Communicating With People With Disabilities 

In our last video, we discussed encounter anxiety, which is a form of anxiety that is associated with being unsure about how to navigate an encounter with a person with a disability (PWD), often due to a lack of experience with PWDs. Encounter anxiety can lead to poor communication with PWDs. For example, people often infantilize PWDs (e.g., college students in one study used more words and a higher voice pitch when giving directions to a person in a wheelchair compared to a person not in a wheelchair; Liesner & Mills, 1999). Patronizing PWDs is a form of ableism and should be avoided. In this video, then, we will briefly discuss a set of suggestions for how to navigate an encounter with a PWD.