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

The US has been institutionally dysfunctional for quite some time, so that puts us in an interesting position where it's easier to imagine inventing our way out of social problems with $30,000 servo-filled boxes than it is to imagine ever getting a cheaper and easier solution moved through Congress. Congress rarely seems to pass disruptive changes to law these days. Statehouses are less sclerotic, but not by much. Many of the civil rights gains touted 10+ years ago came from hacks shoved through the supreme court exploiting a partisan lean.

If you really read between the lines, much of the fuss about Mayor Mamdani in NYC has been a curious rediscovery that the government can in fact Just Do Things for people who elected it.

It's both "the entire nation's infrastructure." and not that.

What I mean is... many cases are individual: the ramp for that library; the door knobs/handles in that office; the floor indicators in this lift/elevator; the audio announcements (or lack of) on the busses/trains; the small print on contracts; live subtitling at the theatre; the checkout button on this web site; the checkout button on that website. You get the idea.

The vast majority of cases are individual; owned by myriad businesses, charities, foundations.

The problem the OP is circling is the same as that proposed by the Social Model of disability. Most systems present obstacles to disabled users which could have been avoided if those systems' owners and designers and included disabled people in the design phase. Instead, no-one does this claiming it's too expensive, forgetting they themselves will be disabled in the future (most people become disabled in one way or another, with age). We all kick the can down the road, rather than deal with it today. Dealing with it is hard. The "national level infrastructure" aspect is a mixture of cultural praxis/expectation and, potentially, government carrot to go with the (existing) government stick (regulation; that most people try to ignore).

(I'm not saying the Social Model of Disability is 100% right. I feel it's viewpoint is hugely instructive it's not the whole story.)

It also feels like a failure to understand the motivations and mechanisms behind these projects- those "misguided" college students are usually doing these projects to further their studies, as capstone or research projects that they may not be concerned with the funding for. Accessible product development is a side effect of the process, not the goal, and that's why they aren't developing scalable solutions.

This is why raising well-rounded children is so important. Intelligent young people today are too often encouraged/forced to specialize and while it makes sense for them economically given the structure of our society, it produces lots of young, intelligent adults who can't see the forest for the trees. They can be brilliant in one area but unable to see the big picture, which is a real loss to society when they have the ambition to contribute.

"...the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced." a significant portion of my internet experience could be boiled down to this single sentence.

> perennially underfunded

I remember voting to fund high speed rail, and the funding was quite generous...

This doesn't hold up to scrutiny because tech companies _do_ provide input at policy level. Sticking to transportation, auto groups and manufacturers were able to popularize "jay walking" a century ago. Tech leadership and politics mingle at the highest levels too. For ex, Trump took Huang, Cook, and Musk with him on a recent trip to China.

> Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded

I think your overall point is relatively sound but that example is just terrible...

Elon Musk has repeatedly lobbied against transit expansion and his Hyperloop pitch arguably derailed HSR talks in California for half a decade while the Las Vegas teslertube prevented the expansion of a monorail to actually service the strip airport corridor.

this type of individualist responsibility diffusion is exactly why nothing happens in the US, & why France has protests the second the govt does anything bad.

no one is asking you to solve the whole problem, just be part of fighting for the real solution

I quite enjoy playing with robots, but I'd rather coordinate the design and installation of 1000 ramps than be involved with one walking liability sedan chair. If you care about results and reliability, no shit a competent engineer will be picking the one that has no moving parts and a 10,000 year track record.

You haven't addressed the grift problem. Without support for traditional nepotism/cronyism grift, how do you expect to motivate politicians?

You won't always be able to count on the threat of exposing their sexual habits, which has been working for decades.

Changing infrastructure would cost way less than buying hardware for all disabled people.

So you don’t solve the problem, you just solve it for a tiny group of wealthy people

> Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp

The problem is that inventing a solution that no-one needs or wants and then using venture money to hype it up feels like rubbing salt in a wound for the very people they're claiming to try to help.

The point is they're not actually trying to help those people. They're using them as a marketing tool to further their own ambition to make money.

The anger is understandable.

Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details. There is ideological opposition against from business types and some other tech types.

> it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.

Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.

Yeah, it kinda feels like a banal thing to hate on. "They're only doing this because it's easier to create a prototype invention than to redo all design standards and enforcement in the country!" I mean, yeah? What exactly is the implied alternative for the sort of individuals targeted by the blog post?

There's a general problem on the web (and to a lesser extent computing in general) that UX is just widely terrible. I think part of this is because developers tend to work at the very edge of their competence, and getting something working at all is a major feat, with no room left over for making it work well. And part of it is developers or designers deciding they know better than everyone else. A lot of this was a solved problem back in the 80s: the platform provides a standard UI toolkit and a set of standard idioms, and all software uses them. But this lesson is ignored because developers and designers don't like it when their stuff looks and works just like everything else. Making buttons that look like everyone else's buttons means you don't set yourself apart, so we end up with custom buttons that look different and don't work as well. And, of course, are less accessible, because accessibility requires integration into the overall system that doesn't exist with a custom solution.

I was a Mac fiend back in the "beleaguered" days, and standard widgets and idioms were a big deal in that community. There was broad consensus that apps should all look and work the same, as much as that was possible. A button should be a button and a text field should be a text field no matter what program it was in. That all went out the window with the web, for no particularly good reason, and it's infecting non-web platforms at an alarming rate.

If you are a disabled person who wants to visit the back country then the $30,000 (or more!) robot wheelchair is your only option. We shouldn't make all mountain trails ADA accessible. My local park system has a few accessible trails (the majority are not) that can get them to enjoy nature, if that isn't enough spend the money on the robot.

However I'm only willing to take the above position because there are plenty of other options. There are a lot of fully able people who live life without going to those remote places and don't miss it. I'm not fine with saying the local grocery store is not accessible - they cannot live without that. Most of what exists in a city should be accessible to everyone despite disabilities - the cost to provide this is not that high.

The stakes ("nature"-as-hobby vs. navigating the built environment that 99.999% of people depend on for survival) are very different, and they're also very different from the stakes of the mythologies ("we've solved blindness!") that sell these disability dongles to the public.

(And the closer you get to nature the more tools like a dumb cane make way more sense than anything digital and battery-powered anyway.)

I do think access to the outdoors is important, though.

> cheap changes such as ramps

My aunt has MS. It cost her nearly $10k to have a _used_ aluminum ramp installed for her house.

She can't come to my house because the gap between the buildings that leads to my door is too narrow for a wheelchair and would require is to get two different building owners, who are not our landlord, to agree to have their building modified to make room for it. It would easily cost 50k+ to actually rebuild two buildings and the sidewalk into a functioning ramp that is the correct slope for a chair.

> I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete.

They don't need to, and the might not even do that, but the boosters and the clipfarms are very much in on it. You don't see that "engagement" for continuous sidewalks and raised crosswalks despite how amazing they are.

And they're also very convenient as a way to avoid infrastructural improvements, you can point to disability dongles as a reason not to invest in it, that way you're conveniently not bearing the cost.

> And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.

The problem is that's at best a post-hoc realisation, when that argument is made upfront it's pretty much always dismissed out of hand (very much blub adjacent), you can see it in pretty much every discussion about better walk/bike infrastructure.

What they're getting at is that the individual level gadget based accommodations can lead hurdles against making the world generally more accessible to people with disabilities by putting the onus on the disabled person to buy those gadgets in people's minds, eg "oh we don't need to pay to put ramps here there's stair climbing wheelchairs", ignoring the cost of those devices. Yes they /eventually/ get cheaper but there's still plenty of people who can't afford even the cheaper versions and it takes decades to get there.

It's a really cynical way to attack people who are at least sort of trying to help.

And obviously the inventions of "a ramp" and "slightly wider door" already exist; those aren't a matter of invention, they're a matter of regulations and enforcement.

A lot of problems are like that. They don't require anything fancy, just regulation, a budget or regular maintenance.

I don't see why it's either/or. There are a lot more legacy doors and stairs especially around the world, than there are people who could be helped with a climbing wheelchair or exoskeleton frame. And there's some infrastructure that might not be possible to upgrade, for historical preservation reasons.

Maybe the tech will always be too bulky, but it could also be rented out on location when traveling.

The casual ableism is not unique to tech but I do notice its prevalence, both here and in my career.

I am slightly disabled physically, I've made comments here a time or two where someone will make a (probably unintentionally) dismissive comment like "This is easy, just do XYZ every day" and I'll make a comment like "lots of people cannot do XYZ every day due to disability" and there's a literal backlash of commenters like "well obviously we're not talking about them," like, what? Do you think disabled people don't exist? That seems to be the implication, it comes out casually so much in my daily interactions, some people are almost offended by the idea of it even.

That seems pretty anathema to current trends. The underlying refrain is that users are stupid and cannot be trusted. Faster horses and all that.

Shut up monkeys, I will tell you what you want.

Look no further than some of the comments on this very post.

Instead of trying to refute the OP, maybe people should listen to what he's saying.

And people have such a poor distinction of exactly where the limits lie.

My mother was blind. I was able to teach her how to glue up PVC. (For those of you who don't know--it's a don't-touch, less than a minute of working time and sets even faster if assembled and not moving.) Could she build things out of PVC? Yes. Could she repair a pipe? No. She needed everything perfectly arranged, an existing pipe wouldn't be perfectly arranged. And when my father died people wouldn't believe the big power tools in the garage were hers, not his. (Stuff where she could measure and clamp, hands only on the tool's controls.)

1. it's possible that the author is blind in a legal sense but not completely blind -- e.g. maybe they only have vision in the center of their visual field, or maybe they have low acuity. You'll often see people with white canes wearing glasses, which would be pointless if they had absolutely zero vision.

2. It's not uncommon for people to use terms like "watch", "see", "hear", "listen", etc. colloquially / metaphorically; e.g. "I heard that X did Y" by someone who, pedantically speaking, _read_ that X did Y; someone typing "listen to me" on a chat app when they really mean "please read my words carefully and internalize them"; etc. If I were playing a video on on my phone, listening to what is being said but not actually watching the screen, I'd probably still say I "watched" the video.

It’s AI