I am highly sceptical of the idea that neurodivergence is rare in comparison to physical disability. Which numbers do you have in mind here? Even if we just count things like being highly gifted, autism and ADHD, the numbers are huge.
I am also sceptical of the idea that mental weirdness cannot be accommodated, because it is too individual.
People in wheelchairs are very, very different from each other. Some can walk, but the amount they can walk is unpredictable, so they are using a wheelchair to prevent a scenario where their steps for the day run out and they are stranded. Some have paralysed nerves, others malfunctioning ones, some are obese, some have joint diseases, some have muscle wasting diseases or chronic fatigue, many complex combinations of these. Wheelchairs and scooters are not the condition, which is varied, they are the measure taken for all these very different people to gain access.
Similar with people with visual impairments. You have people who are completely or partially blind in their eyes, from birth, or later in life. You can also have perfectly functioning eyes, but fascinating forms of cortical blindness, often acquired in adulthood such as through brain injury, such as blindsight, where they can do things like walk around obstacles and catch things, but not respond to them rationally and counterintuitively, because they cannot consciously see them, though their subconscious can. You have things like people seeing detailed textures and colours, but not shapes (which is bananas to think about when you realise they see multiple different textures and colours at once but still no shapes, e.g. someone seeing the exact texture and colour of your skin, and of your hair, and of your clothes, respectively, but they do not see a face or a human and these things have no spatial arrangement and connection). I know someone with partial cortical blindness who seemed completely normal and functional at a party in a dark room, then pulled out a cane when we left the building, and mentioned that she is completely incapable of using computer screens, because her body literally blanks when a certain light threshold is exceeded, so she works exclusively with screenreaders and tactile and audio input. If you focus less on how the specific person individually is, and more on things they say would help them, you still run into commonalities—like canes, support dogs, websites that operate with screen readers and do not need mouse input.
Similarly, if I offer varied forms of instruction in a classroom, the people who embrace a particular form and thrive with it are not identical, and might have different reasons for doing so. When my university recently replaced all light switches with an automatic and undimmable system of extremely bright white light, multiple people were super upset over this and requested control over light levels and their own space in their offices, and they had very different neurodivergencies that had them get stressed out over this. Similarly, the university currently wants to switch to none of us having desks and offices anymore and making everything flex spaces, and discussing this in groups on accessibility that are a crossover between physical disability and neurodivergence had us all very quickly hone in on aspects of this that were absolutely fucking with many of us, albeit for different reasons, from workspaces not customised to physical needs, to a lack of routine, to a lack of silence and privacy. If you include neurodivergent people in the planning process, and they consult other neurodivergent people, they tend to find that they are not alone in their problems. And while the result will still not fit everyone, it will include a lot more people, and that is a good thing.
I am highly sceptical of the idea that neurodivergence is rare in comparison to physical disability. Which numbers do you have in mind here? Even if we just count things like being highly gifted, autism and ADHD, the numbers are huge.
I am also sceptical of the idea that mental weirdness cannot be accommodated, because it is too individual.
People in wheelchairs are very, very different from each other. Some can walk, but the amount they can walk is unpredictable, so they are using a wheelchair to prevent a scenario where their steps for the day run out and they are stranded. Some have paralysed nerves, others malfunctioning ones, some are obese, some have joint diseases, some have muscle wasting diseases or chronic fatigue, many complex combinations of these. Wheelchairs and scooters are not the condition, which is varied, they are the measure taken for all these very different people to gain access.
Similar with people with visual impairments. You have people who are completely or partially blind in their eyes, from birth, or later in life. You can also have perfectly functioning eyes, but fascinating forms of cortical blindness, often acquired in adulthood such as through brain injury, such as blindsight, where they can do things like walk around obstacles and catch things, but not respond to them rationally and counterintuitively, because they cannot consciously see them, though their subconscious can. You have things like people seeing detailed textures and colours, but not shapes (which is bananas to think about when you realise they see multiple different textures and colours at once but still no shapes, e.g. someone seeing the exact texture and colour of your skin, and of your hair, and of your clothes, respectively, but they do not see a face or a human and these things have no spatial arrangement and connection). I know someone with partial cortical blindness who seemed completely normal and functional at a party in a dark room, then pulled out a cane when we left the building, and mentioned that she is completely incapable of using computer screens, because her body literally blanks when a certain light threshold is exceeded, so she works exclusively with screenreaders and tactile and audio input. If you focus less on how the specific person individually is, and more on things they say would help them, you still run into commonalities—like canes, support dogs, websites that operate with screen readers and do not need mouse input.
Similarly, if I offer varied forms of instruction in a classroom, the people who embrace a particular form and thrive with it are not identical, and might have different reasons for doing so. When my university recently replaced all light switches with an automatic and undimmable system of extremely bright white light, multiple people were super upset over this and requested control over light levels and their own space in their offices, and they had very different neurodivergencies that had them get stressed out over this. Similarly, the university currently wants to switch to none of us having desks and offices anymore and making everything flex spaces, and discussing this in groups on accessibility that are a crossover between physical disability and neurodivergence had us all very quickly hone in on aspects of this that were absolutely fucking with many of us, albeit for different reasons, from workspaces not customised to physical needs, to a lack of routine, to a lack of silence and privacy. If you include neurodivergent people in the planning process, and they consult other neurodivergent people, they tend to find that they are not alone in their problems. And while the result will still not fit everyone, it will include a lot more people, and that is a good thing.