Society Should Be More Accessible to Autistic People

Silencing My Chairs

I recently bought a few chairs to furnish my apartment. When I scooted one across the floor, it made this awful noise. I couldn’t stand it.

So I went for an easy DIY solution I found online to correct it. I just used box cutters to cut a small cross in tennis balls, like so:

Then I used my index and middle fingers of both hands to peel back the four flaps of the tennis ball and slide it onto the chair legs. The final result was… silence.

Much better.

Note #1: Tennis balls are not very aesthetic. They may ruin the decor of your space. If that matters to you, you may want to purchase more discreet chair silencers instead.

Note #2: After further testing, I noticed that there’s still some noise produced by my chair legs with this method. It’s still much better than before and, most importantly, no longer overwhelming. But again, you may want to purchase actual chair silencers if eliminating all noise is a requirement.

For a More Autism-Friendly Society

Why write about this if there are already tutorials online on how to do it? Because I’m going to use it to make a larger point.

These chairs are yet another example of products not being made with the autistic population in mind, which leads to environments that are inaccessible to us. Without any changes, this noise would’ve happened every single time I or somebody else pulled my chair out to sit down for a meal. Also potentially when they got out of the chair to get something or use the restroom. Even if you’re not sensitive to noise, if you’re in the same room watching a movie, you could miss important dialogue. If someone is trying to talk to you, you could miss what they have to say.

My point is that when you make products friendly to autistic people, you not only make spaces more accessible to us, but you improve them for everybody. Many of the things that are unbearable to us autistics also annoy non-autistic people. This noise is essentially a design bug in chairs that we collectively tolerate, but we don’t have to.

Making society fully autism-friendly, if that’s even possible, would require a massive redesign of public spaces, transportation systems, businesses, products, and many other things, at a minimum. I don’t know if anyone advocates for that, but I do know there are a lot of simple and inexpensive changes that would make it easier for us to exist in society, such as making chairs less noisy, and those things aren’t being done.

We have wheelchair ramps because we recognize that it’s important for society not to exclude people in wheelchairs. So what is the excuse for not improving accessibility for autistic people as well?