This is doubly the case for *actual* accessibility aids, which are so often far out of the reach of actual disabled people, the majority of whom are kept deliberately in poverty by “state disability benefits” being kept deliberately below the poverty line and workplaces being unwilling to provide the reasonable accommodations that would allow disabled people to work.
I had a remote job for 8-15 hours a week during lockdown, when everything was forced to be remote. Even on the lowest hours, I made about as much monthly as my usual social security payments.
Of course, once things opened up again, my workplace, a grassroots charity, was forced to merge with a larger charity and my job was lost. Finding another salaried remote PT job that allows me actual freedom to choose my hours and doesn’t involve phones has been pretty impossible.
It’s also notable how many incredibly helpful accessibility aids are proposed and made as prototypes by large corporations to showcase their skills, but never actually go into mainstream production. They are basically fancy PR and marketing campaigns.
Sedgeway, notably, started out as a plan to build a modern wheelchair that could handle the inaccessibility of the world, but once the designer started getting excited about marketing it, he dropped the idea of making it an accessibility aid and started aiming it as “a revolution in personal mobility” at wealthy abled people who could already navigate the world perfectly fine. (I highly recommend the Sedgeway episode of Tim Chambers’ Cautionary Tales podcast on Pushkin for the entire story.)












