Category: inclusive design

Published 2025/02/27

Accessible Places

Broken Lifts

International Wheelchair Day is observed every March 1st. I am interested in physical accessibility as much as digital accessibility, but especially the point where the two meet. Where technology can improve physical accessibility by removing barriers or at least warn folks about them. Recently, I came across an older project that came out of “Random Hacks of Kindness” in Berlin called Broken Lifts.

Broken elevators at train stations are a big problem for people who rely on wheelchairs and walking aids, but also for families with strollers. That’s why it’s important to find out about breakdowns in good time. Of course, complex machines like elevators can occasionally break down. Vandalism does the rest. For this reason, BrokenLifts was created – a project by the SOZIALHELDEN association and the Berlin-Brandenburg transport association in collaboration with the HENKELHIEDL project office for the automated visualization of elevator breakdowns in local public transport in Berlin. The elevator malfunction information from the Berlin S-Bahn and the BVG is retrieved, analyzed and bundled every 15 minutes as a database.

Random Hacks of Kindness

Wheelmap.org

The same folks who came up with Broken Lifts are behind wheelmap.org, a map for finding wheelchair accessible places. Anyone can contribute and mark public places around the world according to their wheelchair accessibility.

Google

Of course, there’s a bigger player on the scene. In 2020, Google Maps launched a mode called Accessible Places. When toggled on, it more prominently shows wheelchair accessibility info.

“When Accessible Places is switched on, a wheelchair icon will indicate an accessible entrance and you’ll be able to see if a place has accessible seating, restrooms or parking,” Google explains in a blog post. “If it’s confirmed that a place does not have an accessible entrance, we’ll show that information on Maps as well.”

Find wheelchair-accessible places

In October 2023, Google announced another expansion of its accessible navigation features. It included:

Stair-free wheelchair-accessible routes
Updated Live View experiences for users who are blind
A new identity attribute label for disabled-owned businesses

Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, the wheelchair user making Google Maps more accessible, positioned near a NYC subway elevator with a sign indicating it is out of service

“It’s a basic human right to enter a place like anybody else,” says Sasha Blair-Goldensohn. This simple ideal can seem maddeningly out of reach for wheelchair users in America’s largest and most expensive metropolis. But for Blair-Goldensohn, a 48-year-old software engineer and United Spinal member from New York City, it’s the driving force of his life.

Meet the Wheelchair User Making Google Maps More Accessible

Though his work at Google touched on its Maps technology, Sasha Blair-Goldensohn wasn’t thinking much about the actual route-finding features — how people get from A to B. That changed one morning while he was walking through Central Park to catch the subway and a 100-pound tree limb fell on him. The limb fractured his skull and he sustained a T5 spinal cord injury.

New York City has one of the best subway systems in the U.S., but only if you can navigate stairs. Blair-Goldensohn’s Manhattan commute was hampered by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority system. More than 30 years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it still lacked wheelchair access in nearly 75% of commuter train stations.

Advocacy

Sasha Blair-Goldensohn stepped up his advocacy by working with legal nonprofit Disability Rights Advocates to bring a class action lawsuit. Blair-Goldensohn served as one of the plaintiffs alleging violations of the New York City Human Rights Law due to the subway system’s inaccessibility. It took six years, but in April 2023, a judge approved a final settlement compelling the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to budget for and “add elevators or ramps to create a stair-free path of travel [in] at least 95% of the system’s currently inaccessible subway stations by 2055.”

A group of wheelchair users and allies holding protest signs in NYC that say Stranded by Cuomo and Elevators are for Everyone

Subway elevators were frequently broken down, further limiting mobility and inclusion. “You are either stuck on the inside or the outside,” he says. “In one situation, at least you are on the surface, but you realize there’s no way home because the elevator is shut down for who knows how long. In the other situation, you are several flights of stairs down and you have to rely on strangers to carry you out.”

Sasha Blair-Goldensohn

Accessibility + Technology

For accessibility information to be helpful, it needs to be comprehensive and widely available. Collecting all the information needed to create a useful accessibility map is a big task. Fortunately, a software engineer at Google, which has the most popular free mapping app in the world with over a billion users each month, has become a strong advocate for accessibility. When Blair-Goldensohn returned to his job after his injury, it quickly became clear that his skills and understanding of what people with disabilities need made him a perfect fit for this work.

Since then, he has been working to improve the accessibility information available on Google Maps. In 2017, Google introduced a feature that lets users add details about the accessibility of places they visit. Now, Maps can show if a location has a wheelchair-accessible entrance, marked by the ♿ icon, as well as accessible seating, restrooms, and parking. In 2018, Blair-Goldensohn led a project to display wheelchair-accessible routes for public transportation.

Google Maps depends on its users to share information about various features, from what businesses offer to travel times and directions. Before last summer’s Paralympics, Blair-Goldensohn’s team met with Paralympic athletes to inform them about the accessibility features on Google Maps and to gather their experiences using the service while traveling abroad.

For Blair-Goldensohn, whose work revolves around universal design, it’s hard to understand why you would do things any other way. To him, working toward a world that can be accessed by everyone, benefits everyone. “Solidarity is powerful,” he says. Agreed!

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Published 2025/01/31

Talk Description to Me and more

One of the best parts of my job is curating our monthly Accessibility Community of Practice meetings. I like to tie into monthly awareness campaigns. For January, I highlighted World Braille Day and Braille Literacy Month. But then jumped into some particulars. Like sharing a video from one of my favorite folks, Anthony Ferraro, a blind athlete, musician, motivational speaker, and podcaster. His catchphrases are “the only disability is a bad attitude” and “one love.”

Some fun podcasts

Talk Description to Me podcast

Where the visuals of current events and the world around us get hashed out in description-rich conversations. J.J. Hunt is an innovative Audio Describer and a natural-born storyteller. Christine Malec is a perpetually inquisitive member of the blind and partially sighted community who’s always wondering about something.

In Talk Description to Me, their discussions plunge into current events and topical issues to explore the content of important images and help place vivid descriptions in their cultural context. Lively, hard-hitting, witty, vibrant, and fun, this is conversation with a view!

Talk Description to Me

Say My Meme podcast

Say My Meme is exactly what it sounds like: A podcast that literally describes the world’s most relevant memes, bringing the blind and sighted people together through laughter and the power of visual description. Brought to you by Will from Be My Eyes and Caroline from Scribely.

Say My Meme

Blind beauty expert and journalist Lucy Edwards recently sent in a request to Say My Meme, for beauty and makeup memes. Lucy joined as their first guest host to talk all memes skincare, makeup and more.

Meme with the question "Why don't
you just let your hair dry naturally?" with Danny DeVito wearing a frizzy wig

Say My Meme sub-categories include:

Weird memes
The Album Cover
Disneyland
The Olympics
Online Dating Memes
Star Wars

Darth Vader strangling a rebel troop, with the caption "Strong people don't put others down. They lift them up." accredited to Darth Vader, Philanthropist.

Accessible Social

In our monthly meetings, I also have Accessibility Hall of Shame and Hall of Fame sections. The Hall of Shame section often features accessibility overlays and why they are terrible. For our January Hall of Fame, I highlighted a resource I came across called Accessible Social. This is a free resource and education hub that shares best practices for creating accessible and inclusive social media content. Guides include best practices for sharing:

With additional learning and resources:

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Published 2024/12/16

At the End of Sight

We meet Andrew Leland as he’s suspended in the liminal state of the soon-to-be blind: he’s midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from sightedness to blindness over years, even decades. He grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in. Soon— but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left.

This is Love podcast

Andrew Leland talks with Phoebe Judge about slowly losing his eyesight. He was in high school when he received his diagnosis of the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, also known as RP. “It was like, ‘I’m going out in the woods with my friends at night. And oddly enough, I’m bad at it.’” Full transcript of the podcast.

Andrew Leland’s memoir, The Country of the Blind, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I chose to listen to the audiobook version, narrated by the author himself, and found him to be incredibly charismatic and engaging.

Yellow book cover for Pulitzer Prine Finalist The Country of the Blind, a Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland

In The Country of the Blind, Andrew Leland tells the story of his gradual transition into the blindness community with sensitivity and insight. He vividly describes his new sensory perceptions and emotions and outlines controversies about the training of the blind. His experiences will resonate powerfully with those in the autism community and beyond. A valuable book.

Temple Grandin

Not long after I found Andrew’s book, I encountered a non-fiction film about the same topic. I missed its brief release in theaters but the film will be streaming December 17th, 2024.

When three of their four children are diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare and incurable disease that leads to severe visual impairment, the Pelletier family’s world changes forever. In the face of this life-altering news, Edith Lemay, Sébastien Pelletier and their children set out on a trip around the world to experience all its beauty while they still can. As they fill their memories with breathtaking destinations and once-in-a-lifetime encounters, the family’s love, resilience and unshakeable sense of wonder ensure that their uncertain future does not define their present.

National Geographic: Blink

From the Academy Award-Winning Team behind 'Navalny.' National Geographic Documentary Films Blink. Don't lose sight of what matters.

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Published 2024/06/10

X marks the spot

In 2018, Minnesota became the sixth state in the US to permit nonbinary designations on state ID. Early in 2020, I realized my drivers license would be up for renewal and looked forward to changing my gender marker. Then COVID hit.

In June 2020, I had the option to renew my DL online, as it was. Or go in person to make any changes. At the time, we were still a year away from a COVID vaccine so I chose the physically safer option. But today, the wait was over. I was able to quickly change my gender designation to nonbinary. And update my photograph (my hair color and eyeglasses have changed 5 or 6 times in the last 8 years).

Since my last drivers license renewal, I’ve also been formally diagnosed with Autism and ADHD.

Studies suggest that individuals with gender and sexual identities outside the cis-hetero binary were also three to six times more likely to have a diagnosis of autism.
The Swaddle: The Link Between Neurodivergence and Queerness, Explained

This all serves to help me understand myself and feel more confident in myself. Happy Pride, all!

Person holding a nonbinary flag over the head with stripes in yellow, white, purple, and black

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Published 2023/12/29

Against Technoableism

2023 has been a great year for books in the disability space. Previously, I posted about Sounds Like Misophonia by Dr. Jane Gregory. Most recently, my copy of Against Technoableism arrived.

When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual’s problem rather than a social one.
The MIT Press Bookstore

Technology needs to do more for people with disabilities. Ashley Shew argues that it’s not the individuals who need “fixing,” it’s their environment. The author is participating in an upcoming free talk. The ITS Technoableism seminar series presents: Ashley Shew on Monday, January 15th, 2024. She was also a guest on The Disability Rights Florida podcast last month.

Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (A Norton Short)

Prior to that, the most recent addition to my non-fiction book stack was The View From Down Here: Life as a Young Disabled Woman by journalist Lucy Webster. In her own words, it is “a memoir exploring what it’s like to live at the intersection of ableism and sexism, how these forces have shaped me, and how society often fails to see disabled women as women at all.” Get the book and sign up for her newsletter!

The View From Down Here: Life as a Young Disabled Woman By Lucy Webster book cover Out Sept 2023

Skipping back to October, a couple of significant things occurred. After years of wondering, I was formally diagnosed with autism and ADHD. On the same day I had my final session with my fantastic clinician, a book I pre-ordered arrived. And, in the most ADHD move ever, another copy of the same book showed up the next day. Apparently, I’d pre-ordered it two days in a row without realizing it. That book was Unmasked: The Ultimate Guide to ADHD, Autism and Neurodivergence by Ellie Middleton. Thankfully, I was able to give the second copy to a friend who has been pondering her own neurodivergence.

“Learning the way my brain works has changed everything for me,” she says, and describes herself as almost being a poster girl for what can happen when you get the answers you need.
Ellie Middleton BBC Access All

Author Ellie Middleton grinning while holding a copy of her book Unmasked: the ultimate guide to ADHS, autism, and neurodivergence

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Published 2023/04/24

Spring Cleaning for Accessible Content

It is springtime in Minnesota. Which means we reached a high of 88° one April afternoon, then it snowed just days later. Despite the wildly fluctuating weather, I feel the urge to purge. I’ve tossed piles of junk mail in the recycling bin. Winter sweaters will be moved to storage (soon, I hope). Other items will be given away via our local Buy Nothing group. I may not go the full Marie Kondo method with my tidying, but controlling clutter in my physical space makes me feel better, mentally. You know what else sparks joy for me? Accessible content!

Self-portrait holding a lit sparkler in the darkness with the light illuminating my face

Recently, WebAIM released their annual report on the most popular 1,000,000 home pages on the web. 96.3% of them detected WCAG 2 failures. And that’s just what automated testing found. Manual testing would likely reveal many more.

Across the one million home pages, 49,991,225 distinct accessibility errors were detected—an average of 50.0 errors per page.
The WebAIM Million

Many of those pages may not be relevant anymore and could be retired. Or portions of their content are likely out of date. Clean it up! Disability and accessibility expert Sheri Byrne-Haber has a great post about this:

Sometimes the best way to make something #accessible is to get rid of it.

I wrote an article about this a while back – the very first thing accessibility leaders should think about when tackling remediation is “do we need this at all?”

– Do we need this graphic / table?
– Do we need this CAPTCHA?
– Do we need this 17 year old inaccessible report that no one ever opens
– Do we need a press release on the election of someone to the board that is no longer on the board?

Don’t pack all your content indiscriminately and move it over to the new accessible template. Go through a cleanup first, and just bring the valuable content over that your users still need.
Sheri Byrne-Haber on LinkedIn

There’s more on her website. Her blog post Starting a new accessibility remediation project? outlines helpful “approaches and prioritization that will make your end goal of an accessible website easier and cheaper.” As someone who has been involved in many, many content migration projects, I fully back this approach. The most successful ones only ported what was still purposeful. Content that has been removed doesn’t need to be remediated. Unnecessary content is a distraction. Inaccessible content can be a blocker. Slimming websites down to the essentials will reduce cognitive load, making them more usable for everyone. Ditch that carousel no one clicks through. Get rid of that busy graphic. Embrace the joys of minimalism.

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Published 2023/01/04

World Braille Day 2023

In 2018, the United Nations issued a proclamation declaring January 4th to be World Braille Day, on the anniversary of Louis Braille’s birth. Read more about his life on this page with 19 Fascinating Facts About Louis Braille. We celebrate him now as someone determined to invent a system of reading and writing to bridge the gap in communication between the sighted and the blind. In his own words:

Access to communication in the widest sense is access to knowledge, and that is vitally important for us if we [the blind] are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way this can be brought about.
Wikipedia

Illustration of Louis Braille alongside of the Braille alphabet represented by red dots

Braille is a tactile representation of alphabetic and numerical symbols using six dots to represent each letter and number, and even musical, mathematical and scientific symbols. Braille (named after its inventor in 19th century France, Louis Braille) is used by blind and partially sighted people to read the same books and periodicals as those printed in a visual font.

Braille is essential in the context of education, freedom of expression and opinion, as well as social inclusion.
United Nations

Braille has come a long way since the 1800s. Now there are refreshable braille displays — computer hardware which has a series of refreshable, or fluid, braille cells on its surface.

Braille displays provide access to information on a computer screen by electronically raising and lowering different combinations of pins in braille cells. A braille display can show up to 80 characters from the screen and is refreshable—that is, it changes continuously as the user moves the cursor around on the screen, using either the command keys, cursor routing keys, or Windows and screen reader commands. The braille display sits on the user’s desk, often underneath the computer keyboard. The advantages of braille displays over synthetic speech are that it provides direct access to information; allows the user to check format, spacing, and spelling; and is quiet.
American Federation for the Blind

It’s a bit like carrying around an e-book vs lugging around boxes and boxes of books. Though this equipment is still expensive, it is becoming more affordable as the technology advances.

Additionally, braille is found in more places these days:

In hospitals;
On medication labels;
In banks;
On restaurant menus;
In the business world, on brochures, utility bills and the like;
In accessible parks;
On public transit;
On product packaging from beauty products to board games.

However, more needs to be done. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not mandate the inclusion of braille lettering on pharmaceutical drug packaging. In many cases, these examples are the exception rather than the rule. I want inclusive communication, in all forms, to become the norm.

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Published 2022/10/07

Creating a More Humane Social Order

Writer, disability-justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that it’s possible for society to become more equitable. They envision a future in which “people are free to be, regardless of their ability to fit into capitalist institutions.”
‘The Future Is Disabled’ book review from Ms. Magazine

I’m excited by the work of activists like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. And their latest book that “lays out a bare-bones agenda for what is needed to make the U.S. more socially just: affordable, available and accessible housing; healthcare and pharmacare; a universal basic income for all residents; free, high-quality public education programs; and the elimination of punitive policing and incarceration.” A resounding YES PLEASE to all of it!

Unfortunately, the systems in place are resistant to change. Instead, those in power propose much smaller, incremental tweaks. For example, recently the State Department announced the finalization of their Five-year Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Strategic Plan. Don’t get me wrong, this more intersectional approach is a step in the right direction. But it will only protect federal employees. Only 20% of people with disabilities are employed, compared to 64% of non-disabled people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a huge gap. Only 4% of DEI initiatives include disability and that’s just in organizations that even have a DEI initiative. Most companies don’t have their disabled employees or customers in mind. A perfect example came from the amazing Meryl Evans. Yesterday she posted about her experience with an Apple Watch, and more.

“People with disabilities can bring a lot more to your team than what you see on their resumes.

They have an uncanny ability to come up with innovative ideas and solutions. Feeling excluded has a way of driving people with disabilities.

For instance, I never wanted an Apple Watch. I hadn’t worn a watch in years. A friend convinced me to try it. It made my life as a deaf person easier!

How? It became an accessibility tool.

It buzzes when cooked food is ready. No more overcooked food! It buzzes when someone is at the door. No more packages sitting on the porch for stealing. No more leaving my sister stranded on my doorstep when she dropped by unexpectedly.

No one advertises these benefits. Apple never marketed it that way. If they had, they may have gotten more buyers and fans.

These are examples of how someone who is different from you can innovate and come up with creative solutions.

We don’t always click when we meet someone. This isn’t because of a bad interview. We tend to click with those most like us. You’ll gain more when hiring someone different from you.

The thought of creating a more accessible hiring process feels overwhelming. Just start. How can you get started?

– Ask every candidate what accessibility they require.
– Verify the online application process is accessible for keyboard-only navigation and works with screen readers.

These are starting points. Keep working on it and adding more pieces. Progress over perfection. Just start.”

Again, yes to all of these things! I’m neurodivergent and have an auditory processing disorder. I wear noise-canceling headphones a good portion of the day. The Apple Watch’s haptic feedback has made my life so much easier too. And I want that for others. There’s so much we could do, as a society, to improve the quality of life for our fellow humans. But the pace of change is moving too slowly. More people are being forced to survive with less…while profit margins are on the rise for those at the top. We could all be thriving instead.

Author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on the left, a femme non-binary person with green hair, and the cover of their book on the right, The Future Is Disabled

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