The exhibition presents a cross-disciplinary exploration of adaptive and inclusive design, gathering work from faculty, students, alumni, and invited collaborators at the Art and Design Gallery. It frames design as care—craft that responds to real needs through co-creation and practical problem-solving grounded in inclusive design principles. Visitors encounter a wide range of objects and projects, from bespoke mobility aids and wearables to furniture and social practice installations. The page highlights how many pieces are developed with end-users from the start, echoing design-with-not-for…

Friends and collaborators remember Alice Wong and say they will keep fighting for disability justice; the story recounts organizing rooted in mentorship, public storytelling, and steady relationships among people with disabilities, including Brittanie Hernandez-Wilson reflecting at Lake Merritt on grief, love, and resolve to carry the work forward. The reporting includes the subhead “Centering the most marginalized” and names ableism as an everyday barrier; friends describe barriers in clinics, programs, and public spaces, and emphasize participation by people with disabilities as the point…

Failures to consider Accessibility in Community Development have far-reaching consequences for People with Disabilities, preventing their ability to participate in public spaces. Dani Izzie’s experience in Miami, where the lack of curb cuts blocked her access to public transit, highlights how even small oversights can have devastating impacts. These barriers erode autonomy and reinforce systemic discrimination, excluding People with Disabilities from vibrant and inclusive communities. Addressing such failures requires proactive efforts to integrate accessibility into Community planning.…

Thirty years after waking up paralyzed from the waist down because of transverse myelitis, a rare neurological condition, a Camarillo woman has built her life around advocating for People with Disabilities, propelling herself up the ramp at her own home, serving as Ms. Wheelchair California in 2024, and filling her garden with cherry tomatoes and the milkweed she planted hoping monarch butterflies would come, a full life she can live because her home was built to carry her, which is the standing question she puts to every gathering we plan, since the setup of a gathering decides who can take part in it long before anyone arrives.

The Surgeon General warns that loneliness harms health like heavy smoking, and for people with developmental disabilities it’s driven by systems—not personal shortcomings. The piece argues that Disability Doesn’t Have To Mean Isolation: segregation in housing, day programs, and service models keeps people apart, so the public task is to redesign for connection and belonging. Cincinnati shows the stakes: adults with developmental disabilities experience some of Ohio’s lowest employment and participation rates because our systems prize placement over purpose. Employers, funders, and agencies…

Websites increasingly deploy anti-scraping techniques like dynamic loading to protect data from bots, but these “often block accessibility for users with disabilities by breaking compatibility with screen readers and assistive tools.” The article names this a “silent trade-off” that “erects barriers for human users relying on assistive technologies,” and presses for inclusive web design that balances protection and access. Concrete barriers are spelled out: “rendering text as images or using canvas elements” that screen readers cannot interpret; JavaScript-heavy patterns and dynamic loading…

Arapahoe Community College’s Shared Visions Exhibition, in partnership with the Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB), is the 11th annual multi-sensory show inviting visitors to engage through touch, sound, taste, and smell. Running until Dec. 3, with the gallery closed Nov. 24–30, it features a brightly knitted wall piece, bumpy, half-baked clay cups, music, jelly bean tasting, and a walk-in simulation of a night in the mountains in New York; this year’s gallery includes works from about 30 ACC art students and about 10 CCB artists.

Artificial intelligence is now writing a growing share of the world's production code, and the same failure to build in accessibility that excluded People with Disabilities from the digital web for three decades is being reproduced at far greater scale through a handful of foundation models whose defaults will shape millions of products simultaneously. Public benchmarking through AIMAC, the AI Model Accessibility Checker, has forced measurable improvement in some AI models, yet persistent failures including low contrast text on roughly 85 percent of AI generated pages show that accountability is not yet standard practice across the industry. When People with Disabilities hold genuine decision making authority from the start, as blind developers Taylor Arndt and Jeff Bishop demonstrated by building the Accessibility Agents project because AI tools kept producing interfaces they could not use, the products that result address real access barriers. Removing barriers so that People with Disabilities can participate fully as both creators and users of digital technology is the shared responsibility that defines this moment for every Community Builder.

The most credible guide to what artificial intelligence (AI) means for Blind People is the testimony of Blind People themselves, who have invented and adopted transformative tools, from the typewriter to print reading machines, long before the wider world caught up. Today AI is tearing down barriers to the visual world that Blind People have faced for years, describing photographs, reading mail, and narrating what stands in front of someone wearing smart glasses, while Blind People are also writing their own software through a practice called vibe coding, only to be swarmed online for using AI and to inherit the same neglect of Blind users that human developers long treated as acceptable. The way forward is for Blind People to sit at the center of how these systems are trained and governed, not at the edges, because Blind People creating solutions for Blind People is the surest path to technology that serves rather than sidelines the people it claims to help.

As we celebrate the 34th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, it's essential to acknowledge its profound impact on millions of lives by enhancing accessibility to public spaces, employment, transportation, and vital services. Despite these successes, a significant gap persists in the realm of digital accessibility as our society becomes increasingly digital. It's crucial to address this problem to ensure that digital platforms, which have revolutionized how we live and work, do not create barriers for People with Disabilities. In the digital age, the barriers…

This story spotlights a 72-year-old solo traveler who uses a wheelchair and treats careful preparation as a path to independence. The piece frames travel as doable with realistic planning—choosing routes thoughtfully, pacing days, and using tools that make unfamiliar places easier to navigate—while showing how accessible destinations can expand what’s possible, as seen in an overview of national parks that prioritize accessibility. The traveler explains how methodical checks reduce stress: confirming step-free access, communicating with airlines about assistance and mobility equipment, and…

An engineering student at a public university runs a computer independently using a thin retainer worn against the roof of her mouth, which reads the pressure of her tongue, her sip gestures, and the tilt of her head. That device went on public sale this past July after roughly six years of development built around what People with Disabilities said they wanted, and it delivers hands free Bluetooth control of laptops, phones, tablets, and powered wheelchairs. A designer and disability advocate who has no hands and no shoulder sockets now steers a cursor with his head, clicks with his tongue, and works away from his desk for the first time in his life, and the same team is working toward silent speech for People who can move the mouth and tongue but cannot speak aloud. Access on that scale builds careers and social life at once, and it lands as a duty on our communities every time we produce an email, a flyer, or an event handout to make certain it is accessible and follows the International Accessibility Standards.

Using PDFs for on-screen reading is a common practice that often leads to frustration and inefficiency for users compared to standard web pages. Despite the convenience of PDFs for printing, they are not optimized for online viewing, causing usability problems such as difficulty navigating, slow download times, and lack of accessibility features. As Jakob Nielsen and Anna Kaley emphasize, PDFs are meant for distributing documents for printing, not for online consumption. The heavy text and graphics in PDFs increase file size and hinder navigation, making it challenging for users to find…