The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
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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.
> 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.
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.
Musk is an asshole, no argument there, but most tech company CEOs aren't nearly that crazy.
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.
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
"jaywalking" is a term made up by car companies because they hate you, as a better example
the car obsession didnt quite happen naturally
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.
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 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.
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.
(although obviously it would be less profitable for the investors so it won't happen)
I think thats the core frustration
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
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.
They would have to put that 9 billion into a political takeover of the US government, a major rewriting of environmental and property laws, and silencing/steamrolling opposing interest groups.
This is a pretty tall order.
I dont think AI cost much at all because politicians were largely supportive to begin with, and the legal changes were small if any.
It would be different if you had to replace them all or change their mind on a deeply held issue.
agreed on the LV monorail though
So you don’t solve the problem, you just solve it for a tiny group of wealthy people
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.)
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.
Example:
I have a chronic pain disorder. I have substantial difficulty working in an office. WFH was an absolute blessing, and RTO has been a curse.
RTO is a regressive policy for disabled people who found they were finally able to participate in their industry for the first time in ages. Now they are expected to take on extra burden to function in an able-bodied world. Many, whose bodies do not allow that option simply have to go back on SSDI.
That is an example of progress in the social model that has regressed back to the medical model.
That is a man of straw! I’m talking about desk jobs, here, and I think that’s pretty clear from my comment above.
I don’t know how RTO could be seen as anything but the medical model —
Medical model: it is the disabled person’s responsibility to figure out how to function in society.
Social model: it is society’s responsibility to accommodate people with disabilities.
In any case, I’m actively involved in the disability community and this is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — conversations in the community recent years. WFH/RTO has become the poster-child for the conflict between the medical and social model. This is why I chose it as an example.
Other businesses don't agree. Managers at these businesses want people chitchatting with each other, grabbing lunch together, having hallway talks, etc. They think that desk work is at its best when it's a social activity, and often have specific points where they feel their business didn't work as well when Covid forced everyone to stay home.
Why does the social model of disability imply that the second group of businesses is wrong, or that we have to override their judgment?
It doesn’t, it claims that WFH is a reasonable accommodation for desk workers and employers need to adapt if they want their disabled employees to be as productive.
Don’t worry, though, companies loathe providing WFH accommodation; WFH is my only option and I’ve been unemployed and hunting for months. The arrangement that is most comfortable for able-bodied people is not in danger.
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
Ok, but that's not a "Silicon Valley" thing.
Go talk to politicians or Home Depot and Lowe's and the home builders conventions.
That's why the post screams of mis-placed anger.
Silicon Valley probably would invent FaceID / NFC / Passkeys / WIFI authentication for doors - but that doesn't mean they'll get installed anywhere.
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.
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.
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...
The reason why people call that sort of attitude “ableist” is that you’re requiring me, the disabled person, to prove that I’m not a liar.
> What specific accommodation is being asked for?
There is a whole field of study called “Disability Theory” that includes this topic. It is well-defined with thousands of pages written on the topic. It is not nebulous, you just aren’t familiar with it.
> What counts as a disability?
Words have definitions:
“the condition of being unable to perform as a consequence of physical or mental unfitness”
> Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD
Yes, but a person with ODD is still expected to be a decent human. They may make more often mistakes but they should recognize and apologize for those mistakes. They should be in therapy to help learn self-regulation techniques.
Likewise, you should give them some extra grace because, in spite of all that extremely hard work, it’s hard to ignore what your body is telling you (push back against authority) and sometimes they will slip up.
> can I request proof from a medical professional?
I dunno, can I get a video of your last colonoscopy? Can you tell the public internet if you take take viagra? Can you list your mental health disorders for me please? How’s your gut, had any diarrhea lately?
Medical information is private.
> There are real tradeoffs here.
Yes, the tradeoffs are that things are a bit less convenient for able-bodied people and disabled people get to actually have agency on their lives.
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').
Even though it doesn’t affect me directly I’ve started to notice places where mobility accommodation sucks. In a sense it’s a canary: mobility is the most visible category disability to able-bodied folks and if our society can’t be bothered to help folks like you, god help us who have “invisible” illnesses.
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.
Why? And not why in terms of a trivial statistical tautology, where a bell curve has to have a left tail. Why, in terms of, what downstream causal effect of deliberately maintaining large cohorts of poor people accomplishes something desirable?
??? This is the social model on a nutshell.
It’s absolutely possible for laws around accommodations to be stupid. Once again, that’s the medical model, when able-bodied people write policy for disabled people, there are stupid outcomes. The social model says that there should always be a person with a relevant disability involved with designing accommodations unless it’s absolutely impossible to do. The saying commonly used in the community is “nothing about us without us.”
So perhaps your implementation sucks, but if it does, there’s a good chance it’s because of the medical model.
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).
I remember voting to fund high speed rail, and the funding was quite generous...
You won't always be able to count on the threat of exposing their sexual habits, which has been working for decades.
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.
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.
The criticism is that what they’re choosing to work on is misguided, if the goal is truly to help people. The cost is just one of several factors, and one point about it is that the cost will never come down far enough to make sense, if the fundamental nature of the product isn’t in fact beneficial to the intended users.
It seems that there’s a sizable group who just want their ego stroked about how they’re “making the world a better place,” and other such drivel. Whether that’s actually true doesn’t matter to them, and they’re not going to think about it deeply enough to make any difference.
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.
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.
no one is asking you to solve the whole problem, just be part of fighting for the real solution
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.
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.
Not at all. Just don't start by guessing what a disabled person's concerns are, or presume that an unsolicited suggestion is helpful. A respectful start is letting them know you will be responsive and let them lead the conversation.
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adap...
Received high praise if I recall correctly.
Sure, we've all known engineers and product managers that don't consult the target audience, but don't assume that of everyone.
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.
I mean, it's certainly a factor: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/uber-lyft-proposition-l-...
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
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.
This is simply wrong in a lot of cases. Tech companies absolutely use their immense wealth and influence to alter public policy and spending. Regulation and budget decisions happen all the time to benefit a specific company or industry, at the expense of the overall public. Tech is hardly alone in this, but that industry has more money and mind share than most, and correspondingly more ability to change policies to their benefit.
The more money and hype a Disability Dongle company gets, the more interest and ability it will have to degrade less shiny but more effective alternatives.
Disagree there.
Tech companies and their owners are part of the system of monied interests that have entirely captured our government, and that's why we don't have the funding to fix all our infrastructure.
That is like the old joke about the drunk who lost his keys in the dark alley but is looking for them by the lamppost because the light's better there.
If what's "in your grasp" isn't going to make things better, then just don't do it. Virtually every "engineer type" working for a large tech company is making the world worse simply by participating in that large tech company's activities, and it would be more ethical for them to simply quit than continue to do anything within that context.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't really teens in garages perpetuating this is it though, its universities and companies milking government funding.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
Instead of trying to refute the OP, maybe people should listen to what he's saying.
I've yet to see good outcomes from self-infantilizing.
Shut up monkeys, I will tell you what you want.
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.)
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.
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).
(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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Maybe the tech will always be too bulky, but it could also be rented out on location when traveling.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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 have 'solid evidence' from my time in industry where heedlessly pursuing 'innovation' got companies (including my own) sued back into compliance with the ADA. Along with deserved lost contracts and managerial beheadings.
Higher profile examples of TED talk 'innovation' killing 'the good' would be the proposed CA 'hyperloop' talk, white paper, and project scuttling high-speed rail investment for another decade plus.
What are your bona fides now that you've brought up your familiarity with both perfection and good?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)
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.
I auto-run the skill when certain changes are detected in a branch and it takes just a few minutes. Recommended if your work shows up in browsers.
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.
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
I’m building a website for users of a local disability transportation service. I had read the WCAG guidelines and tested the site, but I didn’t realize that the text was too small for some middle-aged users until they had to take out their reading glasses.
Knowing semantic HTML wasn’t enough, and WCAG testing alone was obviously insufficient.
I had spent far too long overlooking something as simple as font size. Just font size.
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.
But someday many people might need wheelchairs that include some functionality to help with obstacles and are affordable. Those primitive impractical machines engineers build now are where they figure out much of what will go into those later machines.
I'm tired of playing hide and seek with the microscopic 'x' that appears after a minute or two of ads, and that is the only way out of the ad without forcing the app closed.
Sometimes it's in the top left, sometimes the top right.
Sometimes it appears for a second and then disappears again. Act fast!
Sometimes the ad puts a button right under the tiny 'x' so that if you miss it, you get directed to their site, causing analytics to happen so that now you get a flood of ads for healing crystals for several weeks.
I find these sorts of statements about disability over-correcting. It is a tragedy of biology that my brother cannot run but I can. What else could it be?
The wheelchair companies were not the ones who managed to produce the e-bikes and e-scooters, even though they seemed well placed to do so.
It's actually taking an e-bike and turning it into a wheelchair that looks a lot more like the future and not a "dongle" (plus the creator has first-hand knowledge of disability): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuMg0QwKAGI
>> 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
Not with that attitude there won't be.
now, why might a blind person design their site this way? hmmmmm
And it's to the point that it's becoming an accessibility issue in the other direction.
"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.
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.
Incredible.
"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."
Author fails to realize that "better doorknobs and or a ramp" would incur a social cost of billions or more (even w/o adding the social cost tied to legislation, legal costs, and maintenance) as compared to his imaginary $30k "silicon dongle". That's w/o considering such questions as whether I (and all other taxpayers) should pay for a doorknob we don't need but he does. We might be more willing to buy him a SpaceX rocket and send him into orbit around the Sun.
He's a pissed-off handicapped fellow. I get that. And current society is (or once was) one that rewards people for solving their own problems instead of complaining. This may no longer be true: social media, gofundme, the metoo movement, etc. have moved the dial so that formerly "helpless" bitching can be quite rewarding, but I digress. Perhaps someday we'll be so wealthy that every individual's cares and needs are provided for. But we're not there yet.
So if I were him I might do something like go into business designing and marketing a better doorknob opener for the handicapped instead of complaining no one gives a shite. FWIW here's some SOTA at a $30 price-level:
https://www.caregiverproducts.com/handy-hook-door-opening-ai...
Got to admit that looks pretty "iffy" for opening doors, more like a personal defense weapon. In any case it might get you labelled as "Captain Hook" at the grade school (OTOH its always good to have respect, if not reverence). Anyhow, its a starting point and you can only do better!8-)
Sometimes the world just is, and I will take whatever technology can give me to handle it.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
*unintentional metaphor