#and these circumstances can be genetic/environmental/financial/socioeconomical WHATEVER it may be

[uncanny-tranny]

According to the responses to the 2021 American Community Survey available on the US Census Bureau website, approximately 13% of Americans self reported some form of disability. Initially, I thought that this was a high value simply because there's so little perception of it in media, unless that media is specifically designed to show people with disabilities. But then I looked a bit deeper into it. Nearly 50%(it was like 48 point something) of those who reported a disability reported an ambulatory disability. Given this figure, I wonder if the percentage is underreported. A lot of mental health and disability has only been accepted in mainstream media in recent years. There are also questions I have like:Do correctible vision deficiencies count as disabilities? I would argue yes. I wear glasses. It's not something I think about a lot, but without my glasses, I would be hard-pressed to function normally within society. They are an accommodation. Yet in a group of 25-30 people(the class i was in when i was thinking about it), I easily counted at least 5 who wore glasses. Obviously, that's not a large enough sample size to make any kind of assumption off of, but I think I could probably find similar numbers if i looked in other places. Part of me doubts that I was marked as having a vision difficulty despite having and wearing glasses. And it's made me think and wonder if 13% wasn't that large of a number after all. I mean, it's a massive population. It's 42 million people, but I wonder if the number is even larger than that. What do you think?

So, I think it's complex. I'm not saying you are wrong in your investigation, but due to the personal nature of disability, it makes me wonder, too. I think the answer will be just as complex, is what I am saying.

Simultaneously, disability is very common, but the idea of being "unable" to live or be productive makes it so that disability becomes a taboo. It leads you to believe that disability is uncommon, or only exists in the "extremes". I do think that contributes to the perception people have of their disabilities, especially in being in denial about their disabilities disabling them.

I think you can generally say that certain things, like eye vision, can be disabilities, as long as we also recognize that it exists on a spectrum. I also have eye glasses, but if you ask me what I'm disabled by, I probably wouldn't bring that up unless it is relevant, in the narrow ways it is for me personally. I think that's part of why the ambulatory statistic is high. There are many situations where your disability doesn't really... disable you, but you're still disabled because there are aspects of your life you either cannot do, or you need help in order to do.

Thirteen percent is a large number, but when you consider the vast array of disabilities, the number of veterans and elderly, and (like you said) the number of people likely either in denial about their disability or the people for whom education doesn't include disability, the number could very well be thirteen or higher.

It's interesting that ableism is so ubiquitous, yet so many of us are disabled (with or without our knowledge).