Article URL: https://sightlessscribbles.com/disability-dongle/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183665 Points: 26 # Comments: 5

There is a feel-good genre of viral video that I call "The Inspiration Porn Industrial Complex." You know the one. It usually features a college engineering team, a dramatic piano soundtrack, and a disabled person strapped into a machine that looks like a Transformer having a panic attack. The caption usually reads: “Students invent stair-climbing wheelchair! The future is here!” The machine—let’s call it the iClimb 3000—usually costs as much as a Honda Civic. It weighs three hundred pounds. It makes a sound like a blender digesting a brick. And watching the video, all I can feel is the phantom sensation of being strapped into that thing, suspended five feet in the air at a forty-five-degree angle, praying the gyroscope doesn't glitch and toss me down a flight of concrete steps like a sack of potatoes. A Disability Dongle is a piece of technology that is flashy, expensive, and technically impressive, but utterly fails to solve the actual problem it claims to address. It is engineering designed for the abled gaze, not the disabled body. It is designed to win design awards, not to be used. Silicon Valley loves these things. They love the idea of "solving" disability with hardware. It fits their narrative. If disability is just a bug in the human code, then surely they can patch it with enough servos and lithium-ion batteries. But here is the reality they refuse to accept: My disability is not a tragedy of biology. It is a failure of infrastructure. 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. Concrete is not "disruptive." But a ramp works. It doesn’t run out of battery. It doesn’t require a software update. And crucially, it works for the parent with a stroller, the delivery guy with a hand truck, and the old man with bad knees. It is a universal solution.