I do think this is important as an awareness exercise, however, it is worth noting that a lot of the issues CANNOT be seen unless you actually do bring the wheelchair. I learned this in 2018 when as a student I attended a conference with a fellow disabled student in Chicago. I was responsible for pushing her (she could use her arms but it was faster to navigate the city if one of us pushed). Not all train stations have a wide enough platform for wheelchairs to roll across, so your mobility is limited by which stations you can use for the train, which means walking farther from the station to where you actually wanted to go. Accessible hotel room with a pushbutton door shut too quickly for her to get into the threshold. Thankfully one of us was there to hit the button again each time she needed it reopened, but sometimes you had to physically catch and push the (heavier than normal) door before the button would re-open it. If you were just "thinking" about being a wheelchair user, and not actually trying to navigate this, you would not have a sense of the timing of this door. Another complication was her foot in a cast sticking out. The lovely, welcoming residents of Chicago catcalled her using wheelchair-related phrases, one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself, and someone kicked her cast in a crowd. The general attitude toward the disabled, in that environment, is unkind at best.
When I was a child (in the US), the science museum in my hometown had an exhibit dedicated to the ADA. You got into a wheelchair and tried to do tasks. It showed how payphones at a certain height are too high to reach, how difficult it would be to go up a ramp with an unapproved slope, etc. I wonder if it's still there, because that was my first foray into thinking this way. The Chicago trip however, basically radicalized me.
The article has a reference point of the UK and I don't know what their laws are with regards to accessibility. But it's clear that in both countries public attitudes toward accessibility have a very long way to go. And I'm sure most other countries can say this as well.
And the sad thing is, in this respect Chicago is less bad than a lot of other towns and cities in the US and way less bad than many (most?) cities in other countries, including many that are much more progressive than the US. Chicago has been working on curb cuts for years and is in the midst of a years-long quest to upgrade all El (metro/subway) platforms for accessibility, and the ADA---33 years old---has much stronger requirements than, as far as I can tell, even current legislation elsewhere. In Canada, France, Spain, Germany I've seen whole rows of storefronts that are a half-storey up or down from street level, curb cuts are rare, and it's more usual for stores and other business to have steps than not. In other realms of accessibility, I've also noticed a lot more Braille and/or headphone access on ATMs and public kiosks in the US, and fire alarms that are rigged with lights as well as sound.
It's not a perfect mechanism, and the US gets a lot of other things wrong, but the ADA is something we got really, really on the right track (and keep improving).
A lot of this is undone by unofficially allowing parking in crosswalks and other routine "transgressions". The cutouts don't matter when there's a car over it. So many groups are affected by this other than wheelchair users too: parents with strollers, elderly or disabled with walkers or who simply can't lift their foot high enough to step onto a curb, young children on balance bikes or skates.
The enforcement mechanism of ADA being, literally, "sue us" is an absolutely massive barrier that makes its practical efficacy a fraction of what you'd think it is based on reading the rules.
I have spent four years, typically ~2 months a year between first complaint and it actually getting acted upon, getting Somerville to cut overgrowth from its own construction site that completely block a sidewalk that is used by hundreds of people per day (there is no sidewalk at all on the other side).
You couldn't use the sidewalk anyway as it is not ADA compliant in the slightest (random light posts in the middle of a half width sidewalk with tons of cracks and holes). But at least it should be vaguely passable...
Meanwhile literally 100 feet away they managed to redesign and repave an entire highway onramp without hiring a groundskeeper for their own property.
I hate having to bring up the ADA as the reason the city should respect pedestrians. They spent how much money on that highway onramp but can't be bothered to make the frontage on property it owns usable by pedestrians?
Oh boy, do I know... they say it's a city thing because the site is owned by the city or used for city construction or something. It's convoluted as you would expect. 311 and the state DOT disagree about who is responsible for no reason a mere citizen can navigate. It's a long and boring post.
An aside in any case.
A completely blocked and nearly useless sidewalk shouldn't be a thing that requires a resident to file a complaint just the right way to get fixed. Especially when it's in an easily visible area. Something being "compliant" isn't enough, and even publicly managed sites aren't necessarily compliant (and shouldn't take a lawyer to fix).
It's not asking a lot for a site run by a construction company to find a groundskeeper for a few hours a year without figuring out just the right way to complain first. When the same sites were owned by a private company it went without saying.
Well the old famous pizza places are not accessible in the slightest. Basically anything super freaking old is a lost cause unless you magically have room to make the bathrooms bigger or put an extension on the storefront, etc. I'm from the South, and it also shocked me how cars in Chicago would basically inch directly up to where you're walking, like they're just gonna run over you if you stopped, even if pedestrians technically have the green to cross. And they could see we were going slower because we're pushing a wheelchair! People talk crap on the South and how we drive, but at least we usually slow down when someone is crossing. (I can't vouch for Florida, but most of Florida doesn't count as Southern anyway.)
It's easy to take the braille in elevators or lights on fire alarms for granted, but thanks for pointing out how good it is that we have them.
> and it also shocked me how cars in Chicago would basically inch directly up to where you're walking, like they're just gonna run over you if you stopped, even if pedestrians technically have the green to cross.
I just spent the last week in downtown Chicago and in this regard I didn't find it any worse than the downtown areas of other major cities. Not saying it is acceptable but Chicago is not an outlier.
I kind of wonder if we're not solving a lot of these problems in the wrong place. We passed a law that requires buildings to change, but meanwhile we have the technology to make "wheelchairs" that can climb stairs. Something with a continuous track or whatever else human ingenuity can devise.
That would cost money, but how could it possibly cost as much as modifying every building everywhere? A wheelchair ramp is thousands of dollars. An elevator is hundreds of thousands. A person in a wheelchair might encounter a thousand distinct sets of stairs in a year but the median set of stairs doesn't encounter that number of distinct people in a wheelchair.
More importantly, there are stairs in places we're not going to do anything about it, like old buildings and private homes. And there are accessibility devices that become inaccessible, e.g. an elevator that can't be used because the power is out or the building is on fire. A solution that still works in those cases is better.
As far as I can tell we got stuck with the existing one because of politics. The per-person cost of a ramp at a large high volume business is negligible because it has so much traffic, so much so that they'd install one regardless. The real cost is putting them in every small shop and low traffic area. But then you have no opposition from large businesses to a law requiring them because it puts a disproportionate cost on their smaller competitors. Whereas a tax that paid for more capable "wheelchairs" would sensibly be paid mostly by those large companies, and then they object.
Physical changes to building codes and infrastructure have benefited not just those on wheelchairs, but just about everyone else with a wheeled thing for any other purpose. Parents pushing prams and strollers, people moving bikes into parking spots, carrying groceries with wheeled carriers, using mobility scooters, etc.
As others have mentioned: no, it’s the right tack; permanent changes to the built world benefit many and survive whatever byzantine rules might come in place to receiving high-tech wheelchairs from insurance or otherwise.
Commercial buildings have had loading docks and freight elevators since long before the ADA. There wouldn't be a law prohibiting ramps or curb cuts in any place where the value exceeds the cost. But then it would be engineers and competitive pressure doing the math instead of lawyers and politicians.
> permanent changes to the built world
None of that is permanent. Most buildings never make it to 100 years. The real estate consumed is a continuous cost. There is also a massive, ongoing cost to making new construction more expensive, because it increases housing scarcity and transfers wealth to landlords.
> benefit many and survive whatever byzantine rules might come in place to receiving high-tech wheelchairs from insurance or otherwise.
It seems extremely unlikely that in any non-apocalyptic future the technology will cease to be available in the market regardless of how dysfunctional insurance is. The least convenient plausible scenario is that you have to pay money for it. And the entire point is that on net this will be less money than people are having to pay for what's happening now, in the form of high rents.
I once had a job where I listened to calls to a major US health insurance carrier. The amount of grief that people (especially retirees on privately administered medicare) go through to get a claim for a new wheelchair approved can be enormous. If we want to give disabled people better & more expensive medical equipment as a substitute for accessible buildings, we need to fix the system that is depriving many of new or replacement versions of the "dumb" mobility aids that are in wide use today.
But this is just the politics again. If a government program is paying tax money to people with a particular condition then they should just have a table that says how much money it's expected to cost and give you that money to use for whatever you want. Presumably you'll use it to buy an accessibility device, because you need one, which is why you got the money -- but you shouldn't be excluded from using it for something that functions as an accessibility device even if it isn't on some specific list, or devising your own and using the money to buy components.
Only if they did that there wouldn't be any middle men making rules for who gets denied or which company's products you have to buy, so they would be exposed to competitive pressure and have to make better stuff for slimmer margins. Which the existing system is designed to prevent, because politics.
Went through this with parents, ended up paying for a wheelchair for $500 myself from the manufacturer. I hate Medicare denying disabled stroke patients with a passion now.
Those tractor wheelchairs are not a fits-all solution! For one, they're huge and heavy. For another, I would assume they won't work well on irregular stairways or antique stairways.
Honestly, I'll make an insane hot take here: I think historic/antique buildings that can't be made ADA compliant shouldn't be used for anything important. Or rather, that they should be modified to accommodate.
History is important TO A DEGREE. Helping human beings feel more a part of society is more important.
So make one that isn't. There is nothing in them that has to be made out of depleted uranium.
> For another, I would assume they won't work well on irregular stairways or antique stairways.
How is that any worse than the status quo? If you have something that can navigate stairways then it will work on some of the structures which are old and currently inaccessible, as opposed to none of them as it is now.
> Honestly, I'll make an insane hot take here: I think historic/antique buildings that can't be made ADA compliant shouldn't be used for anything important. Or rather, that they should be modified to accommodate.
In many cases this is impossible without taking a wrecking ball to the existing structure and even when it is possible it will commonly be prohibitively expensive because it requires extensive bespoke professional engineering instead of off the shelf commodity products. You're essentially asking for all the old buildings to be torn down, which would not only be the destruction of history but have an extensive economic cost and exacerbate the existing real estate shortage.
It might literally be less expensive to give everyone in a wheelchair a personal flying car.
Many of the subway stations in NYC still don't have elevators, and when they do they're usually far from the platform, slow, and smelly.
I'm not even in a wheel chair, although I do have foot and nerve issues that can make stairs rather treacherous so I usually avoid them when possible. Like, I live in a 3 story house with stairs, and it's fine, but on possibly slick concrete or tile, with many other people around me (usually going faster)...that's something I avoid when possible.
I've noticed this as well. It depends on where you live, but in Brooklyn, almost none of the subway stations are wheelchair accessible. Buses are, and there are many free transfer options from the subway into the bus network, but in my experience living in NYC the buses are very unreliable. You can get to where you're going but half the time the bus you need will not arrive.
Just for fun I looked at a couple subway lines in Brooklyn. Very few wheelchair accessible stops:
- F train: 3 of its 22 stops
- G train: 2 of its 19 stops (a historically neglected line, but still I'm surprised to see this so low)
- A train: 3 of its 17 stops
... in fact, lets play a game. Here's a map I made of part of Brooklyn. The stars represent stops that are not wheelchair accessible. Can you find the stops that don't have a star? https://imgur.com/a/8PdzrOK
> And the sad thing is, in this respect Chicago is less bad than a lot of other towns and cities in the US
Being a “progressive” city isn’t really correlated with being disability friendly. New York is terrible for disabilities. Many walkable and high dense areas are also terrible for them.
Like it or not, suburbia with giant parking lots, dedicated disabled spaces, wheelchair ramps, etc is about the best access you can get (assuming you can drive a vehicle and have one).
> Chicago is less bad than a lot of other towns and cities in the US and way less bad than many (most?) cities in other countries, including many that are much more progressive than the US
You are seriously… I don’t know what to say. I live in Turkey. The treatment in Chicago is something unheard of. I cannot imagine this behavior outside of a tech dystopia, and apparently this is what West is now. Funny to see you think physical accessibility, wheelchair platforms etc. are more important than traditional bonds of family and community to support disabled people. Thank God we’re still not that progressive.
My city has been on a curb cut rampage recently. Pretty much every single corner, whether in a suburban neighborhood or downtown, has been ripped out and replaced with an ADA ramp that is bright yellow with these bumps on it.
Having children and, thus, a stroller, has given me some small level of insight into what it must be to try and navigate Paris in a wheelchair.
I can only think of one, maybe two, Metro stations that I can access with my youngest without carrying him. Many stores I would not be able to enter if I wasn't able to tip the wheels up. Curb cuts are routinely blocked by tourist scooters and anyway people often take up too much of the space on the sidewalk with their vehicles to get through. Add on to the fact that apartment stock must be 95% inaccessible if you're in a wheelchair.
It might be why I have only twice seen someone in a wheelchair in my seven years here. My wife and I have discussed before that, as much as we love it here, we'd move out right away if any of us had accessibility needs.
I got this too. Another thing I notice is how common it is to block pavements with whatever - vehicles, bins, general street furniture, whatever.
Normally when I suggest a driver doesn't park on a pavement I get a grumpy dismissal, though I once suggested it to a DHL driver who immediately got my point and moved. That was refreshing.
I once pushed my daughter’s pram down a path and hit the front of the next slab, and stopped dead. I’d not done her up and she shot out and was caught by the mesh of the sun shade. Lesson learned, belt them in.
Yes, I'm French too and when I was on holiday in Thailand, in a mall I noticed that there were people in wheelchairs shopping, my first thought: in France they wouldn't be able to be here because the accomodations are so bad..
It's not 100% true and it's improving but very, very slowly..
There's a technology issue too: my German in laws gave us a baby carriage that seemed to have been built for ascending the Eiger -- though it seemed (and was) huge it made navigating Paris quite easy (had to carry it up/down the metro steps) and even fit in the prehistoric elevator in our apartment building. Frankly, supposedly-snooty parisians are quite accommodating towards people with babies (once they can walk on their own though...)
But I never saw anything like that in the parisian baby shops.
I agree though about unattended obstacles on the trottoir -- it's as if people forget they need to use them themselves.
Paris is ancient and built on a bunch of hills, there are quite a few places where retrofitting the city to make it more accessible would be easier by rebuilding the whole thing than by making changes and that's not going to happen. Amsterdam has an easier time of it, not quite as old, though old enough that that isn't a big factor in the difference, the good bit is that it is mostly flat (other than the canal bridges, some of which can be pretty steep). Even so there are areas of the inner city that would be hard to navigate in a wheelchair.
Having lived in both Stockholm and Amsterdam, I can assure you that Stockholm is not at all flat like Amsterdam!
No idea about how easy either city is to get around with a wheelchair. Pushing a fully loaded double-stroller is no problem for an average-sized, ablebodied adult in any of them.
The RATP should be ashamed of themselves with the poor accessibility of the Paris metro. Barcelona's metro isn't that much older but is almost 100% accessible.
Wasn't Barcelona's metro mostly either new or newly rebuilt as of 1992? Spain may not have had an ADA equivalent at that point requiring great accessibility at that time, but that's still way different than all the century-old Paris metro lines.
A double-wide stroller really makes you aware of exactly how wide doors are, even ones with automatic openers.
The easy way to measure things - if you couldn't barely squeeze a Jeep into the space, you're going to have a hard time maneuvering a wheelchair or doublewide stroller.
> The lovely, welcoming residents of Chicago catcalled her using wheelchair-related phrases, one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself, and someone kicked her cast in a crowd.
Dear god. My wife broke her leg about a month ago, and I've been pushing her in a wheelchair when we go out. The spectrum of reactions so far has run from a quick smile to strangers coming up to ask what happened and wish her well. This is in the eastern Seattle suburbs. WTF, people?
As I've said in a different reply, the KYS guy was definitely on drugs - his demeanor was abnormal even before he opened his mouth. And every city will have characters of that type. But the other people were just average run-of-the-mill folks from afar who decided to make her day worse.
A few years ago I was discussing my health problems with a group of vague colleagues and someone told me that because I have Celiac disease and type 1 diabetes, I should kill myself. I don’t even remember who it was who told me that, but now and then I ponder what sort of insensitive attitude one would have to make that suggestion. To me it makes them sound rather inflexible and weak. It’s actually something people say commonly in relation to Celiac, that if they couldn’t eat generic pizza or burgers, they would rather simply die. I wager that if put to the test, these people would not choose to end their lives if they had to be careful and selective about food. It makes me wonder, is eating some junk food really the only reason they have to live?
Ironically, the disabled student I went to Chicago with, was Celiac as well. We actually had such a fun time finding Celiac-friendly places to eat, and I enjoyed trying new forms of familiar foods. The one advantage to going to a huge city is that there WERE Celiac-friendly places, and the smaller city I lived in at the time had nothing dedicatedly GF. I'm sorry there are people who said that to you. It's disheartening how people can't think outside the box and realize if human beings are creative enough to build the Coliseum and the Great Wall, we can figure out a way to make a gluten-free version bread. Might not be exactly the same as wheat, but it's decent, and we're innovating all the time. I wish you a flourishing life!
Thanks, and that’s cool! Always good to hang out with other people with actual Celiac. I often meet people who say they have it, but then are “oh, not officially diagnosed, I don’t get real sick, so I just, you know, pick off the croutons…” which is not my situation.
I’ve picked where to live partially because of the amounts of restaurants that are dedicated… Portland was fantastic in that regard, and Denver is not bad, though generally I just don’t eat out much these days.
You’re right that it is easier to adapt to than some people would think. Overall, some people are very strange about food. One, I’ve talked to people who don’t understand that white flour is made from wheat… they thought I only had to avoid whole wheat bread (ha!). Some people think gluten is some basic food chemistry ingredient, like vegetable starch, or maybe a food additive. Other people have acted like no other food besides wheat exists, kind of like saying you’re a vegan (“what do you eat then??!”).
I really have no problem with various GF foods or substitutes. It helps that my favorite foods were already things like tamales and nachos. GF pasta and pizza are great, and even beer. I like to think of it as “alternative grain” rather than define it by what it does not have.
Gluten free pizza does exist and is perfectly adequate to me. Certain styles of crust work great (gf ingredients are good for making something crispy, but not so much doughy and chewy). But yeah, specific pizza or other people’s pizza is out of bounds. It’s very inconvenient, but not total doom.
Yeah I used to do research on robotic wheelchairs, and as part of that I had to use them. Half of the “accessible” doors on campus where not powered, so I had to open them while sitting in the wheelchair. It was impossible to do without holding the door with my legs. And they were these big heavy doors.
Then there was the elevator, which could barely fit the wheelchair. You can go in at juuuuust the right angle to get on the lift, then you had to reverse out because there was no room to maneuver inside. I started actually getting claustrophobic.
I just couldn’t see how an actual wheelchair-bound person could get into these buildings on a daily basis.
Why do "accessible" doors always have to weigh so much more than regular doors? The powered ones are extremely difficult to open if the button decides to not work.
It's like trying to turn power steering in your car with the engine off. They're often not designed to "freewheel" so you're dragging the equipment with it.
Automatic sliding doors is the way to go, or if you have swing doors then they should be very large and well-hung.
The large also contributes to it - a normal door may be 3 feet wide, an accessible one can be 4 or even 5 feet wide.
I don't see an edit button for my comment anymore so I'm just going to add the following thought: remember that no one is immune to disability. One small slip-and-fall, one other careless driver on the road with you, one infection, etc is all it takes and suddenly you've got to struggle through life to make anything work. That is why this is important: it could be you or anyone you know, and happen at any time. Even if you feel invincible.
And it doesn't even have to be you; just someone you live with, or help, etc.
Having two kids in a stroller could put you almost there (if you have only two kids, get an inline stroller as it's much easier even though longer). Once you're at three and have to get a Zoe you're going to learn quite abit about ADA accessibility.
> One small slip-and-fall, one other careless driver on the road with you, one infection, etc is all it takes and suddenly you've got to struggle through life to make anything work.
Or just over time. Everyone gets there by their 80s or 90s, if they're lucky.
Yeah but people are sympathetic to old folks. People understand that sometimes old people can walk a short ways and need a wheelchair for a long distance. It's when they see young people in a wheelchair that they make the "faking it" comments because they see the young person walk a few feet outside the wheelchair, and don't apply the same principle. Or the objectification, who is going to catcall an 80 year old woman?
The UK has, in absolute terms, rather poor accessibility. Maybe better then many places, and the law is allegedly on the right side, but in practice you don't want to rely on anything in particular being accessible without scoping it out first.
I used a wheelchair for one day, and after nearly killing myself trying to get over kerb on a slope (from the hospital car park to the hospital), resolved to use under-armpit crutches instead. It's a rare thing that makes you feel privileged to be able to use those painful things!
Trains are a good recent example. Most trains are extremely inaccessible, with a foot or two of steps up into the carriage and a large, famously announced, gap. There are wheelchair ramps on platforms but you need to find staff to unlock and use them, or telephone ahead. They're about to remove thousands of ticket offices, so there may soon be no one there. Then when you get onto the station, if the lifts don't work, you'll be stuck on the platform. Assuming they have lifts. My local station doesn't have them at all. If I was in a wheelchair, I'd consider trains a complete no-go zone.
Most buses near me are able to "kneel" and have wheelchair ramps, thankfully.
Many commercial buildings in cities and suburbs are haphazardly shoved into old housing stock, so it's quite likely that at many places you will have several flights of stairs to deal with. If I'd been in a wheelchair, I'd have been unable to access the office at my first job, for example: four flights of stairs and a step at the door.
I sometimes wonder if we as a society will end up actually curing all disabilities before making public things universally accessible.
> The UK has, in absolute terms, rather poor accessibility.
It is certainly far better than here in Germany, as is the awareness. I was shocked visiting the UK just how many disabled people were on TV. Presenters of shows, in almost a half of adverts, etc. were in wheelchairs or had severe physical disability. Here in Germany disabled people are still considered to be undesirables and are hidden from public sight. For whatever reason, I do not even see disabled people in public here, whereas in the UK I see a lot of people moving around with mobility issues.
So while it is bad, do not get the impression that it is far better in the European countries that one might expect it to be better in. Certainly the awareness and tolerance is significantly better in the UK.
> I was shocked visiting the UK just how many disabled people were on TV. Presenters of shows, in almost a half of adverts, etc. were in wheelchairs or had severe physical disability.
In the US, I have NEVER seen such a thing. Except maybe in commercials for medicine. or retirement-related things.
a British late-night television humorous talk/sketch show that originally ran alongside the 2012 Summer Paralympics every night following the main coverage on Channel 4.
Anchored by Australian comedian Adam Hills and co-hosted by Josh Widdicombe and Alex Brooker, it gives a review of the week's events.
Featuring a mix of comedy, guests and Paralympics highlights, the show received strong reviews and regularly pulled in more than a million viewers each night of the Paralympic Games.
It has since become a weekly show giving a humorous alternative look back at the week's events. Outside of the UK, the show is broadcast in Hills' native Australia by the ABC
... described by main presenter Adam Hills as "Three guys with four legs talking about the week"
Yeah I was pretty shocked. The first one I pointed out my wife was like "yeah? so what?" but on the fourth TV show we saw hosted by someone in a wheelchair it was undeniable
You're hitting on some extremely key insights IMO. Insights grounded in abstract fundamental principles useful all the way from the "hardest" of sciences (physics and even maths, arguably, as a formal science) to the much "softer" (human psychology etc. - where it's far more difficult to be directly quantitative for a whole host of reasons).
First, when it comes to engineering, the absolute best test is running the actual system. The "acid test" of a rocket is the launch of that rocket. And, even for all of our "computer-aided engineering" progress over the decades, a wind tunnel is still often a key step and can provide "better" and more reliable info regarding some characteristics of, say, rocket body shape performance, than Pro/ENGINEER or etc. can*. So, the best test when it comes to ADA-related issues is to engineer yourself, to the degree possible, into the position of someone with a "disability". The best work in these areas has involved people tying their limbs down etc. - because, even if you consciously work to not use one arm, say, you'll still involuntarily use it in many ways. For example, it'll naturally come up slightly to help regain balance in some situations.
Second, and this is actually, I'd argue, simply a more complete perspective partly covered just above - understanding critically depends on the degree to which one can be in some "position". Often enough, our minds can be adequate. In particular, we can "understand" abstractions that can't necessarily even have obvious "instantiations" - e.g., mathematical abstractions come to mind. There may be "exemplars", but, you can't literally "show" me "the number 3"**. That written, there are many cases where we CAN 'experience' some form of direct 'instantiation' and, for reasons both experiential and even statistical / logical, such an instantiation is pretty well guaranteed to do a better job of producing understanding in our overgrown monkey minds than any amount of sitting around and daydreaming can.
So, really, when it comes to the "hard(er)" (e.g., engineering) and "soft(er)" (e.g., psychology - including empathy, say), there's no substitute for "the actual launch" (to circle back to the language of the rocket example, above).
* Though, there may be cases / "regimes" that are too difficult [at least practically] to test, even in a wind tunnel, and where, especially these days, CFD modeling can at least give some info and potentially be even entirely adequate)
** Can't wait to see the replies that just say "3", kek
Absence of empathy and other-experience - with some political orientations being actively hostile to it - may well be our single biggest cognitive handicap as a species.
Many humans seem to be locked inside their skulls in what is - ironically - a very handicapped and limited mobility way.
Theory of mind (empathy) is what makes humans human. It enabled our comparatively larger social groups to function at all. More important than opposable thumbs, vocal cords / language, walking upright, and fire.
(IMHO; believe but cannot prove; blah, blah, blah.)
> the UK and I don't know what their laws are with regards to accessibility
Europe does not give a fuuuuuck about accessibility. It’s something the US is genuinely miles ahead in. Not perfect of course. But Europe is an accessibility nightmare.
> The lovely, welcoming residents of Chicago catcalled her using wheelchair-related phrases, one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself, and someone kicked her cast in a crowd.
I live in a high-cost-of-living (HCOLA) metro area that wins national awards/rankings for walkability, but the narrow, obstructed, and often poorly-maintained sidewalks are very often impassable for people in wheelchairs.
Even new renovations and widenings, where they put in new, flat sidewalk that's sufficiently wide, the concrete figuratively isn't even dry before they install excessive signposts and random street furniture, again blocking the sidewalk.
Then there's the snow&ice, and the inadequate compliance with the rules about who has to shovel what, when, and how. And the property owners that eventually comply, are fighting the plowing from the streets onto the sidewalks.
There's even further problems with landscaping, and sometimes poison ivy/oak, growing out from a residential property, to effectively block the narrow square of sidewalk that remains. Not something you want brushing or scraping across your arm or face as you're trying to get through and can't dodge it.
Even in good weather I only rarely see people on the sidewalk in wheelchairs or on mobility scooters. That doesn't mean they don't live in town, but that the sidewalks don't let you get far. When I do see them (as a walker), they're usually operating their wheelchair or scooter in the street. A couple times, I've had to help one who was simply stuck in the street. I imagine they don't feel good about it, and feel abandoned.
I would've thought the bicyclists would have empathy and solidarity, at least against the cars, but there actually seems to be a higher rate of problematic behavior there, per rider/driver (e.g., ignoring traffic signals at crossings, barreling down narrow sidewalks). And now we're getting dedicated bike paths often at the cost of sidewalks.
One of the people in a wheelchair who got stuck in the street, after I helped push him out of it and to the nearby grocery store entrance, he held some device to his neck so that he could say thank you.
I imagine that it was implied that this situation sucks -- and I'm thinking: made worse, for no good reason, in an area that can afford to do better -- but he's soldiering through, and doing what he can.
> I would've thought the bicyclists would have empathy and solidarity, at least against the cars ... And now we're getting dedicated bike paths often at the cost of sidewalks.
I live in another HCOL area allegedly famed for its walking and biking facilities, and I hoped the same thing. Unfortunately, the process here seems to have turned into "each individual group vs car drivers", probably by design. For example, where I live has separate pedestrian, bicycle, and transit advisory boards to the city council. Never mind that projects should be built to benefit all three, not just one.
What's wound up happening is, because we "obviously cannot" take space from car drivers, the precious little room given over to modes that don't involve driving are forced to compete with each other. A new train station was built on the north end of town and the former sidewalk area on one side of the train station has been repurposed as a bicycle-only lane. The other side of the street is still a pedestrian sidewalk...but the street itself is a four-lane thoroughfare with very wide lanes and a median turn lane in spots. Of course, narrowing the car space on that road to make the corridor more comfortable for people on feet and on bikes was completely out of the question.
Also, the sidewalk didn't get fully rebuilt so I routinely see people in wheelchairs and pushing prams on the "bicycle-only" side because that's much smoother and even.
> Unfortunately, the process here seems to have turned into "each individual group vs car drivers ... where I live has separate pedestrian, bicycle, and transit advisory boards to the city council.
I suspect you're right; I've seen that, but didn't realize at the time that it could be a barrier.
I could imagine how it might be organized that way in good faith -- e.g., get the input from the people who really care about biking, the people who really care about walking, and the train/transportation buffs, and then have city officials process it all, holistically -- but that's a lot of heavy lifting, and also doesn't bring the advocates together to learn from each other and directly reconcile conflicts.
This kind of thing is why I never really bought into the "Complete streets" philosophy of city planning. So much of it seems like putting extra concrete in a little median for no reason so you can put shrubs in that will die during the next hard freeze, nevermind actually fostering usability. It's like even city planning just wants to do something that looks good for Instagram and leave everyone else to fend for themselves in terms of accessibility. Thanks for sharing this
> The lovely, welcoming residents of Chicago catcalled her using wheelchair-related phrases, one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself, and someone kicked her cast in a crowd.
This is so utterly farcical and disguisting that people will swear until they are black and blue that you are making this up.
Of course, some of the people making that argument would, with the shield of being a face in a crowd, without a shred of irony and self-awareness, behave in that exact same way.
The guy who told her to die was definitely on drugs and absolutely wired. Which there are bound to be some characters that way in a large city. The others I can't say, they were basically normal passers-by with no abnormal demeanor prior to being cruel.
I think this has nothing to do with being handicapped and everything to do with the fact that the cta allows citizens to be assaulted every day by allowing crazy people to squat in trains. Plenty of able-bodied people have horror stories.
It's incredibly ironic how you read the actual horror story, and respond by trying to turn this into blaming a pet issue. "It's the bad others, it's not 'normal'[1] people that are behaving poorly."
---
[1] Despite the OP explicitly stating that a significant part of the abuse did not come from 'Crazies squatting on trains.'
This happens to people without disabilities quite often too
> one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself
a homeless person? I don't think these anecdotes are really representative of anything specific to the disability, this has become commonplace in large cities.
The catcalling tied her disability into the phrasing of what the men said to her. That is why I mentioned it because it wasn't "normal" catcalling.
Even if the guy who yelled the KYS comment was a homeless person, clearly not every homeless person does that. I saw the guy walk past dozens of people on the train. When he saw my fellow student in the wheelchair, he stopped in his tracks and turned around to single her out and point when he said it. And these anecdotes do not outweigh the other issues with accessibility myself and others in this thread are noting, particularly how public transportation is lacking in accessibility. I think they serve to show broader negative attitudes toward the disabled that come to the surface.
The biggest disability I wish people would explore in their accessibility is issues with impulse control. So much of the web is designed to keep us hooked and I firmly believe that people that have issues with impulse control have a good handle on the obvious stuff moreso than people who don't because we are aware of the concept of choice more.
But what about when it's your credit account that is sabotaging you by design? Can't cancel the account unless you call a phone number and talk to somebody. But if you want to increase your credit limit, you can just click a button on the website and validate how much you make a year and boom, you have a $7000 limit when you get $900 a month.
So if you have a phone phobia and an issue with impulse control and you maybe stress spend, you now have a system totally against you by design.
It's great to explore the world as someone with visible disabilities. Also do so with neurodivergence.
Neurodiversity is a nicer sounding term, to mask the fact that underneath there are certain life affecting disabilities - often severely life affecting (if it was just harmless "natural neurodiversity", it wouldn't translate to reduced life expectancy. Not to mention millions of cases which need constant assistance to make it througn everyday life).
That it also targets "everyone's nature" doesn't mean it's not a bigger issue for people with certain neurodiversities affecting impulse control more. Same way a badly maintained road might also inconvenience a perfectly abled walker, but it is far more burdensome to a disabled person.
> if it was just harmless “natural neurodiversity”, it wouldn’t translate to reduced life expectancy.
Without disagreeing that the space of neurodivergence includes some life affecting disabilities, this generalization would also prove that race is not just harmless “natural diversity” but that being of a non-dominant race is also a “life affecting disability”. There are other explanations for correlation with reduced life expectancy than individual disability.
The mechanism doesn't have to be genetic/physiological. Social or behavioral disavantages caused or attenuated by the disability, still means the disability is not harmless.
> that being of a non-dominant race is also a “life affecting disability”.
One thing worth noticing is that a society tends to be designed for the convenience of the dominant ethnicity, people of a different culture are going to have a somewhat harder time.
There are lots of other issues, like losing supporting parents and family, lack of a support network of friends, lack of job opportunities and bad work careers, issues with pursuing healthcare and maintaining health and lack of access to healthcare, and so on.
These are all systemic issues though are they not? You could make all of these same arguments about gay people back in the 80s. Yes even the healthcare one. That doesn't mean that being gay isn't a natural variation in sexual orientation just as being autistic is a natural variation in brain structure.
>These are all systemic issues though are they not?
Only in the sense that the system doesn't provide extra accomondations. Not in the sense of active purposeful systemic opression (unlike say with blacks or gays).
>That doesn't mean that being gay isn't a natural variation in sexual orientation just as being autistic is a natural variation in brain structure.
I wouldn't say it's "just as". Being gay doesn'r bring any special impairement in sensory processing, social understanding, proprioception, speech, and so on. It only affects individuals because of morality / prejudice.
Whereas being autistic, especially of high support needs, means major sensitivity issues, issues with communication, problems coping with changes to routine, sometimes even inability to speak at all, meltdowns, and other issues, which impact the person, and need to be catered and attended, and even when perfectly catered, still cause issues (a school or office can accomondate for sensory issues, but we can't remove noise and light and other sensations from the world).
Saying it's a "natural variation" begs the question.
Well said. I’d go further and say the modern world is only comfortable for a particular subset of neurodivergent people
Namely ones who are content to be sedentary and work on explicitly abstract or highly derived concepts (mathematics, accounting, computing etc).
That’s a novel context even in near history, saying nothing of how far away our nearly unchanged pre-modern biology is from being comfortable in such a context
That's a good point regarding the particular subset being more expected/accepted/integrated.
If you're asd and want to work in math or programming or something similar, it's much smoother sailing than in you want to work in many other professions that aren't abstract/sedentary. Much worse if you'd like to work in a highly social profession like advertising or journalism (or even academia in today's climate where it's mostly about how good you're at self-promotion and networking).
I think you're probably right and I've misread your intention (autism lol). I agree with you that yes being autistic is a disability in the modern world due to a lack of accommodations.
My perception of the word neurodivergent is that firstly the vast majority of people who use the word use it with an often first-hand awareness of the disabling aspects of conditions like adhd or autism, but with a view towards self acceptance. The people using the word are often painfully aware of the downsides of their disability, but equally can see the upshots.
If we were in a world populated by 99% autistic people, neurotypical people would be called overly emotional, lower cognitive function, inability to think abstractly, inability to focus for long periods of time.
The point is you can acknowledge the need for accommodations while simultaneously acknowledging that it's not so much something inherently "wrong" with you, rather something wrong with you existing in a neurotypical world.
Yeah, understanding the disabling aspects shouldn't prevent self-acceptance. Even more so, shouldn't prevent social acceptance. Yet, physical disabilities get much more respect and acceptance.
These are all systemic issues though
are they not? You could make all of
these same arguments about gay people
back in the 80s.
I don't think so. Some but not all.
There's nothing inherent about being gay that prevents healthy mutual interpersonal relationships.
Many people on the autism spectrum have wonderful and fulfilling interpersonal relationships (I suspect I am one of these, in fact) but autism can negatively affect many of the building blocks (empathy, etc) of interpersonal relationships.
Yeah there's comorbidities, the only two of which are significant enough for the literature to note in this context is epilepsy and mental illness. Epilepsy does not account for most early death in level 1 ASD.
I don't actually but i've heard it said by a fair few experts in autism and such as being one of the big things they focus on as it is the main reason for early mortality.
Whether or not something is considered a disability is really matter of severity. I believe this applies to both physical and mental conditions.
If someone has reduced mobility in their arm due to some past injury that might not be considered a disability if its impact on their life is low. If that impairment is so severe that they have functionally lost use of that arm then it could easily be considered such.
I don’t consider my ADHD a disability, but it is an impairment with regards to impulse control. But someone else’s condition could be much more severe. Someone with bipolar disorder or manic depression can easily go through a bout of extreme suggestibility which can wreak absolute havoc on their life.
Categorising many mental disorders as harmless “neurodiversity” feels like a form of forced positivity imposed to alleviate the stigma of some disorders at the cost of dismissing the serious impairments inherent to others.
I’m am bipolar and neurodivergent doesn’t even scratch the surface. Hypomanic episodes are expensive because I have barely any impulse control. No amount of defense in depth can stop me from getting access to money. I have to use a different strategy:
I prepare for these episodes months in advance.
I needed a new car, so I set myself up to be fixated on a new Prius when the episode got bad. Nothing less than new would do because I wouldn’t have the presence of mind to vet a used one.
This put a hard limit on the financial damage. The highest trim Prius with all of the options is cheaper that many other cars I could have bought.
The end result was a car $10,000 over my maximum budget. It has far too many buttons, but it didn’t ruin me and I love the car. All in all, a successfully managed episode.
This is one of hundreds of problems I deal with and plan for.
Can you not get some trusted 3rd party (I assume a lawyer or accountant is the professional option) to limit you. Legally prevent you, for instance, from spending X (or borrowing money) on a car?
It’s a really bad idea. I’m perfectly willing and highly motivated to destroy relationships to get that money. Think heroin addict.
Instead, I save around 25% of every paycheck on top of retirement plans. This gives me a large buffer against episodes. It’s also split across multiple banks. I only use a single account and the others sit for months without a transaction. I don’t have checks or high limit cards for the others to delay access to their full amount. This is exactly the right amount of friction to keep them safe. It’s there, it’s mine, it can be available if I can wait a day. I can’t wait a day.
The results speak for themselves:
1. My credit score is over 800
2. My only loans are a house and car.
3. I’ve never failed to pay my credit card off in full each month.
As a side note, people see this and think I’m not that bad. They are wrong. Very wrong. I am simply extremely good at masking and compensating.
According to my psychiatrist, I’m a fairly severe case despite being easy to treat.
I understand the benefit of preventing future you from fucking up your life. I'm glad you found a solution with the right amount of friction.
And, I'm sorry to repeat myself, but isn't it possible that you go to a third party professional (e.g. a lawyer) whose relationship with you can melt down and it would be fine because the specific boundary would be legally enforced. Or would the resentment build and you would just buy a second car (or house!) as soon as you are free of their strictures. Sure, you destroy the relationship, but there are more lawyers for the next time.
I have no energy to spare to set it up, much less maintain that solution.
Each step of the process requires significant activation energy and unless I finish every step with no delays, it will not be restarted for months.
My brain is incredibly unreliable. There are very few things I can force myself to do. Unless a routine task is more important than work or my twice a month D&D game, it won’t be done on time, if it gets done at all.
That includes cooking, showering, housework, car maintenance, etc. Reminders for these things will be ignored. Todo lists will be ignored.
Pay to win video games really are ultimately targeting a small demographic as a tiny percentage of the audience results in the majority of their income.
The thing is they don’t know who specifically is vulnerable ahead of time, so they cast a wide net.
A lot of disabilities are a sliding scale with fuzzy grey areas. E.g. visual impairment goes all the way from "struggling to distinguish colors" and "vision is distorted enough that it's impossible to correct to 20-20" to "can't see hand in from of face"
Respectfully, you are not trauma informed if you feel this way. Plenty of kids in foster care who have been traumatized by bios have impulse control issues due to their mal-developed amygdala.
I'm skeptical but curious. Trauma caused mal-developed amygdala which causes impulse control issues? That sounds like one of those things that could be true or hokum. Like, would it show up on brain scans. And do they commonly do those on people? That said, I'm sure you have a direction you can point me - at least some search terms for Google.
Simply Google childhood trauma effects on the brain.
Yes, it shows up on brain scans.
Children in abusive households, be it physical, emotional, neglect, etc are in near total fight flight or flee mode constantly. This absolutely effects the amygdala.
Impulse control in general is something that would vastly improve nearly everyone's life to a massive degree. Don't instinctively reach for your phone. Don't add cookies to your shopping cart. Don't thoughtlessly lie to get out of an uncomfortable situation. Don't open hacker news.
I have spent the past couple months with my time off work working on this all day every day. It's made a massive improvement in my life, my habits, my routine, and working towards the things that are meaningful in my life.
Obviously I'm not faultless - I'm still here on a quick break.
I tend to have pretty good impulse control, aside from reading and wanting to eat certain foods. And being aware of that makes it frustrating when I see people engage in harmful or negative behaviours such as ordering from Doordash and paying twice as much as a steak dinner for a basic burger.
It seems so easy to me personally to refrain from doing so many of these things, and that makes it that much more apparent to me how many systems in modern life are so heavily exploitative of and designed to destroy impulse control. A lot of people had their willpower eroded over time and never noticed, and because of that they see nothing is wrong. It's not a great thing to witness actual fully grown adults being just as impulsive as their five year old children.
This also ties into a problem with usability in general. I don't need an impulse control issue to accidentally click ads or accidentally allow notifications on websites. But clicking the wrong thing could cause huge problems in anyone's life when things are made near impossible to use for anyone without 20/20 vision and years of experience. That's why it's so difficult for elderly people to use these things - even Google Chrome now is a nightmare without even going onto a website. But oops now you're subscribed or scammed.
Accessibility seems to be a blind spot for most in tech because we don’t think disability will happen to us, or if it does, it will be a long time from now.
What people often don’t consider is that even if that is true, the likelihood that you will care for someone with a disability — an aging parent, a spouse, or a child - increases the likelihood of lack of accessibility impacting your ability to enjoy your (shared) life.
My partner had a stroke. They can no longer walk steadily, and they likely never will. The number of times a certain thing we wanted to do went from idea to “guess not” is now incalculable. The logistics just become too onerous… and we’re lucky. We are high earners in a developed city.
> What people often don’t consider is that even if that is true, the likelihood that you will care for someone with a disability — an aging parent, a spouse, or a child - increases the likelihood of lack of accessibility impacting your ability to enjoy your (shared) life.
Yes. Many many many people don't realize that their future holds experience with disabilities.
And wait until they have to deal with the young tech people calling all the shots on how products look, change, evolve, etc. This idea that we should constantly be updating our UI, workflows, and shoving new features in front of users as a way to push people to expand (and spend more) of what they do has created such a huge problem in our family for our aging relatives. We've had to constantly shift which tech we use to find stuff that's going to be the most simple and easy to help through through while on the phone.
Heck, it’s already catching up with me in subtle ways. For instance, scroll bars constantly mess me up because they keep making such low contrast between the slider and the background (I don’t know the technical terms). So sometimes I can’t even see where I am on the page without scrolling to see the slider move. But lately when the slider is small enough, I can’t even see it when I’m moving the page! It’s practically invisible to me.
Like, why does it have to be light gray on slightly lighter gray? Whose 20 year old eyeballs decided on this?
> Like, why does it have to be light gray on slightly lighter gray? Whose 20 year old eyeballs decided on this?
"It looks fine on my 32" 8K screen in perfect light conditions 60 centimetres from my face – what are you complaining about?"
I really think lots of people should just use €400 low-end hardware, as that's representative of what people actually use, and all these kind of problems will stand out much sooner.
I'm surprised the low end has such a high entry point. IME a low end phone was usually 20-100. Above that and the specs are usually good enough for a few years of decent performance.
Oh right; I was talking about laptops/dev machines, not phones. I do most of my dev work on old/cheap laptops, which works quite well for me because any performance issues and whatnot stand out immediately.
I’m with you. I’ve spent a huge amount of my time working with older folks in particular, and the complaints about change have essentially shifted from $every_major_release_or_two to, we’ll, every release. My grandparents started shopping online during the pandemic and every week they had a new complaint about some change on the site. (I saw most of those changes and they certainly weren’t user-friendly!)
I’ve felt myself being able to relate more and more. I have a lot more work on my plate now that requires synthesizing previous experience and existing expertise, and that is challenging to do when entire teams at virtually every vendor seem to exist solely to implement changes for the sake of changes. Software moves fast these days and that can be fine, but it doesn’t seem like all that velocity is really genuine in the UX space.
My experience isn’t everyone’s experience of course, but requiring that _everyone_ learn new ways of interacting with essentially every product regularly, makes me feel like it’s just busy work to keep up with the proverbial software UX Joneses. (And everything looks the same now, so I’m not sure that’s the hottest take around…)
This lack of contrast can be annoying. It can sometimes be remedied on our end by playing with non-obvious graphics settings or monitor settings. But it's unfortunately not always as simple as adjusting the contrast.
You can also point out that this is an issue with photos and people will act like you're using trash hardware even if you aren't (had this issue with my nicest monitor, while the cheaper displays were fine). And they really should be also designing for non-premium displays, or displays being used in extremely bright, or extremely dark settings, etc.
>Like, why does it have to be light gray on slightly lighter gray? Whose 20 year old eyeballs decided on this?
Heh, we had a young UI/UX designer in his 20's who liked to put light gray on slightly lighter gray everywhere. When the project was taken over by another designer in her 40's she introduced more contrast.
The only solution, dear reader, if you make it this far, is that you — not metaphorically but literally, you, the abled reader - must advocate loudly for accessibility. Even when it’s annoying. Even when it’s more work on top of your already huge pile of work. You’re not advocating for an abstract other. You’re advocating for your future self.
>Accessibility seems to be a blind spot for most in tech because we don’t think disability will happen to us, or if it does, it will be a long time from now.
I strongly disagree, and I worry that people are now trained to think the worst of themselves.
Abledness is the Chrome of people: we code for the mainstream, the healthy, able people, and then if we have time we add support for the others. I don't think this is evil, or even wrong: it's a wise use of limited resources. There are far, far more error modes in a system (like the human body) than non-error modes. That's why people with disabilities really are more dependent on others. Like in the OP's case, they (quite reasonably) suggested that he get someone to help him on the phone. Why is that bad? I mean, consider the "disability" of not speaking the supported natural languages. Are all customer service teams supposed to speak all natural languages?
Instead of self-flagellating, or flagellating orgs and govs for not covering an infinite number of issues, I think you should instead volunteer to be a helper for someone with a disability. If more people did that, then this issue would be all but moot. Putting the burden on service providers to do the job your friends, family, or helpers should be doing for the disabled doesn't seem fair. (And I say this as someone with a strong bias against central authority).
Consider that everyone experiences being less capable at various points and to various degrees, even in an otherwise healthy life; injured, ill, tired, carrying too many groceries, bad breakup etc.
Designing for accessibility helps everyone. I attended a lecture on the topic and an example I found compelling was curb cuts - a person in a wheelchair makes the need obvious, but they are good to have for a variety of other reasons; pushing something with wheels, hurt ankle, being sick or absolutely ancient etc.
I agree that we don't need to self flagellate or see ourselves as deficient, design is hard after all.
Don't forget being pregnant or having to lug around a baby after it's born! Which is not an error mode. I'm well aware that "disability" is something we all go through; but my central point stands. It's not possible to accommodate all or even most types of disabilities and its reasonable to expect individual disabled people to BYOH (bring your own helper) in many cases, such as the OP's case of a speech disability wanting to do business over the phone. In other cases, like with ramps, BYOH won't help so its reasonable to expect/regulate those measures.
It is not a wise use of limited resources when we aim to build a society that serves all. A human without access to basic civilization is not an "error mode." They are a person that we need to help.
Human civilization doesn't have to be a world where those with means get to enjoy consumption while those without starve. We have the resources to do better by everyone, not only the abled.
The error modes to which I refer are not people, but bodily injury and disease. Your words are the empty product of a mind addicted to the sensation of outrage.
Judgemental idealists have caused more damage to the world in the name of compassion and love than any other class of people. May you continue to use your rhetoric proudly, so that it may continue to serve as a warning to others.
> Judgemental idealists have caused more damage to the world in the name of compassion and love than any other class of people.
Are you counting eugenicists as 'judgmental idealists'?
What about death penalty supporters/tough justice advocates?
Zero-tolerance school administrators?
Abstinence-only-sex-ed proclaimers?
Think-of-the-children law pushers that get teens stuck on sex-offender lists?
All-human-life-is-sacred religious groups that have made it so that our pets can die in peace, dignity, and without suffering but elderly humans have to suffer in agony for years and then get tortured to death by 'life saving efforts' at the very end?
Those judgmental idealists?
Certainly not the ones who simply say that disabled people should be able to access public spaces.
There has to be room in the conversation between extremes. He's saying "everything" and accusing me of saying "nothing" when I'm saying "everything is impossible; something is possible."
Yeah this blows my mind when working with other tech people. None of y'all ever broke a hand? Smashed a fingernail in a door or burned your thumb cooking? Noticed how hard it us to use the computer or shit even open a rounded doorknob sometimes?
Being fully able-bodied is barely even the baseline state, even for "able bodied" people. Temporary changes to that state have been common in my life and the lives of the people I am closest too, and it's always obvious how poorly the world is suited to those deviations. And also clear how small and cheap many of the changes would be to improve it.
If all goes well, you will be disabled for the final years of your life, we all will, and more than a small handful of years too. It is life why don't we plan for it, build our world for it?
> Accessibility seems to be a blind spot for most in tech because we don’t think disability will happen to us, or if it does, it will be a long time from now.
This goes for everything. People don't realize that the golden rule is in their own self-interest and they're often harming themselves when they work against things like welfare and other protections.
Even just helping your parents with tech as they age makes you realize just how insane software alone has become; everything in the damn UI changes day-to-day and it's all completely incomprehensible to explain.
Drives me up the absolute wall; next time their phone dies I'm going to recommend they get a Light Phone: https://www.thelightphone.com
>Accessibility seems to be a blind spot for most in tech because we don’t think disability will happen to us
Which is particularly silly because 1/2 of people end up with presbyopia (far-sighted). My older eyes are often frustrated with tech choices made by web/app designers half my age.
I used to date a person who needed to use a wheelchair from time to time. Not only is the world inaccessible, but there are so many grandfathering rules that most places don’t have to change.
Something this article misses is that many people act totally inappropriately to people using various aids. They used to have people question why they needed a chair. They had people call them wheels in public.
> there are so many grandfathering rules that most places don’t have to change.
Indeed. It's especially hard in a poor areas. I used to live with a disabled person and things like cracks in the sidewalk, or bumps from roots, or potholes, look like nothing to people who can walk. To someone in a wheelchair they can prevent them from going through. They city was too poor and run down to get to it. Older parts of town, are also almost impossible to access.
> They used to have people question why they needed a chair. They had people call them wheels in public.
I noticed this is at the airport. People in a wheelchair often get priority sitting. But to request a wheelchair doesn't require any proof. So, people learned to take advantage of it. May even get an assistant to push them around the airport. And then, as soon as the flight lands, people are miraculously "healed" and don't need a wheelchair any longer.
They think it's a harmless thing: "it's allowed anyway", "I paid a lot of money for this ticket", "not breaking any rules", etc but what they are doing is they are creating animosity and suspicion in the general public who now feel anyone in a wheelchair in the airport is "cheating" to get ahead of the line and get a better spot for their carry-on luggage.
> as soon as the flight lands, people are miraculously "healed" and don't need a wheelchair any longer
The comment you're replying to talks about someone needing a wheelchair from time to time. Many people who use wheelchairs do not need them all the time.
A trivial example would be someone who can walk from the airport to a car when unburdened, but cannot stand in line for an hour while carrying luggage. The available assistance isn't necessarily individually tailored, so "I need to check a bag without extra charge and skip the security and boarding lines" is not an option, but a wheelchair is.
I was mainly replying to them saying that there is animosity towards disabled people ("people question why they needed a chair. They had people call them wheels in public..."). I haven't heard or seen it verbalized explicitly, with that one exception of airports, where people publicly mumble and mention it. I don't like to see it and I don't support that but that's what people do.
> A trivial example would be someone who can walk from the airport to a car when unburdened, but cannot stand in line for an hour while carrying luggage.
Of course. And not all disabilities are visible, either. It's better to have a few cheaters to abuse the system and provide more accommodation to people who need it than go the other way. But the way people are, even if they witness a small minority cheating, they'll start forming an opinion. As a rule, especially as far as I have seen, traveling and living with disabled people needing a wheelchair, most people are willing to help and are accommodating.
I broke my toe just before flying from Portugal to London. I had crutches and was given a wheelchair in the airport. I technically could have walked, it just would have been extremely painful. When the staff at Luton told me that it'd be an hour before the passenger lift was ready, I decided "fuck it" and that I would walk down the stairs instead. One of the other passengers accused me of faking the whole thing, but I can assure you that I was not.
A lot of people cheat, but you also need to keep in mind most disabilities are not binary, but have degrees.
Many people may be able to get up the wheelchair and walk a little, but may not be able to walk a mile in the airport... Or may not be able to navigate the complicated airport environment.
> A lot of people cheat, but you also need to keep in mind most disabilities are not binary, but have degrees.
Exactly. And not all disabilities are visible either.
I was just replying to someone saying that there is animosity towards disabled people ("people question why they needed a chair. They had people call them wheels in public..."). I haven't heard or seen it verbalized explicitly, with that one exception of airports, where people publicly mumble and mention it. I don't like to see it and I don't support that but that's what people do.
I preboard my dad who can’t walk, I transfer him into his seat ahead of the whole plane seating passengers but he is the last to leave the plane as a trade off when they bring his wheelchair. Thankfully have not witnessed anyone pretending they can’t walk and leave first. They all have issues with their gait in my experiences in the US. Sure there might be some bad actors but it’s really sad if they are faking it having to be seen by the actually disabled folks who can probably tell.
My dad can’t even use the restroom on the flight cause he can’t stand, it’s truly hell for wheelchair bound folks. They deserve all the help and accommodations they can get to travel and live a normal, rich and fulfilling life like the rest of us able bodied folks.
I know someone who did what you describe, but in her case it was legitimate. She could walk, though slowly, but had great difficulty with ramps and stairs, and would be in pain for a couple days after standing for a long time, so genuinely needs help to get through airports.
Yes, me too. You should not assume someone who seems able to stand and walk unaided is not in need of assistance for longer periods. It can be a matter of scale, and there can be sudden tipping points.
The person I know is perfectly able to stand for a short while, or walk around a shop or food court for a couple of minutes carrying items with really no obvious problems. But navigating an airport all the way through, quickly making it to a connecting flight on the other side of a large terminal, or standing for minutes in a check-in line is basically impossible without days of pain afterwards.
When I was a teenager my grandmother lived with us for a few years because she was unable to care for herself. Once we went to a museum as a family and my parents sent me and my brother to get a wheelchair for my grandma. When we found one I got in and had my brother push me. As a joke he started running and let go and I flew off the curb and crashed into the parking lot.
A lot of people rushed over to help and were quite upset when I hopped up and ran off with the wheelchair.
When I broke my toe, myself and the other people in airport wheelchairs started the boarding process first, but by the time the passenger lift had gotten us all onto the plane, everyone else was on board and in their seats. Depends on the airport but obviously in this case it's better for everyone if the wheelchair users get started first, as they are on the critical path for the plane departing.
It would vary tremendously depending on the boarding type and sequence and seat location; obviously a jet bridge boarding is different from a stairway/tarmac boarding.
The thing I've noticed in the UK with a buggy is the insane lack of dropped kerbs. Why? Does it really cost a lot more to have a slightly different shaped kerb?
They also seem to have a terrible habit of putting them in the inconvenient places that they want you to walk, not where people actually walk. E.g. set back 10m from a t-junction. So even if there are dropped kerbs it's still significantly more inconvenient if you actually have to use them.
Dropped kerbs are a moderately expense more, especially in time.
And they're rarely retrofitted; there's one missing on a path we take and I always forget about it, and even just a stroller is a pain to get over. I don't see how a wheelchair could; they'd have to go down the (relatively not busy) street to the nearest driveway.
As bad as it seems, without grandfathering, very few of such accessibility laws would ever make it.
Consider that accessibility is a quality of life concern, when governments have to consider the cost of everything, even the "reasonable" cost of averting death.
> Terence: If I want to cancel my account (without using the phone) what can I do?
> John: the only option though is by calling .
Comcast told me this exact same thing but I just told them that section 9(a) of their Xfinity Residential Services Agreement allows for termination by e-mail and that I was providing the agreed notice and will withhold payments effective immediately. They shut up after that.
I'm not deaf but I've claimed to be on multiple occasions to avoid dealing with a customer service phone call. They want me on the phone? Pay me for my lost hours.
It's kinda disappointing that handling someone being unable to call hadn't occurred to these companies previously. But what's pretty terrible is the attitude of customer service being "you just have to call, sorry".
This all reminds me of the advice is Patrick McKenzie's blog post "Identity, Credit Reports and You." Specifically: you never want to deal with customer service, they are the Department of Fobbing People Off. You want to be communicating in writing with a lawyer, since lawyers have the power to tell other people in the business "you're creating liability, make this problem go away".
In this case I think you don't have the same structure as in the credit report case (an act that says they must investigate and respond within X days), so for credibility you probably do need a lawyer writing a letter for you. But I strongly suspect that something like the following will generate a response:
"Dear Sir/Madam,
I represent [user]. My client is a customer of your business but is unable to access your services due to [disability]. He has communicated with your customer services (see attached screenshots) and requested they provide a means for him to access these services. Unfortunately they have declined to do so. [Relevant legislation] requires reasonable adjustments to be made in serving disabled customers, and my client and I believe that [adjustment] could easily be made by your business to allow customers with [disability] to access these services. Please advise us within [x days] what adjustments you plan to make to allow my client to access these services.
In my experience finding lawyers to represent you for these injustices is very hard. Disabled people also tend to be poorer and lawyers just aren't interested. Medical abuse of the chronically ill is a big area which lawyers refuse to deal with and it's rife with potential lawsuits. It's not this easy, everyone and I mean everyone treats you like your disposable.
Very true. This is one of those situations where having a friend who is a lawyer, and willing to write such a letter, is very helpful. It would not be legal to mis-represent yourself as a lawyer. But it's fine to have a lawyer write such a letter, which make the recipient think that you might sue, while having no intention of doing so. This is, of course, completely unfair because the poor, who are more likely to be disabled, are also less likely to have a friend who is a lawyer.
Please don't taint essential, but missing, legal support of marginalised people with the tarry brush of patent trolls. Doubly-so when you only "believe" the story to be true.
ADA sham lawsuits have been a staple of corrupt lawyers since it’s inception. The civil enforcement mechanism is the biggest failure of the ADA. The taint has long been there.
I agree with all of this, the only part I want to push back on is:
"But what's pretty terrible is the attitude of customer service being "you just have to call, sorry"."
I'm pretty confident in saying it's not the CSR who's deciding this - they probably have either limited access or an explicit directive from above that they cannot do x, y, z in email/chat/whatever. In all likelihood they're an underpaid employee of some outsourced subcontractor to the actual company that decides that.
I think we need regulations on this, the same way we need "if you can sign up from a website, you can cancel from a website" laws. If you offer x via a phone call, you can offer x via text chat too.
I feel like things have gotten way worse in the last 4 years. Everyone has eliminated the human assistance so if your problem cannot be solved by the standard flow you are out of luck. Many places won’t pick up the phone, there is no way to escalate to a human. If you are disabled you are just a cost center and nobody will bother with you at all.
The pettiest example of this is red-green colorblindness (the overwhelmingly most common kind of colorblindness).
Many interfaces, such as git's, use red and green despite the common (?) knowledge that red and blue are the preferred combination for accessibility.
I think most people prefer red and green, though.
So there's incompatible concerns to cater to: do you demoralize most people by switching to blue or do you demoralize the colorblind minority by keeping green? :D
(In the limit, you're going to inevitably hit some bedrock of elitism beyond which it's irrational to dig. Your interface will probably not be usable by dogs, for example.)
Coming at this from a gamedev perspective - imo, if you can, the best solution is to never use colour alone to convey information. For example, you can have a blue and a red thing, but the blue one also has spots. Or it's a dark blue, and the red is light. Or the blue thing is a diamond and red thing is a circle, etc etc. This has the added benefit that it helps everyone, not just the colourblind.
>So there's incompatible concerns to cater to: do you demoralize most people by switching to blue or do you demoralize the colorblind minority by keeping green? :D
I'm not sure what to say here to be honest because you're comparing these two things as equal with "demoralized" being the only downside somehow so lets see what the implications to the people are of such a system, using your own example:
- A disabled person not being able to functionally use a system that is often required for their work
- A non-disabled person being able to functionally use a system that is often required for their work, but the text is a less preferable color
In the first case it will take someone with an involuntary disability longer, with more difficulty, to perform the same task (comprehension) as someone without the involuntary disability
I'm not sure how you could possibly equivocate these - and then further double down on lack of empathy by suggesting that making a website easier to use for risks a slippery slope of irrational accessibility requirements
I assume you mean github, rather than git? It's not reliant on the colors. The "Code" and "New Pull Request" buttons are green, but they also have text on them. Various icons also have assistive text.
There are quite a few variations of color blindness, so ultimately you want color to just be a hint. Handling the most common case is a partial fix.
I think they’re talking about the coloring in `git diff`, `git log --patch`, etc, which defaults to red/green for removed/added lines, respectively. (This can be changed with the `color.diff.*` config options, as seen in git-config(1).) This UI also provides an alternative indication, in the form of -/+ indicators in the left column, but the coloring does help a lot—presuming that you can see it.
It's true, there's equal objective "support" for normative ethics claims across the board. So you can prove Nazi fascism is "correct" using the same process that you would to prove altruistic liberalism.
Given that existential nihilism concludes with "it's up to you to choose what is right" my question to you is:
Why would you actively choose a position that would be considered anti-social instead of a position that would be considered pro-social if they have the same objective grounding?
> Why would you actively choose a position that would be considered anti-social instead of a position that would be considered pro-social if they have the same objective grounding?
This simplifies away some crucial details about the actual situation.
For example, I have limited time and opportunities. Spending 200 hours making a piece of software more handicap-friendly may mean 200 hours less of being a good parent to my kids. Or working at a homeless shelter.
We can probably agree that all 3 activities are "pro social" in some manner. But I can't tackle all of them. Part of growing up is accepting that you can't do everything.
I'm open to changing my priorities, but not without good justification.
This is simply saying that you do not have, and do not desire to acquire, the emotional capacity to be satisfied with the social trade offs of voluntary subordination of a portion of your own personal desires to benefit the desires of others who may also want to commune with you.
So if your proof claim is simply “I don’t want to” then it’s entirely ignoring the question with the idea that it’s not your choice anyway - you’re just born that way - which is not a relativistic statement.
In fact it’s a biological determinism argument and if you would like to go down that hole I think it would yield that your claimed antisocial “preference” is extremely rare historically - to the extent where as an outlier it’s questionable if it is an evolutionary fitness trait or if it’s ultimately supporting a genetic brick wall.
> Why would you actively choose a position that would be considered anti-social[…]
Isn’t anti-social a very loose and subjective term? Using your own example, wouldn’t it be considered anti-social in Nazi Germany to oppose mainstream culture like military parades, Hitler-Jugend etc?
>Why would you actively choose a position that would be considered anti-social instead of a position that would be considered pro-social if they have the same objective grounding?
Because one positions imposes significant costs and restrictions, leaving your life significantly worse off.
Paying taxes to support the welfare of others is pro-social, but it means that I am laboring twice as much, instead of relaxing with my friends an family. It means that I am paying for the children of others using resources I would rather devote to my children. Why should I sacrifice my wellbeing for someone I don't know, and might not even like if I met them.
Many behaviors that fall under the Pro-social labor hurt the individual and benefit others.
If they are actually beneficial to the individual, they wouldn't need to be compulsory or the pro-social rhetoric.
> Until the financial incentives of investors, employees and customers align this will never be a priority
In some parts of the world, disabled people can sue businesses over accessibility issues. People complain about the “disability mafia” shaking down businesses, but I think it might be the only way to align incentives to actually get these problems reliably addressed.
> People complain about the “disability mafia” shaking down businesses, but I think it might be the only way to align incentives to actually get these problems reliably addressed.
But IMO the other side of this is also tricky, because you don't want companies to respond by removing services for everyone.
There was an article on here the other day about how a town had a non-ADA-compliant crosswalk. Fearing a lawsuit, the town addressed the issue... by removing the crosswalk. (You could still cross the street—with a wheelchair, even—but you had to walk much further to do so.)
I also remember the article about the California university—was it Berkley?—where some professors posted their lectures freely online for members of the public. Of course, they didn't have the resources to go through and add subtitles—these lectures were for non-students, they didn't generate any revenue—and the university got sued. Obviously, they responded by pulling down the lectures.
Situations like these just make everything worse for everyone. How do we write regulations which avoid that?
You make it illegal for people to profit off of the regulation? Make it so the only "money" they get is in the form of paying doctors, psychiatrists and counselors. Raise the bar to prove that monetary compensation is needed. Also, stop using this mechanism to "punish" companies. Punish them by forcing them to comply, not by taking money from them and giving it to victims. That part is the one that creates a perverse incentive for people to take advantage.
Edit. Make it so it's legal to sue people that profit (money) off of this, at least the lawyers involved or ones that advertise these kinds of services.
So many ways to solve it. Too bad we as a society are stuck in a rut and can't undo bad choices or change direction easily. If you go down this path, be prepared for the onslaught of "you hate the disabled" from the entrenched interests. Some of which will be plain old disability advocacy groups that generally do good but also got stuck in this path and are captured by profit-seekers.
> it is your duty to make sure that no one feels demoralised or rejected because of the systems you build
What a beautiful quip.
What if I'm building driving theory testing software? That's a very on the nose example. What about ticketing systems? Reminder app? TODO app? Wishlist functionality?
Thank you for asking this, it helped tease out and crystalize some thoughts I’ve had about the difference in tenor between computer programming and software engineering. I hope these off-the-cuff answers help explain why this doesn’t feel quippy to me; they are specific in scope but those scopes are common.
—
Write clear error messages that provide a way forward. Accept your system will have bugs, and ensure the system state is communicated to the user so they know if their TODO/Test/Reminder/Wish was stored/updated/deleted. Do your utmost to prevent data loss - even when that data hasn’t been formally introduced to your data storage of choice.
Developers should not worry about their sprints being blown because they have to use your APIs. Teams trying to pass off tasks or getting special commendations for dealing with your software should be embarrassing. If developers are wrapping your API in their API, are they doing it because they need the abstraction or because abstracting it once and tracking changes is easier than using it?
Ensure there are logs in place to assist debugging and documentation catered towards end-users, operations, support, and developers. Track relevant metrics to allow for automated fixes and manual intervention so users aren’t the ones having to remind you your software is broken.
Every piece of software has a user - a person, an organization, other code - and software that doesn’t make the user’s life easier increases the chance they’ll stop using it.
I would argue it's actually an educational problem, not an incentive problem. Most people (made up stat) would struggle to name/describe any disabilities beyond immobility, blindness and maybe handful of others. Then add in the lack of tools and aids (in the form of popular references, guides and QA forums) available and you have a problem.
I don’t disagree with you, however we are talking about real people in society, not a theoretical philosophical system. I’m unaware of any wide scale explicitly adopted philosophy wherein there is zero responsibility from individuals to care for others or society.
I am curious though what you would describe as your personal philosophy, or if you’re not talking about yourself then what ethics framework are you referring to living inside that does not have a normative component.
Maybe a better way to ask it is: what relativistic philosophy is dominant enough or otherwise adopted to such an extent that people are able to functionally live underneath it without any type of a-priori responsibility to others.
What I DO see however are people who reject responsibility for others, yet accept or even demand support from others - even if it’s tacit - and then hold a position like you describe.
So I remain suspect of anyone promoting some extreme version of individualism, as it conflicts with not only biology, but the entire history of societies and philosophies.
That is said as if engineers have exactly zero influence. We are hired to build stuff (and often wearing many hats: UX, design, architecture, market research etc.). I bet if someone said "you have to use Win11 and not allowed a mac" there would be a revolution at many companies :-)
> it is your duty to make sure that no one feels demoralised or rejected because of the systems you build.
This is the most dangerous line of thinking and one of the many reasons people are tiring of woke-ism. Most reasonable people agree accommodations for the disabled are both smart from a business perspective, and kind to patrons in general. To reframe having objections to this as a "demoralization" and "rejection" that needs "special training" to understand seems more like the schizophrenic sociologists are off their meds again.
Importantly, I have no duty to anyone except my family. I am not obligated by anyone to do anything for you. This is not to be interpreted as me not having empathy for the disabled. But it is not my obligation to do anything about it. I have worked specifically in this industry helping the visually impaired navigate websites better. However, I cannot afford to do such a design for my own personal sites. These types of prescriptive ultimatums are exhausting and when they're codified into law they have an unintended chilling effect.
> Most reasonable people agree accommodations for the disabled are both smart from a business perspective, and kind to patrons in general.
If that were true, then given the evidence presented in the post and in this thread, the corollary would be that a significant amount of large businesses are run by unreasonable people.
"This is discrimination. I don't know sign language and I don't have text relay. I can't use my voice."
This his reply to instructions telling him he can ask for sign language or use text relay if he cannot use his voice. I hardly see this as discrimination. This is in no way different from a perfectly able person saying it's discrimination to expect me to read and write! Sign language is the language of the voiceless.
Life isn't perfect. Of course we should do as much as we can to make life for the disabled easier. But seriously people feel so entitled and expect so much from everyone. People need to accept that not everyone can accommodate 100% of needs. Governments should, but not private entities.
No need to use sign language. Had the "can't speak" experience after a dentist visit. Took out a piece of paper and wrote down what I wanted to say and showed that instead. These days people would probably use their phone and type it out.
I'd wait until my sore throat is gone. And if I have a disability for longer I'd have to learn to navigate the world my friend. Just like me and you have had to learn to read and write. Funny enough, we also had to learn to use a phone. Oh how dare companies expect us to know use a phone and dial a few digits!
It's actually not uncommon for deaf kids to be forbidden or discouraged, depending on era and local pedagogy, from learning and using sign language. And like any language, it's harder to learn later in life. ASL isn't just English with handwaving. It's a whole other language. Same with all sign languages.
The writer is fooling you all. Virgin literally provided solutions to his issue.
A text relay service is the answer if you must speak on the phone.
I remember using AT&T text relay as far back as early 2000s. Any person that can't speak would be totally familiar with this solution.
I used to work with upper limb amputees. Learned a lot there.
There's a standardized testing kit for prostheses and injuries that's surprisingly low tech and amazingly useful: The Southampton Hand Assessment Procedure (SHAP)
It's very basic. Things like pouring a glass of milk, opening a deadbolt, tying a shoe, picking up a quarter, buttoning a shirt, etc. Being able to pass any of these quite simple tests is very forgiving, you've got unlimited time to do it.
But the very large majority of prostheses fail outright.
I never really though of how hard it was to just hold a cup of coffee before that, nor to build a prosthetic that could close a jar of jam.
Really opened my eyes to the world around me. Disability tech is human tech, full stop. What helps a wheelchair bound person helps a pregnant one, and a veteran, and an old one too. We grow stronger by making things possible for all of us.
When the guy in the OP explained his experience, all I could think was, "That's equality. An overwhelmingly shit customer service experience to all, disabled or not."
I'm currently stuck with someone else's email account in my authorized users, a phone number as my contact number that I can't update (known VM issue atm apparently), and an strong desire to send their CEO recordings of me screaming.
Great article and a good reminder to focus on accessibility.
There's good news though. Although being disabled is difficult, it is less difficult now than at any other period in history. The amount of awareness, accommodation, accessibility focus, etc is maximum right now and it's only going to continue. It's important to keep this progress in mind as we work to further improve things.
Another point is that people living with disabilities have years or decades of expertise, something that someone "cosplaying" (to use the author's word) has no access to. A cosplayer wouldn't know which streets are easiest with a wheel chair or which companies have the most accessible websites. An actual disabled person has this sort of knowledge and would navigate it far better than a "tourist"
There's lot of work to be done but it's important to acknowledge what's better than it may seem at first.
> Go a couple of weeks without using the phone. Which services are closed off to you?
I think I've called a service provider of any kind once in the last five years. It didn't actually get me anything that text comms would not have.
> Tell people you need an accessible venue for your meetings. How do they respond?
The last time I spoke at a venue was like 8 years ago. The author doing it multiple times in a random week seems like quite an outlier.
> Switch on subtitles and mute your favourite shows. Do they even have subtitles? What do you miss?
I always have subtitles on in any TV show, streaming show, YouTube, etc. I can't even think of the last time it wasn't an option. (The subtitles for the news have a 15 second delay due to it being a real-time broadcast, which is a bit distracting but acceptable.)
I've had to use the phone quite a bit in the last year. Airlines and travel companies are especially bad about only supporting happy-path functionality online and then providing an excruciatingly bad phone experience if something gets off-track.
The pharmacy that I use has a very busy and probably very expensive web site, but it has bugs, and any time you get off the happy path, you have to call. For example, when I get a prescription delivered for my brother-in-law (who has disabilities and lives with us) the pharmacy only gives the name on the credit card to the delivery driver (this is a known bug, for over a year) so the driver shows up and asks for the wrong name. Usually the pharmacist figures this out and gives them the right prescription, but if they don't, the prescription goes into a black hole. It can't be picked up at the pharmacy, it can't be scheduled for delivery again, nothing can happen until I call and get it fixed.
Helping my mother set up online access to her pension, the only way they will grant her access is if they call her at a certain number and she answers the phone.
I can't think of any other examples off the top of my head, but I despise talking on the phone and will go to great lengths to avoid it, and yet I have to do it maddeningly often.
I actually found Twitter DM, of all things to be the most effective way to get customer service from United Airlines. I don't know if this is still the case given Twitter's recent decline.
Anecdotal, but I have also found Twitter DM to be a highly successful communication channel when you need support. I’m assuming that a) it’s the fear of being publicly shamed and b) it’s a channel that’s not made completely unusable through some kind of helpdesk software.
Hi, I wrote the article 4 years ago. So, slightly within your 5 years timeframe.
There are still plenty of services in the UK which are only available by voice.
I may be "an outlier" but it was my lived reality. At the time I was travelling to and speaking at multiple events per week. Why should I be able to do that when others are prevented?
In the last 4 years the situation with subtitles has improved slightly. But there are still plenty of shows on Netflix and Apple+ with no subtitles or - perhaps worse - shitty subtitles.
I'm really pleased that you haven't experienced any of these barriers. Can I please encourage you to find something that you think might be a challenge and spend a few weeks building up your empathy?
> I think I've called a service provider of any kind once in the last five years. It didn't actually get me anything that text comms would not have.
It sounds like what you are implying is that because you haven't experienced it in a 5 year period, someone who lives their entire life like this must not experience this as well? Even though you are presented with data saying otherwise?
The challenge the author set was to go without a phone for a "couple of weeks", not "for your entire life". For that to be a useful challenge and build empathy as is the goal, the people taking the challenge need to be put into a position where they must make a phone call at least once in those two weeks. Otherwise it does nothing at all.
The author appears to be upgrading their internet connection, moving, and arranging financing for a house in their totally normal week. For them, it is a useful challenge. But for my phone use patterns it is utterly useless. I'd need to run the experiment for a decade.
But thanks a lot for telling me that my lived experience is invalid and disproven by "data".
This might be related to Apple, normally Apple is very good for accessibility, but even the BBC has challenges with subtitles on AppleTV, same with the Dutch NPO TV:
“Why are there no subtitles on BBC iPlayer via Apple TV?
There are technical challenges associated with delivering subtitles to Apple TV which will require a significantly different solution to that which we use on all other platforms. We are working towards it but don't currently have timelines associated with this support.”
Makes sense, but it's clear that we still don't live in a world of fully ubiquitous subtitle accessibility, which can cause trouble both for the hard of hearing and for those with English as a second language.
Likewise, subtitles usually are not available at theatres, public screenings, and other venues.
I did not use the word "invalid", or anything like that. You've made that up.
The author seems to think that this list is compelling, and that people will find it incredibly hard to do these challenges. But at least half the list is describing stuff that I know with certainty would be no trouble because it is either stuff I already do all the time, or has boundary conditions that have a <<1% chance of triggering. That's a lot more than "could argue".
So the list seems pretty bad, and I would suggest would not actually have the effect the author suggests of building empathy.
Maybe a minority opinion here, but I find the idea of trying to see what it's like to live with a disability first hand
without taking a minimum effort to understand the nature of the disability or how people with that disability typically deal with it is at best an exercise of very limited worth and and worst moderately offensive.
The author quotes a statistic that 10% of the UK have speech difficulties. Does he believe that 1 out of 10 Brits is completely unable to hold a phone conversation? If not, then why is this the way he chooses to explore the disability? Assuming that he specifically wants to explore aphasia/dysarthria, did he ask an aphasic or dysarthric person how they approach having to make a phone call? If his goal is to truly understand the experience of living with their disability, how can he do that without approaching things the same way they do? Did he do the research to see that aphasia and dysarthria are disabilities that rarely occur in isolation? Because I don't see any discussion of that, and again, how can you understand the experience of an aphasic or dysarthric person without understanding the other disabilities that the average aphasic person also deals with?
I’m of the same opinion. The author has no freaking clue. I broke my ankle in high school and I got zero support. All of the classes were on the third floor and the cafeteria was in the basement.
1. There was no elevator in the building. I had to use crutches to get up the stairs while carrying all of my textbooks.
2. I was required to attend gym class on the second floor of another building (no elevator) and change clothes in a room with no chairs or benches. Then I would sit in a chair while everyone did the assigned activities.
3. I was required to eat lunch in the cafeteria. I wasn’t given extra time. Occasionally there wouldn’t be enough food and I would get a single peanut butter sandwich while others had gone through the line twice before I got there.
4. I was late to every class and everyone watched me while the teacher waited for me to get to an assigned seat down a narrow isle.
5. I wasn’t given extra time to get to the bus after school. So I had to wait in detention for my mom to drive from work if I missed the bus.
6. Oh, I forgot, the second to last class of my day was on a different floor. So I had to go down and back up the stairs.
I forgot how many weeks this went on until I had a walking cast. The whole thing lasted 8 weeks.
The best part, I broke my ankle in gym class because I got tripped and knocked sideways during basketball. They called my mom to pick me up instead of calling an ambulance.
What year and what country (or development level)? I cannot believe this would be legal today in any highly developed country. Did you complain to school administrators? It would have made a great local newspaper article about mistreatment of (sometimes temporarily) physically disabled students.
Late 90s, United States. It was a tiny private religious school in a 1950s building with a bomb shelter.
There was no school administration to complain to and no students with physical disabilities. I suspect they wouldn’t accept them due to a complete lack of facilities and policies.
This is very sad but true. Life is harsh for a lot of people. I have a basic capacity to work and all my senses intact without any major pains and I am very thankful for it. It makes me want to find ways to improve life on this planet somehow.
It surprises me that we need an abled person to pretend he's disabled to realize how difficult is to live as a disabled person.
Why we don't just hear what disabled people tell us and trust them? Why do we trust the opinion of an abled person more than the opinion of disabled people?
Don't get me wrong, I liked the article and it can be eye-opening. But it saddens me that sometimes we forget who's actually suffering this situation, and we empathize with a guy that spend only one week pretending to be disabled more than with actually disabled people.
They are not advocating for you to listen to them over a disabled person. They are advocating for you to experience it directly, as they did, so you can better understand what it is like.
I think you might be on to something here! The biggest problem with whisper right now that kills a lot of use cases is the requirement that you send discrete audio files rather than streams.
However, if you have never had a textual relay conversation, one of the conventions is that each party needs to say/type "go ahead/GA" when they are done. If you can break upon catching that phrase, that might be sufficient for whisper usage!
These services have already existed for decades, with government-funded interpreters. They’re known as Telecommunications Relay Services and they come in a lot of varieties for one’s specific level of disability.
There are apps now that have the same service using AI transcription instead of a live interpreter, which is nice, but it’s not world-changing.
I remember regularly taking text-to-speech calls from a non-speaking Mac customer when I worked on tech support at an ISP back in 1998. Must have reconfigured MacPPP a dozen times before we finally got him up and running. He had the patience of a saint…
I agree, it seems like we’re headed to the everybody suffers equally instead of everybody is benefited equally
Perfect example from a link from yesterday: The removed a crosswalk because it was cheaper to be in compliance by removing it than fixing it [1]
Said another way, nobody…from the traffic engineer to the city counsel…cared enough about the people impacted, that they lobbied or changed the system in such a way that would help the impacted person. Their inputs were ignored or overruled.
When I was a child (in the US), the science museum in my hometown had an exhibit dedicated to the ADA. You got into a wheelchair and tried to do tasks. It showed how payphones at a certain height are too high to reach, how difficult it would be to go up a ramp with an unapproved slope, etc. I wonder if it's still there, because that was my first foray into thinking this way. The Chicago trip however, basically radicalized me.
The article has a reference point of the UK and I don't know what their laws are with regards to accessibility. But it's clear that in both countries public attitudes toward accessibility have a very long way to go. And I'm sure most other countries can say this as well.