After losing the use of her arms, Christina Mallon rose to lead Microsoft’s inclusive design efforts, bringing user-friendly innovations to the disabled.
Fresh out of college and within a month of landing a coveted marketing job in New York City with cosmetics-maker COVERGIRL, Christina Mallon began losing control of her fingers. Then her hands. And then her arms and shoulders.
With doctors unable to pinpoint the cause and no treatment or clear path to recovery, many around her quietly assumed her condition would prevent her from leading an independent and fulfilling life.
They were wrong.
Thirteen years later Mallon, now living in Coconut Grove with her arms and hands fully paralyzed, is the leader of Microsoft’s design team that makes products and services accessible to disabled users. In her free time she volunteers as an advocate for accessible fashion and design for the disabled.
And she’s a mom.
“A lot of the pain and hurt I pushed aside,” Mallon says from her South Grove home. “I was able to take that and use that as a way to achieve more, to really flex the resilience muscle, because that’s all I had control over.”
As Mallon’s symptoms progressed and she lost motor control of her hands and arms, there were few products or resources available to help her navigate even the most mundane day-to-day challenges – brushing her teeth, for instance.
“One of the most difficult parts of becoming severely disabled was the preconceived notions that the individuals around me had around disability.” she says. “They assumed that I would move in with my parents or go into assisted living, and I would stop dating.”
Popular culture in America offered a dismal narrative of life for the disabled. “They thought that because they didn’t see many characters or stories of people with disabilities thriving. So, I didn’t see that either.”
Despite the lack of visible role models within the disabled community, Mallon has been able to flip the script for herself at Microsoft, where she and a team help to assure that artificial intelligence and other technologies and applications are fully accessible to all users despite physical, cognitive or mental health disabilities.
It’s a lofty, but achievable goal, she says: “Ninety percent of the internet is not accessible for accessible technology.”
Much of Mallon’s work focuses on creating products to help web developers incorporate adaptable technologies such as screen readers, which read a page out loud for visually impaired users.
Ali Benter, Senior Product Designer at Microsoft, says Mallon’s work and advocacy has opened her eyes to the limits of conventional approaches to product design: “One of my favorite quotes from Christina is, ‘There shouldn’t need to be inclusive design. There should just be design.”
Since bringing Mallon on board, Microsoft has broadened the scope and approach to what it calls inclusive design. “We really did something revolutionary together,” Benter says. “She has just been a complete change in the company.”
Outside of Microsoft, Mallon serves on the board of Open Style Lab, a nonprofit that helps bring together designers, engineers and occupational therapists to create clothes and other accessories for the disabled.
“Fashion creates culture,” Mallon says. “To have fashion and form together when it comes to adaptive products, I would be able to take the stigma away from disability.”
While Mallon has drawn attention for her ability to pursue a successful, challenging career without the use of her arms and hands, what raises the most eyebrows – and the occasional rebuke – is her decision to become a mother.
“The most painful feedback that I get from other moms or individuals is that it was unfair for me to have my daughter, given that I have to mother differently,” she says.
Not that it hasn’t been rough at times. Like fashion, there were not a lot of products available for a mom like her, so she’s learned to perform many daily tasks with her feet, including feeding and bathing her two-year-old daughter Margot.
She’s taken on the challenge of parenthood with her husband Jamie Michalove and is grateful for his support. “I am so lucky that I have such an involved husband. My daughter and I call him Octopus Man because he always finds an extra arm to help.”
Moving to Florida, specifically Coconut Grove, also helped by offering one very important practical advantage: warm weather, eliminating the daily routines of donning and removing boots, socks, sweaters, coats and hats.
Mallon is also thankful for the community she and her husband found when they moved onto Irvington Avenue in the South Grove.
“The most important thing with raising my daughter that has led to my success is really my neighbors on Irvington – and my nanny,” she says. “I’m able to not have the judgment of being a disabled mom.”
She spoke out on her parenting experience in a People Magazine profile in March 2024, sharing the stigmas surrounding disabilities.
“I can’t live my day-to-day life unless, you know, someone helps me? That’s a really large concept to think about, especially as a grown adult. But at the end of the day, from cradle to grave, you’re always going to need somebody, and I think people really need to be reminded of that,” she says.
Sharing her story and fostering a sense of understanding for people with disabilities is something Mallon feels is part of her mission.
“One thing that I’m excited about with my daughter starting pre-K 2 is how I will be able to work with teachers there to introduce disability and the concept of it early on in a way that is understandable to children,” she says.
While the cause of Mallon’s condition initially was a mystery, doctors now suspect a rare variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease which is extremely uncommon in women under 50. And while most ALS cases tend to be progressive, increasing in severity, hers is not – at least for now.
“I’m still wrangling,13 years in, to handle those emotions, and I’m still working through them not knowing what my future holds,” she said. “It motivates me more to get things done faster and have that impact because I don’t know how long I’ll be here.”
Christina is an inspiration, thank you for sharing her story!