Some accessibility impact-makers break the mold and fit into their own categories—from media training to venture capital.
Sometimes accessibility means solving a specific problem with a specific solution (a running prosthetic, for example). But some require changes to systems and process.
How can startups geared toward disabled innovation get connected to capital, and not just in developed countries? What’s the best way to support disabled U.S. veterans with the often unique services they deserve? Can disabled people become more involved in product and service design? And how can journalists learn how to cover disability issues with respect and nuance?
The below members of the Accessibility 100 defy categorization, but their impact remains undeniable.
Courtesy of Diego Mariscal
2Gether-International
Diego Mariscal
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Disabled entrepreneurs face particular challenges getting funding. “Incubators don’t have materials in braille and don’t have sign language interpreters,” says Diego Mariscal, CEO of 2Gether-International, which has helped 700 disabled founders raise $80 million in funds. “We’ve had a number of investors tell our entrepreneurs, ‘Hey, you should not disclose that you have a disability, because it’s going to harm you in your process of fundraising money.'” Mariscal, who has cerebral palsy, sits on the SEC’s Small Business Advisory Committee, where he advocates for programs that support disabled entrepreneurs similar to those for women and underrepresented minorities. 2Gether plans to soon launch one of the first global venture funds for disabled founders. “We have to be resilient, creative, tenacious as a way of surviving a world that is not built to fit our needs,” Mariscal says. “Bill Gates and other famous entrepreneurs, they’ve publicly disclosed that they have a disability. But that tends to happen after they become rich and famous.”
America’s Warrior Partnership
Jim Lorraine
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Some veterans’ more visible injuries (amputations and paralysis, to name two) require more typical accessibility solutions—yet their emotional wounds, leading to horrifyingly high suicide rates, are more hidden and in need of unique pathways to recovery. America’s Warrior Partnership helps veterans with all types of disabilities readjust to the lives they left, often by coordinating with local nonprofits to fill the gaps in Veterans Administration services and reconnect veterans with their communities. The organization says it has worked with 7,000 disabled veterans over the last six years none of them has taken their lives by suicide. “It’s more than ramps,” says Sherman Gillums, a member of the organization’s advisory board. “It’s how you make people feel like they’ve begun the journey of getting back into society.”
Courtesy of Bernard Chiira
AT4D
Bernard Chiira
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In Africa, support for disability-focused organizations is a wildly varied patchwork. Their founders rely on Bernard Chiira and his Assistive Technologies for Disabilities Trust (AT4D) for instruction, funding and advocacy. AT4D, and the accelerator project that launched it, have led the acceleration and education of startup founders in assistive tech for six years, distributing more than $500,000 to 74 startups, providing online training for founders, beginning a series of 80 university innovation competitions, and now spinning up a $10 million fund for early-stage African innovators. AT4D has funded companies to create electric wheelchairs from recycled components; embed cameras, navigation and haptic tech in headphones; and produce hearing aids with solar-powered recharging cases. The hearing aids have been distributed to 40,000 people, mostly children via UNICEF. “Africa is now building many new cities in Kenya,” Chiira says. “We are hoping that the technologies we are nurturing will power these future cities.”
Disability Culture Lab
Meier Galblum Haigh
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They’re called “inspiration porn”—media profiles of disabled people that reek of woe and the underlying notion: “if this poor, tragedy-burdened person can survive adversity, you can too!” (Complete with elegiac music in the background.) The Disability Culture Lab strives to change such narratives from pitiable to dignified by advising journalists on portraying disabled mindsets, pitching pieces involving disability issues, hiring disabled journalists to tell stories more authentically, and connecting journalists to experts. “So much coverage is pity, inspiration and sad stories, and bad storytelling leads to bad policy,” says Galblum Haigh, the Disability Culture Lab’s founder and executive director. “Our lives are like everyone’s—messy, joyful, and we don’t fit in a box. Our stories are just as diverse and complex as the American experience.” Two other organizations, the Disabled Journalists Association and Arizona State’s National Center on Disability and Journalism, also work on improving media coverage of disabled people and issues.
Enable Ventures
Regina Kline
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In the Accessibility space, you don’t just need a good ideayou have to convince skeptical (even ignorant) investors to give it a chance. Enter Regina Kline, the Founder and Managing Partner of Enable Ventures, a venture fund that aims to marry disability impact with competitive financial returns. “In a moment in which there are some real existential questions about the systems that govern the lives of people with disabilities, there’s capital at the table and a rampant curve of new innovations,” says Kline, a former civil rights lawyer turned venture capitalist. Perhaps most significant of Enable’s investments has been in Be My Eyes, the software inside the Ray-Ban Meta glasses that allows blind and low-vision people to navigate terrain from city streets to hiking trails (itself a member of the Accessibility 100). Other investments include companies that are involved in live captioning and others assisting disabled people in securing government benefits, and bionic limb sleeves that can provide targeted electrical stimulation to impaired muscles. The goal, Kline says, is to “find the best ideas in the world, layer in an institutional approach to investing, and make sure they can scale to serve millions of people and reach broader markets.”
Global Alliance Of Assistive Technology Organizations
Evert Jan Hoogerwerf
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Dozens of countries have assistive technology organizations that pursue devices and software for residents with disabilities. But these groups had no worldwide voice until the Global Alliance of Assistive Technology Organizations was created in 2019. Representing more than 20,000 members, GAATO is now an international source of research and discussion worldwide, helping the World Health Organization and UNICEF with major research on needs and opportunities, including a recent WHO report involving 330,000 families in 32 countries. “Sooner or later, everyone needs assistive technology,” says Evert Jan Hoogerwerf, GAATO secretary general. Three priorities now: helping countries in crisis, including Ukraine; determining how to best distribute assistive tech; and urging countries to improve access to digital advances. As GAATO president Luc de Witte says: “This collective is working on really global issues, and on the other hand, supporting professionals and new organizations to establish themselves, to strengthen themselves.”
Courtesy of Sandy Lacey
Howe Innovation Center
Sandy Lacey
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Inventors have ideas. People with disabilities have first-hand expertise. And investors have money. The Howe Innovation Center, at the Perkins School for the Blind outside Boston, connects those three groups so they can collaborate on designing products and services that truly serve the disabled community, and then make them actually exist. The organization maintains a database of 2,500 startups—young and scrappy companies, not the behemoths—to create a bustling ecosystem. One example being worked on now is to create the first at-home pregnancy test for the blind so they don’t have to ask another person to read it; another became a robotic hand that deaf and blind people put their fingers on to communicate with the world. “What we want to do is to source 100 innovation challenges to the disability community where they vote, and then we make that available to every MBA program, any AI-for-good class, any social enterprise class, or just straight-up tech-entrepreneurship class,” says Sandy Lacey, Howe’s executive director. “They can look at that list and say, ‘How might I be able to solve this problem?’ rather than widgets in search of a market.”
Kite Research Institute
Dr. Miles Popovich
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How do you test products that claim to make a wheelchair or prosthetic user’s home more navigable? Rather than evaluate technology solely in a lab, you build your own model home and test the products under real-life conditions with actual wheelchair users doing everyday tasks, from reaching into kitchen cabinets to using bathtubs. That’s the philosophy of the Kite Research Institute in Toronto, where hundreds of “next-new-thing!” products of all types and uses are put through the ringer by the people they’re actually designed for (as well as more than 200 scientists and graduate students) to see if they work effectively and safely. They test the friction on bottoms of walkers just as one would shoes and even tires, check wall-mounted grab bars that might fail under conditions like twisting falls, and assess new airtight plastic to make food easier to unwrap with one hand. When something hits the market, chances are good it’s been through the Kite Research Institutes protocols.
Jennison Asuncion
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When Asuncion—currently Head of Accessibility Engineering Evangelism at LinkedIn—co-founded Global Accessibility Awareness Day with web developer Joe Devon in 2012, it could have become just another enter-cause-here day. But the third Thursday in May now catalyzes companies worldwide to hold seminars, trainings, contests and more to confront challenges in digital accessibility—effects of which extend well beyond that date. Asuncion, who is blind, himself has become one of the most impactful faces of the accessibility movement. “[Without] what he and Joe built, would companies large and small hold events and everything every year, to educate and propagate the importance of accessibility? I don’t know,” says Fred Moltz, Chief Accessibility Officer at Verizon. “These are folks who aren’t like, ‘Forget blind people,’ it’s just that they don’t know, and GAAD helps them know.” LinkedIn also stands out for leveraging its massive employment data warehouse for studies on disabled workforces, which have evidenced promotion lags and other patterns for people with disabilities.
Courtesy of Victor Calise
Walmart
Victor Calise
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When Walmart hired Calise as “Director, Global Accessibility Center of Excellence and Belonging,” they hired an accessibility force with a reputation even larger than his title. From 2012 to 2000 he served as the commissioner of New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities under three administrations, spearheading efforts that improved the city’s subways and buses, building codes, website, parks, emergency response and countless other aspects of city life for the disabled. (Thanks to Calise, New York is the only city in the U.S. where rideshare companies like Uber must provide accessible vehicles.) “I’ve always started with no—people always told me no,” says Calise, a former sled hockey Paralympian. “So I had to find how they’d say yes.” He has brought that mindset to Walmart, whose website now has a dedicated section for accessibility-related items ranging from mobility aids to sports equipment. All stores have a dedicated time period for sensorially sensitive shoppers to enjoy no music and lowered lights.
The World Bank
Charlotte Vuyiswa McClain-Nhlapo
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If your government wants its civic project financed by the World Bank—as communities around the world do to the tune of $117.5 billion a year—it must report on whether and how it will address accessibility. And when that plan is filed, Charlotte Vuyiswa McClain-Nhlapo, the World Bank’s Global Disability Advisor, sees it through. On one African field visit, a school proudly showed off bathrooms and ramps it said were accessible to people in wheelchairs—but bathroom doors opened inward into the stalls, and the pretty tiled ramps were steep and slippery from rain, had no grab bars, and ended in sand. “I’ve seen too many accessibility features that are in fact not accessible,” says Porrero, a former civil rights lawyer and a wheelchair user herself. “We often hear the clients say, ‘But there are no children with disabilities, so why would we build a school that’s accessible?’ Well, you’re not seeing children with disabilities because your school is not accessible. It becomes a bit of a vicious cycle.”
