How Helping People With Disabilities Helps Everyone

Recently the Education Department proposed cutting millions of dollars for the Special Olympics from the budget. Fortunately, intense opposition caused the administration to give in, and the funding remained in place. However, I think it’s a reminder of how we often undervalue people with disabilities in the U.S. and the issues they face.

Much of the technology that we use today came from products initially designed to offer accessibility to disabled people. Some of the more well-known are driverless cars, virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, text auto-complete, and auto-captioning.

According to Eve Andersson, Director of Accessibility Engineering at Google, “The accessibility problems of today are the mainstream breakthroughs of tomorrow.”

However, there are so many other things that we can and should do. I would hope that as a society that says everyone’s life is valuable, we could work harder to help disabled people be able to participate fully in that society.

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