Navigating the inaccessible platform: disability, digital storytelling, and the creative labour of Javanese fiction writers on Wattpad

This paper examines how disabled Javanese fiction writers navigate a platform that is simultaneously a space of creative liberation and structural inaccessibility. Drawing on interviews with 18 disabled Javanese fiction writers, an accessibility audit of three digital fiction platforms, and textual analysis of 30 disability-themed stories, this paper argues that disabled creative workers in the Global South face a triple precarity: platform labour precarity, linguistic-algorithmic precarity from the privileging of English-language content, and disability-specific accessibility precarity that renders the platform unusable for writers with visual, motor, or cognitive impairments. This paper proposes a crip platform labour to name the invisible, uncounted adaptive work that disabled writers perform to make inaccessible tools usable. Disabled Javanese writers develop creative practices and disability aesthetics drawn from wayang and kejawen traditions that challenge the platform's ableist and linguistic hierarchical design.