11/17/2025
Why It Matters Monday: Accountability Matters:
Have you ever had to fight for something that should have been automatic? What was it?
Accountability is care. When systems that disabled people rely on fail, it is not a minor inconvenience. It is a disruption that touches every part of someone’s life. And too often, those failures happen because agencies, companies, and government systems are not held responsible for the promises they make.
A lack of accountability shows up differently across our community.
For a wheelchair user, it looks like a broken power chair sitting for weeks or months because a company refuses to hire enough technicians and prioritizes private equity over real people. The delay is not caused by missing data or confusion. It is caused by a business model that profits from bottlenecks and scarcity. And the consequence is missed work, missed medical care, increased health risks, and being trapped inside their home. A wheelchair is not optional. It is mobility, safety, and freedom.
For a Deaf or hard of hearing person, accountability means knowing that CART or ASL will be provided when promised. When it is not, they are cut off from vital information, excluded from public participation, and forced to fight for access that should have been automatic.
For someone with a developmental disability, it means not waking up one day to find their services reduced, changed, or eliminated without explanation or recourse. Families should not have to spend hours every week navigating a system that creates its own obstacles.
For people with chronic illness or mental health disabilities, a lack of accountability looks like endless referrals, denials without reasoning, and care that falls through the cracks because no one is responsible for making sure the system actually works.
These failures are not abstract. They shape whether people stay in their homes, stay healthy, and stay connected to their communities.
And here is the truth too many people overlook:
When accountability is missing, the burden shifts to disabled people.
We become the ones calling, documenting, pushing, following up, and begging systems to do what they were already funded and required to do. Disabled people have been forced to fight for ourselves for generations because the systems built around us have not taken responsibility for the harm caused by delay, neglect, or indifference.
But the burden of accountability does not belong on us.
It belongs on the systems, agencies, and companies whose job is to provide equitable, timely, and accessible care.
Disabled people deserve systems that work.
We deserve agencies that keep their word.
We deserve companies that value human beings over profit.
This is why DPC holds the credo about us by us. Because accountability must start with disabled people leading the conversation, identifying the gaps, and demanding the systems around us do their part.
Accountability should never fall on the people harmed by the failures of the system.
And DPC will keep fighting until that becomes the standard.
