By Heather Albright

Asalamu alaykum wa Rahmatullah,

Inshallah, Ramadan Mubarak to all my Muslim brothers and sisters. This has been on my mind: inclusion in the Islamic community, or the lack thereof, in 2024. The Muslim community is notably lacking in support for persons with any type of disability. I have never encountered a community so deficient in support until I took my shahada in 2003, and not much has changed even in 2024.

We do not have one united Islamic group within the Islamic community that addresses all disability-related issues. There are no disabled persons on any masjid boards—well, there might be someone, but I haven’t seen it so far. There is no certified disability training, ensuring they know what they are doing. They just keep telling the disabled person to have patience and that Allah will provide. Meanwhile, Muslimas with disabilities continue to be left out of mainstream Islamic activities in their community. They do not have inclusive, accessible Islamic classes for themselves or their disabled children. They do not have regular transportation to attend Islamic functions. They do not have CART services (Communication Access Realtime Translation) for their families. Some do not even have physical access to the very Islamic masjids around them. They do not have equal access to the Islamic texts that everyone else has.

I left this message on YouTube for this video. Sometimes, I feel like a broken record because I keep telling my Muslim community about the accessibility issues we face throughout the Islamic community every day. I have received support, and I have even been verbally abused for speaking out to ask for equal access. But Allah put me on this Earth, and I keep having this drive to keep asking for full inclusion within the Islamic community. So may Allah forgive those who have verbally abused me on the subject because maybe they did not know they were being this way.

Please stop asking me to ask Allah for forgiveness for asking my Islamic community to be accessible, and ask Allah to forgive you for not being fully inclusive. Like I say in my YouTube comment, it takes like 30 seconds to make a change that will be felt throughout the world. So please take 30 seconds and ask what Allah would want you to do or say before you actually say something to another Muslim. For what you say, you will be asked about on the Day of Judgment. I always strive to forgive those who say things to me, but there may be some who do not.

“Bismillah. As-salamu alaykum wa Rahmatullah,

I was listening to this lecture and find it to be so true. Alhamdulillah, Allah has given those who have any type of disability a blessing, even if some of us do not appreciate it as a blessing. Allah has brought various individuals into my life over the years that I may have never met if I did not myself have multiple disabilities.

I appreciate Yaqeen Institute for producing this lecture. However, I want to educate Yaqeen on something: they themselves are not accessible to their print-disabled Muslim brothers and sisters. Yaqeen materials are not in OCR accessible format (Optical Character Recognition), and your site makes it really hard to download these materials using assistive technology on all platforms. As far as I know, the only direct response I received from Yaqeen was, ‘We are looking into it,’ for the past five years. There is nothing to look into; you just check in your Adobe Pro where you create the PDF materials, and it clearly says to produce in OCR-readable text for assistive software. Ray Kurzweil has been doing this for years.

Some of the texts on Yaqeen’s site download as just a graphic picture of text that assistive software cannot read. Yaqeen Institute, please, once again, be accessible for the print disabled across the board by using the very Adobe program that you use to create your materials and taking one more click to create your text in OCR-readable format.

Do you know how many print-disabled persons are out there throughout the world? I always think about Surah 80. Yaqeen is so focused on print-abled persons that you forget about the ones who are striving the most to obtain Yaqeen, even more so because we do not have equal access to the materials. Everyone else just downloads the materials and starts reading. We, the print-disabled, have to find a way to download the materials. The website is not very accessible with assistive software when you want to download materials. Next, one has to use a program to OCR the text so our assistive software can read the same materials. I myself am able to do this effectively as I have access to expensive OCR programs that people around the world do not have. It took several people to figure out how to make the text accessible as the website really needs to be more accessible for downloading the materials in the first place.

Ya Allah, I am so happy my blind Muslim groups are blessed with blind techs who made it possible for all blind and print-disabled persons to have equal access to the materials. We work together across the world with one goal: to try and make the world just a little more disability-friendly in Islamic spaces. In my groups I belong to, we speak over 35 languages, including ASL and tactile ASL. We are providing accessibility access across the world—South and North America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. I wish Yaqeen had an accessibility department so you can learn about this issue. For example, if you are deaf, you may use sign language (ASL for USA) to get your information, which is its own language separate from spoken English. Most deaf persons have to be multilingual to access the world around them. Just take my deaf-blind Muslim friends; they speak over 11 languages. Ya Allah gave them this ability. They sign for the non-hearing persons and use tactile sign for the non-seeing and non-hearing.

I still find disability to be a taboo subject within the Muslim communities, even in 2024. Why do our masjids just have one iftar for disabled persons? They should have full inclusion within their masjids and Islamic centers. So I appreciate the lecture being created, but the reality I see every day within the Islamic communities does not reflect what they preach, even from my communications with Yaqeen Institute over the past five years. It is just one step, less than 30 seconds, while it takes several hours and several programs to make the same materials accessible for the print-disabled.

But we do it for the same reason Abdullah ibn Umm Maktum came to the Prophet (PBUH): to seek Islamic knowledge. Just think about all the blessings that Yaqeen would receive from Allah if they spent 30 seconds to ensure their electronic text was accessible. How many more print-disabled persons could Yaqeen reach!”