My 22 year old daughter has an extra handle on the steering wheel of her car called a “Spinner Knob”. It’s a modification that allows the driver to interact with the steering wheel without having to grip it. It’s a common adaption for drivers who have difficulty using their hands.
A spinner knob.
My daughter inherited the car from her grandmother who still loved driving in her 80s. Despire power steering, her grandmother still needed extra help due to arthritis and loss of strength in her hands.
Thankfully my daughter has no mobility problems but she loves the Spinner Knob. I sometimes drive her car and I love it too. It’s like having bonus maneuverability power plus it feels satisfying tangible to use. It reminds me of the fun I had driving forklifts and dumper trucks in a student summer job I had.
Subtitles - an everyday innovation
Many people won't have used a Spinner Knob but almost everyone knows about closed captions or subtitles as we call them in the UK.
Closed captioning isn’t new of course. It was first demonstrated in the US at the First National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1971. The BBC in the UK was the first broadcaster to include closed captions (subtitles) in 1979 using the Teletext framework. (Teletext was an amazing invention BTW. It was like lofi web browsing on analogue TVs before the age of the internet. The French had Minitel which was even better).
Closed captioning is universally useful. My wife and I increasingly use it to watch TV when the action or dialogue is hard to follow or when passively watching in bed. Kids love it too. Young people are almost four times more likely than older viewers to watch TV shows with subtitles, despite having fewer hearing problems, according to research by a captioning charity.
August de los Reyes, pioneer of inclusive design
August de los Reyes is someone you should know, a pioneer of inclusive design. Whilst at Microsoft leading design on the Xbox, he fell out of bed, fracturing his back and confining him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. This experience radicalised his view of design.
He began to see disabilities as failures of the built environment to accommodate people’s ever-changing needs. As he so eloquently and succinctly described it, “Disability is designed”.
Sadly Augusto died of COVID complications in December 2021. But he leaves an incredible legacy of deep thinking. In one of his talks, he blows our minds on the secret origins of everyday innovations.
Early email protocols were invented by Vint Cerf who was hard of hearing so that he could communicate more seamlessly with his wife who is deaf.. The keyboard was invented by an Italian aristocrat for his lover, a Contessa who was blind, so she could write letters without assistance.
I recommend you watch the whole talk. He goes on to describe how all of these innovations are essentially love stories from inventors to people they cared about, all of whom had accessibility constraints that were instrumental to the resulting innovation.
Reframing accessibility
How would you quantify the lifetime value of email? Of the keyboard? They are priceless just like our health and mobility. And yet accessibility is all too often framed in terms of cost, whether it's financial, attentional or opportunity.
The inclusive design which Augusto championed is just one attempt to reframe accessibility by looking at the bigger picture - the value of designing things the right way by including a diversity of perspectives upfront.
But there shouldn’t be a need to reframe an idea that has resulted in so much unquantifiable value over time. We shouldn't simply accept the cost argument. Instead we should talk about innovation and the infinite value of design constraints in creating innovative products and services.
Accessibility = innovation.