Disability Pride affirms disability as a natural part of human diversity, and its flag represents the disability community while being safe for people with visually-triggered conditions.
Disability Pride is a movement and identity affirming disability as a natural part of human diversity rather than something to be hidden or pitied. Ann Magill's flag uses a charcoal field crossed by five diagonal stripes: red for physical disabilities, gold for neurodivergence, white for invisible and undiagnosed disabilities, blue for mental illness including anxiety and depression, and green for sensory disabilities.
The muted colours and straight stripes were chosen so the flag is safe for people with visually-triggered conditions such as migraine and seizures.
A charcoal field crossed by five diagonal stripes. The muted colours and straight stripes were chosen so the flag is safe for people with visually-triggered conditions such as migraine and seizures. Magill never published official colour codes; the values given here are the ones that circulate in the community, and they differ slightly between sources.
Ann Magill, a disabled writer and activist with cerebral palsy, designed the flag because she wanted something the disability community could visibly rally around, after an Americans with Disabilities Act anniversary event that she felt had been tucked out of public view. She has said the July 2016 killings of disabled residents at the Tsukui Yamayuri En care home in Sagamihara, Japan, were what turned that wish into action, taking her past "I want a flag" to "We need a flag. We need to be visible." She posted the design on 10 August 2016. That first version was a black field crossed by a zigzag of four bright stripes; a fifth, white stripe for invisible and undiagnosed disabilities was added later, after someone in the community asked her directly for one.
On 4 June 2019 she formally waived all copyright, writing that she had "officially waived all copyright claims to this flag, and registered it under International Public Domain." Her reasoning was that flags should belong to the public, and that she did not want people hesitating to make things for fear of her. A great many secondary accounts, including some large encyclopaedias, give 2019 as the year the flag was created. 2019 is when it entered wide circulation, not when it was designed.
In July 2021 Magill learned that the zigzag could create a strobe effect when scrolled on a screen, posing a risk to people with epilepsy and to migraine sufferers. Her response was to fix it rather than defend it. Working from community suggestions, she straightened the stripes into a single diagonal band, softened the black field to charcoal, muted the colours, removed the black separators between the stripes and regrouped the warm colours and the cool colours so the flag reads more clearly for colourblind people. The visually safe version was published on 13 October 2021. Magill has said the redesign is what makes the flag genuinely representative, because the community came together to solve a problem.
Describing the current flag, Magill gives red for physical disabilities; gold for neurodivergence, which she picked as a visual pun, since the chemical symbol for gold is Au and autism starts with "au"; white for invisible disabilities; blue for "mental illness, anxiety and depression"; and green for sensory disabilities, "like deafness, blindness, lack of smell." Of the field she has said it represents "the anger and mourning over the eugenics and the neglect that disabled people have to fight against."
