Here is what doesn’t go viral: Ángel worked as a housepainter for decades but had a stroke three years ago that paralyzed the left side of his body. Now, his favorite spot is the recliner in his living room. From his perch, he can reach some essential items that he stores on a table to his right: a power screwdriver, painter’s tape, and a clipboard with paper and pen.
“I’d like to mount this new striker plate on the front door,” Ángel says. He transfers himself from the recliner to his wheelchair and leans over to pick up a small metal striker plate along with the roll of tape from the table. Using his right foot, he turns around and propels his wheelchair toward the front door. Then, he props the roll of tape between his knees in order to pull off a section. He sets the striker plate on the tape, pulls a little more while bracing it with his knees, and tears it off. Ángel wheels in closer to the frame and lifts the tape and striker plate onto the inside of the door jamb, pressing it into place. It stays there, mounted to the spot where he needs it. “Now, I just need to screw it on.” He wheels over, gets a screw from the table, and passes it through the hole in the striker plate so that it sits just inside the hole already drilled into the door jamb. “See?” Now, he’s set up to use the screwdriver with his “good hand.”
Here is what does go viral: braille decoder rings, sign-language-translating gloves, “haptic footwear” for blind folks, stair-climbing wheelchairs. In other words, a preponderance of innovations, unveiled to great fanfare, that purport to solve disability-related problems. While the press applauds the tech sector’s forward-thinking and sensitivity to the needs of underserved populations, the concerns of disabled people—voiced again and again and again—are disregarded. So much uncritical attention gets lavished on these seductive yet generally silly objects that the disabled design critic Liz Jackson aptly named them “disability dongles” in 2019. This concept was recently taken up again in a piece for Platypus coauthored by Jackson, along with Alex Haagaard and Rua Williams. In it, they argue that disability dongles generate feel-good content for brands that may be “promising in concept, but in actuality unattainable.” Indeed, they’re often just prototypes that designers have no intention of ever manufacturing.
A friend of mine is an accessibility expert and teaches children who are in long term hospital care. While she is a huge advocate for technology accessibility (she makes incredible use of her iPhone and Watch to help her live with her own disability) she also uses really simple things way more than high tech. For example, she helped a non verbal child with CP learn to communicate by writing letters in rows on a paper towel roll. There was a second roll over top with a space so only one row of letters was visible at a time. When they got to the row of the first letter of the first word he wanted to say, he blinked. Then they would move their finger across the row slowly and he would blink when they got to the individual letter. Slow but effective, and allowed a pre-teen to effectively communicate his needs for the first time.
-------------------------------- "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
