As someone who is deaf, Sara Nović says, “the phone has long been my nemesis.”
Nović, an organizer and author of the novel True Biz, has tried to call their representatives in Congress by phone—but they’ve been hung up on. When they started organizing earlier this year with fellow deaf people on issues like Donald Trump’s attacks on the federal Department of Education, Novic wrote in an email, “we started getting feedback from reliable sources that, due to the offices being overloaded, they were only really counting phone calls, and either not tallying emails or weighing those contacts less.”
At protests and rallies since Trump’s return to office, organizers often encourage people to call their representatives in order to fight changes that harm Americans. The pressure to call, not email, is just one of many challenges to disabled people’s participation in democracy—despite new urgency to resist the Trump administration’s attacks on disability rights through its campaigns against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the dismantling of the Administration for Community Living, and more.
“It’s my dream that all activist efforts would be planned for the broadest possible accessibility.”
Calling representatives has long been a straightforward way to push for political change; although there’s growing demand for such calls as part of the wave of protest action that has followed Trump’s return, some disabled people have long been left out by accessibility challenges.
There is assistive technology: video relays that connect Deaf people, for example, to American Sign Language interpreters who read out their messages. But there’s an often unfamiliar lag associated with that, Nović explained, and people on the other end tend to hang up.
A former legislative director for a Democratic member of Congress, now working in advocacy, told me phone calls tend to be encouraged because they can better disrupt business as usual.
“If you got a thousand phone calls in a day, phones ringing off the hook, that’s an audible thing in the office,” the former legislative director said. “It is probably overwhelming the more junior and front-line staff who typically field the phone calls, so more senior staff are having to pitch in and answer calls.”
Emails, the legislative director said, are for the most part put into batches based on the issue and how the constituent feels: “They will send the same letter to everybody who is writing, who are saying the tariffs are bad,” he said by way of example, “that will express their boss’ viewpoint.”
At the same time, another disabled person living with hearing sensitivity told me they wished that activism groups would put more of an emphasis on allowing for email-based advocacy, too: “It’s my dream that all activist efforts would be planned for the broadest possible accessibility and inclusivity,” they wrote in an email.
The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN) has responded to concerns that some disabled people’s voices aren’t being heard by setting up a proxy calling system for issues with significant impact for disabled people. The system, first established in 2019, can accommodate six to nine action items each year. Disabled people—they do not have to be autistic—can fill out a form and have a volunteer call on their behalf, ASAN communications manager Dean Strauss told me.
“It takes a huge step forward in terms of advocacy, especially for nonspeaking autistic folks, that you don’t have to have a friend or a caregiver make the call for you,” he said. “You get to decide what you want to say and what’s going to happen because you get to make your voice heard.”
ASAN has about 50 volunteers helping to make proxy calls, who can make an impact by picking up even just a few calls at a time, with no set hours; it received 24 call requests in the first week after a call for action to protect Medicaid was announced in March.
“We do get folks who are excited, like, ‘I have an autistic child, and I want to be able to help the community,’” Strauss said, “but we also get a lot of like, ‘I am an autistic person, and I want to help my community.’”
