemented was attaching PVC tubing to the dial that controls our shower’s temperature, so that I could reach and use it independently. Another solution we had to adopt was adding a line of cement up our driveway so that one side of my wheelchair was not wheeling over coarse gravel.

Small, low-tech ideas that instantly improved my quality of life.

Coming up in a future post, I’ll be introducing the Discovery Awards — an initiative designed to showcase personal solutions like the ones already mentioned. For now, let’s dive deeper into projects and solutions with a broader scope.

Step forward, the Zero Project.

On an annual basis, the Zero Project requests changemakers, project leaders, and organisations from around the world, regardless of size, sector, or country, to nominate innovative solutions. The Zero Project Call for Nominations 2026 (#ZeroCall26) focuses specifically on accessibility, ICT, and crisis response.

Submitted solutions are not only judged on innovativeness, but on impact and ability to scale. The end goal is always ‘the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)’.

The benefits of submitting a solution to the Zero Project are extensive, with awardees receiving international recognition and the chance to present at the Zero Project Conference 2026, in Vienna. For a full list of awardee benefits and to find out more information, you can visit ZeroProject.org.

The above video, shared with respect to the 2025 Zero Project Awards, gives some valuable insight into the selection process of awardees and what awardees can expect from their selection.

This year’s focused categories piqued my interest twofold. One, as my brand, The World is Accessible, will attest to, I am deeply committed to the promotion and long-term sustainability of accessibility for all, and two, the topic of crisis response touched me greatly last year during the extensive flooding that occurred in our region of Southern Brazil. How we respond to crisis’ including conflict, natural disasters, and climate change, has never been a more pressing issue than it is now, and time and time again, folks with disabilities are the one’s who are left behind during a state of emergency — I’ll write more on this topic in a future post.

Nominations for #ZeroCall26 close on June 29th, 2025 — so time truly is of the essence if you’d like to apply. You can jump straight to the application form if you feel ready to submit your solutions connected to any of the three topics.

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Community is integral within society, and one of the key pillars of community is the notion of shared responsibility, knowledge, and values. That’s why shared knowledge becomes shared power. Power to embolden, champion independence, and liberate others with thoughtful solutions to problems that may have previously been causing them untold grievances. So, with that in mind, if you or if some person or organisation that you know has innovative ideas and solutions that are having/will have a positive impact, please consider nominating said solutions to #ZeroCall26 — because together, we are stronger.

Let’s turn our solutions into someone else’s breakthrough.

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