Living With Disability

Original source: Associated Press Not every important advance in disability technology requires artificial intelligence, robotics or a laboratory full of expensive equipment. Sometimes innovation begins with a material growing locally. A project in Kenya has been developing lightweight wheelchairs for children using locally sourced bamboo. According to Associated Press reporting, the initiative involving Bethany Kids...

Original source: The Guardian Making public transport accessible is normally presented as something society should pay for because it is fair. A recent British analysis asks a different question: what if inaccessible transport is itself extraordinarily expensive? The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has estimated that fully accessible public transport in the United Kingdom could potentially...

Music is usually described as something we hear. Anyone who has stood close enough to a concert speaker knows that description is incomplete. Bass is physical. Drums move air. A nightclub floor vibrates. A crowd reacting together creates a sensation that reaches the body as much as the ear. Technology is beginning to use that...

Entrepreneurship is usually sold with an appealing collection of words: freedom, flexibility, independence and being your own boss. Anyone who has actually run a business knows there are less glamorous words available too: cash flow, customers, risk, long hours and uncertainty. For disabled entrepreneurs, both descriptions can be true at exactly the same time. Self-employment...

There is a particular kind of bad design that most people never notice. A mascara tube that demands a firm grip to open. A small cap that becomes almost impossible to twist when your hands are painful. Two bottles that feel identical even though one contains shampoo and the other conditioner. A pump that requires...

AUGUST 2026 For years, digital accessibility lived in the corner reserved for specialists: important, but endlessly deferred. That era is beginning to close. As more of life moves online, accessibility is increasingly being treated not as a courtesy, but as part of basic service quality. There was a time when a badly designed website could...

JULY 2026 Housing conversations are usually dominated by price, location and size. Accessibility still arrives too late, often only after illness, injury or age forces the issue. That is beginning to change, and not a moment too soon. Most people do not think about accessibility when they first imagine a home. They think about light,...

JULY 2026 A few years ago, remote work was treated as a temporary fix. Then it became a bargaining chip in culture wars about productivity and office life. For many disabled professionals, it was something much simpler: proof that work could finally be organised around output rather than endurance. It is easy to talk about...

JUNE 2026 Travel has always been sold as freedom. For many disabled travellers, it still requires too much advance planning, too much uncertainty and too many compromises. Yet this is also one of the areas where design thinking is finally starting to catch up. There is a particular exhaustion that comes with travel when you...

JUNE 2026 For years, wearable robotics sat in the category of astonishing demonstrations. What is changing now is not the dream, but the practicality. Exoskeletons and soft wearable devices are slowly moving from spectacle toward use. The language around disability technology often swings between two extremes. On one side, there is sentimentality: the miraculous machine,...