MIT Technology Review – July/August 2023: ‘The Accessibility issue’ features Connecting climate change and the digital divide. A blind educator working to make images accessible to everyone. How the app meant to streamline immigration at the border may be making things worse. Plus regulating robotaxis, Metaverse attorneys, and the forgotten history of highway photologs.

The future is disabled

Looking down a neighborhood street where a man in wheelchair has crossed with wife and daughter.

We need to take steps toward a more inclusive future—one that we all can inhabit.

“Technology,” wrote the late historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg Jr., “is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.” It’s an observation that often doesn’t stick with people as they think about technologies related to accessibility.

The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility. What happened?

a tiny person in the center of a maze protruding from the screen of an iPad

For people who can’t speak, there has been depressingly little innovation in technology that helps them communicate.

A piece of hardware, however impressively designed and engineered, is only as valuable as what a person can do with it. After the iPad’s release, the flood of new, easy-to-use AAC apps that LoStracco, Shevchenko, and their clients wanted never came.