While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced.
Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replacing every building and road regulation and the politicians who put them there?
It reminds me of the people in self-driving car threads complaining that the billions should've gone to transit. Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
This is so true and I see this pattern constantly all over the west:
There is some horrible problem that was created by the government or needs government intervention to fundamentally solve. The idea of the government being effective or useful in any way is so distant that it doesn't even register as a possibility. The government doesn't even register as a valid target to blame or locus of change anymore, so it never even enters the conversation. Instead, the next proximate cause is blamed and the anger is directed to them.
Recently - a teacher made a private joke on Snapchat expressing frustration about her workday. Snapchat automatically sent the message to the police and the police pulled up an hour later to the school and arrested her. She wasn't charged thankfully. The response on reddit is "FUCK SNAPCHAT" even though we know all communication platforms are being monitored by the government and are no doubt strong-armed into doing this by the government. Even the potential solutions being discussed are only finding and using E2EE communication platforms not policy change, because that's not in the window of possibility.
It's both "the entire nation's infrastructure." and not that.
What I mean is... many cases are individual: the ramp for that library; the door knobs/handles in that office; the floor indicators in this lift/elevator; the audio announcements (or lack of) on the busses/trains; the small print on contracts; live subtitling at the theatre; the checkout button on this web site; the checkout button on that website. You get the idea.
The vast majority of cases are individual; owned by myriad businesses, charities, foundations.
The problem the OP is circling is the same as that proposed by the Social Model of disability. Most systems present obstacles to disabled users which could have been avoided if those systems' owners and designers and included disabled people in the design phase. Instead, no-one does this claiming it's too expensive, forgetting they themselves will be disabled in the future (most people become disabled in one way or another, with age). We all kick the can down the road, rather than deal with it today. Dealing with it is hard. The "national level infrastructure" aspect is a mixture of cultural praxis/expectation and, potentially, government carrot to go with the (existing) government stick (regulation; that most people try to ignore).
(I'm not saying the Social Model of Disability is 100% right. I feel it's viewpoint is hugely instructive it's not the whole story.)
Another way to look at the social model is kids playing in neighborhoods. It's not unsafe to walk from one place to another because of lousy sidewalks or excessive leaves: it's the roads we put between any place they want to go. This might've been tolerable when each household only had 1 car and it was gone all day, but not now that everybody has a RAM Child-squasher 2500. In my neighborhood the sidewalks also just... end randomly, would be awful to live here and be blind. Would be a lot better to be blind if you weren't a misstep away from getting run over.
Under the medical model, disabled individuals are expected to change their behavior to accommodate (fit on with) society. We ask people whose lives are already more difficult than average to do additional work.
Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead. Further, the social model says that any policy that affects disabled people should be crafted by or with disabled people who are affected by that policy. Nothing about us without us.
I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.
I support the social model. It’s the one where I get to have agency.
I support the medical model then, disabled people who can't work should, ought, to be among the poorest in society, just above the people that can work but don't. Because some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest (in absolute terms though: you are richer than almost anyone alive in year 800 CE so not starving poor nor barely surviving poor) and so, who should be? Should the able working be poorer than a disabled person doing less work? The same work?
And why should disabled people be able to craft policy that will be funded largely by the abled? In order to have legitimacy of a policy, you need to involve the people that will pay for it.
The social model is non-sensical, it's unfair, and it cloaks its unfairness in the language of social justice which it doesn't deserve to. There are better forms of advocacy.
> I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.
For what it is worth, I'm probably in different countries to you, and "me too". I fractured T8 and spent some time unable to walk at all and in a wheelchair -- I can now use a crutch some of the time and have a fairly complex medical history.
You never notice how much [en-gb] pavements / [en-us] sidewalks camber towards the road for drainage until moving your pelvis is excruciating, or driving a manual wheelchair on a camber means that you're constantly working twice as hard with one hand compared to the other. Nor do you notice what a bin on the street does when kerbs are difficult. Low hanging vegetation, normally pretty, over a neighbour's wall becomes incredibly annoying if you literally cannot move yourself to avoid it inevitably hitting your eyes. So many minor annoyances, from booked assistance on train travel forgetting you exist halfway through, right the way through to outright discrimination from your colleagues. And don't get me started on the bladder management!
Everyone could be disabled, and as said earlier at some point in life everyone probably would be. Inclusive design is just that -- inclusive -- and done correctly it costs nothing to little extra. I don't really understand why we don't build it into society, rather than try to get people to (as I increasingly want to) fork out thousands to tens of thousands for electric wheelchairs. Sure, they're great, but sometimes I miss taking long walks or cycling ('normally').
> Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead.
This sounds good in the abstract, but the devil is in the details. What specific accommodation is being asked for? What counts as a disability? For example, should I simply have to ignore angry outbursts directed at me and my coworkers from someone with oppositional defiance disorder[1]? Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD or can I request proof from a medical professional?
There are real tradeoffs here. You see it in how these kinds of accommodations are abused at elite universities[2].
I mean you kinda are just expected to ignore angry outbursts directed at you from anyone. That's not even about disability, it's just part of the social contract that you don't start throwing blows when people yell at you.
A great deal of changes proposed to make disabled peoples' lives easier end up having many fringe benefits for the non-disabled. The classic example is strollers or hand trucks going up the little dip on the sidewalk rather than having to lug them over an enormous curb.
The cost argument starts looking weak when you observe there's always billions of dollars shaken from magical couch cushions whenever it's time to wage another losing war.
In terms of the web two of the greatest things we could do for accessibility: (1) eliminate GDPR pop-ups (and all pop-ups and senseless modal dialogs) and (2) eliminate cloudflare harassment, ReCAPTCHA harassment and anubis harassment. Any of those things should be an immediate F rank for WCAG.
The cost argument is a cover for institutional cruelty. Some people really really want to be cruel. Usually those folks are the most emotionally damaged people IME.
> The vast majority of cases are individual; owned by myriad businesses, charities, foundations.
Agreed, but the solution is more general. If you want handicapped people to have more access, that probably means widespread societal change through regulations, like the ADA (which obviously didn't fix everything, but was at least a big step forward).
But don't you see how the fact that many cases are individual makes it harder? You mention doorknobs, and it's easy to declare (which is why the US government has declared) that lever style door handles are more accessible and should be preferred. It's hard, impossibly so, to construct a world where nobody with wrist mobility problems will ever encounter a round doorknob they'd like to open.
It seems like the implication here is “if we can’t do anything, we shouldn’t do anything at all” under the social model.
Not every doorknob will be disability friendly. If pressure from the social model fixes 20% of doorknobs, now there is a group of people can open 20% of doors where they could open 0% before.
My intended implication is that pressure from the social model has achieved as much as it can, and the left over problems must be resolved through other means. The vast majority of doorknobs I personally interact with, including 100% of the ones at my house and workplace, are lever-style.
> it's hard, impossibly so, to construct a world where nobody with wrist mobility problems will ever encounter a round doorknob they'd like to open.
its not that hard to get to 99.999% though.
stop selling door knobs, or doors that accept round knobs. add incentives to swap or return round knobs. include checks for round knobs both for building inspections and insurance.
you wont wont get the last couple people that build their own doors and machine their own knobs, but thats gonna be a really small segment
You can't talk about things from a social model perspective without modeling the political realities of the policies you're proposing. A national ban on the sale of round doorknobs would not pass, and local bans would create an enormous backlash which might well ruin the longstanding consensus that ADA compliance requires levers.
The US has been institutionally dysfunctional for quite some time, so that puts us in an interesting position where it's easier to imagine inventing our way out of social problems with $30,000 servo-filled boxes than it is to imagine ever getting a cheaper and easier solution moved through Congress. Congress rarely seems to pass disruptive changes to law these days. Statehouses are less sclerotic, but not by much. Many of the civil rights gains touted 10+ years ago came from hacks shoved through the supreme court exploiting a partisan lean.
If you really read between the lines, much of the fuss about Mayor Mamdani in NYC has been a curious rediscovery that the government can in fact Just Do Things for people who elected it.
Congress passed the ADA in 1990. There isn't much more they can do - they have limited power. (there were a few updates since then, and I'm sure there are more tweaks they can make, but the majority of their work is done). Most of the authors rant are not things the government does or should do, government buildings generally are ADA compliant these days. The rant is about non-government things.
The biggest thing that I want is a way for ADA to realistically apply to invisible disabilities like autism. Although in theory people with invisible disabilities can get accomodations, in practice the accomodation that they really need is "stop being a shitty employer".
I think their anger is justified. Yes there's not a lot that individual engineers can do to help, but a big part of the problem is that they don't even understand the people they're "helping".
These tech gadgets are the annoying experience we've all had of someone taking a look at a problem from the outside and proposing unhelpful "solutions" that won't work because they don't fully understand it.
It reminds me of conversations I've had with people who suffer from insomnia. They say that everyone has some suggestion to just try melatonin, or not use screens before bed, or whatever. As though they haven't tried these things.
Yes they're just trying to be helpful, but it comes off as patronizing.
Experience says they're not, they're being dismissive.
They don't understand because they don't care to and it's beneath them to learn, because the solution is to 'just' do this simple thing everyone knows to do. It now becomes the sufferers fault they continue to suffer and it's not longer required for anyone else to care.
Not at all. Just don't start by guessing what a disabled person's concerns are, or presume that your suggestions are relevant. A respectful start is letting them know you will be responsive and let them lead the conversation.
It also feels like a failure to understand the motivations and mechanisms behind these projects- those "misguided" college students are usually doing these projects to further their studies, as capstone or research projects that they may not be concerned with the funding for. Accessible product development is a side effect of the process, not the goal, and that's why they aren't developing scalable solutions.
> Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
mind you, tech companies are also lobbyists with money, and are happy to pay politicians to not build infrastructure that would make the self driving or electric cars less useful
"...the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced."
a significant portion of my internet experience could be boiled down to this single sentence.
This is why raising well-rounded children is so important. Intelligent young people today are too often encouraged/forced to specialize and while it makes sense for them economically given the structure of our society, it produces lots of young, intelligent adults who can't see the forest for the trees. They can be brilliant in one area but unable to see the big picture, which is a real loss to society when they have the ambition to contribute.
Ride hailing apps promised to decrease traffic and social media apps promised to make people more social, in both cases the opposite happened and this is just off the top of my head.
I quite enjoy playing with robots, but I'd rather coordinate the design and installation of 1000 ramps than be involved with one walking liability sedan chair. If you care about results and reliability, no shit a competent engineer will be picking the one that has no moving parts and a 10,000 year track record.
The fact that this is or isn't happening is basically unrelated to inventing new stuff. It's almost entirely a political issue, not one of engineering.
ramps have been around for a long time, and are well known to take up a ton of space. especially if every propery gets its own ramp rather than all the properties on a block sharing the same ramp system and having a common porch
I just don't know what it means to prefer to be involved with the design and installation of ramps. There's a lot of ramps around, and the knowledge of how to build them is widely distributed. Is there some phenomenon I'm not aware of, where lots of people want to have ramps if only they could find a way to design and install them?
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny because tech companies _do_ provide input at policy level. Sticking to transportation, auto groups and manufacturers were able to popularize "jay walking" a century ago. Tech leadership and politics mingle at the highest levels too. For ex, Trump took Huang, Cook, and Musk with him on a recent trip to China.
> Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded
I think your overall point is relatively sound but that example is just terrible...
Elon Musk has repeatedly lobbied against transit expansion and his Hyperloop pitch arguably derailed HSR talks in California for half a decade while the Las Vegas teslertube prevented the expansion of a monorail to actually service the strip airport corridor.
I'll grant you Musk being terrible, no argument there, but that's not tech companies as a whole.
And California hardly needed any help to sabotage its HSR, the state's whole process for that kind of development is incredibly backwards and broken, sadly.
it's not really tech companies fault on this either but it sucks to see large amounts of investor money going to them when it could go to solving the issue more efficiently.
(although obviously it would be less profitable for the investors so it won't happen)
It all depends on the counterfactual. Could the money solve the problem, if the issues with transportation arent funding?
It seems like an institutionally made black hole that will simply consume anything put into it. I dont think flooding it with more money will fix that problem.
Investors have poured about 10 billion into waymo prior to 2026. That could only have paid for about 5 to 7 miles of urban light rail given recent project costs in Seattle, San Francisco, or New York.
And that's if you completely ignore the challenge around who has the money and assume the state can just collect extra taxes without discontent or impacts
What if investors poured 9 billion into making light rail cheaper, and then 1 billion into light rail? Where would we be then? Other countries don't spend 2 billion dollars a mile. Hire the best engineers from Europe and Asia.
> A March 2025 report by the Maryland comptroller's office found that permitting and legal fees for the project, originally budgeted at $6 million, had actually consumed roughly $800 million, thanks to two lawsuits and the contract renegotiations
Better tech cannot solve that on its own, the problem is not even there.
this type of individualist responsibility diffusion is exactly why nothing happens in the US, & why France has protests the second the govt does anything bad.
no one is asking you to solve the whole problem, just be part of fighting for the real solution
> Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp
The problem is that inventing a solution that no-one needs or wants and then using venture money to hype it up feels like rubbing salt in a wound for the very people they're claiming to try to help.
The point is they're not actually trying to help those people. They're using them as a marketing tool to further their own ambition to make money.
These nameless people could very well want to help people. A device that costs as much as a Honda Civic? Yes, that's exactly the kind of stuff that happens as you attempt to mature a product.
I was working on a drone automation system at another company. The initial prototypes were also in the Honda Civic multiplier range. The companies that bought into us knew the price tag. The customers who wanted conventional products with conventional pricing... ignored us!
Once you develop an actual manufacturing line the costs go away down, but first you must develop that maturity.
Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details. There is ideological opposition against from business types and some other tech types.
> it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.
> Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details.
Some will, and that's great, but as the blog post accurately points out, the invention of these things isn't the primary issue, it's the lack of implementation. And that isn't the fault of the engineers designing better doorknobs or ramps.
> Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.
Bullshit. The US has had underfunded transit for near a century now because of our obsession with cars. Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse.
the car companies at the time were tech companies that paid the government to kick people off of roads and build communities that require cars to get to.
> Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse.
Depends. Do car manufacturers count as tech companies?
The obsession with cars and car infrastructure isn't accidental either, it's been manufactured and pushed heavily by car companies over decades. Same with the opposition to public transit. None of this stuff is happening 100% organically, it's being pushed by corporate interests via lobbying with government and funding advertising at individuals
If someone watched a press video for the RAV4, and responded by saying "Toyota Motor Corporation Hates Me and You" and demanding that Toyota fix the bus routes in their city, I would think that's pretty silly. Everything's interrelated, and no consumer demand is 100% organic, but the linkage is just too remote to make sense.
It's literal, direct linkage. About a century ago, when cars were starting to become popular, car makers spent a shitload of money on bribes to city governments to make the cities only usable by car.
I live in California, where as of 2023 I can cross most roads whenever and wherever I'd like so long as I do so safely. But this hasn't really shifted car discourse at all, even in my quite walkable neighborhood.
Of course, to me this isn't a surprise at all. Cars are a wildly popular technology which lots of people want to purchase and use, and living in a country where nearly everyone can afford to do so means that much of the infrastructure will be optimized for it. (It's true that this is all very convenient for car companies and that they worked hard to make it so.)
Better doorknobs? Better civil infrastructure? A lot of those companies in that space aren't even tech companies, even if they deal with tech.
The companies he talks about have a Very different business culture, and thus a very different response to if an in-house tech person wanted to do anything, really.
How are Tech companies fighting public transit? At least in these parts a relatively high fraction of their employees commute by (private) bus.
I can only presume that Tech companies would prefer the government provide safe, clean, and timely bussing for the public to save the company the cost and effort.
Hyperloop and Boring Company were both created as distractions from real proven transit technologies, and the latter has been quite successful at getting rail projects cancelled or at least confusing politicians enough to delay them.
No, I provided one particularly eggregious example. Uber/Lyft have also lobbied against transit. The Google shuttles OP alludes to interfered with real transit operations.
They generally would, though for the most part I imagine they're just ambivalent here. As long as workers can get to work, that's most of what they care about.
Every time a tech company lobbies against taxes, they’re fighting public transit. Every time they spend the exact same money they just argued shouldn’t go to the state on privatized busses, they’re fighting public transit.
Totally blind person. I once had this bright idea that the blind community could fix Linux into our perfect platform. I don't care all that much anymore about anything being fixed, foss or not. FOSS is everyone scratching their own itch, and if a developer who can see creates a program that scratches his itch but isn't accessible, but his itch is scratched, why would he then spend time fixing it up for the one blind Linux user that made an issue on Github about it?
For non-FOSS products, it's even worse. There is no way to tell Amazon that, for the past several months, their library view for Kindle on iOS was inaccessible to VoiceOver, with the books having no accessibility label, and the only way one can tell what book they're about to open is through VoiceOver's tiny on-device image describer model. Of course, in iOS 27 (beta currently) this is improved, but it shouldn't have to be. The last few versions of Kindle has begun fixing this, but last time I tried, about a week ago, it could easily break even just by my scrolling the view a few times.
So I don't even bother anymore. If Google can stand having poor Braille support on Android, fine, I'll use an iPhone. If Apple can stand having awful Google Docs support, which I use at work, on MacOS, I'll use Windows or even Linux where it works fine. If an image isn't described, I will put it through AI. If a page doesn't work well with a screen reader, I'll send it through AI too. If I want to play a video game where 99% of them do not have spoken menus, but I can enjoy the actual gameplay, I'll ask AI which menu option I'm on.
I've come to feel that life is so miserable when I and only a few others fight and fight for accessibility. If it works, it only works for a moment. So I just lean on AI because it can "see" a lot better than I can. Besides, people have used AI to make accessibility mods for Final Fantasy 1 through 6, the pixel-remaster versions. So when terminally angry people come at me for my use of AI, I just don't care anymore. Let them go blind and see how it feels.
Every time I see someone complain about the idea of these fancy wheelchairs as a terrible distraction I think of Michael Kaplan's blog, Sorting It All Out. He had many good things to say about the iBot wheelchair and he was devastated when it got discontinued in 2009 (looks like it's back more recently).
The author is seeing that it's easier for one team to get backing (VC money, course credit, design awards, TED talk applause, etc.) for "solving" an accessibility problem than for us to enforce that entire industries follow good accessibility practices in new work and retrofit existing work. In theory industry-wide enforcement is the sort of thing legislation like the ADA solves, but obviously that hasn't been completely effective. Not sure how to fix it.
There was a subthread recently complaining about password managers and their UX problems. These aren't aimed specifically at "disabled" users, but I think it's a similar situation. We can't reliably enforce good standards for sign-in (whether that's just setting the autofill attribute correctly and choosing the correct event handlers for Javascript validators or something far more ambitious), so we expect a password manager to just deal with the web as it is. IMHO they work remarkably well given that constraint, but it's not optimal overall.
Yeah, it kinda feels like a banal thing to hate on. "They're only doing this because it's easier to create a prototype invention than to redo all design standards and enforcement in the country!" I mean, yeah? What exactly is the implied alternative for the sort of individuals targeted by the blog post?
The video of the prototype invention has the effect of making people think they don't need to be concerned about ramps and doorknobs and ADA enforcement because some teen in a garage has just solved this problem forever. People who need accommodations also require the political support of able-bodied people in order to actually make change happen, and his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
> his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
That seems like a major stretch. Really feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here, like saying that a video about improved airbags means that nobody will care about safer road design anymore.
If it weren't for all the supermassive cars rolling around, purchased because they're ostensibly safer in a crash for the person driving them (while markedly decreasing the safety of the other driver) then maybe I could agree with you. But with so many people intentionally electing to value their individual safety at cost of the safety of others, I actually think that it makes for a great reason for them to not think about road safety! Who cares if the road is unsafe if I'm driving a tank?
The expressed (not implied) alternative in the post is for those people to stop pretending they care, and start actually caring. Stop trying to save the world. The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.
People do care, but there are so many problems in the world, and only so much caring to go around.
It's extremely cynical to view it as "people pretend to care", rather than looking around and realizing there's a ton of important problems out there that the caring is distributed over. People care about disabilities, but they also care about war, about public schooling, about the environment, about feminism, about animal rights, about transparency in government, about road safety, about child well-being, about unemployment, and so on. All of these are important things, and of course there are dozens more that I haven't listed.
And inventions are sometimes actually useful. Sure, most of those prototypes will go nowhere, but every once in a while something that really helps is invented. And you can't predict in advance only the ones that will actually go on to help.
Some people actually care, but they can't always win the battle at their own companies when there are other priorities, much less go fix all the other websites, pour concrete at other businesses, etc. Is the solution for everyone to care? If, so how do you accomplish that? ("Americans with Disability Act" v2?)
The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.
This is an excellent summary of the sort of anti-tech thinking that I strongly disagree with. Caring about people with Alzheimer's is well and good, but what we actually want are vaccines and cures.
There's a general problem on the web (and to a lesser extent computing in general) that UX is just widely terrible. I think part of this is because developers tend to work at the very edge of their competence, and getting something working at all is a major feat, with no room left over for making it work well. And part of it is developers or designers deciding they know better than everyone else. A lot of this was a solved problem back in the 80s: the platform provides a standard UI toolkit and a set of standard idioms, and all software uses them. But this lesson is ignored because developers and designers don't like it when their stuff looks and works just like everything else. Making buttons that look like everyone else's buttons means you don't set yourself apart, so we end up with custom buttons that look different and don't work as well. And, of course, are less accessible, because accessibility requires integration into the overall system that doesn't exist with a custom solution.
I was a Mac fiend back in the "beleaguered" days, and standard widgets and idioms were a big deal in that community. There was broad consensus that apps should all look and work the same, as much as that was possible. A button should be a button and a text field should be a text field no matter what program it was in. That all went out the window with the web, for no particularly good reason, and it's infecting non-web platforms at an alarming rate.
100% agree about the UX problems. Most engineers would be happy to fix those issues, but of course, companies always want the new features...because that's what customers want and what drives more $$$.
Sadly, it's true that the % of new sales generated by improving a11y beyond the bare minimum isn't going to be terribly large. That's why it's important to have regulations that mandate decent support, because the monetary incentive that drives corporate behavior just isn't there.
I feel like that hasn't been true for a long time. Companies no longer compete on featuresets. I mean take any tool you've used for 10-15 years, the trend is often less features, not more. And the irony is that its the products from the biggest most well compensated companies in the world falling into this pattern of removing features and making things slower and less usable over time. Compare humble old VLC, no shortage of features, to what google routinely does to their products.
Quality, functionality, standing on its own merits, no longer is the aim of business. It is about capturing the mindshare through propaganda a.k.a. advertising. It is why these shitty companies can continue to exist on the top while serving continually inferior tooling: they've flooded the mindshare such that even if some superior product came about, it would never gain traction.
The author is simultaneously correct and incorrect.
The author is correct that simple and cheap changes such as ramps and door knobs are the logical fixes. And yes, based on personal experience, companies hate disabled people at the first sign that they will be an inconvenience to the company.
However, nature has no such things. If you enjoy nature and the outdoors, then user-specific equipment can provide capabilities not available through cheap alternatives. The prototypes shown are always marketing with some flair to it. Yes, the noise and bulk are terrible, but proof of concept can lead to improvements over time - eg you're looking at a some no-name competitor to the Model T (prototype suit), just imagine what the 2026 civic will look like (suits 75 years from now).
My aunt has MS. It cost her nearly $10k to have a _used_ aluminum ramp installed for her house.
She can't come to my house because the gap between the buildings that leads to my door is too narrow for a wheelchair and would require is to get two different building owners, who are not our landlord, to agree to have their building modified to make room for it. It would easily cost 50k+ to actually rebuild two buildings and the sidewalk into a functioning ramp that is the correct slope for a chair.
Agree with your broader point, but out of curiosity:
> It cost her nearly $10k to have a _used_ aluminum ramp installed for her house.
Why so expensive? I did a quick search, and the only way I could get a (new) aluminum ramp up to $10k was by selecting the 30-foot platform model, [1] which I'd guess would be excessive in most cases. I'm not counting installation fees but it looks like something I could do myself in an hour, and I'm not that handy.
I used cheap as a relative term. But $10k for a ramp seems like someone got gouged. A couple hundred in lumber etc and a couple hundred for labor is doable in many cases. I see those wooden ramps at homes often.
The stakes ("nature"-as-hobby vs. navigating the built environment that 99.999% of people depend on for survival) are very different, and they're also very different from the stakes of the mythologies ("we've solved blindness!") that sell these disability dongles to the public.
(And the closer you get to nature the more tools like a dumb cane make way more sense than anything digital and battery-powered anyway.)
I do think access to the outdoors is important, though.
If you are a disabled person who wants to visit the back country then the $30,000 (or more!) robot wheelchair is your only option. We shouldn't make all mountain trails ADA accessible. My local park system has a few accessible trails (the majority are not) that can get them to enjoy nature, if that isn't enough spend the money on the robot.
However I'm only willing to take the above position because there are plenty of other options. There are a lot of fully able people who live life without going to those remote places and don't miss it. I'm not fine with saying the local grocery store is not accessible - they cannot live without that. Most of what exists in a city should be accessible to everyone despite disabilities - the cost to provide this is not that high.
All of the legislation and regulation and infrastructure in the world is not going to get rid of stairs everywhere.
Medi cal, medicare, and private insurance have all chipped in for my ramps, but none of them will touch something like an iBot chair with a 50 ft pole because it has ambiguous insurance coding associated to it rather than being a normal wheelchair.
So.. In other words, what's the problem? People are buying the high tech gimmicks either out of pocket or through equally spotty VA coverage.
The US has systems in place to aid the purchase of ramps for those in need and offers ample opportunity to sue businesses into bankruptcy for getting any ADA stuff wrong.. what's the demand exactly? It seems like "engineers shouldn't be so creative" to me, but the reality is that they should work on stuff they're interested in rather than some abstract civic duty, assigned unpassionate work is how you build crap.
The real problem IMO is for most SV companies, the audience is the investors and the press, not the actual customer. Which I guess kind of makes sense structurally -- if the idea is to grow fast and exit, then you gotta know who butters your bread, but I think it's bad structurally for problem solving and building sustainable businesses. I know in the past "small" businesses got kind of denigrated as "lifestyle" businesses, but I think we structurally need more funding around things that solve real problems but aren't going to "CHANGE EVERYTHING!!!" and maybe only end up worth a few tens of millions instead of billions or trillions.
I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete. And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.
And yes, the cost of such devices is high today, but that's true of any new technology. The first print reading devices were huge machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now the technology is free on your phone. Early hearing aids were bulky, expensive, and not much better than an ear horn. Now they're affordable, compact, and have handy features like bluetooth connectivity. My guess is that most of these prototypes will fizzle and go nowhere, but some will succeed, and the lives of disabled people will be improved by them.
> I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete.
They don't need to, and the might not even do that, but the boosters and the clipfarms are very much in on it. You don't see that "engagement" for continuous sidewalks and raised crosswalks despite how amazing they are.
And they're also very convenient as a way to avoid infrastructural improvements, you can point to disability dongles as a reason not to invest in it, that way you're conveniently not bearing the cost.
> And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.
The problem is that's at best a post-hoc realisation, when that argument is made upfront it's pretty much always dismissed out of hand (very much blub adjacent), you can see it in pretty much every discussion about better walk/bike infrastructure.
Sure, but only if you want to do that. I have a wheelchair bound friend who uses a $20,000 tracked wheelchair when he goes camping (I've never been camping with him, so I'm not sure how he sets up his tent...). However most people in wheelchairs don't care that much about camping and are happy to do without - which they can do because the places they want to go don't need the expensive tools. For most places the cost to make something disabled friendly is minimal.
What they're getting at is that the individual level gadget based accommodations can lead hurdles against making the world generally more accessible to people with disabilities by putting the onus on the disabled person to buy those gadgets in people's minds, eg "oh we don't need to pay to put ramps here there's stair climbing wheelchairs", ignoring the cost of those devices. Yes they /eventually/ get cheaper but there's still plenty of people who can't afford even the cheaper versions and it takes decades to get there.
> I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew. I need better doorknobs and/or a ramp. But a ramp is boring. You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud. You can’t give a TED Talk about a ramp. You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.
It's a really cynical way to attack people who are at least sort of trying to help.
And obviously the inventions of "a ramp" and "slightly wider door" already exist; those aren't a matter of invention, they're a matter of regulations and enforcement.
Trying to help does not give you a free pass. Pushing a wheelchair user up a ramp without asking their permission first is both "trying to help" and inconsiderate (and scary and dangerous).
Before inventing a more advanced stair climbing wheelchair, you should ask a few wheelchair users if stairs are really the issue they need solving.
I've seen visually impaired and wheelchair users have more issues with elevators than I have with not having proper ramps.
Although I have seen several wheelchair bound accessibility experts invited to give talks and there's no ramp or accessible way for them to access the stage where they're giving a talk about. . . . . accessibility.
When there is a substantial elevation difference you need a lot of ramp--which needs a lot of space.
We already are seeing the problem with road construction--cities avoiding doing work that would require bringing the sidewalks up to current standards. I don't know what the issue is but those curb cuts for wheelchairs are labor intensive.
Contributing to a net loss of funding and attention, all while making the public more ignorant and more passive, results in material harms to the population they claim to serve.
This kind of self-aggrandizement at other's expense deserves to be recognized as it is and should be met with an equal measure of contempt.
Really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. No, we can't let people attempt new inventions, some of which may actually help, because the mere fact that people will see them may result in less attention for more basic, important stuff.
Is there solid evidence that TED talks about stair-climbing wheelchairs undermine actual regulations and investments in ramps, or is this more of a "my source is that I made it up" kind of situation?
You replied "Letting perfect be the enemy of good" several times in the comments here. I think the sentence works against the arguments you're making:
Perfect is the promise of a climb-everywhere-wheelchair. It's hypothetical, dreamed up, and causing people to forego the immediate and good solution (ramps).
You are also making the assumption that the hypothetical climb-everywhere-wheelchair is better than a ramp.
The ramp is easier to make safe, and so we need to ask about safety if it works most of the time. This also gets into maintenance, the robot with moving parts is expected to have more parts to break.
The ramp's batteries will never go dead (or if they do it doesn't matter since they are only for lights anyway?).
I don't see why it's either/or. There are a lot more legacy doors and stairs especially around the world, than there are people who could be helped with a climbing wheelchair or exoskeleton frame. And there's some infrastructure that might not be possible to upgrade, for historical preservation reasons.
Maybe the tech will always be too bulky, but it could also be rented out on location when traveling.
Accessibility ramps and accessible doorknobs are easy to empathize with. Most everybody is going to be in a situation where those are necessary or at least helpful at some point in their life.
Exoskeletons and climbing wheelchairs can help the people who need them on a regular basis. But when you hurt yourself so climbing stairs is an ordeal and need temporary accommodations, universal accessible design means those accommodations are already there, whereas there's probably not going to be climbing wheelchairs and exoskeletons easily available.
Doing both things is the way forward. It takes time for the built environment to change, but it's been about 35 years since the ADA passed and it's getting harder to find public buildings (in the US) without the basics like ramps, accessible doors, and accessible restrooms. This mostly happened without a lot of fanfare, but by enforcement over time; most jurisdictions will check for accessibility during the permit processes for building and occupancy permits; if not, the ADA provides a private right of enforcement.
There's no jurisdictions providing permitting for the digital world (except maybe app stores?); there's some ability to do private ADA enforcement, but it's not as established as for physical accessibility. There's also federal standards for municipal websites that are going to be in effect real soon now.
on the other hand, the vibes are off when everything is so standardized, such that maybe the affordances exist for the building, but there's nobody inside. youve avoided the problem as a whole by removing the building as a destination
The author seems to be screaming into the void here. The task of rebuilding infrastructure is mountainous compared to attempting new technological solutions.
I do agree with his rant about clean and semantic HTML being nessecary for accessibility. It's too often overlooked (as I scramble to check my sites for alt-text on images)
Wow, that`s very true...
> My disability is not a tragedy of biology. It is a failure of infrastructure.
Everybody is different. Tall, short, strong, week, two legs, one leg, short sighted or blind. So it makes a lot of sense to point (as a mistake) that our infrastructure favors one type over the others.
> the "Checkout" button is labeled "Button_Graphic_v2_Final"
Everybody is also different at different times in their life. Many people will develop at least one disability as they age, but even in temporary scenarios good design is accessible design.
Consider opening a door when holding a heavy package by yourself. Good doorknobs, as mentioned in the article, make a world of difference
I’m inclined to think of Apple, who seem to bake accessibility deeply into their products. From my point of view, maybe their investment in accessibility has led to emergent breakthroughs in hardware design. This is just my impression however
This is absolutely true, although I'd broden it to "systems design" since software is part and parcel of the advancements. An example that comes to mind is AssistiveTouch for for Apple Watch (2021), which ultimately drove the requirement for a faster low-power Neural Engine, and which then evolved into Watch's mainstream Double Tap interaction (2023).
A classic in the genre of misunderstood agents. This is such a common thing these days I really wonder at it.
"Why do we have to build Electric Vehicles? Why don't we just build more trains?"
There's no 'we' here. 'We' are not doing anything. 'You' are sitting writing a blog. 'I' am writing a HN comment. 'They' are building EVs. You might as well say "Why do we want to build a dumpling store here? I never asked for that. I wanted Thai food" when someone else is building a dumpling store. It's not a 'we' decision.
The fact of the matter is that you can't redirect my money and effort to your goals. You can maybe find alignment between my objectives and your objectives, and when I try to find such alignment you can work with me or you can reject me. But we're free individuals. I'm not going to make you your Thai food. I'm going to make Chinese food. And if you want some, you can eat some by paying me, and if no one wants some I go out of business and it sucks for me.
I neither hate you nor love you. And you neither hate me nor love me. We are strangers to each other and where our interactions align we can work with each other; and where they don't we can't. The world is full of other people with other objectives. Some are opposed and some are aligned.
In the words of the Spiderman antagonist Sauron:
> I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs
And no matter what, I'm not going to try to work with anyone who's going to jump my case the moment the cosine of our vectors is not precisely 1. It never surprises me when all these perpetually angry people find themselves with no allies, because a desire to coordinate is fairly built-in to human nature and people recognize defectors from that framework easily and stop attempting coordination with habitual non-coordinators.
I have a buddy who did his Human Factors PHd at wright state/wright patt nearly 15 years ago.
"Tech people" have a lot of lies they believe, about disabilities, about valid addresses, everything.
When he told me that schools for the blind train their student to fact check things like directions and not simply rely on a single source while navigating new terrain it clicked for me that the sighted have no clue and sympathy is more honest and less presumptive/simulative than empathy.
But to be sympathetic you have to listen to actual user feedback and do actual observation, with empathy you just get to use your imagination to put yourself in their shoes.
At least for some definition of sympathy and some definition of empathy.
The casual ableism is not unique to tech but I do notice its prevalence, both here and in my career.
I am slightly disabled physically, I've made comments here a time or two where someone will make a (probably unintentionally) dismissive comment like "This is easy, just do XYZ every day" and I'll make a comment like "lots of people cannot do XYZ every day due to disability" and there's a literal backlash of commenters like "well obviously we're not talking about them," like, what? Do you think disabled people don't exist? That seems to be the implication, it comes out casually so much in my daily interactions, some people are almost offended by the idea of it even.
I mean, there's a lot going on here, contextually speaking.
If I made a comment saying "oh just write a quick bash script to change all the files to pngs" and someone commented saying "lots of people cannot write a bash script because they don't know bash", is that a useful comment?
It's in the context of health, which is what most relevant discussions regarding a disability would arise here. It's worth noting that the original comment "just do" also probably isn't very helpful to a discussion.
> train their student to fact check things like directions
In college I had a blind guy ask me how to get to some building on campus. I looked up and the was sign of the building he wanted into. It still took me several tries to get him useful directions. I know that I can duck under that railing..., but how to explain that - I still don't know. I did eventually get him there, but it is a lot harder than you think and I only needed to get him about 5 meters.
And people have such a poor distinction of exactly where the limits lie.
My mother was blind. I was able to teach her how to glue up PVC. (For those of you who don't know--it's a don't-touch, less than a minute of working time and sets even faster if assembled and not moving.) Could she build things out of PVC? Yes. Could she repair a pipe? No. She needed everything perfectly arranged, an existing pipe wouldn't be perfectly arranged. And when my father died people wouldn't believe the big power tools in the garage were hers, not his. (Stuff where she could measure and clamp, hands only on the tool's controls.)
The imbalance is profound. I once tried to find a lawyer who could handle getting accommodations for a visually impaired person I knew. In practice, we probably just needed them to draft a sufficiently stern letter notifying the operator of their responsibilities under the ADA and it would have eventually gotten handled.
I spent a while trying to find law firms that specialized in this. If you do this kind of search 99% of the results are for law firms that specialize instead in defending companies against ADA suits and helping them evade their responsibilities.
I eventually was able to find exactly one law firm via contacting the bar. They weren't interested in talking to me - they said the person with the disability would need to contact them directly and pay out of their own pocket.
The author's definition of a "Disability Dongle" perfectly describes the early versions of motorized wheelchairs. Why is it such an obvious conclusion that we need remake the world to be compatible with the previous generation of disability dongle instead of building the next? At the very least, couldn't we do both?
While it is frustrating, I do think disability is a bug (I have some). Just like I take medicines to manage my condition, or use glasses to read better (I don't ask everything to be made bigger - the text on pages in a book - I use an aid) - I really believe technology is the answer to many issues. Implementation is always political/controlled by vested interests, but throwing innovation and Silicon Valley under the bus is not the answer. I'd rather hope the blender blending brick today will be as silent as an electric car one day.
Sometimes the world just is, and I will take whatever technology can give me to handle it.
There's already a lot of ramps, there's probably never going to be a lot more ramps, I think I'd like to have some technology to assist me with edge cases.
Could you make the text bigger on mobile? At present I get about one word a line. But clearly we can do better… see if you can get it to just one letter!
This feels like an excessive hate of "Silicon Valley" that is just awkward. Yes, it turns out it is easier to do easier tasks. No, it is not cheaper to pound the table with claims that all infrastructure should be better.
One company I was at wouldn't even keep basic first aid supplies stocked.
Facilities succesfully made a big push to get a bunch of people CPR/AED training, especially because it was free. I then made the obvious point that we had no AEDs and should get some. Absolute crickets.
Yeah they had no problem paying broadway theater talent to write and perform corporate musicals for them but wouldn't spend on Advil, band aids and AEDs. I guess those don't "contribute to company culture".
...Is "disability dongle" the new "autonomous transit pods"?
For context, San Francisco being a city with billionaire tech oligarchs, lots of traffic, and OK but not great transit means there's a LOT of rich people who want to fix traffic by way of almost literally reinventing the wheel.
We already know how to move lots of people to a particular destination very quickly: some variation[0] of a bus or train on dedicated right-of-way. The problem is that America is specifically engineered to make operating transit unprofitable outside of high density urban areas, acquiring land for that right-of-way in high density is astronomically expensive, and increasing density limits to break this chicken-and-egg problem is a political nightmare in most places.
This is exactly the kind of problem Silicon Valley hates having to solve because it is, in a sense, the enemy. A good chunk of Big Tech got drunk on Ayn Rand, and transit in particular presents a problem that Objectivist philosophy is unwilling to engage with. To solve it requires both negotiating with the urban planning equivalent of a Soviet central planner and long-term subsidy through coercive taxation.
The pitch for all these projects is ultimately a complicated heavy engineering project to make a train seem less like a train and more like a tech product. Think like the Hyperloop, a concept for a vaccum-sealed tube in which "pods" could be shot through at high speeds. This doesn't need to exist, heavy rail can absolutely go 200mph, we can already bury it underground, and there is no need to have individualized vehicles aside from a mistaken belief that Americans are allergic to sharing space with other Americans.
The one version of this that actually got built is the Vegas Loop, which despite the name and the hype has nothing to do with Hyperloop and was just Teslas driving down a one-way tunnel. All the hype around it delayed actual transportation. As I hinted at above, federal politicians[1] in America would really rather you not take a train. Americans themselves will happily ride them[2], but getting local funding for it is a battle. And all the talk of hyperloops and pods made local politicians hold off on fighting that fight for a good decade, so there's a lot of transit we're missing, because the stupid sci-fantasy ideas never panned out.
[0] I am being very broad here - France has it's obsession with rubber-tired trains, Mexico City has an extensive BRT network that provides metro-like service frequencies.
[1] Joe Biden excluded
[2] We abuse the shit out of commercial aviation to do things high-speed trains can do better, so it's not like we're afraid to share space. The only thing is that Americans don't know how to stay quiet on a train or plane - but that doesn't make the train unprofitable or impractical.
EDIT: Actually, the post reads as if two different people wrote it. The first half doesn't mention anything about blindness, and the second half doesn't mention anything about wheelchairs. But there's only one credit, so I don't know what's going on.
1. it's possible that the author is blind in a legal sense but not completely blind -- e.g. maybe they only have vision in the center of their visual field, or maybe they have low acuity. You'll often see people with white canes wearing glasses, which would be pointless if they had absolutely zero vision.
2. It's not uncommon for people to use terms like "watch", "see", "hear", "listen", etc. colloquially / metaphorically; e.g. "I heard that X did Y" by someone who, pedantically speaking, _read_ that X did Y; someone typing "listen to me" on a chat app when they really mean "please read my words carefully and internalize them"; etc. If I were playing a video on on my phone, listening to what is being said but not actually watching the screen, I'd probably still say I "watched" the video.
Almost all blind people can see the sun. In the US blind legally means your eyes cannot be corrected to better than 20/200 - without glasses my eyes are worth than that so I have a good idea of what the low end of blind would be like. I take my glasses off to read. (of course most people who are blind will be much worse than me without glasses - but we can safely assume at least some of them can watch TV and get something out of it)
I did check for metaphor before commenting. It'd be odd to describe the chair in question as a "Transformer having a panic attack" if you didn't actually see it. If it was noisy, I might have described it as sounding like a blender choking on concrete, for example.
I have no response for point #1, but it doesn't make my other observation go away.
> Kingett has Cerebral Palsy, CP, in addition to his blindness. He’s had both ever since he was a baby. He has Retinopathy of prematurity, commonly referred to as ROP. Even though he is ambulatory, his cerebral palsy makes it difficult to walk long distances or to stand for lengthy periods of time, which is probably why writing fell right into his lap!
So it sounds* like he uses his cane from his wheelchair and/or when walking.
While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced.
Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replacing every building and road regulation and the politicians who put them there?
It reminds me of the people in self-driving car threads complaining that the billions should've gone to transit. Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
This is so true and I see this pattern constantly all over the west:
There is some horrible problem that was created by the government or needs government intervention to fundamentally solve. The idea of the government being effective or useful in any way is so distant that it doesn't even register as a possibility. The government doesn't even register as a valid target to blame or locus of change anymore, so it never even enters the conversation. Instead, the next proximate cause is blamed and the anger is directed to them.
Recently - a teacher made a private joke on Snapchat expressing frustration about her workday. Snapchat automatically sent the message to the police and the police pulled up an hour later to the school and arrested her. She wasn't charged thankfully. The response on reddit is "FUCK SNAPCHAT" even though we know all communication platforms are being monitored by the government and are no doubt strong-armed into doing this by the government. Even the potential solutions being discussed are only finding and using E2EE communication platforms not policy change, because that's not in the window of possibility.
It's both "the entire nation's infrastructure." and not that.
What I mean is... many cases are individual: the ramp for that library; the door knobs/handles in that office; the floor indicators in this lift/elevator; the audio announcements (or lack of) on the busses/trains; the small print on contracts; live subtitling at the theatre; the checkout button on this web site; the checkout button on that website. You get the idea.
The vast majority of cases are individual; owned by myriad businesses, charities, foundations.
The problem the OP is circling is the same as that proposed by the Social Model of disability. Most systems present obstacles to disabled users which could have been avoided if those systems' owners and designers and included disabled people in the design phase. Instead, no-one does this claiming it's too expensive, forgetting they themselves will be disabled in the future (most people become disabled in one way or another, with age). We all kick the can down the road, rather than deal with it today. Dealing with it is hard. The "national level infrastructure" aspect is a mixture of cultural praxis/expectation and, potentially, government carrot to go with the (existing) government stick (regulation; that most people try to ignore).
(I'm not saying the Social Model of Disability is 100% right. I feel it's viewpoint is hugely instructive it's not the whole story.)
Another way to look at the social model is kids playing in neighborhoods. It's not unsafe to walk from one place to another because of lousy sidewalks or excessive leaves: it's the roads we put between any place they want to go. This might've been tolerable when each household only had 1 car and it was gone all day, but not now that everybody has a RAM Child-squasher 2500. In my neighborhood the sidewalks also just... end randomly, would be awful to live here and be blind. Would be a lot better to be blind if you weren't a misstep away from getting run over.
> the Social Model of disability
The best way I’ve heard this articulated is:
Under the medical model, disabled individuals are expected to change their behavior to accommodate (fit on with) society. We ask people whose lives are already more difficult than average to do additional work.
Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead. Further, the social model says that any policy that affects disabled people should be crafted by or with disabled people who are affected by that policy. Nothing about us without us.
I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.
I support the social model. It’s the one where I get to have agency.
I support the medical model then, disabled people who can't work should, ought, to be among the poorest in society, just above the people that can work but don't. Because some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest (in absolute terms though: you are richer than almost anyone alive in year 800 CE so not starving poor nor barely surviving poor) and so, who should be? Should the able working be poorer than a disabled person doing less work? The same work?
And why should disabled people be able to craft policy that will be funded largely by the abled? In order to have legitimacy of a policy, you need to involve the people that will pay for it.
The social model is non-sensical, it's unfair, and it cloaks its unfairness in the language of social justice which it doesn't deserve to. There are better forms of advocacy.
May you someday experience the same lack of empathy you're broadcasting here.
> I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.
For what it is worth, I'm probably in different countries to you, and "me too". I fractured T8 and spent some time unable to walk at all and in a wheelchair -- I can now use a crutch some of the time and have a fairly complex medical history.
You never notice how much [en-gb] pavements / [en-us] sidewalks camber towards the road for drainage until moving your pelvis is excruciating, or driving a manual wheelchair on a camber means that you're constantly working twice as hard with one hand compared to the other. Nor do you notice what a bin on the street does when kerbs are difficult. Low hanging vegetation, normally pretty, over a neighbour's wall becomes incredibly annoying if you literally cannot move yourself to avoid it inevitably hitting your eyes. So many minor annoyances, from booked assistance on train travel forgetting you exist halfway through, right the way through to outright discrimination from your colleagues. And don't get me started on the bladder management!
Everyone could be disabled, and as said earlier at some point in life everyone probably would be. Inclusive design is just that -- inclusive -- and done correctly it costs nothing to little extra. I don't really understand why we don't build it into society, rather than try to get people to (as I increasingly want to) fork out thousands to tens of thousands for electric wheelchairs. Sure, they're great, but sometimes I miss taking long walks or cycling ('normally').
> Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead.
This sounds good in the abstract, but the devil is in the details. What specific accommodation is being asked for? What counts as a disability? For example, should I simply have to ignore angry outbursts directed at me and my coworkers from someone with oppositional defiance disorder[1]? Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD or can I request proof from a medical professional?
There are real tradeoffs here. You see it in how these kinds of accommodations are abused at elite universities[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder
[2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/8/harvard-undergr...
I mean you kinda are just expected to ignore angry outbursts directed at you from anyone. That's not even about disability, it's just part of the social contract that you don't start throwing blows when people yell at you.
A great deal of changes proposed to make disabled peoples' lives easier end up having many fringe benefits for the non-disabled. The classic example is strollers or hand trucks going up the little dip on the sidewalk rather than having to lug them over an enormous curb.
The cost argument starts looking weak when you observe there's always billions of dollars shaken from magical couch cushions whenever it's time to wage another losing war.
In terms of the web two of the greatest things we could do for accessibility: (1) eliminate GDPR pop-ups (and all pop-ups and senseless modal dialogs) and (2) eliminate cloudflare harassment, ReCAPTCHA harassment and anubis harassment. Any of those things should be an immediate F rank for WCAG.
For 1: https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
The cost argument is a cover for institutional cruelty. Some people really really want to be cruel. Usually those folks are the most emotionally damaged people IME.
> The vast majority of cases are individual; owned by myriad businesses, charities, foundations.
Agreed, but the solution is more general. If you want handicapped people to have more access, that probably means widespread societal change through regulations, like the ADA (which obviously didn't fix everything, but was at least a big step forward).
But don't you see how the fact that many cases are individual makes it harder? You mention doorknobs, and it's easy to declare (which is why the US government has declared) that lever style door handles are more accessible and should be preferred. It's hard, impossibly so, to construct a world where nobody with wrist mobility problems will ever encounter a round doorknob they'd like to open.
It seems like the implication here is “if we can’t do anything, we shouldn’t do anything at all” under the social model.
Not every doorknob will be disability friendly. If pressure from the social model fixes 20% of doorknobs, now there is a group of people can open 20% of doors where they could open 0% before.
My intended implication is that pressure from the social model has achieved as much as it can, and the left over problems must be resolved through other means. The vast majority of doorknobs I personally interact with, including 100% of the ones at my house and workplace, are lever-style.
> it's hard, impossibly so, to construct a world where nobody with wrist mobility problems will ever encounter a round doorknob they'd like to open.
its not that hard to get to 99.999% though.
stop selling door knobs, or doors that accept round knobs. add incentives to swap or return round knobs. include checks for round knobs both for building inspections and insurance.
you wont wont get the last couple people that build their own doors and machine their own knobs, but thats gonna be a really small segment
You can't talk about things from a social model perspective without modeling the political realities of the policies you're proposing. A national ban on the sale of round doorknobs would not pass, and local bans would create an enormous backlash which might well ruin the longstanding consensus that ADA compliance requires levers.
The US has been institutionally dysfunctional for quite some time, so that puts us in an interesting position where it's easier to imagine inventing our way out of social problems with $30,000 servo-filled boxes than it is to imagine ever getting a cheaper and easier solution moved through Congress. Congress rarely seems to pass disruptive changes to law these days. Statehouses are less sclerotic, but not by much. Many of the civil rights gains touted 10+ years ago came from hacks shoved through the supreme court exploiting a partisan lean.
If you really read between the lines, much of the fuss about Mayor Mamdani in NYC has been a curious rediscovery that the government can in fact Just Do Things for people who elected it.
Congress passed the ADA in 1990. There isn't much more they can do - they have limited power. (there were a few updates since then, and I'm sure there are more tweaks they can make, but the majority of their work is done). Most of the authors rant are not things the government does or should do, government buildings generally are ADA compliant these days. The rant is about non-government things.
The biggest thing that I want is a way for ADA to realistically apply to invisible disabilities like autism. Although in theory people with invisible disabilities can get accomodations, in practice the accomodation that they really need is "stop being a shitty employer".
I think their anger is justified. Yes there's not a lot that individual engineers can do to help, but a big part of the problem is that they don't even understand the people they're "helping".
These tech gadgets are the annoying experience we've all had of someone taking a look at a problem from the outside and proposing unhelpful "solutions" that won't work because they don't fully understand it.
It reminds me of conversations I've had with people who suffer from insomnia. They say that everyone has some suggestion to just try melatonin, or not use screens before bed, or whatever. As though they haven't tried these things.
Yes they're just trying to be helpful, but it comes off as patronizing.
> Yes they're just trying to be helpful
Experience says they're not, they're being dismissive.
They don't understand because they don't care to and it's beneath them to learn, because the solution is to 'just' do this simple thing everyone knows to do. It now becomes the sufferers fault they continue to suffer and it's not longer required for anyone else to care.
'Help me but don't patronize' is a tall order without some real linguistic gymnastics.
Not at all. Just don't start by guessing what a disabled person's concerns are, or presume that your suggestions are relevant. A respectful start is letting them know you will be responsive and let them lead the conversation.
It also feels like a failure to understand the motivations and mechanisms behind these projects- those "misguided" college students are usually doing these projects to further their studies, as capstone or research projects that they may not be concerned with the funding for. Accessible product development is a side effect of the process, not the goal, and that's why they aren't developing scalable solutions.
> Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
mind you, tech companies are also lobbyists with money, and are happy to pay politicians to not build infrastructure that would make the self driving or electric cars less useful
"...the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced." a significant portion of my internet experience could be boiled down to this single sentence.
> perennially underfunded
I remember voting to fund high speed rail, and the funding was quite generous...
This is why raising well-rounded children is so important. Intelligent young people today are too often encouraged/forced to specialize and while it makes sense for them economically given the structure of our society, it produces lots of young, intelligent adults who can't see the forest for the trees. They can be brilliant in one area but unable to see the big picture, which is a real loss to society when they have the ambition to contribute.
Ride hailing apps promised to decrease traffic and social media apps promised to make people more social, in both cases the opposite happened and this is just off the top of my head.
>but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded
I mean, it kind of is when the tech company is spending a lot of money lobbying against transit in favor of expanding their product's market share.
I quite enjoy playing with robots, but I'd rather coordinate the design and installation of 1000 ramps than be involved with one walking liability sedan chair. If you care about results and reliability, no shit a competent engineer will be picking the one that has no moving parts and a 10,000 year track record.
The fact that this is or isn't happening is basically unrelated to inventing new stuff. It's almost entirely a political issue, not one of engineering.
land use and design issue more than anything.
ramps have been around for a long time, and are well known to take up a ton of space. especially if every propery gets its own ramp rather than all the properties on a block sharing the same ramp system and having a common porch
It's very much related because the technology provides an excuse to ignore the infrastructure problems even when it isn't good enough.
The two are not unrelated, and perhaps the inventiveness and energy of the latter could be applied to affecting the outcomes of the former.
I just don't know what it means to prefer to be involved with the design and installation of ramps. There's a lot of ramps around, and the knowledge of how to build them is widely distributed. Is there some phenomenon I'm not aware of, where lots of people want to have ramps if only they could find a way to design and install them?
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny because tech companies _do_ provide input at policy level. Sticking to transportation, auto groups and manufacturers were able to popularize "jay walking" a century ago. Tech leadership and politics mingle at the highest levels too. For ex, Trump took Huang, Cook, and Musk with him on a recent trip to China.
> I need better doorknobs and or a ramp.
I'm not aware of any tech company lobbying against doorknobs or ramps, and I don't see any particular reason for them to care.
There's been some general corporate push back against the expense of some ADA fixes.
> Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded
I think your overall point is relatively sound but that example is just terrible...
Elon Musk has repeatedly lobbied against transit expansion and his Hyperloop pitch arguably derailed HSR talks in California for half a decade while the Las Vegas teslertube prevented the expansion of a monorail to actually service the strip airport corridor.
I'll grant you Musk being terrible, no argument there, but that's not tech companies as a whole.
And California hardly needed any help to sabotage its HSR, the state's whole process for that kind of development is incredibly backwards and broken, sadly.
it's not really tech companies fault on this either but it sucks to see large amounts of investor money going to them when it could go to solving the issue more efficiently.
(although obviously it would be less profitable for the investors so it won't happen)
I think thats the core frustration
It all depends on the counterfactual. Could the money solve the problem, if the issues with transportation arent funding?
It seems like an institutionally made black hole that will simply consume anything put into it. I dont think flooding it with more money will fix that problem.
Investors have poured about 10 billion into waymo prior to 2026. That could only have paid for about 5 to 7 miles of urban light rail given recent project costs in Seattle, San Francisco, or New York.
And that's if you completely ignore the challenge around who has the money and assume the state can just collect extra taxes without discontent or impacts
What if investors poured 9 billion into making light rail cheaper, and then 1 billion into light rail? Where would we be then? Other countries don't spend 2 billion dollars a mile. Hire the best engineers from Europe and Asia.
A big chunk of the problem is planning/political:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Maryland)
> A March 2025 report by the Maryland comptroller's office found that permitting and legal fees for the project, originally budgeted at $6 million, had actually consumed roughly $800 million, thanks to two lawsuits and the contract renegotiations
Better tech cannot solve that on its own, the problem is not even there.
That's still only 3% of the money per track length that we're talking about here.
Since the Hyperloop time, China built an entire HSR network starting from nothing. Since the Hyperloop.
HSR derailed itself. CA takes 95% of the blame
agreed on the LV monorail though
this type of individualist responsibility diffusion is exactly why nothing happens in the US, & why France has protests the second the govt does anything bad.
no one is asking you to solve the whole problem, just be part of fighting for the real solution
> Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp
The problem is that inventing a solution that no-one needs or wants and then using venture money to hype it up feels like rubbing salt in a wound for the very people they're claiming to try to help.
The point is they're not actually trying to help those people. They're using them as a marketing tool to further their own ambition to make money.
The anger is understandable.
These nameless people could very well want to help people. A device that costs as much as a Honda Civic? Yes, that's exactly the kind of stuff that happens as you attempt to mature a product.
I was working on a drone automation system at another company. The initial prototypes were also in the Honda Civic multiplier range. The companies that bought into us knew the price tag. The customers who wanted conventional products with conventional pricing... ignored us!
Once you develop an actual manufacturing line the costs go away down, but first you must develop that maturity.
Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details. There is ideological opposition against from business types and some other tech types.
> it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.
> Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details.
Some will, and that's great, but as the blog post accurately points out, the invention of these things isn't the primary issue, it's the lack of implementation. And that isn't the fault of the engineers designing better doorknobs or ramps.
> Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.
Bullshit. The US has had underfunded transit for near a century now because of our obsession with cars. Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse.
the car companies at the time were tech companies that paid the government to kick people off of roads and build communities that require cars to get to.
the car obsession didnt quite happen naturally
> Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse.
Depends. Do car manufacturers count as tech companies?
The obsession with cars and car infrastructure isn't accidental either, it's been manufactured and pushed heavily by car companies over decades. Same with the opposition to public transit. None of this stuff is happening 100% organically, it's being pushed by corporate interests via lobbying with government and funding advertising at individuals
If someone watched a press video for the RAV4, and responded by saying "Toyota Motor Corporation Hates Me and You" and demanding that Toyota fix the bus routes in their city, I would think that's pretty silly. Everything's interrelated, and no consumer demand is 100% organic, but the linkage is just too remote to make sense.
It's literal, direct linkage. About a century ago, when cars were starting to become popular, car makers spent a shitload of money on bribes to city governments to make the cities only usable by car.
toyota is a late comer though.
"jaywalking" is a term made up by car companies because they hate you, as a better example
I live in California, where as of 2023 I can cross most roads whenever and wherever I'd like so long as I do so safely. But this hasn't really shifted car discourse at all, even in my quite walkable neighborhood.
Of course, to me this isn't a surprise at all. Cars are a wildly popular technology which lots of people want to purchase and use, and living in a country where nearly everyone can afford to do so means that much of the infrastructure will be optimized for it. (It's true that this is all very convenient for car companies and that they worked hard to make it so.)
Better doorknobs? Better civil infrastructure? A lot of those companies in that space aren't even tech companies, even if they deal with tech.
The companies he talks about have a Very different business culture, and thus a very different response to if an in-house tech person wanted to do anything, really.
How are Tech companies fighting public transit? At least in these parts a relatively high fraction of their employees commute by (private) bus.
I can only presume that Tech companies would prefer the government provide safe, clean, and timely bussing for the public to save the company the cost and effort.
Hyperloop and Boring Company were both created as distractions from real proven transit technologies, and the latter has been quite successful at getting rail projects cancelled or at least confusing politicians enough to delay them.
So it's basically just Tesla/Musk here, when people say "tech companies"?
Musk is an asshole, no argument there, but most tech company CEOs aren't nearly that crazy.
No, I provided one particularly eggregious example. Uber/Lyft have also lobbied against transit. The Google shuttles OP alludes to interfered with real transit operations.
They generally would, though for the most part I imagine they're just ambivalent here. As long as workers can get to work, that's most of what they care about.
Every time a tech company lobbies against taxes, they’re fighting public transit. Every time they spend the exact same money they just argued shouldn’t go to the state on privatized busses, they’re fighting public transit.
You haven't addressed the grift problem. Without support for traditional nepotism/cronyism grift, how do you expect to motivate politicians?
You won't always be able to count on the threat of exposing their sexual habits, which has been working for decades.
Changing infrastructure would cost way less than buying hardware for all disabled people.
So you don’t solve the problem, you just solve it for a tiny group of wealthy people
Yes,and...? /s
Yes, and...? /s
> but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded
I mean, it's certainly a factor: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/uber-lyft-proposition-l-...
Totally blind person. I once had this bright idea that the blind community could fix Linux into our perfect platform. I don't care all that much anymore about anything being fixed, foss or not. FOSS is everyone scratching their own itch, and if a developer who can see creates a program that scratches his itch but isn't accessible, but his itch is scratched, why would he then spend time fixing it up for the one blind Linux user that made an issue on Github about it?
For non-FOSS products, it's even worse. There is no way to tell Amazon that, for the past several months, their library view for Kindle on iOS was inaccessible to VoiceOver, with the books having no accessibility label, and the only way one can tell what book they're about to open is through VoiceOver's tiny on-device image describer model. Of course, in iOS 27 (beta currently) this is improved, but it shouldn't have to be. The last few versions of Kindle has begun fixing this, but last time I tried, about a week ago, it could easily break even just by my scrolling the view a few times.
So I don't even bother anymore. If Google can stand having poor Braille support on Android, fine, I'll use an iPhone. If Apple can stand having awful Google Docs support, which I use at work, on MacOS, I'll use Windows or even Linux where it works fine. If an image isn't described, I will put it through AI. If a page doesn't work well with a screen reader, I'll send it through AI too. If I want to play a video game where 99% of them do not have spoken menus, but I can enjoy the actual gameplay, I'll ask AI which menu option I'm on.
I've come to feel that life is so miserable when I and only a few others fight and fight for accessibility. If it works, it only works for a moment. So I just lean on AI because it can "see" a lot better than I can. Besides, people have used AI to make accessibility mods for Final Fantasy 1 through 6, the pixel-remaster versions. So when terminally angry people come at me for my use of AI, I just don't care anymore. Let them go blind and see how it feels.
Every time I see someone complain about the idea of these fancy wheelchairs as a terrible distraction I think of Michael Kaplan's blog, Sorting It All Out. He had many good things to say about the iBot wheelchair and he was devastated when it got discontinued in 2009 (looks like it's back more recently).
The author is seeing that it's easier for one team to get backing (VC money, course credit, design awards, TED talk applause, etc.) for "solving" an accessibility problem than for us to enforce that entire industries follow good accessibility practices in new work and retrofit existing work. In theory industry-wide enforcement is the sort of thing legislation like the ADA solves, but obviously that hasn't been completely effective. Not sure how to fix it.
There was a subthread recently complaining about password managers and their UX problems. These aren't aimed specifically at "disabled" users, but I think it's a similar situation. We can't reliably enforce good standards for sign-in (whether that's just setting the autofill attribute correctly and choosing the correct event handlers for Javascript validators or something far more ambitious), so we expect a password manager to just deal with the web as it is. IMHO they work remarkably well given that constraint, but it's not optimal overall.
Yeah, it kinda feels like a banal thing to hate on. "They're only doing this because it's easier to create a prototype invention than to redo all design standards and enforcement in the country!" I mean, yeah? What exactly is the implied alternative for the sort of individuals targeted by the blog post?
The video of the prototype invention has the effect of making people think they don't need to be concerned about ramps and doorknobs and ADA enforcement because some teen in a garage has just solved this problem forever. People who need accommodations also require the political support of able-bodied people in order to actually make change happen, and his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
> his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
That seems like a major stretch. Really feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here, like saying that a video about improved airbags means that nobody will care about safer road design anymore.
If it weren't for all the supermassive cars rolling around, purchased because they're ostensibly safer in a crash for the person driving them (while markedly decreasing the safety of the other driver) then maybe I could agree with you. But with so many people intentionally electing to value their individual safety at cost of the safety of others, I actually think that it makes for a great reason for them to not think about road safety! Who cares if the road is unsafe if I'm driving a tank?
> because some teen in a garage has just solved this problem forever
Isn't really teens in garages perpetuating this is it though, its universities and companies milking government funding.
The expressed (not implied) alternative in the post is for those people to stop pretending they care, and start actually caring. Stop trying to save the world. The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.
People do care, but there are so many problems in the world, and only so much caring to go around.
It's extremely cynical to view it as "people pretend to care", rather than looking around and realizing there's a ton of important problems out there that the caring is distributed over. People care about disabilities, but they also care about war, about public schooling, about the environment, about feminism, about animal rights, about transparency in government, about road safety, about child well-being, about unemployment, and so on. All of these are important things, and of course there are dozens more that I haven't listed.
And inventions are sometimes actually useful. Sure, most of those prototypes will go nowhere, but every once in a while something that really helps is invented. And you can't predict in advance only the ones that will actually go on to help.
Holy smokes, that comes across as "We just want all people to be impoverished equally".
Some people actually care, but they can't always win the battle at their own companies when there are other priorities, much less go fix all the other websites, pour concrete at other businesses, etc. Is the solution for everyone to care? If, so how do you accomplish that? ("Americans with Disability Act" v2?)
The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.
This is an excellent summary of the sort of anti-tech thinking that I strongly disagree with. Caring about people with Alzheimer's is well and good, but what we actually want are vaccines and cures.
There's a general problem on the web (and to a lesser extent computing in general) that UX is just widely terrible. I think part of this is because developers tend to work at the very edge of their competence, and getting something working at all is a major feat, with no room left over for making it work well. And part of it is developers or designers deciding they know better than everyone else. A lot of this was a solved problem back in the 80s: the platform provides a standard UI toolkit and a set of standard idioms, and all software uses them. But this lesson is ignored because developers and designers don't like it when their stuff looks and works just like everything else. Making buttons that look like everyone else's buttons means you don't set yourself apart, so we end up with custom buttons that look different and don't work as well. And, of course, are less accessible, because accessibility requires integration into the overall system that doesn't exist with a custom solution.
I was a Mac fiend back in the "beleaguered" days, and standard widgets and idioms were a big deal in that community. There was broad consensus that apps should all look and work the same, as much as that was possible. A button should be a button and a text field should be a text field no matter what program it was in. That all went out the window with the web, for no particularly good reason, and it's infecting non-web platforms at an alarming rate.
100% agree about the UX problems. Most engineers would be happy to fix those issues, but of course, companies always want the new features...because that's what customers want and what drives more $$$.
Sadly, it's true that the % of new sales generated by improving a11y beyond the bare minimum isn't going to be terribly large. That's why it's important to have regulations that mandate decent support, because the monetary incentive that drives corporate behavior just isn't there.
I feel like that hasn't been true for a long time. Companies no longer compete on featuresets. I mean take any tool you've used for 10-15 years, the trend is often less features, not more. And the irony is that its the products from the biggest most well compensated companies in the world falling into this pattern of removing features and making things slower and less usable over time. Compare humble old VLC, no shortage of features, to what google routinely does to their products.
Quality, functionality, standing on its own merits, no longer is the aim of business. It is about capturing the mindshare through propaganda a.k.a. advertising. It is why these shitty companies can continue to exist on the top while serving continually inferior tooling: they've flooded the mindshare such that even if some superior product came about, it would never gain traction.
While searching for that Telepathy article, I found this which fits his example: https://neuralink.com/updates/a-year-of-telepathy/
The author is simultaneously correct and incorrect.
The author is correct that simple and cheap changes such as ramps and door knobs are the logical fixes. And yes, based on personal experience, companies hate disabled people at the first sign that they will be an inconvenience to the company.
However, nature has no such things. If you enjoy nature and the outdoors, then user-specific equipment can provide capabilities not available through cheap alternatives. The prototypes shown are always marketing with some flair to it. Yes, the noise and bulk are terrible, but proof of concept can lead to improvements over time - eg you're looking at a some no-name competitor to the Model T (prototype suit), just imagine what the 2026 civic will look like (suits 75 years from now).
> cheap changes such as ramps
My aunt has MS. It cost her nearly $10k to have a _used_ aluminum ramp installed for her house.
She can't come to my house because the gap between the buildings that leads to my door is too narrow for a wheelchair and would require is to get two different building owners, who are not our landlord, to agree to have their building modified to make room for it. It would easily cost 50k+ to actually rebuild two buildings and the sidewalk into a functioning ramp that is the correct slope for a chair.
Agree with your broader point, but out of curiosity:
> It cost her nearly $10k to have a _used_ aluminum ramp installed for her house.
Why so expensive? I did a quick search, and the only way I could get a (new) aluminum ramp up to $10k was by selecting the 30-foot platform model, [1] which I'd guess would be excessive in most cases. I'm not counting installation fees but it looks like something I could do myself in an hour, and I'm not that handy.
[1] https://reliableramps.com/collections/aluminum-wheelchair-ra...
I used cheap as a relative term. But $10k for a ramp seems like someone got gouged. A couple hundred in lumber etc and a couple hundred for labor is doable in many cases. I see those wooden ramps at homes often.
The stakes ("nature"-as-hobby vs. navigating the built environment that 99.999% of people depend on for survival) are very different, and they're also very different from the stakes of the mythologies ("we've solved blindness!") that sell these disability dongles to the public.
(And the closer you get to nature the more tools like a dumb cane make way more sense than anything digital and battery-powered anyway.)
I do think access to the outdoors is important, though.
If you are a disabled person who wants to visit the back country then the $30,000 (or more!) robot wheelchair is your only option. We shouldn't make all mountain trails ADA accessible. My local park system has a few accessible trails (the majority are not) that can get them to enjoy nature, if that isn't enough spend the money on the robot.
However I'm only willing to take the above position because there are plenty of other options. There are a lot of fully able people who live life without going to those remote places and don't miss it. I'm not fine with saying the local grocery store is not accessible - they cannot live without that. Most of what exists in a city should be accessible to everyone despite disabilities - the cost to provide this is not that high.
All of the legislation and regulation and infrastructure in the world is not going to get rid of stairs everywhere.
Medi cal, medicare, and private insurance have all chipped in for my ramps, but none of them will touch something like an iBot chair with a 50 ft pole because it has ambiguous insurance coding associated to it rather than being a normal wheelchair.
So.. In other words, what's the problem? People are buying the high tech gimmicks either out of pocket or through equally spotty VA coverage.
The US has systems in place to aid the purchase of ramps for those in need and offers ample opportunity to sue businesses into bankruptcy for getting any ADA stuff wrong.. what's the demand exactly? It seems like "engineers shouldn't be so creative" to me, but the reality is that they should work on stuff they're interested in rather than some abstract civic duty, assigned unpassionate work is how you build crap.
-guy in a wheelchair
The real problem IMO is for most SV companies, the audience is the investors and the press, not the actual customer. Which I guess kind of makes sense structurally -- if the idea is to grow fast and exit, then you gotta know who butters your bread, but I think it's bad structurally for problem solving and building sustainable businesses. I know in the past "small" businesses got kind of denigrated as "lifestyle" businesses, but I think we structurally need more funding around things that solve real problems but aren't going to "CHANGE EVERYTHING!!!" and maybe only end up worth a few tens of millions instead of billions or trillions.
I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete. And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.
And yes, the cost of such devices is high today, but that's true of any new technology. The first print reading devices were huge machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now the technology is free on your phone. Early hearing aids were bulky, expensive, and not much better than an ear horn. Now they're affordable, compact, and have handy features like bluetooth connectivity. My guess is that most of these prototypes will fizzle and go nowhere, but some will succeed, and the lives of disabled people will be improved by them.
Edit: Pangram says the entire post is written by AI. I've flagged it for misrepresenting the author. https://www.pangram.com/history/06093378-dcca-42d8-b683-5ed7...
> I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete.
They don't need to, and the might not even do that, but the boosters and the clipfarms are very much in on it. You don't see that "engagement" for continuous sidewalks and raised crosswalks despite how amazing they are.
And they're also very convenient as a way to avoid infrastructural improvements, you can point to disability dongles as a reason not to invest in it, that way you're conveniently not bearing the cost.
> And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.
The problem is that's at best a post-hoc realisation, when that argument is made upfront it's pretty much always dismissed out of hand (very much blub adjacent), you can see it in pretty much every discussion about better walk/bike infrastructure.
Sure, but only if you want to do that. I have a wheelchair bound friend who uses a $20,000 tracked wheelchair when he goes camping (I've never been camping with him, so I'm not sure how he sets up his tent...). However most people in wheelchairs don't care that much about camping and are happy to do without - which they can do because the places they want to go don't need the expensive tools. For most places the cost to make something disabled friendly is minimal.
What they're getting at is that the individual level gadget based accommodations can lead hurdles against making the world generally more accessible to people with disabilities by putting the onus on the disabled person to buy those gadgets in people's minds, eg "oh we don't need to pay to put ramps here there's stair climbing wheelchairs", ignoring the cost of those devices. Yes they /eventually/ get cheaper but there's still plenty of people who can't afford even the cheaper versions and it takes decades to get there.
> I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew. I need better doorknobs and/or a ramp. But a ramp is boring. You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud. You can’t give a TED Talk about a ramp. You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.
It's a really cynical way to attack people who are at least sort of trying to help.
And obviously the inventions of "a ramp" and "slightly wider door" already exist; those aren't a matter of invention, they're a matter of regulations and enforcement.
The articles premise seems to say clearly "you arent helping". The thought counts, yes, but in ignoring feedback it becomes arrogance.
Trying to help does not give you a free pass. Pushing a wheelchair user up a ramp without asking their permission first is both "trying to help" and inconsiderate (and scary and dangerous).
Before inventing a more advanced stair climbing wheelchair, you should ask a few wheelchair users if stairs are really the issue they need solving.
THIS.
I've seen visually impaired and wheelchair users have more issues with elevators than I have with not having proper ramps.
Although I have seen several wheelchair bound accessibility experts invited to give talks and there's no ramp or accessible way for them to access the stage where they're giving a talk about. . . . . accessibility.
And sometimes seriously non-trivial.
When there is a substantial elevation difference you need a lot of ramp--which needs a lot of space.
We already are seeing the problem with road construction--cities avoiding doing work that would require bringing the sidewalks up to current standards. I don't know what the issue is but those curb cuts for wheelchairs are labor intensive.
Contributing to a net loss of funding and attention, all while making the public more ignorant and more passive, results in material harms to the population they claim to serve.
This kind of self-aggrandizement at other's expense deserves to be recognized as it is and should be met with an equal measure of contempt.
Really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. No, we can't let people attempt new inventions, some of which may actually help, because the mere fact that people will see them may result in less attention for more basic, important stuff.
Is there solid evidence that TED talks about stair-climbing wheelchairs undermine actual regulations and investments in ramps, or is this more of a "my source is that I made it up" kind of situation?
You replied "Letting perfect be the enemy of good" several times in the comments here. I think the sentence works against the arguments you're making:
Perfect is the promise of a climb-everywhere-wheelchair. It's hypothetical, dreamed up, and causing people to forego the immediate and good solution (ramps).
You are also making the assumption that the hypothetical climb-everywhere-wheelchair is better than a ramp.
The ramp is easier to make safe, and so we need to ask about safety if it works most of the time. This also gets into maintenance, the robot with moving parts is expected to have more parts to break.
The ramp's batteries will never go dead (or if they do it doesn't matter since they are only for lights anyway?).
A lot of problems are like that. They don't require anything fancy, just regulation, a budget or regular maintenance.
I don't see why it's either/or. There are a lot more legacy doors and stairs especially around the world, than there are people who could be helped with a climbing wheelchair or exoskeleton frame. And there's some infrastructure that might not be possible to upgrade, for historical preservation reasons.
Maybe the tech will always be too bulky, but it could also be rented out on location when traveling.
Accessibility ramps and accessible doorknobs are easy to empathize with. Most everybody is going to be in a situation where those are necessary or at least helpful at some point in their life.
Exoskeletons and climbing wheelchairs can help the people who need them on a regular basis. But when you hurt yourself so climbing stairs is an ordeal and need temporary accommodations, universal accessible design means those accommodations are already there, whereas there's probably not going to be climbing wheelchairs and exoskeletons easily available.
Doing both things is the way forward. It takes time for the built environment to change, but it's been about 35 years since the ADA passed and it's getting harder to find public buildings (in the US) without the basics like ramps, accessible doors, and accessible restrooms. This mostly happened without a lot of fanfare, but by enforcement over time; most jurisdictions will check for accessibility during the permit processes for building and occupancy permits; if not, the ADA provides a private right of enforcement.
There's no jurisdictions providing permitting for the digital world (except maybe app stores?); there's some ability to do private ADA enforcement, but it's not as established as for physical accessibility. There's also federal standards for municipal websites that are going to be in effect real soon now.
on the other hand, the vibes are off when everything is so standardized, such that maybe the affordances exist for the building, but there's nobody inside. youve avoided the problem as a whole by removing the building as a destination
The author seems to be screaming into the void here. The task of rebuilding infrastructure is mountainous compared to attempting new technological solutions.
I do agree with his rant about clean and semantic HTML being nessecary for accessibility. It's too often overlooked (as I scramble to check my sites for alt-text on images)
> You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud.
Someone more inclined toward fraud than me should figure out how to make a cloud connected ramp as a way to get VCs to fund more ramps.
Spikes rise up if you tap your phone on the scanner and your rampbucks balance is too low.
Wow, that`s very true... > My disability is not a tragedy of biology. It is a failure of infrastructure.
Everybody is different. Tall, short, strong, week, two legs, one leg, short sighted or blind. So it makes a lot of sense to point (as a mistake) that our infrastructure favors one type over the others.
> the "Checkout" button is labeled "Button_Graphic_v2_Final"
This is a very good point.
Everybody is also different at different times in their life. Many people will develop at least one disability as they age, but even in temporary scenarios good design is accessible design. Consider opening a door when holding a heavy package by yourself. Good doorknobs, as mentioned in the article, make a world of difference
I’m inclined to think of Apple, who seem to bake accessibility deeply into their products. From my point of view, maybe their investment in accessibility has led to emergent breakthroughs in hardware design. This is just my impression however
This is absolutely true, although I'd broden it to "systems design" since software is part and parcel of the advancements. An example that comes to mind is AssistiveTouch for for Apple Watch (2021), which ultimately drove the requirement for a faster low-power Neural Engine, and which then evolved into Watch's mainstream Double Tap interaction (2023).
A classic in the genre of misunderstood agents. This is such a common thing these days I really wonder at it.
"Why do we have to build Electric Vehicles? Why don't we just build more trains?"
There's no 'we' here. 'We' are not doing anything. 'You' are sitting writing a blog. 'I' am writing a HN comment. 'They' are building EVs. You might as well say "Why do we want to build a dumpling store here? I never asked for that. I wanted Thai food" when someone else is building a dumpling store. It's not a 'we' decision.
The fact of the matter is that you can't redirect my money and effort to your goals. You can maybe find alignment between my objectives and your objectives, and when I try to find such alignment you can work with me or you can reject me. But we're free individuals. I'm not going to make you your Thai food. I'm going to make Chinese food. And if you want some, you can eat some by paying me, and if no one wants some I go out of business and it sucks for me.
I neither hate you nor love you. And you neither hate me nor love me. We are strangers to each other and where our interactions align we can work with each other; and where they don't we can't. The world is full of other people with other objectives. Some are opposed and some are aligned.
In the words of the Spiderman antagonist Sauron:
> I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs
And no matter what, I'm not going to try to work with anyone who's going to jump my case the moment the cosine of our vectors is not precisely 1. It never surprises me when all these perpetually angry people find themselves with no allies, because a desire to coordinate is fairly built-in to human nature and people recognize defectors from that framework easily and stop attempting coordination with habitual non-coordinators.
>> You can’t give a TED Talk about a ramp.
>> You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.
>> Concrete is not "disruptive."
Well, not with that attitude.
You simply need these 3 things:
1. A revenue subscription model
2. Execute at massive scale by leveraging AI
3. An advertising model
Now you can change the world
I have a buddy who did his Human Factors PHd at wright state/wright patt nearly 15 years ago.
"Tech people" have a lot of lies they believe, about disabilities, about valid addresses, everything.
When he told me that schools for the blind train their student to fact check things like directions and not simply rely on a single source while navigating new terrain it clicked for me that the sighted have no clue and sympathy is more honest and less presumptive/simulative than empathy.
But to be sympathetic you have to listen to actual user feedback and do actual observation, with empathy you just get to use your imagination to put yourself in their shoes.
At least for some definition of sympathy and some definition of empathy.
The casual ableism is not unique to tech but I do notice its prevalence, both here and in my career.
I am slightly disabled physically, I've made comments here a time or two where someone will make a (probably unintentionally) dismissive comment like "This is easy, just do XYZ every day" and I'll make a comment like "lots of people cannot do XYZ every day due to disability" and there's a literal backlash of commenters like "well obviously we're not talking about them," like, what? Do you think disabled people don't exist? That seems to be the implication, it comes out casually so much in my daily interactions, some people are almost offended by the idea of it even.
I mean, there's a lot going on here, contextually speaking.
If I made a comment saying "oh just write a quick bash script to change all the files to pngs" and someone commented saying "lots of people cannot write a bash script because they don't know bash", is that a useful comment?
It's in the context of health, which is what most relevant discussions regarding a disability would arise here. It's worth noting that the original comment "just do" also probably isn't very helpful to a discussion.
> train their student to fact check things like directions
In college I had a blind guy ask me how to get to some building on campus. I looked up and the was sign of the building he wanted into. It still took me several tries to get him useful directions. I know that I can duck under that railing..., but how to explain that - I still don't know. I did eventually get him there, but it is a lot harder than you think and I only needed to get him about 5 meters.
That seems pretty anathema to current trends. The underlying refrain is that users are stupid and cannot be trusted. Faster horses and all that.
Shut up monkeys, I will tell you what you want.
Look no further than some of the comments on this very post.
Instead of trying to refute the OP, maybe people should listen to what he's saying.
It's a form of engaging, plus it's a rant.
I've yet to see good outcomes from self-infantilizing.
And people have such a poor distinction of exactly where the limits lie.
My mother was blind. I was able to teach her how to glue up PVC. (For those of you who don't know--it's a don't-touch, less than a minute of working time and sets even faster if assembled and not moving.) Could she build things out of PVC? Yes. Could she repair a pipe? No. She needed everything perfectly arranged, an existing pipe wouldn't be perfectly arranged. And when my father died people wouldn't believe the big power tools in the garage were hers, not his. (Stuff where she could measure and clamp, hands only on the tool's controls.)
The imbalance is profound. I once tried to find a lawyer who could handle getting accommodations for a visually impaired person I knew. In practice, we probably just needed them to draft a sufficiently stern letter notifying the operator of their responsibilities under the ADA and it would have eventually gotten handled.
I spent a while trying to find law firms that specialized in this. If you do this kind of search 99% of the results are for law firms that specialize instead in defending companies against ADA suits and helping them evade their responsibilities.
I eventually was able to find exactly one law firm via contacting the bar. They weren't interested in talking to me - they said the person with the disability would need to contact them directly and pay out of their own pocket.
Years later that website still isn't accessible.
The author's definition of a "Disability Dongle" perfectly describes the early versions of motorized wheelchairs. Why is it such an obvious conclusion that we need remake the world to be compatible with the previous generation of disability dongle instead of building the next? At the very least, couldn't we do both?
While it is frustrating, I do think disability is a bug (I have some). Just like I take medicines to manage my condition, or use glasses to read better (I don't ask everything to be made bigger - the text on pages in a book - I use an aid) - I really believe technology is the answer to many issues. Implementation is always political/controlled by vested interests, but throwing innovation and Silicon Valley under the bus is not the answer. I'd rather hope the blender blending brick today will be as silent as an electric car one day.
Sometimes the world just is, and I will take whatever technology can give me to handle it.
There's already a lot of ramps, there's probably never going to be a lot more ramps, I think I'd like to have some technology to assist me with edge cases.
> there's probably never going to be a lot more ramps
Not with that attitude there won't be.
Could you make the text bigger on mobile? At present I get about one word a line. But clearly we can do better… see if you can get it to just one letter!
(the text seems to be about the same size (physically on a screen) across resolutions)
now, why might a blind person design their site this way? hmmmmm
Do they view their desktop from the same distance?
And it's to the point that it's becoming an accessibility issue in the other direction.
This feels like an excessive hate of "Silicon Valley" that is just awkward. Yes, it turns out it is easier to do easier tasks. No, it is not cheaper to pound the table with claims that all infrastructure should be better.
One company I was at wouldn't even keep basic first aid supplies stocked.
Facilities succesfully made a big push to get a bunch of people CPR/AED training, especially because it was free. I then made the obvious point that we had no AEDs and should get some. Absolute crickets.
Weird, AEDs are cheap enough. Most companies I know have them now. They need to be checked to ensure they still work (that is the battery isn't dead)
Yeah they had no problem paying broadway theater talent to write and perform corporate musicals for them but wouldn't spend on Advil, band aids and AEDs. I guess those don't "contribute to company culture".
Incredible.
...Is "disability dongle" the new "autonomous transit pods"?
For context, San Francisco being a city with billionaire tech oligarchs, lots of traffic, and OK but not great transit means there's a LOT of rich people who want to fix traffic by way of almost literally reinventing the wheel.
We already know how to move lots of people to a particular destination very quickly: some variation[0] of a bus or train on dedicated right-of-way. The problem is that America is specifically engineered to make operating transit unprofitable outside of high density urban areas, acquiring land for that right-of-way in high density is astronomically expensive, and increasing density limits to break this chicken-and-egg problem is a political nightmare in most places.
This is exactly the kind of problem Silicon Valley hates having to solve because it is, in a sense, the enemy. A good chunk of Big Tech got drunk on Ayn Rand, and transit in particular presents a problem that Objectivist philosophy is unwilling to engage with. To solve it requires both negotiating with the urban planning equivalent of a Soviet central planner and long-term subsidy through coercive taxation.
The pitch for all these projects is ultimately a complicated heavy engineering project to make a train seem less like a train and more like a tech product. Think like the Hyperloop, a concept for a vaccum-sealed tube in which "pods" could be shot through at high speeds. This doesn't need to exist, heavy rail can absolutely go 200mph, we can already bury it underground, and there is no need to have individualized vehicles aside from a mistaken belief that Americans are allergic to sharing space with other Americans.
The one version of this that actually got built is the Vegas Loop, which despite the name and the hype has nothing to do with Hyperloop and was just Teslas driving down a one-way tunnel. All the hype around it delayed actual transportation. As I hinted at above, federal politicians[1] in America would really rather you not take a train. Americans themselves will happily ride them[2], but getting local funding for it is a battle. And all the talk of hyperloops and pods made local politicians hold off on fighting that fight for a good decade, so there's a lot of transit we're missing, because the stupid sci-fantasy ideas never panned out.
[0] I am being very broad here - France has it's obsession with rubber-tired trains, Mexico City has an extensive BRT network that provides metro-like service frequencies.
[1] Joe Biden excluded
[2] We abuse the shit out of commercial aviation to do things high-speed trains can do better, so it's not like we're afraid to share space. The only thing is that Americans don't know how to stay quiet on a train or plane - but that doesn't make the train unprofitable or impractical.
>every time I see one of these vapid videos.
>And watching the video,
>I am blind
Um...
EDIT: Actually, the post reads as if two different people wrote it. The first half doesn't mention anything about blindness, and the second half doesn't mention anything about wheelchairs. But there's only one credit, so I don't know what's going on.
1. it's possible that the author is blind in a legal sense but not completely blind -- e.g. maybe they only have vision in the center of their visual field, or maybe they have low acuity. You'll often see people with white canes wearing glasses, which would be pointless if they had absolutely zero vision.
2. It's not uncommon for people to use terms like "watch", "see", "hear", "listen", etc. colloquially / metaphorically; e.g. "I heard that X did Y" by someone who, pedantically speaking, _read_ that X did Y; someone typing "listen to me" on a chat app when they really mean "please read my words carefully and internalize them"; etc. If I were playing a video on on my phone, listening to what is being said but not actually watching the screen, I'd probably still say I "watched" the video.
Almost all blind people can see the sun. In the US blind legally means your eyes cannot be corrected to better than 20/200 - without glasses my eyes are worth than that so I have a good idea of what the low end of blind would be like. I take my glasses off to read. (of course most people who are blind will be much worse than me without glasses - but we can safely assume at least some of them can watch TV and get something out of it)
I did check for metaphor before commenting. It'd be odd to describe the chair in question as a "Transformer having a panic attack" if you didn't actually see it. If it was noisy, I might have described it as sounding like a blender choking on concrete, for example.
I have no response for point #1, but it doesn't make my other observation go away.
https://sightlessscribbles.com/about/
> Kingett has Cerebral Palsy, CP, in addition to his blindness. He’s had both ever since he was a baby. He has Retinopathy of prematurity, commonly referred to as ROP. Even though he is ambulatory, his cerebral palsy makes it difficult to walk long distances or to stand for lengthy periods of time, which is probably why writing fell right into his lap!
So it sounds* like he uses his cane from his wheelchair and/or when walking.
*unintentional metaphor
Never mind, then. It's just bad writing.
It’s AI
I think even AI wouldn't do that.
I recognize the LLM prose and verified on Pangram