In a compelling open letter dated February 24, 2026, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, distinguished disability rights researcher Nilesh Singit challenges the notion of "AI for All" amid India's ambitious AI push. Referencing the India AI Impact Summit 2026's sign language AI demonstration and a recent Moneylife article on technoableism, Singit highlights how AI systems absorb societal biases, scaling exclusion for persons with disabilities through default designs that overlook diverse needs. He calls for proactive measures: embedding accessibility standards, conducting disability impact assessments, auditing datasets for bias, and including disability expertise in AI governance bodies. Drawing from lived experience and aligned with the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and UNCRPD obligations, the letter urges structural inclusion over symbolic gestures to align technological leadership with social justice. For deeper insights into disability bias in AI, visit The Bias Pipeline.
Thursday, 26 February 2026
Saturday, 21 February 2026
Designing for Everyone Is Not a Slogan: What Recent Indian Developments Mean for the Built Environment
 |
| The Continuous Path: Systemic Inclusion in Modern Architecture |
In recent years, conversations around accessibility in India have become more visible. Institutions speak of inclusion, new developments refer to universal design, and public discourse increasingly acknowledges that the built environment must respond to a wider range of users. Yet visibility alone does not transform experience. Many environments that claim to be inclusive remain difficult to use in practice. The challenge before India is not whether accessibility should exist, but how it should be understood. If it continues to be treated as a matter of compliance or isolated provision, its impact will remain limited. If, however, it is recognised as a design condition — something that shapes how spaces are conceived — then accessibility can fundamentally improve how environments function for everyone.
Recent national discussions, including those that arose in connection with the Rajive Raturi proceedings before the Supreme Court of India and the research initiative Finding Sizes for All developed by the Centre for Disability Studies at NALSAR, have drawn attention to precisely this shift: accessibility must move from token provision to systemic thinking.
This is not a legal transition alone. It is a design transition.
The Limits of “Standard Solutions”
Accessibility is often reduced to a predictable set of features — a ramp, an accessible toilet, a lift, a designated parking space. These elements are necessary, but they are not sufficient. When treated as add-ons, they operate in isolation from the spatial logic of the building.
Consider a large institutional campus. A ramp may exist at the entrance, yet pathways between buildings involve uneven surfaces, long gradients, or unclear direction. A lift may be available, but reaching it requires navigating a confusing sequence of corridors. Facilities may technically meet dimensional standards, yet remain impractical because they are poorly located or disconnected from everyday movement patterns.
The difficulty lies not in the absence of features, but in the absence of continuity.
Standard solutions cannot address environments that are complex, layered, and heavily used. Accessibility must therefore be approached as an organising principle rather than a collection of components.
From Dimensions to Experience
Traditional approaches to accessibility focus on measurements: widths, heights, slopes, and turning radii. These are important, but they describe only the geometry of space, not how space is experienced.
Usability depends on factors that measurements alone cannot resolve:
The distance a person must travel without rest or orientation.
The clarity with which destinations are understood.
The predictability of transitions between indoor and outdoor areas.
The relationship between circulation routes and services.
The ease with which assistance can be sought if required.
An environment may satisfy every prescribed dimension and still be exhausting, disorienting, or exclusionary.
Designing for everyone therefore requires moving beyond the question, “Does it comply?” to the more meaningful one, “Does it work?”
The Indian Built Environment: Scale and Diversity
India presents a uniquely demanding context for accessibility. Developments are often large, multi-functional, and intensely used. Educational campuses accommodate thousands of students; hospitals manage continuous public flow; transport hubs connect diverse populations across long distances.
In such environments, accessibility cannot be inserted retrospectively without creating fragmentation. Each addition risks becoming an isolated adjustment rather than part of a coherent system.
The work emerging from research such as Finding Sizes for All has emphasised that Indian environments must respond to variability — in body types, mobility patterns, climate conditions, and patterns of use. Designing for uniformity in such a context is ineffective; designing for range is essential.
Accessibility as a System, Not an Element
When accessibility is integrated early, it shapes how the entire environment is organised:
Routes are planned as continuous networks rather than disconnected segments.
Entrances align with natural movement rather than requiring detours.
Facilities are placed where they are actually needed.
Landscapes, buildings, and infrastructure function together.
Wayfinding is embedded in spatial clarity rather than dependent on signage alone.
Such integration benefits all users, not only those who identify as persons with disabilities. Older persons, families with children, temporary injuries, and even those carrying luggage experience the environment differently when it is designed with range in mind.
Accessibility, in this sense, becomes synonymous with good planning.
Why Retrofitting Cannot Deliver the Same Outcome
Retrofitting remains necessary for older structures, but it is inherently constrained. Once a building’s structure, levels, and services are fixed, change becomes reactive rather than generative.
Retrofitted environments often reveal tell-tale signs:
Secondary entrances used as accessible routes.
External ramps added without integration into landscape design.
Altered interiors that disrupt circulation.
Facilities that meet standards but feel marginal.
By contrast, when accessibility informs the original design, it is invisible — not because it is absent, but because it is integral.
The Emerging Expectation: Inclusion as Normal Practice
What recent Indian discourse signals is not merely regulatory attention but a cultural expectation that public environments must anticipate diversity. Institutions and developers increasingly recognise that accessibility is tied to credibility, longevity, and public engagement.
Design teams are therefore being asked to think differently:
not how to correct exclusion after construction,
but how to avoid producing it in the first place.
This requires collaboration across disciplines — architecture, planning, engineering, and user experience — rather than delegating accessibility to a late-stage audit.
Designing for Range Rather Than Average
Much conventional design assumes an “average user.” Accessibility challenges this assumption by recognising that no such average exists. Human bodies, abilities, and interactions with space vary widely, and environments must accommodate that variability.
Designing for range does not dilute architectural intent; it strengthens it by making spaces more adaptable, resilient, and humane.
An accessible campus is easier to navigate.
An accessible hospital is less stressful to use.
An accessible transport system is more efficient for everyone.
These outcomes are not specialised benefits. They are indicators of quality.
A Shift in Professional Responsibility
The responsibility for accessibility cannot rest solely on enforcement or audit mechanisms. It must be internalised within design practice itself.
When architects and planners begin to treat accessibility as a parameter equal to structure, climate response, or safety, it ceases to be an external demand and becomes part of professional judgement.
India’s current moment of rapid construction offers an opportunity to make this shift deliberately rather than retrospectively.
Conclusion: From Awareness to Integration
Accessibility in India is no longer an unfamiliar concept. The task now is to translate awareness into environments that function seamlessly for diverse users.
Designing for everyone is not a slogan to be applied at the end of a project. It is a way of thinking that must begin at the first sketch — when decisions are still fluid and inclusion can be embedded without compromise.
If accessibility is considered early, it improves design.
If considered late, it attempts repair.
The choice between those approaches will shape how inclusive India’s future built environment truly becomes.
Suggested Reading
For readers interested in exploring these questions further:
Built environment accessibility guidelines issued by Government of India ministries addressing planning and infrastructure.
Research publications and design studies developed under the Centre for Disability Studies, NALSAR.
International literature on universal design and inclusive spatial planning.
Technical discussions on campus-scale accessibility and transport environment usability.
Comparative studies examining lifecycle outcomes of integrated versus retrofitted accessibility approaches.
Monday, 16 February 2026
Accessibility Is Not a Retrofitting Exercise: It Must Begin at the Drawing Board
Across India, accessibility is still widely misunderstood as a corrective measure — something to be “added later” once a building is complete. A ramp is inserted near the entrance, a toilet is relabelled, a lift button is lowered, and the project is declared accessible. Yet anyone who has attempted to use such spaces knows that these adjustments rarely produce environments that are genuinely usable.
Accessibility cannot be retrofitted into a design that was never conceived with diverse users in mind. It must be embedded at the conceptual stage, when circulation, spatial hierarchy, services, and human interaction with the building are first imagined. When inclusion is postponed, it becomes expensive, technically compromised, and frequently symbolic rather than functional.
The Persistent Myth of Post-Construction “Fixes”
The belief that accessibility can be added later stems from two assumptions: first, that accessibility concerns only a small minority; and second, that it involves isolated physical features. Both assumptions are flawed.
Built environments are not experienced in fragments. A ramp that leads to a heavy manual door, followed by a narrow corridor, an inaccessible reception desk, and confusing wayfinding does not create access. It creates a sequence of barriers. Retrofitting often addresses one point of failure while leaving the rest of the journey intact — and exclusionary.
When accessibility is introduced after construction, designers must work against decisions already locked into the structure: plinth heights, column grids, service shafts, toilet layouts, fire exits, and level differences. At that point, meaningful change is constrained by what has already been built.
The Cost of Delay: Financial and Spatial
It is commonly believed that incorporating accessibility early increases project costs. In practice, the reverse is true.
During the design stage, inclusive planning usually involves adjustments in geometry, alignment, and specification — decisions that cost little to implement on paper. Once construction is underway, however, even minor corrections can require demolition, regrading, relocation of services, or structural alteration. What could have been achieved through thoughtful layout becomes a logistical and financial burden.
For example:
Designing a step-free entrance at the outset requires alignment of site levels.
Introducing it later may require external ramps, drainage reworking, and façade modification.
Planning accessible toilets from the beginning affects partition placement.
Attempting to enlarge them later disrupts plumbing, finishes, and circulation.
Early decisions shape the entire lifecycle cost of accessibility.
Accessibility as Spatial Logic, Not Equipment
Another reason retrofitting fails is that accessibility is treated as the installation of elements rather than the shaping of relationships between spaces.
True accessibility is about:
How one arrives at a building.
How one understands where to go.
How easily one can move between functions.
How independently one can use facilities.
How safely one can exit in an emergency.
These are questions of spatial logic, not accessories.
If corridors are too long without rest points, lifts are hidden, signage lacks clarity, or transitions between buildings involve level changes, no amount of later modification can fully resolve the experience. Accessibility must therefore be conceived as an organising principle — a way of structuring movement and perception.
The Indian Context: Rapid Construction, Limited Integration
India is currently witnessing an unprecedented expansion of educational campuses, healthcare institutions, transport hubs, and commercial developments. Much of this growth is driven by tight timelines and standardised construction models. Accessibility is frequently introduced only when approvals, certifications, or complaints demand it.
This reactive approach produces environments that technically satisfy requirements yet remain difficult to use in practice. Large campuses often reveal discontinuities between buildings; transport interchanges provide access at entry but not at transition points; institutional spaces treat accessibility as an isolated compliance package rather than an integrated system.
The challenge is not absence of intent, but absence of early engagement.
Why the Drawing Board Is the Most Powerful Moment
The conceptual design phase offers a unique opportunity: nothing is fixed, yet everything is possible. Decisions taken here determine whether accessibility will be seamless or forced.
At this stage, designers can:
Align entrances with natural pedestrian movement.
Establish step-free circulation networks.
Integrate vertical movement logically within building cores.
Plan sanitary facilities where they are actually needed.
Ensure gradients, surfaces, and transitions are inherently usable.
Coordinate landscape and architecture to function as one system.
When accessibility informs these foundational choices, it disappears into the design — not because it is absent, but because it is naturally accommodated.
Moving From Compliance to Usability
Compliance frameworks are necessary, but they represent minimum thresholds. Usability asks a different question: can a wide range of people actually use this environment without assistance?
A compliance-driven retrofit may achieve dimensional correctness. A usability-driven design considers human diversity — mobility, ageing, temporary injury, sensory differences, and the simple unpredictability of everyday life.
Buildings that are usable tend also to be:
Easier to navigate.
Safer in emergencies.
More comfortable for all occupants.
More adaptable over time.
Thus accessibility, when planned early, strengthens overall design quality rather than constraining it.
Institutional Projects: The Multiplier Effect
Large institutions illustrate the importance of early planning most clearly. Universities, hospitals, and public facilities function as interconnected environments rather than single buildings. If accessibility is not embedded at the planning stage, barriers multiply across distances, levels, and services.
Retrofitting one building at a time cannot resolve systemic issues such as:
Disconnected pedestrian routes.
Inconsistent level management.
Fragmented signage strategies.
Transport drop-offs that do not relate to entrances.
Variations in usability between old and new blocks.
Early accessibility planning allows such environments to function coherently as campuses rather than collections of structures.
The Role of Design Teams and Developers
Accessibility should not be viewed as an external audit imposed late in the project. It is most effective when design teams engage with it as part of their own decision-making process.
Developers increasingly recognise that inclusive environments:
Enhance long-term asset value.
Reduce later modification liabilities.
Improve public perception and usability.
Support demographic realities such as ageing populations.
When accessibility expertise is consulted during planning rather than after completion, it becomes a collaborative design tool rather than a corrective mechanism.
From Adjustment to Intention
Retrofitting will always remain necessary for older environments. However, new construction offers a choice: continue repeating patterns that require later correction, or shift towards intentional inclusion from the outset.
Designing access from the beginning does not require radical change. It requires a different sequence of thought — one that asks, early on, who the building is for and how it will actually be used.
When accessibility begins at the drawing board, it ceases to be a special feature. It becomes part of how architecture works.
Suggested Reading
Readers wishing to explore these ideas further may consult widely recognised guidance on inclusive design, built environment usability, and universal design approaches, including:
National accessibility guidelines issued for built environment planning in India.
Technical provisions within India’s building regulatory framework addressing access and circulation.
International good practice documents on usability and universal design principles.
Research literature examining the relationship between spatial planning and inclusive participation.
Studies on lifecycle cost comparisons between early integration and post-construction modification.
Friday, 31 October 2025
Human in the Loop, Bias in the Script: A Film Review
Human in the Loop, a recent film examining the uneasy partnership between Artificial Intelligence and humanity, arrives when the technological imagination oscillates between utopian optimism and existential dread. Marketing narratives portray AI as either our benevolent assistant or our imminent overlord. The film attempts to resist these binaries, grounding its narrative in the messy, often uncomfortable, space where human judgement and machine logic are forced to coexist. It is this space that disability communities know too well: the zone where systems intended to “assist” end up surveilling, disciplining, or excluding.
This review engages with the film through the arguments I have articulated in my work on prompt bias, accessibility, and disability-led design. If AI systems are only as ethical as the assumptions fed into them, then “the human in the loop” is not a safeguard by default. A biased human keeping watch over a biased machine produces not balance, but compounding prejudice. The film gestures towards this tension, though at times without the depth that disability perspectives could have added.
The Premise: Humans as Moral Guardrails
The core narrative premise is straightforward: an AI system designed to support decision-making in public services begins exhibiting troubling patterns. Authorities insist that the system will remain safe because a “human in the loop” retains final authority. The question the film explores is whether this safeguard is meaningful or merely bureaucratic comfort dressing.
The film wisely avoids technical jargon. Instead, it frames the issue through a series of real-world scenarios: automated hiring, predictive policing, healthcare triage, and social welfare determinations. In each, the human reviewer is presented as the ethical backstop. But the film repeatedly reveals how rushed, under-trained, and system-dependent these humans are. Their “oversight” is often symbolic, not substantive.
This aligns with disability critiques of assistive and decision-making technologies. If the system itself is designed upon a logic of normalcy, hierarchy, and suspicion of difference, then a human operator merely rubber stamps the discrimination. A safeguard which never safeguards must be called by its proper name: ritual.
A Loop that Learns the Wrong Lessons
One of the film’s strongest structural choices is its metaphor of the loop. We see not only “human in the loop” but “loop in the human”. Over time, the human reviewers begin adopting the AI’s rationale. Instead of questioning outputs, they internalise them. Confidence in machine judgement breeds complacency in human judgement.
A particularly sharp moment occurs when a social welfare officer rejects an application, citing the AI risk score. When challenged, she responds: “The system has seen thousands of cases. How can I overrule that?” In that instant, the audience witnesses the reversal of power. The human is no longer the check on the system; the system becomes the check on the human.
For disabled audiences, this dynamic is painfully familiar. Tools meant to empower often become tools of compliance. Speech-to-text systems that refuse to recognise dysarthric voices, proctoring software that flags blind students for “not looking at the screen”, hiring algorithms that treat disability as “lack of culture fit” — all operate with the same logic: non-legibility equals non-credibility.
The film hints at this, though it does not explicitly name disability. This omission is a missed opportunity, because disability provides the clearest lens to examine what happens when “the loop” is built upon default assumptions of normality.
The Myth of the Neutral Observer
The film’s central critique is that a human in the loop is only meaningful if that human has both empathy and agency. However, the film does not fully unpack how social bias contaminates the loop. It largely presents “the human” as a neutral figure rendered passive by technology. But no human enters oversight without prejudice; their judgement is shaped by culture, training, and power.
In my recent writing, I have argued that prompts reveal user bias and AI tends to follow the user’s framing. The same principle applies here: if the human reviewer is biased, the loop becomes a bias amplifier. The film gestures towards this through a brief subplot involving a hiring panel. The human reviewer rejects a disabled candidate not because of the AI’s output, but because “the system must be correct”. The tragedy is that the system’s training data reflected decades of hiring discrimination. The reviewer trusts the machine because the machine echoes societal prejudice.
Here, the film could have benefited from a deeper exploration of disability-led prompting, reframing, and language etiquette. Without anchoring oversight in rights-based frameworks, human judgement merely masks bias with a polite face.
When Oversight Becomes Theatre
A recurring motif in the film is the performative nature of oversight. We see checklists, audit meetings, and compliance reports — all signalling responsible governance. Yet none of these prevents harm. The film’s critique of “audit theatre” resonates strongly with disability experience, where accessibility audits often occur after design is complete, and disabled persons are called in merely to validate decisions already made.
The phrase “human in the loop” functions similarly. It reassures the public that humans retain power, while hiding the fact that decision-making has already been ceded to algorithmic systems. The supervision is decorative.
This mirrors the “tokenism trap” in disability inclusion. When disabled persons are consulted at the tail end of design, their role becomes symbolic. Their presence legitimises inaccessible systems rather than transforming them. The film understands this dynamic intuitively, even if it does not explicitly borrow from disability discourse.
Moments of Ethical Clarity
Despite its gaps, the film contains several moments of thoughtful clarity:
- A data scientist resigns after realising the oversight team is incentivised to approve system decisions, not scrutinise them.
- A scene where a reviewer is told: “Your job is not to judge the system, but to justify it.”
- A powerful montage showing how tech developers, under pressure to scale, see oversight as an obstacle, not a safeguard.
The film effectively illustrates that governance cannot rely on individual moral courage. Systems that reward speed, efficiency, and conformity will always erode slow, reflective, ethical judgement.
This is precisely why disability advocacy insists on structural safeguards, not individual discretion. Access cannot depend on the goodwill of one sympathetic officer. Rights must be enforceable at design, deployment, and review.
Where the Film Hesitates
While Human in the Loop is compelling, it hesitates in two important areas:
1. Lack of Specific Marginalised Lenses
The film takes a universalist tone — “AI harms us all” — which is true at a philosophical level but shallow at a lived level. Harm is not evenly distributed. Disabled persons, along with other marginalised communities, bear disproportionate risk from AI mis-judgement. The absence of disability voices weakens the film’s moral authority. Had it engaged with disabled lived experience, the critique of oversight would have gained both nuance and urgency.
2. Limited Exploration of Alternatives
The film critiques existing oversight but does not explore disability-led or community-led models of design and evaluation. Without offering a counter-imaginary, the narrative risks fatalism: that human oversight is doomed. In reality, oversight becomes meaningful when the overseers are those most impacted by harm. Not diversity on paper, but power-sharing in practice.
Relevance to Disability-Smart Prompting and Design
My recent work argues that prompting AI with disability-inclusive language can reduce prejudice in responses. The film unintentionally reinforces this principle: the question shapes the system. If oversight questions are bureaucratic — “Has the system followed protocol?” — the loop measures compliance. If oversight questions are justice-centred — “Has the system caused inequity, exclusion, or rights violations?” — the loop measures fairness.
Imagine if the oversight process in the film had disability-smart prompts such as:
- “Does the system assume normative behaviour or body standards?”
- “How would this decision affect a disabled applicant exercising their legal right to reasonable accommodation?”
- “Have persons with disabilities been involved in evaluating model outcomes?”
Suddenly, “human in the loop” ceases to be ritual and becomes accountability.
Conclusion: The Loop Must Expand, Not Collapse
Human in the Loop leaves the viewer with a sobering realisation: a lone human reviewer is inadequate protection against systemic bias, particularly when that human has neither the mandate nor training to challenge the system. The film’s haunting closing image — a reviewer staring at a screen, accepting an AI-generated decision despite visible discomfort — encapsulates the danger of symbolic oversight.
For disability communities, the message is clear. We cannot trust systems to self-correct. We cannot assume human judgement will prevail over technological momentum. And we certainly cannot allow oversight to exclude those most impacted by discrimination.
A human in the loop is meaningful only if that human is:
- empowered to challenge the system,
- trained in bias literacy and rights-based frameworks, and
- accountable to the communities the system affects.
Where disability is concerned, the safeguard is not a human in the loop, but disabled humans designing the loop.
The future of ethical AI will not be secured by adding a human after the fact. It will be built by placing disability, inclusion, and justice at the centre of design, prompting, and governance. The loop must not shrink into a rubber stamp. It must widen into a circle of shared power.
Thursday, 30 October 2025
Prototype — Accessible to Whom? Legible to What?
When I first read this theme, I thought to myself, at last someone has asked the right two questions, though perhaps in reverse.
We often think of prototyping as a neutral, creative act—a space of optimism and experimentation. Yet, for many of us in the disability community, it is also the stage where inclusion quietly begins or silently ends.
And when Artificial Intelligence enters this space, another question arises: what does it mean for a prototype to be legible to a machine before it is accessible to a human?
My argument today is straightforward: AI-powered assistive technologies often make disabled people legible to machines, but not necessarily empowered as agents of design.
The challenge before us is to move from designing for to designing with, and ultimately to designing from disability.
Accessibility and Legibility
Accessibility, as Aimi Hamraie reminds us, is not a technical feature but a relationship—a continuous negotiation between bodies, spaces, and technologies.
It is not about adding a ramp at the end, but about asking why there was a staircase to begin with.
Legibility, on the other hand, concerns what systems can recognise, process, and render into data. Within Artificial Intelligence, what is not legible simply ceases to exist.
Now imagine a person whose speech, gait, or expression does not fit the model. The algorithm blinks and replies: “Pardon? You are not in my dataset.”
Speech-recognition tools mishear dysarthric voices; facial-recognition models misclassify disabled expressions as errors.
In such moments, accessibility collapses into machinic readability. One is included only if the code can comprehend them. The bureaucracy of bias, once paper-bound, now speaks in silicon.
The Bias Pipeline—What Goes In, Comes Out Biased
In one experiment, researchers submitted pairs of otherwise identical resumes to AI-powered screening tools. In one version, the candidate had a “Disability Leadership Award” or involvement in disability advocacy listed; in the other, that line was omitted. The AI system consistently ranked the non-disability version higher, asserting that the presence of disability credentials indicated “less leadership emphasis” or “focus diverted from core responsibilities.”Much Much Spectrum+1
This is discrimination by design. A qualified person with disability is judged unsuitable—even when their skills match or exceed the baseline—because the algorithm treated their disability as liability. Such distortions stem not from random error but from biased training data and value judgments encoded invisibly.
The Tokenism Trap
The bias in data is reinforced by bias in design. Disabled persons are often invited into the process only when the prototype is complete—summoned for validation rather than collaboration.
This is an audit theatre, a performance of inclusion without participation.
The United Kingdom’s National Disability Survey was struck down by its own High Court for precisely this reason: it claimed to be the largest listening exercise ever held, yet failed to involve disabled people meaningfully.
Even the European Union’s AI Act, though progressive, risks the same trap. It mandates accessibility for high-risk systems but leaves enforcement weak.
Most developers receive no formal training in accessibility. When disability appears, it is usually through the medical model—as something to be corrected, not as expertise to be centred.
Real-World Consequences
AI hiring systems rank curricula vitae lower if they contain disability-related words, even when qualifications are stronger.
Video-interview platforms misread the facial expressions of stroke survivors or autistic candidates.
Online proctoring software has flagged blind students as “cheating” for not looking at screens. During the pandemic, educational technology in India expanded rapidly, yet accessibility lagged behind.
Healthcare algorithms trained on narrow datasets make incorrect inferences about disability-related conditions.
Each of these failures flows from inaccessible prototyping practices.
Disability-Led AI Prototyping
If the problem lies in who defines legibility, the solution lies in who leads the prototype.
Disability-led design recognises accessibility as a form of knowledge. It asks not, “How do we fix you?” but “What can your experience teach the machine about the world?”
Google’s Project Euphonia trains AI to understand atypical speech. The effort is valuable, yet it raises questions of data ownership and labour—who benefits from making oneself legible to the machine?
By contrast, community-led mapping projects, where wheelchair users, blind travellers, and neurodivergent coders co-train AI systems, are slower but more authentic.
Here, accessibility becomes reciprocity: the machine learns to listen, not merely to predict.
As Sara Hendren writes, design is not a solution; it is an invitation.
When disability leads, that invitation becomes mutual—the technology adjusts to us, not the other way round.