Blindfolds Don’t Build Inclusion: The Myth of Experiential Learning

Thanks to Deborah Dagit for the spark!

Experiential learning has long been praised as a powerful instructional method. Rooted in the idea that direct experience enhances comprehension, it’s widely used in professional development, diversity workshops, and educational environments. In the context of disability inclusion, experiential learning often takes the form of simulation, using tools such as blindfolds to mimic vision loss, wheelchairs to imitate mobility impairment, or earplugs to simulate deafness. The premise is that by temporarily experiencing the life of a person with a disability, participants will walk away with deeper insight, increased empathy, and a commitment to inclusive design.

But this is a dangerous oversimplification. These simulations do not recreate disability—they recreate shock, disorientation, and helplessness. The result is often trauma without understanding, emotion without insight, and guilt without action. For all the good intentions that drive these exercises, experiential learning in this form may be doing more harm than good.

This article serves as a continuation of a previous argument I’ve made: that empathy alone is not enough to drive meaningful change. Here, the focus turns to the method we often rely on to produce that empathy—experiential simulation—and its unintended consequences.

To understand why simulations fail, we must first acknowledge what they are not. A simulation is not a lived experience. A person who wears a blindfold for twenty minutes is not experiencing blindness. They are experiencing the removal of a sense they have always relied on, without preparation, tools, community, or cultural context. The discomfort they feel is not insight—it is untrained vulnerability.

This difference matters. Simulations center on loss, while lived disability is about adaptation. A person born blind does not experience panic when crossing a room; instead, they navigate through trained orientation and environmental cues. A person who is Deaf is not confused in conversation—they are fluent in a visual language and embedded in a cultural community. To simulate only the absence of a function, and not the presence of expertise, is to misrepresent the disability experience grossly.

Moreover, these simulations often lead to vicarious trauma, a term introduced by McCann and Pearlman (1990) to describe the emotional residue left by indirect exposure to another’s suffering. In accessibility simulations, participants often report feeling shaken, overwhelmed, or helpless. But they walk away with no tools to understand how disabled individuals live, work, and thrive in environments not built for them. They absorb the pain but not the power.

Even worse, many leave the experience resigned. They say things like, “I could never live like that,” or “There’s no way we can accommodate everyone.” This resignation is a classic example of learned helplessness, a concept developed by Martin Seligman in 1967. When people encounter repeated failure or discomfort, they may begin to doubt that change is possible. In the context of accessibility, this often becomes an unconscious justification for inaction.

This dynamic becomes even more problematic when paired with a widespread but incorrect assumption—what some in education and disability studies refer to as the simulation fallacy. This is the belief that short-term imitation creates a meaningful understanding of a long-term lived experience. A person believes that because they struggled to navigate a hallway in a wheelchair, they now understands what wheelchair users face. But what they know is their, not someone else’s life. Simulations often produce the illusion of empathy without the substance of knowledge.

There is another consequence—one that is often overlooked but deeply damaging. These simulations frequently marginalize the voices of those who live with disability. When the emotional response of a non-disabled participant becomes the focus, the lived expertise of disabled individuals is sidelined. Philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007) defines this as epistemic injustice—a form of harm that occurs when someone’s credibility as a knower is diminished due to bias. In these exercises, we ask non-disabled people to “try on” a condition rather than listening to those who embody it every day.

This dynamic is pervasive in corporate workshops, university classrooms, and even design studios. I’ve seen tech developers use screen readers for thirty minutes and walk away convinced they “get it.” I’ve seen airline executives participate in wheelchair boarding simulations and focus entirely on how uncomfortable they felt, not on how poorly the system was designed. In all of these cases, the emotional reaction is treated as the learning—while the structural causes of exclusion remain untouched.

The truth is that discomfort is not a learning outcome. Awareness is not accountability. Emotional exposure is not systems change.

So what does work?

Rather than simulate exclusion, we must dismantle the conditions that make exclusion possible. That starts by shifting the focus away from “understanding how it feels” toward understanding what it takes to thrive. It requires engaging directly with people who live with disability—not as subjects of empathy, but as experts in interface, adaptation, and resilience.

We must build environments that do not require anyone to adapt to failure. We must hire disabled professionals not just as advisors but as designers and decision-makers. And we must treat accessibility not as a lens to be occasionally applied but as a foundation for everything we build.

Simulating disability may stir emotion. But if it leaves systems untouched, processes unchanged, and leadership unchallenged, then it is not a learning exercise. It is a performance.

Disability is not a costume. It is not an empathy experiment. It is a lived interface with the world—one shaped by barriers, workarounds, and, more often than not, brilliance.

If our goal is inclusion, simulation is not the way forward. Listening is. Hiring is. Redesigning is. Sharing power is.

The next generation of learning will not come from mimicking struggle. It will come from co-creating environments where no one has to struggle to be seen, heard, or included in the first place.