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

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.

There was a subthread recently complaining about password managers and their UX problems. These aren't aimed specifically at "disabled" users, but I think it's a similar situation. We can't reliably enforce good standards for sign-in (whether that's just setting the autofill attribute correctly and choosing the correct event handlers for Javascript validators or something far more ambitious), so we expect a password manager to just deal with the web as it is. IMHO they work remarkably well given that constraint, but it's not optimal overall.

The author is correct that simple and cheap changes such as ramps and door knobs are the logical fixes. And yes, based on personal experience, companies hate disabled people at the first sign that they will be an inconvenience to the company.

However, nature has no such things. If you enjoy nature and the outdoors, then user-specific equipment can provide capabilities not available through cheap alternatives. The prototypes shown are always marketing with some flair to it. Yes, the noise and bulk are terrible, but proof of concept can lead to improvements over time - eg you're looking at a some no-name competitor to the Model T (prototype suit), just imagine what the 2026 civic will look like (suits 75 years from now).

And yes, the cost of such devices is high today, but that's true of any new technology. The first print reading devices were huge machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now the technology is free on your phone. Early hearing aids were bulky, expensive, and not much better than an ear horn. Now they're affordable, compact, and have handy features like bluetooth connectivity. My guess is that most of these prototypes will fizzle and go nowhere, but some will succeed, and the lives of disabled people will be improved by them.

Edit: Pangram says the entire post is written by AI. I've flagged it for misrepresenting the author. https://www.pangram.com/history/06093378-dcca-42d8-b683-5ed7...

For non-FOSS products, it's even worse. There is no way to tell Amazon that, for the past several months, their library view for Kindle on iOS was inaccessible to VoiceOver, with the books having no accessibility label, and the only way one can tell what book they're about to open is through VoiceOver's tiny on-device image describer model. Of course, in iOS 27 (beta currently) this is improved, but it shouldn't have to be. The last few versions of Kindle has begun fixing this, but last time I tried, about a week ago, it could easily break even just by my scrolling the view a few times.

So I don't even bother anymore. If Google can stand having poor Braille support on Android, fine, I'll use an iPhone. If Apple can stand having awful Google Docs support, which I use at work, on MacOS, I'll use Windows or even Linux where it works fine. If an image isn't described, I will put it through AI. If a page doesn't work well with a screen reader, I'll send it through AI too. If I want to play a video game where 99% of them do not have spoken menus, but I can enjoy the actual gameplay, I'll ask AI which menu option I'm on.

I've come to feel that life is so miserable when I and only a few others fight and fight for accessibility. If it works, it only works for a moment. So I just lean on AI because it can "see" a lot better than I can. Besides, people have used AI to make accessibility mods for Final Fantasy 1 through 6, the pixel-remaster versions. So when terminally angry people come at me for my use of AI, I just don't care anymore. Let them go blind and see how it feels.

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)

I auto-run the skill when certain changes are detected in a branch and it takes just a few minutes. Recommended if your work shows up in browsers.

Someone more inclined toward fraud than me should figure out how to make a cloud connected ramp as a way to get VCs to fund more ramps.

Medi cal, medicare, and private insurance have all chipped in for my ramps, but none of them will touch something like an iBot chair with a 50 ft pole because it has ambiguous insurance coding associated to it rather than being a normal wheelchair.

So.. In other words, what's the problem? People are buying the high tech gimmicks either out of pocket or through equally spotty VA coverage.

The US has systems in place to aid the purchase of ramps for those in need and offers ample opportunity to sue businesses into bankruptcy for getting any ADA stuff wrong.. what's the demand exactly? It seems like "engineers shouldn't be so creative" to me, but the reality is that they should work on stuff they're interested in rather than some abstract civic duty, assigned unpassionate work is how you build crap.

-guy in a wheelchair

I’m building a website for users of a local disability transportation service. I had read the WCAG guidelines and tested the site, but I didn’t realize that the text was too small for some middle-aged users until they had to take out their reading glasses.

Knowing semantic HTML wasn’t enough, and WCAG testing alone was obviously insufficient.

I had spent far too long overlooking something as simple as font size. Just font size.

But someday many people might need wheelchairs that include some functionality to help with obstacles and are affordable. Those primitive impractical machines engineers build now are where they figure out much of what will go into those later machines.

Everybody is different. Tall, short, strong, week, two legs, one leg, short sighted or blind. So it makes a lot of sense to point (as a mistake) that our infrastructure favors one type over the others.

> the "Checkout" button is labeled "Button_Graphic_v2_Final"

This is a very good point.

I find these sorts of statements about disability over-correcting. It is a tragedy of biology that my brother cannot run but I can. What else could it be?

"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.

>> You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.

>> Concrete is not "disruptive."

Well, not with that attitude.

You simply need these 3 things:

1. A revenue subscription model

2. Execute at massive scale by leveraging AI

3. An advertising model

Now you can change the world

I spent a while trying to find law firms that specialized in this. If you do this kind of search 99% of the results are for law firms that specialize instead in defending companies against ADA suits and helping them evade their responsibilities.

I eventually was able to find exactly one law firm via contacting the bar. They weren't interested in talking to me - they said the person with the disability would need to contact them directly and pay out of their own pocket.

Years later that website still isn't accessible.

"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."

Author fails to realize that "better doorknobs and or a ramp" would incur a social cost of billions or more (even w/o adding the social cost tied to legislation, legal costs, and maintenance) as compared to his imaginary $30k "silicon dongle". That's w/o considering such questions as whether I (and all other taxpayers) should pay for a doorknob we don't need but he does. We might be more willing to buy him a SpaceX rocket and send him into orbit around the Sun.

He's a pissed-off handicapped fellow. I get that. And current society is (or once was) one that rewards people for solving their own problems instead of complaining. This may no longer be true: social media, gofundme, the metoo movement, etc. have moved the dial so that formerly "helpless" bitching can be quite rewarding, but I digress. Perhaps someday we'll be so wealthy that every individual's cares and needs are provided for. But we're not there yet.

So if I were him I might do something like go into business designing and marketing a better doorknob opener for the handicapped instead of complaining no one gives a shite. FWIW here's some SOTA at a $30 price-level:

https://www.caregiverproducts.com/handy-hook-door-opening-ai...

Got to admit that looks pretty "iffy" for opening doors, more like a personal defense weapon. In any case it might get you labelled as "Captain Hook" at the grade school (OTOH its always good to have respect, if not reverence). Anyhow, its a starting point and you can only do better!8-)

"Why do we have to build Electric Vehicles? Why don't we just build more trains?"

There's no 'we' here. 'We' are not doing anything. 'You' are sitting writing a blog. 'I' am writing a HN comment. 'They' are building EVs. You might as well say "Why do we want to build a dumpling store here? I never asked for that. I wanted Thai food" when someone else is building a dumpling store. It's not a 'we' decision.

The fact of the matter is that you can't redirect my money and effort to your goals. You can maybe find alignment between my objectives and your objectives, and when I try to find such alignment you can work with me or you can reject me. But we're free individuals. I'm not going to make you your Thai food. I'm going to make Chinese food. And if you want some, you can eat some by paying me, and if no one wants some I go out of business and it sucks for me.

I neither hate you nor love you. And you neither hate me nor love me. We are strangers to each other and where our interactions align we can work with each other; and where they don't we can't. The world is full of other people with other objectives. Some are opposed and some are aligned.

In the words of the Spiderman antagonist Sauron:

> I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs

And no matter what, I'm not going to try to work with anyone who's going to jump my case the moment the cosine of our vectors is not precisely 1. It never surprises me when all these perpetually angry people find themselves with no allies, because a desire to coordinate is fairly built-in to human nature and people recognize defectors from that framework easily and stop attempting coordination with habitual non-coordinators.

Sometimes the world just is, and I will take whatever technology can give me to handle it.

I'm tired of playing hide and seek with the microscopic 'x' that appears after a minute or two of ads, and that is the only way out of the ad without forcing the app closed.

Sometimes it's in the top left, sometimes the top right.

Sometimes it appears for a second and then disappears again. Act fast!

Sometimes the ad puts a button right under the tiny 'x' so that if you miss it, you get directed to their site, causing analytics to happen so that now you get a flood of ads for healing crystals for several weeks.

Facilities succesfully made a big push to get a bunch of people CPR/AED training, especially because it was free. I then made the obvious point that we had no AEDs and should get some. Absolute crickets.

For context, San Francisco being a city with billionaire tech oligarchs, lots of traffic, and OK but not great transit means there's a LOT of rich people who want to fix traffic by way of almost literally reinventing the wheel.

We already know how to move lots of people to a particular destination very quickly: some variation[0] of a bus or train on dedicated right-of-way. The problem is that America is specifically engineered to make operating transit unprofitable outside of high density urban areas, acquiring land for that right-of-way in high density is astronomically expensive, and increasing density limits to break this chicken-and-egg problem is a political nightmare in most places.

This is exactly the kind of problem Silicon Valley hates having to solve because it is, in a sense, the enemy. A good chunk of Big Tech got drunk on Ayn Rand, and transit in particular presents a problem that Objectivist philosophy is unwilling to engage with. To solve it requires both negotiating with the urban planning equivalent of a Soviet central planner and long-term subsidy through coercive taxation.

The pitch for all these projects is ultimately a complicated heavy engineering project to make a train seem less like a train and more like a tech product. Think like the Hyperloop, a concept for a vaccum-sealed tube in which "pods" could be shot through at high speeds. This doesn't need to exist, heavy rail can absolutely go 200mph, we can already bury it underground, and there is no need to have individualized vehicles aside from a mistaken belief that Americans are allergic to sharing space with other Americans.

The one version of this that actually got built is the Vegas Loop, which despite the name and the hype has nothing to do with Hyperloop and was just Teslas driving down a one-way tunnel. All the hype around it delayed actual transportation. As I hinted at above, federal politicians[1] in America would really rather you not take a train. Americans themselves will happily ride them[2], but getting local funding for it is a battle. And all the talk of hyperloops and pods made local politicians hold off on fighting that fight for a good decade, so there's a lot of transit we're missing, because the stupid sci-fantasy ideas never panned out.

[0] I am being very broad here - France has it's obsession with rubber-tired trains, Mexico City has an extensive BRT network that provides metro-like service frequencies.

[1] Joe Biden excluded

[2] We abuse the shit out of commercial aviation to do things high-speed trains can do better, so it's not like we're afraid to share space. The only thing is that Americans don't know how to stay quiet on a train or plane - but that doesn't make the train unprofitable or impractical.

>And watching the video,

>I am blind

Um...

EDIT: Actually, the post reads as if two different people wrote it. The first half doesn't mention anything about blindness, and the second half doesn't mention anything about wheelchairs. But there's only one credit, so I don't know what's going on.