Very often, specialized companies create assistive technology with little input from actual users with disabilities. These products are usually institutional in look and feel, overpriced, and only reimbursable by insurance.

Organizations run by primarily white, cis, straight founders train the majority of their focus on alleviating alienation for white cis women in cis male-centric spaces, but do little to dig deeper into other marginalized identities and access needs.

College campuses can, and should, do a better job of advocating for their students, staff and faculty with disabilities.

New programming language communities are “graded” on how cutting-edge they are: our pattern-matching capabilities associate white men with the cutting edge, especially if they’re talking about monads.

Wide accessibility must become a part of everything we do in the tech industry, and our events are a critical part of that mission.

The power and promise of social media is still out of reach for some people with disabilities who do not have the same ease-of-use and benefits as non-disabled users.

Decades have passed and still accessibility remains on the fringes of technical change.

I have never met another person who is deaf at a hearing tech conference. I regularly see uncaptioned video tutorials for open source libraries and transcript-less tech podcasts. I stopped going to tech meetups. Without any representation in tech, I grew up a token.

"Not many hearing people realize Deaf people have to fight for access on a daily basis."

Instead of complaining that disabled people just don't come to your conference, do something that would make them want to come to it!