[satori99]

> I've seen so many interesting/disappointing behaviors from people when it comes to people with disabilities.

The city I live in had a systematic problem with loud speakers announcements on trains. Blind people rely on these announcements to know which station they are at. And trains speaker systems were mostly broken or heavily distorted on nearly every carriage.

The remarkable thing about this was that the only blind person making complaints was an Australian Disability Discrimination Commissioner, who made a written complaint (to himself) each time he found it hard to get off at the right station while going to his job [1].

I share a house with my physically disabled sister who deals with similar problems nearly everyday. My sister was lucky enough to find employment with a government agency that takes it's responsibilities towards disabled people seriously, but many disabled people still disengage from society because of the extreme hassle involved in something so simple for the rest of us, like getting to work.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/blind-rage-over-railcorps-silent-s...

[schoen]

> who made a written complaint (to himself) each time he found it hard to get off at the right station

I was going to ask whether there was then a civil service ethics rule that required him to recuse himself from investigating his own complaint. But the article already addressed that:

> Each complaint, which will have to be addressed by others within the commission [...]

[stevetrewick]

This drives me crazy. My local light rail system has an automated announcement system that malfunctions frequently. I write a complaint every time. I've escalated all the way up the org chart and I still can't convince them that this system not working needs to be noted in their service disruption announcements. Same with busses, always too quiet, always send the company a complaint while I'm still on the bus. It's tiring to be that guy but unless someone is letting them know, nothing gets fixed.

[SiVal]

It seems to me that one thing we could do would be to use some updated version of our existing technologies to provide people with personalized notifications of such things as what station they're entering via personal technologies such as a phone. Your phone (or alternative device) tells you, in a language or visual or tactile cue of your choice, where you are, what station you are entering, how much more time to your destination station, and so on. You subscribe to the notifications you want in the format you want.

This sort of thing could be approached more generally, so that it would work for kids who aren't paying attention, for travelers who don't speak the loudspeaker's language even when it's working, adults who see and understand the language just fine but need an alarm because of a tendency to fall asleep and miss their stop, and so on.

Which then tells me that the big tech companies should all have whole divisions of employees with various "features" (very short, tall, blind, speech problems, etc.) who would not only test ideas like these but design, prototype, and build them. They would not only be experimenting with products and services for customers but with how to get their own work done, looking into questions such as whether you could design a programming language with a syntax optimized for hearing instead of looking, which would then be transpiled into something more mainstream, or creating alternatives to keyboard & mouse for those with muscular disorders, or countless other things.

My guess is that many of the ideas they come up with for helping some small niche of the population will be discovered to be of great value to many other groups in ways that weren't anticipated. Of course the dev tools they come up with for blind coders would be made available to all, but the "audio-optimized syntax" might just prove to be popular with programmers with no vision problems, and the keyboard/mouse replacement might be a big hit with cooks, surgeons, and musicians.

I'm sure there are many such things already going on that I haven't heard of, but I'm thinking it could become a very rich source of innovative technologies and products with big markets and should be such a big push that everybody knows about it.

[SwellJoe]

This is a super cool way to think of it, and I think some good companies probably already do it this way.

It also makes me wonder what the "best" programming language would be for blind coders. I know my friend has talked about Java and Python, and I think Python has problems for blind folks because of the significant white space; but I believe even that is surmountable.

But, your mention of a syntax optimized for hearing is probably something we want to build, anyway. I just noticed a while back that there's a whole generation of kids who don't type to interact with their devices. They talk to them; I guess they still read the screen for replies, but I would guess there will come a time when even reading is optimized out of the system...already lots of folks interact primarily with their device through an earbud. Things like Google Glass will eventually happen.

In short, optimizing for other abilities seems like a future-friendly direction for exploration.