This month, like every July, we are celebrating Disability Pride Month!

Interesting Fact: Disability Pride Month falls in July in order to commemorate the signing into law of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which happened on July 16th 1990, and the first Disability Pride Month was officially celebrated on the 25th anniversary of said Act in 2015.

During this month I love seeing the amount of Disability Pride Flags on my feed (hopefully to be soon seen IRL as well!) but I have to admit I found out the story of the flag, and the meaning behind the design, not too long ago. 

Since I don’t think this is necessarily common knowledge, but it REALLY SHOULD BE, here’s an overview of the history of the Disability Pride Flag, the community-driven changes in it, and the meaning of each colour!

The first design and the community driven changes

The design of the flag was created in 2016 by Ann Mcgill, a writer with Cerebral Palsy, who created the well known black background flag with 5 coloured zig-zag stripes. The stripes were a symbol for the way disabled people have to constantly “manouver” around barriers of a world that just isn’t willing to create accessible places, experiences, lives.

Although this flag was developed with great attention to inclusivity (we will talk about the many many communities included in the colours in a second), the Disabled community offered some pointers to make it more accessible and less visually overwhelming to those with seizures, migraines, sensory sensitivities or other conditions.

This is how the second design, with more muted colours and straight lines, was born in 2021! I love how the very creation of this flag is the greatest example of how accessibility is achieved: by listening to the community. Even a disabled person cannot possibly imagine every single accessibility issue by themselves: we need a multitude of voices, by a multitude of disabled people, to be put in the position to be listened to when it comes to accessibility.

The fact that the flag is inclusive of so many identities and experiences is amazing, but it also means we all have very diverse lives, and we all should be made able to live them without barriers.

So, who is included in the flag?

The community is incredibly wide, but this is really not a well known fact! The first time I researched the flag I was still unsure whether I could call myself disabled or not, and ended up finding out I actually fall within multiple forms of disability. And I since found out this happened to many others!

 Here is the full list of the colours, and what they represent:

So many people have told me they finally felt represented after my first post on the Disability Pride Flag. And we all know how important it is to find your community, to be able to share your experience with others. For this reason I created this blog post to dive deeper into the topic, get to even more people and create awareness, and communities, even wider.

Let me know if you liked this post, if you found out something new, or if you have any thoughts! You can do it here in the comments, by commenting my instagram post, or via dm.

Finally, here you can find some Disability Rights and Disability Pride items for Disabled Icons and our Allies!