Believe them. Please just do everyone a favor in general and take them at their word.

And for the record, the Google definition of disability, to make it even easier on people:
“a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities.”

I can not begin to convey in here, let alone articulate, how many times I have seen — or heard — people playing “the disability police”, being the arbiter of whether or not someone is “disabled enough” or “truly disabled”. If you live in the United States, you probably already have a good idea how difficult it is for an adult to actually get disability benefits. Not getting them does not mean that they are not disabled. One’s worth is not defined by the job that they have, any jobs that they are capable of holding, or their lack of job.

Some people are disabled and can work. Some people are disabled and can not work.

Sometimes this fluctuates over the course of the disabled person’s life, depending on their disabilities.

This does not mean that they are not disabled, or that their disabilities have any less of an impact on them.

For able-bodied people to smugly suggest jobs that they think someone who is disabled should get, or “be able to work”, is so outrageous that I don’t actually have words for it other than the fact that it is so smug that I don’t ever want to be around when it actually happens. It must take an extreme amount of smugness to sit on your high, usually middle-class throne to make comments like that when you’re not disabled (and no, your intermittent conditions do not count if they are not disabling, so do not use them trying to gain clout with the community… I’ve seen this happen when these folks have their feet held to the fire, as they should), not having any of the lived experiences that come with disability. Do these folks not even hear themselves?

If a disabled person says that they can’t do something, please just take them at their word.

The person living the experience, the disabled person, should be able to describe in sufficient detail what their limitations are, and it should go without saying that since they live with those limitations every day — at least as a general rule of thumb insofar as them being disabled, having that disabling condition — that they should be believed when they discuss them. We as a society should more automatically believe them.

It would make disabled people’s lives so much more easier as a whole if people just simply did this.

Comparatively speaking, very few people lie about being disabled. Far more people are telling the truth.