6 ms·

The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You

210 points by calcifer 2mo ago

calcifer 2mo ago
> 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.
- nicbou 2mo ago
  A lot of problems are like that. They don't require anything fancy, just regulation, a budget or regular maintenance.
- capitainenemo 2mo ago
  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.
  - toast0 2mo ago
    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.
    - 8note 2mo ago
      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
- TulliusCicero 2mo ago
  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.
  - lkey 2mo ago
    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.
    - TulliusCicero 2mo ago
      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?
      - Lalabadie 2mo ago
        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).
        bluGill 2mo ago
        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?).
fellowniusmonk 2mo ago
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.
- JohnMakin 2mo ago
  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.
  - wredcoll 2mo ago
    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?
    - JohnMakin 2mo ago
      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.
TulliusCicero 2mo ago
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.
- watwut 2mo ago
  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.
  - thereisnospork 2mo ago
    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.
    - TulliusCicero 2mo ago
      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.
    - hamdingers 2mo ago
      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.
scottlamb 2mo ago
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.
- TulliusCicero 2mo ago
  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?
  - chowells 2mo ago
    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.
    - TulliusCicero 2mo ago
      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.
ggreer 2mo ago
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-b683-5ed72d20debe https://www.pangram.com/history/06093378-dcca-42d8-b683-5ed7...
- masklinn 2mo ago
  > 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.
- rtkwe 2mo ago
  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.
Drakexor 2mo ago
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)
- magarnicle 2mo ago
  Maybe, but regulations do have a widespread impact on issues like this. Disabled access is a legal requirement and so we have ramps, despite the extra cost. Asking for better regulation to lead to better ramps is reasonable.
giantg2 2mo ago
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).
- isityettime 2mo ago
  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.
- fishpen0 2mo ago
  > 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.
  - giantg2 2mo ago
    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.
fervor 2mo ago
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
- CharlesW 2mo ago
  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).
nsxwolf 2mo ago
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.
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
  > there's probably never going to be a lot more ramps Not with that attitude there won't be.
boscillator 2mo ago
> 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.
- asdff 2mo ago
  Spikes rise up if you tap your phone on the scanner and your rampbucks balance is too low.
HoldOnAMinute 2mo ago
>> 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
hobonation 2mo ago
[dead]
fluoridation 2mo ago
>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.
- armchairhacker 2mo ago
  It’s AI
  - fluoridation 2mo ago
    I think even AI wouldn't do that.
    - armchairhacker 2mo ago
      [flagged]
- meatmanek 2mo ago
  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.
  - fluoridation 2mo ago
    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.
busterarm 2mo ago
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.
- bluGill 2mo ago
  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)
  - busterarm 2mo ago
    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.
overgard 2mo ago
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.
kg 2mo ago
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.
tengbretson 2mo ago
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?
- magarnicle 2mo ago
  I don't know why you are getting down-votes. If you've spent any time around a motorized wheelchair you would see they are still pretty bad tech. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuMg0QwKAGI
kmeisthax 2mo ago
...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.
ppedra 2mo ago
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.
- legobmw99 2mo ago
  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
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
throwaway7783 2mo ago
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.
Henchman21 2mo ago
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!
- throawayonthe 2mo ago
  (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
  - Dylan16807 2mo ago
    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.
serf 2mo ago
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
taeric 2mo ago
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.
arjie 2mo ago
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.
devinprater 2mo ago
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.
axus 2mo ago
While searching for that Telepathy article, I found this which fits his example: https://neuralink.com/updates/a-year-of-telepathy/ https://neuralink.com/updates/a-year-of-telepathy/
Dylan16807 2mo ago
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).
giardini 2mo ago
TFA: "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-aid.html?msclkid=3abf1af3024b13fb96a27080977c23f8 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-)
Yizahi 2mo ago
Every day when I need to carry something in both hands (gasp, the sheer gall and audacity of such an idea!) I weep for the disabled people around. It's genuinely crazy even in the oh so social EU cities. Every single door has a goddamn door closer (which you can't even legally disconnect), automatic door needing a precise timed press of an obscure button, mandatory info hidden in some weird nooks and crannies in the bus/tram, the newfangled trend to disable traffic lights around the city for the misjudged urbanism error, graded sidewalks which looks modern but so very fun to traverse when iced (there is no bad weather in the design bureaus I guess, maybe they are all on Ibiza?) and the list goes on.
theturtle 2mo ago
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1123581321 2mo ago
Specifically about accessible websites: I’m a web developer. At the request of a designer I work with, I spent a couple hours making a Claude skill that would run through WCAG AA and AAA, check contrast, screen reader experience etc. Since then, we’ve caught many little issues and a few big ones like adding a parallel screen reading element for a visually-oriented search tool. Building and testing the skill gave me better insight into WCAG, too. 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.
- averynicepen 2mo ago
  Could you share your skill? I've been working on a web app that I've been wanting to do a much more comprehensive accessibility audit on.
  - 1123581321 2mo ago
    Sure thing! https://github.com/michaeldhopkins/a11y-review https://github.com/michaeldhopkins/a11y-review
joquarky 2mo ago
If SV cares so much about disabilities, they should look at the UX in mobile ad platforms. 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.
magarnicle 2mo ago
> My disability is not a tragedy of biology. 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?
tzs 2mo ago
> I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew 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.
Agreeing6 2mo ago
It was a huge shock. The content itself, of course—but most of all, the size of the text. 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.
nunez 2mo ago
All of this also applies to public transit (whose systems usually have excellent ADA compliance).

210 points by calcifer 2mo ago

> 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.

nicbou 2mo ago
A lot of problems are like that. They don't require anything fancy, just regulation, a budget or regular maintenance.
capitainenemo 2mo ago
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.
- toast0 2mo ago
  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.
  - 8note 2mo ago
    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
TulliusCicero 2mo ago
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.
- lkey 2mo ago
  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.
  - TulliusCicero 2mo ago
    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?
    - Lalabadie 2mo ago
      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).
      - bluGill 2mo ago
        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?).

fellowniusmonk 2mo ago

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.

JohnMakin 2mo ago
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.
- wredcoll 2mo ago
  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?
  - JohnMakin 2mo ago
    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.

TulliusCicero 2mo ago

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.

watwut 2mo ago
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.
- thereisnospork 2mo ago
  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.
  - TulliusCicero 2mo ago
    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.
  - hamdingers 2mo ago
    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.

scottlamb 2mo ago

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.

TulliusCicero 2mo ago
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?
- chowells 2mo ago
  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.
  - TulliusCicero 2mo ago
    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.

ggreer 2mo ago

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-b683-5ed72d20debe https://www.pangram.com/history/06093378-dcca-42d8-b683-5ed7...

masklinn 2mo ago
> 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.
rtkwe 2mo ago
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.

Drakexor 2mo ago

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)

magarnicle 2mo ago
Maybe, but regulations do have a widespread impact on issues like this. Disabled access is a legal requirement and so we have ramps, despite the extra cost. Asking for better regulation to lead to better ramps is reasonable.

giantg2 2mo ago

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).

isityettime 2mo ago
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.
fishpen0 2mo ago
> 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.
- giantg2 2mo ago
  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.

fervor 2mo ago

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

CharlesW 2mo ago
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).

nsxwolf 2mo ago

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.

BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
> there's probably never going to be a lot more ramps Not with that attitude there won't be.

boscillator 2mo ago

> 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.

asdff 2mo ago
Spikes rise up if you tap your phone on the scanner and your rampbucks balance is too low.

HoldOnAMinute 2mo ago

>> 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

hobonation 2mo ago

[dead]

fluoridation 2mo ago

>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.

armchairhacker 2mo ago
It’s AI
- fluoridation 2mo ago
  I think even AI wouldn't do that.
  - armchairhacker 2mo ago
    [flagged]
meatmanek 2mo ago
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.
- fluoridation 2mo ago
  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.

busterarm 2mo ago

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.

bluGill 2mo ago
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)
- busterarm 2mo ago
  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.

overgard 2mo ago

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.

kg 2mo ago

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.

tengbretson 2mo ago

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?

magarnicle 2mo ago
I don't know why you are getting down-votes. If you've spent any time around a motorized wheelchair you would see they are still pretty bad tech. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuMg0QwKAGI

kmeisthax 2mo ago

...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.

ppedra 2mo ago

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.

legobmw99 2mo ago
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
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

throwaway7783 2mo ago

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.

Henchman21 2mo ago

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!

throawayonthe 2mo ago
(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
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
  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.

serf 2mo ago

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

taeric 2mo ago

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.

arjie 2mo ago

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.

devinprater 2mo ago

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.

axus 2mo ago

While searching for that Telepathy article, I found this which fits his example: https://neuralink.com/updates/a-year-of-telepathy/ https://neuralink.com/updates/a-year-of-telepathy/

Dylan16807 2mo ago

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).

giardini 2mo ago

TFA: "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-aid.html?msclkid=3abf1af3024b13fb96a27080977c23f8 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-)

Yizahi 2mo ago

Every day when I need to carry something in both hands (gasp, the sheer gall and audacity of such an idea!) I weep for the disabled people around. It's genuinely crazy even in the oh so social EU cities. Every single door has a goddamn door closer (which you can't even legally disconnect), automatic door needing a precise timed press of an obscure button, mandatory info hidden in some weird nooks and crannies in the bus/tram, the newfangled trend to disable traffic lights around the city for the misjudged urbanism error, graded sidewalks which looks modern but so very fun to traverse when iced (there is no bad weather in the design bureaus I guess, maybe they are all on Ibiza?) and the list goes on.

theturtle 2mo ago

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1123581321 2mo ago

Specifically about accessible websites: I’m a web developer. At the request of a designer I work with, I spent a couple hours making a Claude skill that would run through WCAG AA and AAA, check contrast, screen reader experience etc. Since then, we’ve caught many little issues and a few big ones like adding a parallel screen reading element for a visually-oriented search tool. Building and testing the skill gave me better insight into WCAG, too. 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.

averynicepen 2mo ago
Could you share your skill? I've been working on a web app that I've been wanting to do a much more comprehensive accessibility audit on.
- 1123581321 2mo ago
  Sure thing! https://github.com/michaeldhopkins/a11y-review https://github.com/michaeldhopkins/a11y-review

joquarky 2mo ago

If SV cares so much about disabilities, they should look at the UX in mobile ad platforms. 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.

magarnicle 2mo ago

> My disability is not a tragedy of biology. 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?

tzs 2mo ago

> I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew 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.

Agreeing6 2mo ago

It was a huge shock. The content itself, of course—but most of all, the size of the text. 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.

nunez 2mo ago

All of this also applies to public transit (whose systems usually have excellent ADA compliance).