‘A Lone Voice In The Wilderness’
My friend and peer Stephen Hackett has a Now page on his 512 Pixels blog, which he describes as “a running log of things I have going on, both professionally and in real life.“ It’s a cool idea, one I’ve considered adapting for Curb Cuts, and I check the page whenever he updates it.
The reason I write about Hackett’s Now page is because a sentence he wrote recently truly resonated with me, as it crystallized a sentiment I’ve felt deeply in the over 13 years I’ve been a tech journalist and part of the Apple community. Writing about what he calls his personal “struggle” with AI’s impact on society, he says the schism in covering the problems with data centers in and around his hometown of Memphis whilst finding AI genuinely useful makes him sometimes feel as though he’s “a lone voice in the wilderness.”
That phrase—“a lone voice in the wilderness”—perfectly captures the essence of my entire career covering accessibility and assistive technologies. While I know several people with disabilities who work as reporters at various outlets, both corporate and independent, I don’t know many people with disabilities who cover accessibility—or disability inclusion writ large. The business desks of newsrooms cover technology like other areas of news; disability is not mainstream, so they don’t cover it. They don’t cover it, so the disability community is left yearning for exposure. Even in the Apple community, accessibility really is only covered on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, one day of the year; even then, most of the talk on blogs and on podcasts tend to patronize the people for whom these features are truly innovative and life-changing. It’s “gee whiz, these features are great” and “accessibility is for everyone” when, in actuality, GAAD is the one day when accessibility is supposed to raise awareness of their target demographic. I get it—most commentators are not accessibility aesthetes. They need not be. The salient point is simply, as GAAD co-founder Joe Devon told me last year, we aren’t a focus most of the time. Indeed, the disability community can “look forward to 364 days of global accessibility oblivion,” he said.
So yes, I absolutely feel like I’ve been a lone voice over the last decade-plus. I cringe whenever I see media outlets falling over themselves to hire AI reporters. If they can do that, why not do so for accessibility? Why are disability-centric stories always perpetual fodder for sappy human interest stories at the end of news broadcasts? It’s frustrating, not because I crave adoration or accolades, but because I do feel so lonesome and as though every story I write, every interview I do, is destined to be swallowed up by a journalistic black hole. It’s emotionally exhausting, despite the fact I know I do what I do for the greater good. It just feels like my reporting, my insight and perspective, is perpetually being squeezed out by ostensibly more important topics.
It’s a Sisyphean task, both coping with, and writing about, disability.
Just please know my lone voice should matter.
