The everyday impact of accessible tech is too often ignored – but it can’t be overstated

Apple’s newly released short film, The Greatest, is a beautifully neat fleeting snapshot of ordinary disabled lives.

It includes the pianist Matthew Whitaker, as viewers watch him move through part of an ordinary day – from the dressing room to the stage – throughout the film.

But, beneath the pretty, fashionable packaging there’s an important message: assistive technology has an everyday impact.

For all its beauty and neatness – the ad captures the nitty-gritty of living a disabled life.

Onscreen, viewers watch a day in the lives of seven disabled Apple users whose lives intertwine seamlessly with the company’s tech and its accessible settings.

They are not the superhumans of elsewhere. They are mere mortals.

The video stars and was produced by disabled people who use tech like smartphones and tablets daily. It emphasises the iPhone’s Assistive Touch and Door Detection, which enables Whitaker to find the door to the stage, demonstrating that disabled people live with the technology.

Through the advert, disabled people are able to offer our lived experience – a more nuanced, vivid explanation that not everyone may be aware of.

Elsewhere, the Apple Watch’s Sound Recognition notifications are shown along with the impact they have on improving lives.

Why am I telling you about this advert? Because I have grown up with assistive technology. Like the internet, our existences and stages of development are rather neatly intertwined.

I only have vague recollections of life without it – although it wasn’t fully formed – closer to the original Star Trek special effects than the technology it promised.

I was born in the early 90s and sustained a brain injury before or shortly after birth. It’s as if fragments of my brain scattered across the floor on the good days. I can retrieve most of it – on the bad, much less.

I struggle to read numbers and remember dates – the small details of life, so I use assistive technology – which allows me to retrieve more of those fragments from the floor.

I wouldn’t be a writer – a disabled journalist without it. Most of the articles I’ve written started as voice notes. Handwriting is a psychically draining process. I need to consider the value of every word. So I use different types of voice-to-speech software to type articles, write e-mails, make notes and use voice commands when convenient.

There’s more freedom, less precision, and more creativity in my spoken scrawls.

That’s the reality of the assistance these features provide: half-remembered, slightly rambling voice notes or a reminder in my calendar that I have a meeting all the mundane, essential tasks of life – which have given me the freedom to build a career and sustain my health.

So, for example, I have an app to remind me that I must drink water, an idea someone had because unless prompted, I forget that I should feel thirsty. Before the app, I became dehydrated often.

Apple’s advert speaks to a broader truth that disabled experiences need to be built into the DNA of products. This push to highlight accessibility is for the Day of People with Disabilities. An event defined online as finding ‘transformative solutions for inclusive development: the role of innovation in fuelling an accessible and equitable world.’

It’s a reminder of a simple truth: disabled people have fought to be the bold voices in these untraditional spaces.

Our lived experience should be at the fore.

Google’s push for disability inclusion

Christopher Patnoe, EMEA lead for Accessibility and Disability Inclusion at Google, agreed: ‘years of research goes into our products,’ he told me. ‘Years of collaboration with people with disabilities and working with the community – it’s a process.’

Google has also made announcements to coincide with the day: establishing its first dedicated Accessibility Discovery Centre in the UK to drive research and design in accessible technology.

In addition, there is a promise to provide over £1m in grants to support disabled people with online safety and technology skills and the Project Relate app. Newly launched in beta form in the UK to help people with non-standard speech communicate more efficiently and effortlessly.

For someone with a speech impairment, the app has the potential to alter how we move through the world radically, and it’s a clear sign that Google is listening to disabled users. One of the app’s most notable features is the repeat function: the ability to reiterate what you’ve said using a clear, synthesised voice.

As someone who gradually grew reluctant to talk to strangers because their bewildered glances and dismissive shakes of the head slowly tore at my confidence – I know the power this will have. It can’t be overstated.

As Patnoe mentioned during our exchange, e-mail was once a revolution in communication, so tech continues to evolve and transform and eventually becomes mundane. Google is normalising the use of all tech for every user. In previous decades, it felt ‘othering’ and prohibitively expensive. Now it’s the norm – as simple as a single button. The next generation may not even have to make a conscious effort.

But, as he concluded, ‘we’re never done’ – there’s always more to be achieved, and Google wants to continue finding gaps and researching solutions.

The timing is perfect for such a conversation, if a little jarring in its almost Utopian view, given the strained relationship between some in tech and the disabled community recently.

Pressure from activists and disabled users meant that Twitter had begun to do vital work supporting all disabled users. For example, the introduction of ‘alt-text’ badges on all images provides a reminder that image description is a bare minimum. So, it was a personal blow to many of us when the entire Twitter accessibility team was abruptly laid off.

The problem worsened when Noam Bardin, the co-founder of The Post (a still-in-beta Twitter rival), angered disabled advocates by announcing in a post that accessibility wasn’t a core consideration as it would remove focus from other areas.

Because it’s of lower importance, then, many disabled people may lose the use of a social media platform that could help them access the wider world.

Accessible tech doesn’t have to be pretty or fashionable – it just has to work.

But an ad which features seven people with various disabilities – navigating everyday life without a problem might be what we need right now. Moreover, it serves as a reminder in the face of difficulties within technology.

We’re still so fortunate to live in a time when accessibility is advancing and improving our lives in real, tangible, forgettable ways – it’s not such a utopian view of tech.

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