Our history begins in the year 2028.

The asteroid scientists have been warning us about for centuries -- 2001 FO32 -- finally makes impact with the earth seven years from today in 2028.

The magnitude of this event has created a new epidemic within healthcare. Alongside physical injuries sustained from the impact, exposure is causing dormant genetic diseases to surface at alarming rates. The asteroid carried with it a mysterious energy and pathogens that seem to be affecting every life form long-term in a very heterogeneous manner.

The world adjusts to widespread injuries in people, nature, and infrastructure. Even working with a disabled population, civilizations living nearest to the crash rebuild their infrastructures swiftly, since their existing environments were automatically toppled, and many of their citizens became sick immediately. Because of this, ironically cities near the crash moved quickly toward a more Utopian society. Their environments developed toward universal design, and their social structures became more supportive of everyone, regardless of disabilities. The term inaccessible became synonymous with useless, or untenable.

Cities farther from the crash believed, rather egotistically and occasionally with prejudice, that the pathogenic health issues did not apply to them, so they were slow to integrate infrastructural and societal changes. But, as it turned out, the pathogens would eventually cause all inhabitants of the earth to develop a disability within their lifetime, at a time unknown and unpredictable. So once the health ripples of the asteroid reached the outer cities, the cities closest to the epicenter were able to provide a roadmap of some best practices for redesigning cities and social structures for the outliers. Although more physically intact from a historical perspective, these fringe cities became less desirable in terms of accessibility, leading to an unanticipated migration into the cities that were first destroyed by the blast, and a dissolution of conventional political boundaries and borders. Migration visas prioritized people with existing disabilities to ensure they could receive better care and quality of life, and so the currently healthy were sometimes stranded in these inaccessible cities.

As a result of these changes, from an accessibility perspective, our current world in 2021 is practically barbaric compared to this future. This new society is more accessible for all people, culturally, environmentally, physically, socially, and emotionally. One of the benefits of this rapid innovation caused by increased disability is an increase in reliance on non-linguistic communication, which has led to a more intuitive and more altruistic society, with enhanced digital tools to communicate wellbeing to one another. There has also been a major shift to life-long care instead of trying to push people out of rehabilitation as swiftly as possible.