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

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

#21

Post by TulliusCicero »

watwut wrote: post #10
TulliusCicero wrote: post #6

While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced. Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replaci…

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.

> Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details.

Some will, and that's great, but as the blog post accurately points out, the invention of these things isn't the primary issue, it's the lack of implementation. And that isn't the fault of the engineers designing better doorknobs or ramps.

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

Bullshit. The US has had underfunded transit for near a century now because of our obsession with cars. Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse.

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

#22

Post by TulliusCicero »

thereisnospork wrote: post #19
watwut wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are Tech companies fighting public transit? At least in these parts a relatively high fraction of their employees commute by (private) bus. I can only presume that Tech companies would prefer the government provide safe, clean, and timely bussing for the public to save the company the cost and effort.

They generally would, though for the most part I imagine they're just ambivalent here. As long as workers can get to work, that's most of what they care about.

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

#23

Post by wat10000 »

scottlamb wrote: post #7

The author is seeing that it's easier for one team to get backing (VC money, course credit, design awards, TED talk applause, etc.) for "solving" an accessibility problem than for us to enforce that entire industries follow good accessibility practices in new work and retrofit existing work. In theory industry-wide enforcement is the sort of thing legislation like the ADA solves, but obviously that hasn't been comple…

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.

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

#24

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #5

I have a buddy who did his Human Factors PHd at wright state/wright patt nearly 15 years ago. "Tech people" have a lot of lies they believe, about disabilities, about valid addresses, everything. When he told me that schools for the blind train their student to fact check things like directions and not simply rely on a single source while navigating new terrain it clicked for me that the sighted have no clue and symp…

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.

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

#25

Post by lkey »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #11
calcifer wrote: post #2

> I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew. I need better doorknobs and/or a ramp. But a ramp is boring. You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud. You can’t give a TED Talk about a ramp. You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.

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.

Contributing to a net loss of funding and attention, all while making the public more ignorant and more passive, results in material harms to the population they claim to serve.

This kind of self-aggrandizement at other's expense deserves to be recognized as it is and should be met with an equal measure of contempt.

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

#26

Post by TulliusCicero »

nancyminusone wrote: post #20
TulliusCicero wrote: post #6

While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced. Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replaci…

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.

The fact that this is or isn't happening is basically unrelated to inventing new stuff. It's almost entirely a political issue, not one of engineering.

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

#27

Post by Jblx2 »

chowells wrote: post #12
TulliusCicero wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The expressed (not implied) alternative in the post is for those people to stop pretending they care, and start actually caring. Stop trying to save the world. The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.

Holy smokes, that comes across as "We just want all people to be impoverished equally".

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

#28

Post by masklinn »

ggreer wrote: post #13

I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete. And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck. And yes, the cost of such devices is hig…

> 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.

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

#29

Post by Drakexor »

The author seems to be screaming into the void here. The task of rebuilding infrastructure is mountainous compared to attempting new technological solutions.

I do agree with his rant about clean and semantic HTML being nessecary for accessibility. It's too often overlooked (as I scramble to check my sites for alt-text on images)

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

#30

Post by TulliusCicero »

wat10000 wrote: post #23
scottlamb wrote: post #7

The author is seeing that it's easier for one team to get backing (VC money, course credit, design awards, TED talk applause, etc.) for "solving" an accessibility problem than for us to enforce that entire industries follow good accessibility practices in new work and retrofit existing work. In theory industry-wide enforcement is the sort of thing legislation like the ADA solves, but obviously that hasn't been comple…

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…

100% agree about the UX problems. Most engineers would be happy to fix those issues, but of course, companies always want the new features...because that's what customers want and what drives more $$$.

Sadly, it's true that the % of new sales generated by improving a11y beyond the bare minimum isn't going to be terribly large. That's why it's important to have regulations that mandate decent support, because the monetary incentive that drives corporate behavior just isn't there.

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