In the fields of user experience and accessibility, everyone talks about the curb cut effect: Features that are added as accommodations for people with disabilities sometimes become widely useful and beloved. But not every accommodation becomes a "curb cut," and I've been thinking about other patterns that come up when accommodations intersect with wider society.

The original Curb Cut Effect

The eponymous curb cut -- the place at the intersection where the sidewalk slopes down to the street instead of just dropping off -- is most obviously there to for wheelchair users. But it's also great for people who are pulling a suitcase, runners who want to avoid jarring their ankles, and people who are walking their bikes. Universal captioning on TV, movies, and video is nominally for Deaf or hearing-impaired people, but captions are handy to anyone who's watching TV in a noisy restaurant, or trying to make sense of a show with artistically muddy audio, or trying to watch a video at 3x speed and the audio is unintelligible. When we make products easier to use, or spaces easier to access, it's not just some essentialized group of people with disabilities who benefit -- accessibility is good for everyone.

Why the idea is useful: First, it breaks down the perspective of disability accommodations as being a costly charity where "we" spend resources to help "them." Further, it breaks down the idea of disability as an essentialized, either-or, othered type of thing. Everybody has some level of difficulty accessing parts of the world some of the time, and improving accessibility is an inherent part of good design, good thinking, and good communication.^[1] Plus, it's cool to be aware of all the different ways we can come up with to hack our experience of the world around us!

I think there's also a dark side to the idea -- a listener could conclude that we wouldn't invest in accommodations if they didn't happen to help people without disabilities. A just and compassionate society designs for accessibility because we value everybody, not because it's secretly self-interested.

That said, no society spends unlimited money to make literally every experience accessible to literally every human. There's always a cost-benefit analysis and sometimes it might be borderline. In those cases there's nothing wrong with saying that the benefits to the wider population tip the balance in favor of investing in accessibility. But when it comes to things as common as mobility impairments and as simple as curb cuts, I think it would be a moral no-brainer even if the accommodation had no value to most people.

The Handicapped Parking effect

This edgier sibling of the curb cut effect comes up when there's a limited resource -- like handicapped parking. There are only X parking spaces within Y feet of the entrance to the Chipotle, and if we allocate them to people who have trouble getting around, then everyone else has a longer average walk to their car.

That doesn't mean it's zero-sum: The existence of a handicapped parking spot that I can't use might cost me an extra 20 seconds of walking, but save an extra five minutes of painful limping for the person who uses it.^[2] This arrangement probably increases overall utility both in the short term (reduced total pain experienced by people walking from their cars) and in the long term (signaling the importance of helping everyone participate in society). But this is manifestly not a curb cut effect where everyone benefits: You have to decide who's going to win and who's going to lose, relative to an unregulated state where all parking is first-come-first-served.

Allocation can be made well or poorly. If the person designing parking (or the person designing the laws about designing parking) allocates too few handicapped spots, some people who have trouble getting around will suffer unnecessarily. If they allocate so many handicapped spots that there are usually lots of unused ones, then non-users pay the cost but no one benefits.

We can sometimes improve this with flexible allocation. For example, many bus and train systems have seats where anyone is allowed to sit, but if a person in a wheelchair comes in, they need to leave the seat so it can be converted to wheelchair parking^[3].

Why this idea is useful: First of all, because it's true. I'm a UX researcher and I'm as excited as anyone when a curb cut effect shows up, but we can't insist everything works that way. Second, because recognizing cases of conflicting incentives is a starting point when we want to reduce conflict or polarization. Third, because if you're a decision-maker of any kind, recognizing a handicapped parking situation means you have the opportunity to be conscious about allocation choices, or look for ways to make allocation smarter and more flexible.

The Braille Signage effect

I coined this name to refer to the lack of any pattern. Braille signage (and/or raised lettering on printed signs) is useful to people who can't see well enough for visual text, yet almost invisible to people who can. It's very elegant!

This is especially common in digital interfaces. For example, a person using a screen reader will be told that the picture above shows a sign reading "Unisex Toilet and Shower" in braille, with a hand touching the braille text to read it. Sighted people using a standard web browser would find that information redundant and distracting, but they never see it!^[4]

Why this idea is useful: First because it's lovely and elegant, and second because it helps us think about ways to make more accommodations flexible in this way. It seems especially possible to do this with digital interfaces or augmented reality.

The Weighted Blanket effect

Weighted blankets used to be an expensive specialty item targeted squarely at children with sensory or emotion regulation issues. But at some point someone noticed that a lot of people found them calming, even if they didn't "need" them (did you ever go to the dentist and wish you could take home that lead blanket they put on you for x-rays? I can't be the only one). As Sarah Luterman describes:

When I bought my weighted blanket years ago, it cost a little less than $400, which I paid out of pocket. [...] I waited months for it to arrive. I remember excitedly opening the box, only to find a pamphlet addressed to a parent, covered in pictures of smiling, gap-toothed toddlers. It was unimaginable that an adult would buy a blanket for herself.

[...]

Now I can get a weighted blanket, in an adult size, on sale at Target for as low as $79.99.

Luterman goes on to call this a curb cut effect, but I don't agree. For someone in a wheelchair, it's immaterial whether I get any benefits from a curb cut. But for users of weighted blankets (or fidget spinners, or Good Grips utensils) mainstream adoption made things better.

One distinction is that curb cuts (and other curb cut effect exemplars like TV captioning) are structural adaptations that are either literally or effectively capacity-unlimited. Build them once and everyone benefits (ie, they're a public good). If the accommodation is an item or product that individuals get for themselves, then wider adoption leads to economies of scale, niche marketing, and generally more thoughtful design work.

This might not be true the product is sold openly, like a weighted blanket, but is actually a limited resource, like handicapped parking. For example, continuous glucose monitors make life vastly easier for people with diabetes who can get better data with fewer finger pricks, and can get automated warnings if they're going hypoglycemic. They're also useful for people approaching prediabetes, and a sick toy for biohackers who like optimization. Occasionally there are shortages and people in the first group get outraged about people in the latter groups taking monitors away from people who need them. I've never seen any evidence that the number of biohacker users could possibly make a dent in the overall supply, but it could be true: medical device production is strictly regulated such that market forces can't easily lead to an increase in supply. The regulations are probably a net good, but they do create an artificial Handicapped Parking Effect.

Why this idea is useful: First because in some ways, it's even more awesome than the curb cut.

Second, these situations can help de-stigmatize certain accessibility needs or self-care practices. When "normal" people recognize how calming a fidget spinner or a weighted blanket can be, maybe they get a little more insight into neurodivergent people whose sensory soothing needs used to seem alien.

Finally -- as Luterman points out in the article above -- stories about people from a majority culture adopting a practice used by a minority can also ping on some people's "cultural appropriation" alarms. It's good to notice when that's not the right way to look at things -- sometimes the result is a win-win!^[5]

The Clapper Effect

For folks younger than I am, the Clapper was a primitive home automation device that let you turn lights on or off by clapping. At one time it was the go-to example for ridiculous, frivolous gadgets sold in TV ads. And to be fair, the commercials were kind of asking for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRWtFVFSx5I

... but I suspect most people who laughed at it weren't imagining how it felt to be someone who takes several minutes to get out of bed and reach the light switch, or whose knees flare with pain when they squat down to reach an outlet near the ground (the people who made the Clapper knew, though -- note how old most of the people in the commercials are).

The same is true of other products that might immediately seem ridiculous, like banana slicers, sock-putter-onners, and egg-crackers. There's been a lot written about this, and as far as I know my main intellectual contribution is giving it a clever name, and connecting it to other, more ennobled examples of accommodative products crossing over with the broader population. The award for most trenchant phrasing certainly goes to s.e. smith, writing in Vox, "If you can’t use your hands to open a jar of pasta sauce, does that mean you should live in an institution?"

Why this idea is useful: I'm not going to say we must stop laughing at quirky, niche problem-solving products, but maybe we could laugh about their clever insights and the scope of human ingenuity instead of laughing at some imagined doofus who uses this stuff even though it has no practical utility for them. And, like with the weighted blanket, maybe we could more generally start to de-stigmatize the entire concept of need and accommodation, and recognize that some of this stuff is actually pretty useful.^[6]

The Orange in a Box effect

Sometimes people don't just laugh at accommodations. Sometimes they get really mean.

It did eventually make it into the discourse that pre-peeled fruit was a godsend for people with arthritis or limited hand mobility who missed being able to eat fresh fruit, but by that time Whole Foods had pulled the product, describing it as "a mistake".

from https://www.instagram.com/disabled.daisy/

But... do I think everybody who bought pre-peeled oranges^[7] needed them in order to access fresh fruit? No. Do I think some of them were wastefully avoiding trivial inconveniences and/or improperly weighting the environmental externalities of plastic usage? Yeah, probably. And do I think society as a whole would benefit from discouraging pre-peeled, plastic-boxed fruit as the standard for food sales? Also yes.

So the orange in a box effect is a curb cut effect for any individual who uses it, but at a large scale starts to impose collective costs... or at least, people think it does.

What should we do about orange-in-a-box effects? I strongly believe in this guiding principle: Don't be a dick. That means not shaming someone who looks like they don't need an accommodation, but might have invisible or intermittent physical impairments or sensory sensitivities. It means not piling on someone who maybe could chop their own vegetables, but they're living a hard life or battling depression or otherwise on their last centispoon, and the minor convenience is keeping them from melting down. And since you can't always recognize who these people are, that means, just don't be a dick to anybody.

There are lots of other health and environmental topics this applies to, like getting people to take the stairs instead of the elevator, to give up plastic straws, or to drive less. In aggregate, they're good ideas and there would be widespread benefits to moving the baseline in their direction. In any individual case, it's impossible to evaluate another person's needs, costs, and experiences, and trying to police one another's behavior is a futile and self-destructive rage trap.

Having been a workplace health researcher, I believe it is possible to encourage healthy and prosocial behaviors without stigmatizing people for whom they're excessively costly or unattainable. We can make access to stairwells easy and attractive, without making elevator access a walk of shame. We can find ways to improve access to healthy food without trying to ban anything "unhealthy".

It's not even always that hard. For example, the heavily culture-war-ified "plastic straw ban" in California has a workaround for people who need plastic straws to eat or drink: restaurants are allowed/required to provide plastic straws if you ask for one. Of course, that only works if restaurants comply and if bystanders don't take it upon themselves to shame the person making the request. So seriously, don't be a dick.

Why this idea is useful: To remind us that designing for behavior change and societal improvements is possible, and important -- but that doing it from a perspective of stigma or individual shaming can get really awful.

Conflicting accommodation needs

Finally, a comment on something I don't have a clever name for: Sometimes an accommodation interacts, not with the population at large, but with another specific group's accommodations. For example, how loud should public address systems be? You can imagine turning up the volume so that things are audible by people with hearing impairments, and then making the environment intolerable for people with auditory sensitivities. On a social level, you can have a group that adopts very exacting or elaborate norms for communication styles in order to avoid alienating or triggering vulnerable people, but then becomes unfriendly to neurodivergent people who have difficulty picking up all the rules.

Another example came from my partner who described a class where her professor had difficulty absorbing written information so he took all the words off of his slides! This no doubt improved his comprehension but was not great for students who absorb information in language better than using pictures with an ephemeral soundtrack.

Why this idea is useful: Because there might be a clever solution! Good sound engineering can probably produce announcements that are loud but not not distorted/screeching/irritating in ways that hurt people's ears. An instructional designer could create slides with a parallel text track. Groups can enforce norms around behavior that permit people to build trust even when they communicate differently.

If you're the person designing a system, this is a reminder not to optimize too far for the single set of needs that's most salient to you. If you benefit from the current set of accommodations and someone is asking for changes, it's a reminder to check whether they're trying to get their own needs met before you treat them as the enemy. And if you're currently ill-served by the system, it's a reminder to look for solutions that don't end up excluding someone else.^[8]

Conclusion

These are some ways accommodations can interact with society at large that are importantly different from the curb cut effect. I introduced the ideas in an order that made narrative sense to me, but it might be most useful to think about them this way:

First, a trio of scenarios in which an accommodation proves helpful to more people than it was originally intended for:

• The Curb Cut Effect: When something designed as an accommodation for a particular group becomes widely useful
• The Weighted Blanket Effect: When a curb cut effect also leads to innovation or broader availability, creating additional benefits to the original users
• The Orange-in-a-Box Effect: When a curb cut effect has potential externalities or societal costs in aggregate. It requires thoughtful design to avoid stigmatizing or disadvantaging the people who have reasonable needs for it or get great benefits from it.

Second, a trio in which the wider society's interactions are neutral or negative:

• The Braille Signage Effect: When an accommodation can be useful to some people and invisible or zero-cost to everyone else (which is also a great win-win situation, even though it's on the "neutral" list).
• The Clapper Effect: When an accommodation isn't immediately recognizable as an accommodation, leading non-users to think it's ridiculous. This might be a missed curb cut / weighted blanket opportunity, but it's not inherently bad -- as long as it doesn't lead to bad treatment of the users.
• The Handicapped Parking Effect: When accommodation requires a limited resource, and not everyone can get the best outcome. The amount you allocate to accessibility, and the way you make it available to people, can make a big difference in aggregate good.

A recurring theme: you can't always tell what's an accommodation, you can't always tell who has a disability, and you can't always tell what ridiculous-seeming contraption might be useful to you, now or in the future. So we return to some very general design advice: Be curious about what's going on, assume that people have some kind of reason for the things they do, and never stop believing that we can find ways to solve problems!

1. ^{^}

   This post talks about accommodations from the perspective of a non-user. That isn't meant to assume that people with disabilities aren't involved in these conversations or in the work of designing for their needs! But no one has every possible accommodation need, so even people with disabilities will have most of their encounters with accommodations from the perspective of someone who doesn't need the particular accommodation in question.

2. ^{^}

   Or for past me, on a couple of occasions when I've been injured, or for future me, who despite the efforts of my transhumanist friends will probably have increasing trouble getting around comfortably over the next 10-20 years.

3. ^{^}

   I don't know how it feels to be the person in the wheelchair in this scenario. Do they often feel embarrassed or worry about attracting hostility from the people who had to move? In many years of riding the bus I never saw anyone overtly complain or signal annoyance when the driver asked them to move, but I'm sure it happens sometimes. It might be more delicate when it comes to vehicles where people with mobility impairments can board on their own and have to interact directly with the people who are supposed to give up their seats.

4. ^{^}

   Unless they're unable to load images or are using a text-based web browser, in which case the descriptions are helpful -- another curb cut!

5. ^{^}

   There are a few things I don't agree with Luterman about, especially her blanket dismissal of any kind of disabled culture appropriation. But I think the main idea of the article is on target.

6. ^{^}

   This is one foible I don't consider myself too prone to: I have no trouble getting out of bed, but I have a home automation setup that lets me turn off all the lights from bed and I feel pleased as punch every time I use it.

7. ^{^}

   They're not even oranges, they're mandarins! Even easier to peel!

8. ^{^}

   ... though I'm cautious about pushing so hard for Chesterton's Fence that it ends up discouraging people from speaking up for themselves without a huge burden of research. Maybe the advice is just to be curious and open to hearing about others' needs, even while fighting for your own.