The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You(sightlessscribbles.com) |
The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You(sightlessscribbles.com) |
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Forcibly confiscate some people’s money to spend $30 million opening one grocery store.
Government run child care, because governments caring for people’s children is famously the best way to raise kids.
Doxing 900,000 people who own a second residence.
What a guy!
I remember voting to fund high speed rail, and the funding was quite generous...
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.
I mean, it kind of is when the tech company is spending a lot of money lobbying against transit in favor of expanding their product's market share.
I 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.
agreed on the LV monorail though
no one is asking you to solve the whole problem, just be part of fighting for the real solution
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.
So you don’t solve the problem, you just solve it for a tiny group of wealthy people
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
You won't always be able to count on the threat of exposing their sexual habits, which has been working for decades.
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.
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.
The author is correct that simple and cheap changes such as ramps and door knobs are the logical fixes. And yes, based on personal experience, companies hate disabled people at the first sign that they will be an inconvenience to the company.
However, nature has no such things. If you enjoy nature and the outdoors, then user-specific equipment can provide capabilities not available through cheap alternatives. The prototypes shown are always marketing with some flair to it. Yes, the noise and bulk are terrible, but proof of concept can lead to improvements over time - eg you're looking at a some no-name competitor to the Model T (prototype suit), just imagine what the 2026 civic will look like (suits 75 years from now).
My aunt has MS. It cost her nearly $10k to have a _used_ aluminum ramp installed for her house.
She can't come to my house because the gap between the buildings that leads to my door is too narrow for a wheelchair and would require is to get two different building owners, who are not our landlord, to agree to have their building modified to make room for it. It would easily cost 50k+ to actually rebuild two buildings and the sidewalk into a functioning ramp that is the correct slope for a chair.
And yes, the cost of such devices is high today, but that's true of any new technology. The first print reading devices were huge machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now the technology is free on your phone. Early hearing aids were bulky, expensive, and not much better than an ear horn. Now they're affordable, compact, and have handy features like bluetooth connectivity. My guess is that most of these prototypes will fizzle and go nowhere, but some will succeed, and the lives of disabled people will be improved by them.
I 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)
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.
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.
Before inventing a more advanced stair climbing wheelchair, you should ask a few wheelchair users if stairs are really the issue they need solving.
This 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.
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.
Maybe the tech will always be too bulky, but it could also be rented out on location when traveling.
>> You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.
>> Concrete is not "disruptive."
Well, not with that attitude.
You simply need these 3 things:
1. A revenue subscription model
2. Execute at massive scale by leveraging AI
3. An advertising model
Now you can change the world
I 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.
"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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Shut up monkeys, I will tell you what you want.
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.
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.)
> I'm not aware of any tech company lobbying against doorknobs or ramps
Nobody has put forth that argument.
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.
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.
Give that guy a chance to properly fuck things up before you pass judgment.
And anyway, since life isn’t a Git branch, we’ll never know if the alternatives were better or worse in practice.
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.
(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
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
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?).
Musk is an asshole, no argument there, but most tech company CEOs aren't nearly that crazy.