Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

This is remarkable and could be life changing for the disabled, elderly, gamers, or profoundly lazy and their caretakers.

View on HN

I forgot where I saw that, but generally, improving things for people with disabilities improves things for everyone, like making sidewalks wheelchair friendly helps parents with a stroller, or people carrying heavy stuff, walking with a cane, young children on bicycles, people who can't see well...

>> improving things for people with disabilities improves things for everyone

Everything has its limits. Many years ago I was involved in building a series of staircases in a rock climbing area inside a park. There were about a hundred steps in a handful of orientations to get from the parking lot over a rocky hill to the small valleys behind. The project was primarily to prevent trail erosion and falls. These steps weren't going to even have handrails. (Think 2x6 framed boxes filled with dirt and bolted to the rock.) Then someone in government said if we wanted to use donated money inside a park we would have to somehow make the project wheelchair accessible. All stop. Project over. No stairs were built. Access trail remained a mess.

We were going to replicate these stairs from another climbing area in BC. There is no way to make such a thing wheelchair accessible.

https://sonnybou.ca/ssbou2001/skaha01.jpg

In the US? I assume ADA was the kicker. A lot of folks even in government don’t realize the ADA isn’t unthinking. If the activity or environment doesn’t lend itself to accessibility it’s not required. Cutting a wheel chair ramp into a mountain face is a good example where the ADA wouldn’t apply because it’s impractical given the environment to do so. Even national parks only offer a subset set of activities ADA complaint.

No, it wasn't an ADA thing. It was a purely local thing. The local authority had adopted some resolution that no further "development" would happen before they added some sort of accessibility. So we couldn't move forwards even using donated money. We could repair things but not make substantive improvements.

Rock climbing areas tend to be inaccessible or at least very rough terrain. Ironically, a vertical rock surface can be made accessible. There are actually many disabled climbers out there. But with a mixed dirt/rock/scree slope you basically need to install a mile-long ramp.

I guess pointing at the cliff and saying that’s the accessible route doesn’t fly eh? It’s an inclined slope - just very inclined. And yes there are tons of disabled climbers.

We generally understand that disabled people have a right to access the spaces that everyone else does. But climbing/caving is different, different than most any other activity: Access to space is controlled by ability. I have stood on ledges that are impossible to get to without a certain set of skills. If there was a ladder or a staircase, standing on that ledge would mean nothing. We can make a pool or athletic field accessible, but making such a remote ledge half way up a sheer cliff accessible by people without those abilities isn't possible without destroying the nature of that space. So there is always going to be conflict.

I like to think that each individual has a limit to their ability to access the physical world around them, which will likely go up and down through their lifetime. Factors which might affect this limit are physical or medical differences between individuals. These factors can be mitigated, such as a prosphetic, or medication to help with altitude sickness. Humans also have ways to change the physical world to mitigate these limits. I'm guessing that there is a road which brings you closer to this climbing area? And that most people use vehicles to get closer and leave those somewhere? That infrastructure is in place, but there was a time when it wasn't. Vehicles, great invention aren't they? You see where I'm going with this? Take away that infrastructure or take away the vehicles and the trail errosion problem is solved, because suddenly there is a massive drop in people accessing the area. I'm not suggesting either way that those steps should be built or not, that is indeed a conflict and no one can say where the line should be drawn, but please don't loose sight of the limits of your own ability, that your limit WILL change and the mitigating factors that are already in place that enable you to exceed your limit.

I've never understood this argument. Why would somebody else getting to a point through a different easy way cause another to feel like the hard way lost its value?

Stand on a remote ledge, a few square feet of flat space half way up a thousand-foot cliff. Yes, putting a ladder up to that ledge would reduce its magic, just as offering helicopter rides up K2 would cheapen every summit photo taken there.

You have repeated the point as if it were self-evident, but you haven't explained it.

The value is showing that one has reached that destination by overcoming obstacles and having sufficient skill to get there. Removing the need for skill and overcoming obstacles makes reaching the destination pointless.

The obstacles are still there.

Just because we have Linux, Python and JavaScript doesn't mean nobody's playing with assembly and experimenting with new ideas at a more fundamental level.

I have a suspicion that the sort of people who think they wouldn't do something hard just because other people have it too easy weren't going to do it in the first place.

Making an on-the-record decision to not provide accessibility is grounds for a lawsuit on that basis. It doesn't matter if they think they'd win that lawsuit, it's a chilling effect, and a big one.

This is not a limit of making things accessible. This is a bureaucratic/legal/funds limit. Had they told you "for accessibility, we will build an alternative route and handle the cost", would you have said "No, thanks"?

"improving things" and "mandatory requirements that, in some cases, can go against common sense" are not the same things.

It’s so frustrating that city leaders can’t even try to use common sense. Where I live a parking requirement blocked a restaurant from being built and our city council publicly acknowledged that there isn’t enough space for parking and a building, but “that’s the law” so they blocked it. Lazy idiots.

Isn’t that the point of the parking requirement? If you don’t have room for enough parking to support the Thing, then you don’t have room to add the Thing to the neighborhood. Seems like the intended outcome.

Or maybe the city doesn't want businesses that are going to bring people into an area without giving them space to park the cars they inevitably bring with them.

I've heard this called the curb cut effect. (It's a subject right in 99% Invisible's wheelhouse and there is a good episode about it that mostly focuses on the history of literal curb cuts.)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect

2. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/

‘Designing things like door handles for people with only one arm is a good idea not just because it helps those with only one arm, but also because all of us sometimes have only one arm. If we’re carrying a hot cup of tea, for instance…’

…to (very liberally) paraphrase Rory Sutherland.

I heard this from Anna Martelli Ravenscroft in her presentation "Diversity as a Dependency" [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOpdDxJzNkw

While I would agree in general, I once slipped on one of those overly steep carved-out kerbs in SF and broke my elbow... I guess if you hit a bad spot you might need a wheelchair afterwards (ok, but it really did hurt!)

So you have to do it right to keep the potential harm as low as possible and not forget about security in the face of rewarding improvements. And watch your step, of course.

Might also be applicable in the context of self-learning household robots and their potential to burn down that house :)

... daleks

Thank you! A large motivation behind this line of home-robot work for me is thinking about the elderly, people with disabilities, or busy parents who simply don't have enough time to do it all. I am personally hopeful that we can teach AI to take the jobs that no one wants rather than the jobs that everyone wants :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com