The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
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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
#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.
Re: The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
#3> 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.
A lot of problems are like that. They don't require anything fancy, just regulation, a budget or regular maintenance.
Re: The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
#4> 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.
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.
Re: The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
#5I have a buddy who did his Human Factors PHd at wright state/wright patt nearly 15 years ago.
"Tech people" have a lot of lies they believe, about disabilities, about valid addresses, everything.
When he told me that schools for the blind train their student to fact check things like directions and not simply rely on a single source while navigating new terrain it clicked for me that the sighted have no clue and sympathy is more honest and less presumptive/simulative than empathy.
But to be sympathetic you have to listen to actual user feedback and do actual observation, with empathy you just get to use your imagination to put yourself in their shoes.
At least for some definition of sympathy and some definition of empathy.
Re: The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
#6While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced.
Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replacing every building and road regulation and the politicians who put them there?
It reminds me of the people in self-driving car threads complaining that the billions should've gone to transit. Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
Re: The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
#7The author is seeing that it's easier for one team to get backing (VC money, course credit, design awards, TED talk applause, etc.) for "solving" an accessibility problem than for us to enforce that entire industries follow good accessibility practices in new work and retrofit existing work. In theory industry-wide enforcement is the sort of thing legislation like the ADA solves, but obviously that hasn't been completely effective. Not sure how to fix it.
There was a subthread recently complaining about password managers and their UX problems. These aren't aimed specifically at "disabled" users, but I think it's a similar situation. We can't reliably enforce good standards for sign-in (whether that's just setting the autofill attribute correctly and choosing the correct event handlers for Javascript validators or something far more ambitious), so we expect a password manager to just deal with the web as it is. IMHO they work remarkably well given that constraint, but it's not optimal overall.
Re: The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
#8I 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…
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.
Re: The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
#9The 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…
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?
Re: The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
#10While 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.