In the fields of user experience and accessibility, everyone talks about the curb cut effect: Features that are added as accommodations for people with disabilities sometimes become widely useful and beloved. But not every accommodation becomes a “curb cut,” and I’ve been thinking about other patterns that come up when accommodations intersect with wider society.
The original Curb Cut Effect
The eponymous curb cut—the place at the intersection where the sidewalk slopes down to the street instead of just dropping off—is most obviously there to for wheelchair users. But it’s also great for people who are pulling a suitcase, runners who want to avoid jarring their ankles, and people who are walking their bikes. Universal captioning on TV, movies, and video is nominally for Deaf or hearing-impaired people, but captions are handy to anyone who’s watching TV in a noisy restaurant, or trying to make sense of a show with artistically muddy audio, or trying to watch a video at 3x speed and the audio is unintelligible. When we make products easier to use, or spaces easier to access, it’s not just some essentialized group of people with disabilities who benefit—accessibility is good for everyone.
Why the idea is useful: First, it breaks down the perspective of disability accommodations as being a costly charity where “we” spend resources to help “them.” Further, it breaks down the idea of disability as an essentialized, either-or, othered type of thing. Everybody has some level of difficulty accessing parts of the world some of the time, and improving accessibility is an inherent part of good design, good thinking, and good communication.[1] Plus, it’s cool to be aware of all the different ways we can come up with to hack our experience of the world around us!
I think there’s also a dark side to the idea—a listener could conclude that we wouldn’t invest in accommodations if they didn’t happen to help people without disabilities. A just and compassionate society designs for accessibility because we value everybody, not because it’s secretly self-interested.
That said, no society spends unlimited money to make literally every experience accessible to literally every human. There’s always a cost-benefit analysis and sometimes it might be borderline. In those cases there’s nothing wrong with saying that the benefits to the wider population tip the balance in favor of investing in accessibility. But when it comes to things as common as mobility impairments and as simple as curb cuts, I think it would be a moral no-brainer even if the accommodation had no value to most people.
The Handicapped Parking effect
This edgier sibling of the curb cut effect comes up when there’s a limited resource—like handicapped parking. There are only X parking spaces within Y feet of the entrance to the Chipotle, and if we allocate them to people who have trouble getting around, then everyone else has a longer average walk to their car.
That doesn’t mean it’s zero-sum: The existence of a handicapped parking spot that I can’t use might cost me an extra 20 seconds of walking, but save an extra five minutes of painful limping for the person who uses it.[2] This arrangement probably increases overall utility both in the short term (reduced total pain experienced by people walking from their cars) and in the long term (signaling the importance of helping everyone participate in society). But this is manifestly not a curb cut effect where everyone benefits: You have to decide who’s going to win and who’s going to lose, relative to an unregulated state where all parking is first-come-first-served.
Allocation can be made well or poorly. If the person designing parking (or the person designing the laws about designing parking) allocates too few handicapped spots, some people who have trouble getting around will suffer unnecessarily. If they allocate so many handicapped spots that there are usually lots of unused ones, then non-users pay the cost but no one benefits.
We can sometimes improve this with flexible allocation. For example, many bus and train systems have seats where anyone is allowed to sit, but if a person in a wheelchair comes in, they need to leave the seat so it can be converted to wheelchair parking[3].
Why this idea is useful: First of all, because it’s true. I’m a UX researcher and I’m as excited as anyone when a curb cut effect shows up, but we can’t insist everything works that way. Second, because recognizing cases of conflicting incentives is a starting point when we want to reduce conflict or polarization. Third, because if you’re a decision-maker of any kind, recognizing a handicapped parking situation means you have the opportunity to be conscious about allocation choices, or look for ways to make allocation smarter and more flexible.
The Braille Signage effect
I coined this name to refer to the lack of any pattern. Braille signage (and/or raised lettering on printed signs) is useful to people who can’t see well enough for visual text, yet almost invisible to people who can. It’s very elegant!
This is especially common in digital interfaces. For example, a person using a screen reader will be told that the picture above shows a sign reading “Unisex Toilet and Shower” in braille, with a hand touching the braille text to read it. Sighted people using a standard web browser would find that information redundant and distracting, but they never see it![4]
Why this idea is useful: First because it’s lovely and elegant, and second because it helps us think about ways to make more accommodations flexible in this way. It seems especially possible to do this with digital interfaces or augmented reality.
The Weighted Blanket effect
Weighted blankets used to be an expensive specialty item targeted squarely at children with sensory or emotion regulation issues. But at some point someone noticed that a lot of people found them calming, even if they didn’t “need” them (did you ever go to the dentist and wish you could take home that lead blanket they put on you for x-rays? I can’t be the only one). As Sarah Luterman describes:
When I bought my weighted blanket years ago, it cost a little less than $400, which I paid out of pocket. [...] I waited months for it to arrive. I remember excitedly opening the box, only to find a pamphlet addressed to a parent, covered in pictures of smiling, gap-toothed toddlers. It was unimaginable that an adult would buy a blanket for herself.
[...]
Now I can get a weighted blanket, in an adult size, on sale at Target for as low as $79.99.
Luterman goes on to call this a curb cut effect, but I don’t agree. For someone in a wheelchair, it’s immaterial whether I get any benefits from a curb cut. But for users of weighted blankets (or fidget spinners, or Good Grips utensils) mainstream adoption made things better.
One distinction is that curb cuts (and other curb cut effect exemplars like TV captioning) are structural adaptations that are either literally or effectively capacity-unlimited. Build them once and everyone benefits (ie, they’re a public good). If the accommodation is an item or product that individuals get for themselves, then wider adoption leads to economies of scale, niche marketing, and generally more thoughtful design work.
This might not be true the product is sold openly, like a weighted blanket, but is actually a limited resource, like handicapped parking. For example, continuous glucose monitors make life vastly easier for people with diabetes who can get better data with fewer finger pricks, and can get automated warnings if they’re going hypoglycemic. They’re also useful for people approaching prediabetes, and a sick toy for biohackers who like optimization. Occasionally there are shortages and people in the first group get outraged about people in the latter groups taking monitors away from people who need them. I’ve never seen any evidence that the number of biohacker users could possibly make a dent in the overall supply, but it could be true: medical device production is strictly regulated such that market forces can’t easily lead to an increase in supply. The regulations are probably a net good, but they do create an artificial Handicapped Parking Effect.
Why this idea is useful: First because in some ways, it’s even more awesome than the curb cut.
Second, these situations can help de-stigmatize certain accessibility needs or self-care practices. When “normal” people recognize how calming a fidget spinner or a weighted blanket can be, maybe they get a little more insight into neurodivergent people whose sensory soothing needs used to seem alien.
Finally—as Luterman points out in the article above—stories about people from a majority culture adopting a practice used by a minority can also ping on some people’s “cultural appropriation” alarms. It’s good to notice when that’s not the right way to look at things—sometimes the result is a win-win![5]
The Clapper Effect
For folks younger than I am, the Clapper was a primitive home automation device that let you turn lights on or off by clapping. At one time it was the go-to example for ridiculous, frivolous gadgets sold in TV ads. And to be fair, the commercials were kind of asking for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRWtFVFSx5I
… but I suspect most people who laughed at it weren’t imagining how it felt to be someone who takes several minutes to get out of bed and reach the light switch, or whose knees flare with pain when they squat down to reach an outlet near the ground (the people who made the Clapper knew, though—note how old most of the people in the commercials are).
The same is true of other products that might immediately seem ridiculous, like banana slicers, sock-putter-onners, and egg-crackers. There’s been a lot written about this, and as far as I know my main intellectual contribution is giving it a clever name, and connecting it to other, more ennobled examples of accommodative products crossing over with the broader population. The award for most trenchant phrasing certainly goes to s.e. smith, writing in Vox, “If you can’t use your hands to open a jar of pasta sauce, does that mean you should live in an institution?”
Why this idea is useful: I’m not going to say we must stop laughing at quirky, niche problem-solving products, but maybe we could laugh about their clever insights and the scope of human ingenuity instead of laughing at some imagined doofus who uses this stuff even though it has no practical utility for them. And, like with the weighted blanket, maybe we could more generally start to de-stigmatize the entire concept of need and accommodation, and recognize that some of this stuff is actually pretty useful.[6]
The Orange in a Box effect
Sometimes people don’t just laugh at accommodations. Sometimes they get really mean.
It did eventually make it into the discourse that pre-peeled fruit was a godsend for people with arthritis or limited hand mobility who missed being able to eat fresh fruit, but by that time Whole Foods had pulled the product, describing it as “a mistake”.
from https://www.instagram.com/disabled.daisy/
But… do I think everybody who bought pre-peeled oranges[7] needed them in order to access fresh fruit? No. Do I think some of them were wastefully avoiding trivial inconveniences and/or improperly weighting the environmental externalities of plastic usage? Yeah, probably. And do I think society as a whole would benefit from discouraging pre-peeled, plastic-boxed fruit as the standard for food sales? Also yes.
So the orange in a box effect is a curb cut effect for any individual who uses it, but at a large scale starts to impose collective costs… or at least, people think it does.
What should we do about orange-in-a-box effects? I strongly believe in this guiding principle: Don’t be a dick. That means not shaming someone who looks like they don’t need an accommodation, but might have invisible or intermittent physical impairments or sensory sensitivities. It means not piling on someone who maybe could chop their own vegetables, but they’re living a hard life or battling depression or otherwise on their last centispoon, and the minor convenience is keeping them from melting down. And since you can’t always recognize who these people are, that means, just don’t be a dick to anybody.
There are lots of other health and environmental topics this applies to, like getting people to take the stairs instead of the elevator, to give up plastic straws, or to drive less. In aggregate, they’re good ideas and there would be widespread benefits to moving the baseline in their direction. In any individual case, it’s impossible to evaluate another person’s needs, costs, and experiences, and trying to police one another’s behavior is a futile and self-destructive rage trap.
Having been a workplace health researcher, I believe it is possible to encourage healthy and prosocial behaviors without stigmatizing people for whom they’re excessively costly or unattainable. We can make access to stairwells easy and attractive, without making elevator access a walk of shame. We can find ways to improve access to healthy food without trying to ban anything “unhealthy”.
It’s not even always that hard. For example, the heavily culture-war-ified “plastic straw ban” in California has a workaround for people who need plastic straws to eat or drink: restaurants are allowed/required to provide plastic straws if you ask for one. Of course, that only works if restaurants comply and if bystanders don’t take it upon themselves to shame the person making the request. So seriously, don’t be a dick.
Why this idea is useful: To remind us that designing for behavior change and societal improvements is possible, and important—but that doing it from a perspective of stigma or individual shaming can get really awful.
Conflicting accommodation needs
Finally, a comment on something I don’t have a clever name for: Sometimes an accommodation interacts, not with the population at large, but with another specific group’s accommodations. For example, how loud should public address systems be? You can imagine turning up the volume so that things are audible by people with hearing impairments, and then making the environment intolerable for people with auditory sensitivities. On a social level, you can have a group that adopts very exacting or elaborate norms for communication styles in order to avoid alienating or triggering vulnerable people, but then becomes unfriendly to neurodivergent people who have difficulty picking up all the rules.
Another example came from my partner who described a class where her professor had difficulty absorbing written information so he took all the words off of his slides! This no doubt improved his comprehension but was not great for students who absorb information in language better than using pictures with an ephemeral soundtrack.
Why this idea is useful: Because there might be a clever solution! Good sound engineering can probably produce announcements that are loud but not not distorted/screeching/irritating in ways that hurt people’s ears. An instructional designer could create slides with a parallel text track. Groups can enforce norms around behavior that permit people to build trust even when they communicate differently.
If you’re the person designing a system, this is a reminder not to optimize too far for the single set of needs that’s most salient to you. If you benefit from the current set of accommodations and someone is asking for changes, it’s a reminder to check whether they’re trying to get their own needs met before you treat them as the enemy. And if you’re currently ill-served by the system, it’s a reminder to look for solutions that don’t end up excluding someone else.[8]
Conclusion
These are some ways accommodations can interact with society at large that are importantly different from the curb cut effect. I introduced the ideas in an order that made narrative sense to me, but it might be most useful to think about them this way:
First, a trio of scenarios in which an accommodation proves helpful to more people than it was originally intended for:
The Curb Cut Effect: When something designed as an accommodation for a particular group becomes widely useful
The Weighted Blanket Effect: When a curb cut effect also leads to innovation or broader availability, creating additional benefits to the original users
The Orange-in-a-Box Effect: When a curb cut effect has potential externalities or societal costs in aggregate. It requires thoughtful design to avoid stigmatizing or disadvantaging the people who have reasonable needs for it or get great benefits from it.
Second, a trio in which the wider society’s interactions are neutral or negative:
The Braille Signage Effect: When an accommodation can be useful to some people and invisible or zero-cost to everyone else (which is also a great win-win situation, even though it’s on the “neutral” list).
The Clapper Effect: When an accommodation isn’t immediately recognizable as an accommodation, leading non-users to think it’s ridiculous. This might be a missed curb cut / weighted blanket opportunity, but it’s not inherently bad—as long as it doesn’t lead to bad treatment of the users.
The Handicapped Parking Effect: When accommodation requires a limited resource, and not everyone can get the best outcome. The amount you allocate to accessibility, and the way you make it available to people, can make a big difference in aggregate good.
A recurring theme: you can’t always tell what’s an accommodation, you can’t always tell who has a disability, and you can’t always tell what ridiculous-seeming contraption might be useful to you, now or in the future. So we return to some very general design advice: Be curious about what’s going on, assume that people have some kind of reason for the things they do, and never stop believing that we can find ways to solve problems!
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This post talks about accommodations from the perspective of a non-user. That isn’t meant to assume that people with disabilities aren’t involved in these conversations or in the work of designing for their needs! But no one has every possible accommodation need, so even people with disabilities will have most of their encounters with accommodations from the perspective of someone who doesn’t need the particular accommodation in question.
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Or for past me, on a couple of occasions when I’ve been injured, or for future me, who despite the efforts of my transhumanist friends will probably have increasing trouble getting around comfortably over the next 10-20 years.
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I don’t know how it feels to be the person in the wheelchair in this scenario. Do they often feel embarrassed or worry about attracting hostility from the people who had to move? In many years of riding the bus I never saw anyone overtly complain or signal annoyance when the driver asked them to move, but I’m sure it happens sometimes. It might be more delicate when it comes to vehicles where people with mobility impairments can board on their own and have to interact directly with the people who are supposed to give up their seats.
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Unless they’re unable to load images or are using a text-based web browser, in which case the descriptions are helpful—another curb cut!
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There are a few things I don’t agree with Luterman about, especially her blanket dismissal of any kind of disabled culture appropriation. But I think the main idea of the article is on target.
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This is one foible I don’t consider myself too prone to: I have no trouble getting out of bed, but I have a home automation setup that lets me turn off all the lights from bed and I feel pleased as punch every time I use it.
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They’re not even oranges, they’re mandarins! Even easier to peel!
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… though I’m cautious about pushing so hard for Chesterton’s Fence that it ends up discouraging people from speaking up for themselves without a huge burden of research. Maybe the advice is just to be curious and open to hearing about others’ needs, even while fighting for your own.
One thing that you largely ignore in this post is the cost of creating such accommodations.
I will give a couple of examples. The first concerns a “curb cut” scenario; the second is about a “Braille signage” scenario.
Making public spaces uglier on the public’s dime
Not far from me is a highway, which has a residential neighborhood on one side of it and a waterfront promenade on the other. In several places there are pedestrian bridges that cross the highway. One of these bridges (which doubles as a ramp onto the highway, in one direction) is currently being rebuilt; the project nears completion (indeed the bridge is already usable, as the remaining work is mostly to do with railings and such), so it is now possible to see, and judge, what the completed construction will be like.
Now, prior to this project, this was a perfectly functional bridge, which was not in any way damaged, decrepit, crumbling, failing, dangerous, or even unsightly. There was nothing wrong with the bridge whatsoever—except that it wasn’t wheelchair-accessible. Hence, the rebuilding.
The new bridge is much less convenient for non-disabled pedestrians (one must walk thrice as far to get from one side to the other, due to the lengthy sloped ramps which the new design uses). It is more dangerous to pedestrians of all kinds, due to the incorporation of a bizarre roundabout in the design of the new ramp. It is much uglier and more obtrusive; it takes more of the promenade away from greenery. The bridge couldn’t be used while it was being rebuilt, of course (the project has taken considerable time, as such things do). And, of course, the rebuilding project is taxpayer-funded.
As far as I can tell, this is a case of me paying (via taxes) for my life to be made strictly worse than it was before.
Helping users who seem strangely uninterested in solving their problems
Web designers/developers routinely hear that we should make our websites accessible to users of screen readers. The specific things that must be done to accomplish this are sometimes reasonable (add
altattributes to images)… but often aren’t.For instance, I have been told that using soft hyphens as hyphenation hints is bad, because it causes screen readers to get confused and pronounce all the words incorrectly. Alright. Well, why is that my problem? If a screen reader does this, that sounds like a bug in the screen reader program. So the users of that program should talk to the developers of said program; or, if that does not help, switch to a different screen reader. (There seem to be quite a few options!)
Similarly, I’ve been told that using the
titleattribute (on links, say) is bad, because screen readers will read out the value of said attribute, which is usually undesirable. Again: why is this the web dev’s problem? Fix the screen reader, or use a better one!And yet “accessibility advocates” seem much more interested in hectoring web developers about all the myriad inconvenient, time-consuming, headache-inducing ways in which we must cater to the strange (and strangely persistent—some of these supposed limitations of screen readers have been around for decades, it seems, despite the plenitude of offerings, of which a good number are even free software licensed and can presumably be patched, forked, etc.!) peculiarities of screen readers than they are in… fixing the screen readers.
“Every web developer must remember to do all of the following long list of specific things—many of which take time and development resources, and substantively restrict your options for implementing certain features or solving certain problems—in order to support users of screen readers” is a demand for a very large number of people to contribute unpaid work (and to keep doing so, indefinitely) to solve a problem which could be solved much more easily (with a solution that needs to be implemented just once) by a much smaller number of precisely the people who are making the demand.
This is clearly a negative-sum solution.
I haven’t worked on front end for over a decade, so I am not familiar with recent development, but from the days I did, I remember adding the alt tag to images, but I never heard anything about soft hyphens.
Could it possibly be that the good and bad advice does not come from the same sources? And that we should listen to some sources and ignore the others? I can imagine that a set of advice that was reasonable at the beginning can grow through the game of telephone.
(Something similar happened with SEO advice, which started with “if you use keywords in the URL, Google will prioritize your page for the keyword, so use the page title in the URL rather than id=123”, and quickly mutated to “if you use id=123 in your URL, Google will refuse to index your page” that was obvious nonsense, but you could find it in 99% of articles about SEO. Or all that stuff “required by” GDPR.)
For example, page Accessibility Principles on W3C homepage does not mention hyphens.
No, the lack of screen reader support for soft hyphens is a real thing, with actual user complaints behind it. Besides, that guidelines page doesn’t mention
titleattributes either; those are only very general guidelines, lacking details.As far as ignoring some advice—sure. I ignore all of it, personally.
Even googling for “accessibility soft hyphen” did not return much. The #1 result on my computer says: “Well, screen readers mispronounce a lot of the words in a document or on a website. Should we just eliminate words entirely to prevent the problem? … The answer: It’s the responsibility of screen reader manufacturers to do a better job of recognizing and pronouncing hyphenated words.”
So it is does not seem like a frequent advice / complaint.
Come now; you can do better than that.
A search for
screen reader "soft hyphen"easily finds this:https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/9343
A search for
"screen reader" "soft hyphen"easily finds these:https://www.reddit.com/r/accessibility/comments/lku7kq/comment/go5kkwy/
https://lists.apache.org/thread/8bjr2lxhy3jj4vqrqzdp98hlndbt3sol
https://github.com/e2b/wordpress-hyphenator
The last link goes to a page that says:
The Reddit link goes to a post that has 1 karma, where 1 user suggests to remove the soft hyphens, 1 user disagrees… and that’s all.
In the Github debate, most people seem to agree that it is a bug of screen readers.
Only in the Apache link, someone recommends to do something about the hyphens. Even there, it seems to happen in context of discussing FOP, which is a PDF file generator. So as I understand it, it is not about “every web developer should adapt to the bugs of screen readers” but rather “authors of a PDF generator have an opportunity to compensate for the bugs of screen readers by automatically adding some PDF equivalent of ‘alt text’ containing the unhyphenated version of the word”. It still means compensating for someone else’s bug, but it’s a hack you only need to do once.
I think you have misunderstood my claims and my point.
The links I have posted were to demonstrate the fact that screen readers having a problem with soft hyphens is a real thing that really happens. (You seemed to be skeptical of this.)
That developers are sometimes told to not use soft hyphens, on account of this issue, is something for which I have and need no links, because, as I said initially, this is something which I, personally, have been told, by self-described accessibility advocates and/or disabled users, in discussions of actual websites which I have worked on. (You could disbelieve me on this, I suppose…)
And whether this specific advice/request/demand happens often is inconsequential. It is one example of a class of such things, which collectively one ends up hearing quite a bit, if one does serious web development work these days. The
titleattribute example was another. I could also have mentioned the deeply confusing and bizarre ARIA attributes.Again: any specific such issue comes up only occasionally. But if I were to try to build a website such that screen readers have no problems with it, I would have to deal with many such issues—most of which could be fixed much more easily by the developers of the screen reader software… but aren’t. And the attitude of most accessibility advocates I’ve encountered has been that I should indeed take that (“build a website such that screen readers have no problems with it”) as my goal.
Achmiz is a bit salty because the issue came up occasionally with Gwern.net and other sites, and it’s striking that it came up at all because generally, even if there is a severe problem with a website, “they will never tell you”. If you never ran into it, that might have as much to do with you not bothering with justification or typographic niceties like fixing linebreaks with manual soft hyphen use.
I once spent nearly a month working on accessibility bugs at my last job and therefore found the screen reader part of this comment incredibly insightful and somewhat cathartic.
I don’t think this is unrelated to the “Deaf” community’s “hearing aids/cochlear implants are genocide” position. I suspect getting other people to submit to their arbitrary whims is the point, and the “problems” are in fact the means to that end.
I would guess it’s because the Americans with Disabilities Act provides a private right of action against businesses whose websites are not accessible to people with disabilities, but doesn’t say anything about screen reader software bugs.
That’s basically agreement with my “getting other people to submit to their arbitrary whims,” isn’t it?
I would guess most of them just want their screen readers to work, but a badly written law assigns the responsibility for fixing it to the wrong party, probably due to excessive faith in Coase’s theorem.
Yes, that may be part of it. I suspect, however, that in this case it is a slightly different (though somewhat related) dynamic that’s mostly responsible.
“Accessibility advocate” is qualification which leads naturally to “accessibility expert”; and there is a certain amount of demand for such people (e.g., as consultants on projects which are required by regulations to be “accessible”, or which otherwise benefit from being able to claim to be “accessible”). Such people have an incentive to establish their credentials and their credibility by talking about what web developers must do in order to make their websites accessible, to frequently mention accessibility in Hacker News discussions, to write blog posts about accessibility best practices, etc.
They do not have any incentive whatever to help to fix bugs in screen reader programs. What would that do for them? The better such programs work, the less work there is for these people to do, the less there is to talk about on the subject of how to make your website accessible (“do nothing special, because screen readers work very well and will simply handle your website properly without you having to do anything or think about the problem at all” hardly constitutes special expertise…), the less demand there is for them on the job market…
None of this helps actual vision-impaired users, of course. It’s a classic principal-agent problem.
You don’t even need to describe this as a baptist-and-bootleggers problem to explain most of the lack of actual bug fixing.
A frontend developer who runs into accessibility-related browser bugs all day and gets very good at working around them and publicizing how to work around them is unlikely to be a competent C++ developer who is capable of going into browser-engine codebases and actually fixing the bugs.
Uh-huh, and what about the people who aren’t front-end developers, either, but only “advocates”, “experts” (but not the kind that write code), etc.?
To help with projects like “an open-source screen reader”, it is not necessary to be able to write C++ (or whatever) code. You can also:
file well-written and well-documented bug reports, including testing with various setups, detailed replication steps, etc.
survey alternate software options, cataloguing which of them correctly handle the relevant test cases, and how
find people who do have the relevant expertise and may be willing to contribute code, and connect them with the maintainers
contribute funding to the project and/or help to convince other people to contribute funding
other (i.e., “reach out to the maintainer(s) to ask them what would help get the bug fixed, then do that”)
If even one out of every ten accessibility advocates/experts/etc. did these things, then all these bugs would’ve been fixed years ago.
Maybe you’re aware of an OOM more accessibility advocates than I am, but I come across all sorts of well-written blog posts explaining this or that bug, which browser/etc. it happens in, and how to work around it. That’s most of the bullet points, although it might not be in the bug tracker of choice for the project.
What people aren’t doing, as far as I have seen, is starting pooled-funds bug bounties for these things. People pass the collection plate for childhood cancer, especially since I’m told that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, but not bugfixing.
This is not insensible: all sorts of people tend to be unwilling to set aside the cost of a new cell phone to fix one bug apiece that, generally speaking, is encountered in one’s day job.
And there are a lot of accessibility bugs out there, some of which are quite old. I can only assume that accessibility bugs aren’t treated massively more seriously than anything else in the WebKit or Firefox Bugzillas.
While the world would be a better place if bug-bounty collection plates were more popular, I can see why they’re not as popular as I’d like.
I only know the very basics of design for screen readers so I’ll stick to talking about your first example. I agree this isn’t a case of the curb cut effect, because the curb cut effect by definition refers to an accommodation creating benefits for a broader set of people than it was originally intended for. Part of my goal was to make it clear that we can’t always expect that to happen. If an accommodation makes life worse for non-users then it’s at best what I’d call a handicapped parking effect, meaning that designers have to make a hard tradeoff. It’s also possible that the people working on your bridge just didn’t think about it or didn’t try very hard, in which case it’s not any kind of cleverly-named effect, it’s just bad design. (but I also don’t know anything about civil engineering, so I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion in any particular case.)
As for financial cost: This post was meant to be about usage patterns around the accommodations themselves, so it doesn’t go into decisions about whether to invest in any particular accommodation in the first place (except for the aside about curb cut effects increasing the total benefits). But I agree that financial cost is real and important. If someone believes that accessibility either is a fundamental moral imperative or has diffuse benefits to all of society, that should lead them to argue that it’s worth paying high costs to make things more accessible, but it shouldn’t let them get away with ignoring cost/benefit thinking entirely.
Right. The thing is (and this is what I was getting at), it seems to me that disability accommodations are often argued for on the basis of the “curb cut effect” concept, but in fact such accommodations turn out to be handicapped parking effects—at best! It seems to me, in fact, that disability accommodations quite often make life tangibly worse for many more people than those whose lives they improve.
(By the way, here’s something which I find to be… interesting, let’s say. It’s often claimed that curb cut effects are ubiquitous. Yet if you ask for three examples of such things, people tend to have trouble producing them. One’s a freebie: actual curb cuts. Two, also easy, there’s the standard-issue second example: closed captions (although I am not entirely convinced that they’re strictly positive-or-neutral either, but never mind that). But what’s the third? After some straining, you might get something lame like “high contrast on websites” (what websites…?) or “accessibility features in games” (what features…?). At that point the well of examples runs dry.)
Sure they didn’t. Why should they? It’s not like anyone is building the thing out of a purely altruistic desire to help disabled people. Someone somewhere passed a law, someone else in another place wrote some regulations, a third person somewhere else wrote some funding proposal, a budget was approved, jobs were created, political capital was made, etc., etc.
But that’s how it almost always is. Almost nobody ever really thinks about it or tries very hard. This entire domain is absolutely jam-packed with principal-agent problems. That’s the whole problem.
From the tone of your text I feel like you’re expressing disagreement, but as far as I can tell we’re in agreement that not every accommodation is a win-win curb cut effect. I’m a lot more enthusiastic about the good outcomes of many accommodations than you are but I fervently agree that 1) sometimes there are negative tradeoffs and 2) it’s harmful and dogmatic, not to mention infuriating, when people insist that this never happens or that negative consequences to non-users are unimportant. Am I missing someplace where my post dismisses the issues you’re talking about?
Not explicitly, no.
I would characterize the difference in our views (as I understand your views) as having primarily to do with expectations about the distribution of outcomes w.r.t. whether any given accommodation will be positive-sum, zero-sum, or negative-sum (and the details of how the benefits and harms will be distributed).
If one believes that the distribution is skewed heavily toward positive-sum outcomes, and zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes are rare or even essentially of negligible incidence, then the emphasis and focus of your post basically makes sense; in such a case, overlooking opportunities to provide accommodations is the primary way in which we end up with less value than we might have done.
If one believes that the distribution contains a substantial component of zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes (and, especially, if one believes that there are common categories of situations wherein a negative-sum outcome may be the default), then the emphasis and focus of your post is essentially mis-aimed, and the lack of discussion of costs, of harms, etc., is a substantial oversight in any treatment of the topic.
That said, I of course agree with the basic thesis which you express in the post’s title, and which you develop in the post, i.e. that not everything is a curb cut effect and that there are different dynamics that arise from different sorts of accommodations. You can think of my top-level comment in this thread as additive, so to speak—addressing a lacuna, rather than directly challenging any specific claim in your post. (My other top-level comment does directly challenge some of your claims, of course. But that’s a different subtopic.)
That makes sense, thanks. I should think more about cases where design for accessibility just generally makes something worse. You could shoehorn that into the handicapped parking paradigm but it’s not really the best fit—the challenge there isn’t allocating a limited resource, though there probably is an underlying limitation in terms of budget or attention. Those are frustrating because usually you can imagine a thoughtful solution that would make everyone happy, but you can’t count on it actually working out that way.
This seems like a good place to ask something I’ve always wondered about Braille on elevated signs: how do blind people… know where the sign is and that they should touch it to read the Braille on it?
They obviously can’t see the sign, and it’s not on the floor where any cane or foot might touch it normally, and the signs emit no noise they can hear to be alerted about it, and while sign locations may be standardized they do not appear to be so universally present (like light switches) that groping around blindly on the walls of every corridor would be reasonable to do everywhere you go in case there is a sign. They would appear to be about as useless to blind people as Braille-less signs, and for the same reason.
And if you have to ask someone sighted if/where any Braille-containing sign was, then the sign would seem to be largely pointless in that scenario too. (“Excuse me, where’s the men’s bathroom sign?” “Oh, it’s over there, 5 feet to your left, forward 10 feet, up 4.5 feet on the wall, right next to the unisex bathroom door. Grope around for a while, you can’t miss it. But try not to hit anyone walking in and out of our bathroom.” “Great, thanks. Incidentally, what does the sign say?” “It says ‘unisex bathroom’.”)
I’ve only ever read a little bit about this but my understanding is:
Much of what you say is right, and braille signage is not a perfect and comprehensive solution to accessibility for all blind people, but
It’s still useful because public spaces are designed with a lot of regularities that make it not-that-hard to predict where signage will be, especially given that
Many blind people are unbelievably good at exploring unfamiliar spaces, relative to what a sighted person might imagine.
Speaking of which, I wonder if multi-modal transformers have started being used by blind people yet. Since we have models that can describe images, I wonder if it would be useful for blind people to have a device with a camera and a microphone and a little button one can press to get it to describe what the camera is seeing. Surely there are startups working on this?
Yes. See Be my AI.
Why the retrofuturistic description of a smartphone?
Cool, Facebook is also on this apparently: https://x.com/PicturesFoIder/status/1840677517553791440
Actually, that is a common misconception. Most “blind” people are not fully blind (based on a few google searches only 10-15% are fully blind) and can make out rough shapes and objects. They could be able to identify a rectangular sign, but might not be able to recognize the written symbols and thus the Braille is helpful.
This does not demonstrate that handicapped parking spots aren’t zero-sum (or, indeed, even that they’re not negative-sum). Merely comparing the advantage to one handicapped person of parking in a reserved spot, and the disadvantage to one non-handicapped person of having one less spot (in an optimal location) available, is not enough; you must multiply both quantities by the number of instances affected (respectively, the number of occasions on which a handicapped person uses one of the reserved spots, and the number of occasions on which a non-handicapped person uses one of the regular spots), and compare those quantities.
It is very, very easy for an accommodation like this to end up being negative-sum.
To be able to use a handicapped parking space, it is not sufficient to be injured; one must also apply for a handicapped parking permit, which is not a trivial process.
I have, several times in the past, been injured in such a way that I would have benefited from being able to use a handicapped parking spot. On zero of those occasions was it even remotely practical to apply for, and receive, a permit that would enable me to do so. Because of this, while handicapped parking spaces could have helped me on a number of occasions, they have actually helped me never.
I agree that allocation is hard and in particular that if regulations overboard with trying to ensure that there will always be more handicapped spots than there are people who need them, there’s a point at which adding spots becomes net negative. As for the point about injuries, you’re right—I wasn’t thinking clearly there and it doesn’t apply, at least not in the current US implementation of handicapped parking.
Indeed. The difficult question, of course, is: what exactly constitutes “going overboard”, here? How often is it acceptable for a handicapped person to need a reserved parking spot, but not be able to get one (because they’re all full)? Whatever answer we come up with, I sure don’t envy the politician who has to defend that answer to the public!
But also, how would we come up with an answer? (Would we have to go all the way to fully general utilitarianism, where we calculate how many utils are lost by the average disabled person who has to park in a regular spot, and how many utils are lost by the average non-disabled person who has to park slightly further away due to the presence of empty reserved spots? How would we account for the effect of the presence and number of reserved spots on people’s behavior?)
How do these decisions actually get made? Like, in real life—how is it determined that there shall be this many handicapped spots in a shopping center parking lot?
In other words—you write:
Do you know of any resources that go into detail on this? Are there such?
I didn’t know much about this subject when I made the original post, because I was interested in handicapped parking as a design pattern rather than a specific topic, but it turns out that the ADA has a very clear answer: 2-4% of all spaces, with a minimum of 1 space.
I don’t know how they came up with that percentage or if there’s any mechanism for updating it based on the prevalence of mobility limitations. Requirements are considerably higher for hospitals and rehab facilities, which does seem sensible.
This is a topic I’d like to learn more about sometime. I imagine it causes some tension for urbanist types because they tend to love accessibility but hate parking space mandates.
One curb cut example that has come up lately is that image captions/descriptions, particularly alt text, may wind up being a curb cut for non-blind people. While a normal person doesn’t benefit at all from an alt text under pretty much any circumstance where the alt text goes beyond a normal image caption (if a caption is necessary at all), what they’ve been really useful for is training AI.
All the stuff like CLIP or Stable Diffusion or GPT-4-v/o all depend heavily on the alt text as a large fraction of their text data. Given how little use they are normally, most of that alt text would not exist except for accessibility impulses.
And of course, those systems then benefit normal people in a myriad of ways—everywhere that any kind of image or video is ever processed or used in the future. Even if you yourself are not creating generative images or analyzing images or using improved OCR or uploading images to ChatGPT/Claude for some task, you’re still indirectly benefiting from better Youtube search powered by video embeddings etc.
And it is a virtuous loop because now you can use those systems to make alt texts much cheaper. I’ve experimented a bit with using GPT-4-V to caption images on Gwern.net lacking alt descriptions (doing it iteratively to ensure it catches details), and it works pretty well, and while I personally do not directly benefit much from better alt text systems directly, I do benefit indirectly for similar reasons—by encoding images into alt-texts, those alt-texts would make my website corpus more usable with other systems: now there’s text to be grepped, embedded, read by LLMs, etc. (And this would help other systems I might like to make, like my Utext document format would benefit from powerful image<->text AI capabilities to allow things like cheap usecase-customized ASCII art.)
Not a deep insight, Just to add an example to the curb-cut effect I experienced that went from mild reluctance to enthusiastic acceptance.
Background: My son is hard of hearing (almost deaf). The health insurance paid for a system of microphones that connect to his hearing aid /CI and also to very high quality speakers in the back. The whole thing cost several thousands euros. The school also has really good acoustic panels in the ceiling (this schools admits one or two hard-of-hearing kids a year, out of about 120).
First reactions. Some teachers looked like “do I have to do this?” Meaning wearing the mic, learning how to use it. Other parents complaint in the fist parents meetings, asking “Why does my kid need to speak into a microphone?”, presuming it is unnatural and it does not lead to good class discussion. “What about the shy kids?”
One month in, everyone loves it. The teachers love it because their voices get amplified with high fidelity. Students like that the system forces them to speak one at a time and everyone gets their turn. In addition, every child in the back can hear what the shy child in the front is mumbling when they contribute to class discussion. Overall, the learning experience is much better. So much better, that some teachers actually commented that they would like the system in every classroom. Without the hearing aid tech, such a system would cost about 2000 euros. But it cannot be installed, because the improved learning is unquantifiable and the insurance would only pay for it if there is a child with a hearing disability.
That’s an amazing story, thanks for sharing! I would not have expected that outcome, and I hope the folks in charge take other lessons / hypotheses from it too.
A few random things:
Seems to me that some accommodations are costly (in money), and some are merely “you have to remember to do that” (but can be costly in money if you forget to do that, and try to fix it afterwards). I think the curb cut is the latter—it will cost you if you want to add it to an existing sidewalk, but has no/little extra cost if you are making a new sidewalk.
Captions are also good for translating. Automated translation is still imperfect but better than nothing; and it is easier for a human to make captions in another language by translating the original ones rather than by starting from scratch.
The obsession with plastic straws seems silly to me, because if you just want one drink then the paper ones are okay, and if you want to use them repeatedly at home, then the washable silicon ones are the right choice. I guess this is just a question of time until people get used to it.
Could the wrappers for oranges be made from something biodegradable?
Thanks for the summary / classification at the end!
Good point that building for accessibility is often much cheaper than retrofitting for it!
For every plastic straw alternative, I’ve read a harrowing explanation of why it’s awful for some particular kind of person. eg, this article
It’s worth coming up with piecemeal solutions to each of these problems. But I think for this and many other cases we still need a universal fallback of, “if someone says they need [specific low-cost accommodation] in order to function normally, let them have it and don’t give them shit about it.”
I find it difficult to imagine a person who will bite through the paper straw but wouldn’t bite through the thin plastic straw.
I couldn’t bite through a plastic straw if I tried. I’d have to gnaw on it for quite a while. I don’t think this is a crux or anything but if you are able to bite through a plastic straw, and the straws you get are the same as the ones I’m used to, then I’m impressed.