Imagine how disabled people can, rather than assuming we can’t

When I was a teenager, a professor my parents knew heard that I wanted to major in physics. Because I am blind, he told my parents that wouldn’t be possible: “Physicists,” he informed us, “have to be able to write on blackboards.”

I went on to earn a physics degree from UC Berkeley, proving him wrong about blackboards. But his warning, meant to highlight the hurdles of inaccessible technology, inadvertently highlighted an even larger and more pervasive barrier: ableism.

Ableism is the societal package of preconceptions, assumptions and negative stereotypes about disability that pervade our educational system, our hiring practices and our physical and digital infrastructure. My career as a scientist and an inventor of accessible technology for people with visual and other disabilities proved that while inaccessible technologies can be a huge barrier to success for people with disabilities, conquering them will not be the last battle that must be fought.

The reason I didn’t become a physicist was that I found a more interesting problem to focus on. During college and grad school in the 1990s, technologies designed for sighted students and scientists were a distinct pain in my blind butt. Print textbooks, inaccessible computers, visual data representations, ancient lab equipment — the tools of physics were not designed for me. Time and time again, I had to cobble together and build my own accessibility systems and technology simply to do the things I needed to do. For example, in grad school I couldn’t use the charts and graphs sighted students used. I had to write my own software to convert my data into sound and tactile graphics. By the time I graduated, it was clear that while there were plenty of physicists in the world, there weren’t enough blind designers of blindness technology.

Improving accessibility became my first career: designing and building things that everybody can use and enjoy, including people with disabilities. Examples include talking computers, video captions and curb ramps at intersections. More than a billion people in the world live with some kind of disability. More than 250 million of us are blind or visually impaired — enough to populate California more than six times over. And as the population ages, more and more people qualify for the club. We’ve got a long way to go toward making the world more accessible for those billion people.

And yet, every day around the world, people with disabilities are limited not principally by inaccessible technology but by ableist thinking. Kids are told they can’t succeed because of their disabilities. Disabled job candidates are disproportionately turned away. And inaccessible technologies continue to be mass-produced.

Shifting the needle on ableism will bring us a more accessible world, but there’s so much more to it than technology. We will all benefit from a culture that understands disability more and fears it less. It’s a big job, but we can start interrupting ableism by demystifying disability for ourselves.

My own career arc has shown the potential that can be unlocked when one gets a chance to disprove mistaken assumptions.

After grad school I spent almost 20 years happily designing and prototyping accessible technologies for blind people at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. Projects included specialized GPS apps, Braille street maps, a system for adding audio description to YouTube videos and talking STEM education tools. The work was incredibly fun and rewarding, but eventually I decided big tech seemed like the place to design for accessibility at scale.

Every day, millions of blind people use products and services from companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, and those companies are always looking for ways to make their offerings more accessible. After two decades in academia, I was ready to make the jump to industry.

So I compressed my 20-page academic CV into a two-page business résumé. It showcased my technical skills, project management experience, accessibility inventions, awards and academic publications in the field of accessible design. My next step was to send my résumé and design portfolio to a recruiter recommended by a friend.

I was delighted by her quick response but unimpressed by her voicemail: “I’m fascinated by your story, but I don’t understand what makes you think a blind person could possibly be a designer.”

I was disappointed but not at all surprised. She probably hadn’t even looked at my portfolio of accessibility innovations, which would have demonstrated ways in which a blind person can be a designer.

The recruiter’s assumptions of what a blind person could do didn’t match up with her assumptions about what a designer does. She needed to think bigger — seriously considering my proven record and seriously reconsidering “design,” which in this situation was not about choosing colors or font sizes. Instead, like the family friend from so many years ago who was hung up on blackboards, the recruiter’s preconceptions about blindness dictated why I couldn’t, rather than being open to how I could. She, with her gentle ableism, was gatekeeping me from countless jobs I could have performed well.

Of course, she was wrong. I got a great job at Amazon designing accessible devices. But how many millions of other people have been kept from realizing their potential because parents, teachers, recruiters and colleagues clung to mistaken assumptions about the limitations of people with disabilities? The solution will be not a technical fix but for all of us to think bigger — to default to curiosity rather than ableism.

The best way to learn about the reality of disability is from real disabled people. Be skeptical of books, shows and movies about disability based on the imaginings of people who are not disabled. They often perpetuate stereotypes and harmful myths. There’s no shortage of high-quality memoirs and essays about disability by disabled authors. There is even a growing body of film and video by disabled actors, directors and producers. Read them. Watch them.

To help make the world a more accessible place, learn about disability from the source, and imagine how disabled people can, rather than why we can’t.

Joshua A. Miele, a blind designer and scientist in Berkeley, is a co-author, with Wendell Jamieson, of “Connecting Dots: A Blind Life.”