Students with disabilities innovate ways to use spaces, products not designed for them

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• Amna Nawaz:

  For people with disabilities, innovating ways to navigate spaces and use products that weren't designed for them can be an everyday part of life.

  For some, that's meant making their own tools, modifying existing ones, or entirely reimagining environments.

  Special correspondent Cat Wise recently spent a day with inventors in Berkeley, California.

• Speaker:

  So, we are trying to find new avenues for that.

• Cat Wise:

  Every Friday, members of the University of California Berkeley Disability Lab meet to discuss their latest projects.

• Speaker:

  Fluid and responsive way.

• Cat Wise:

  You made this in one week?

  Lab members Amaan Jogia-Sattar And Anthony Zhou are working on a new device.

  Anthony Zhou, University of California, Berkeley, Disability Lab: So, if you give it a nice breath, then the CO2 value should go up.

• Cat Wise:

  It can measure conditions like air quality and light levels in U.C. Berkeley classrooms, things people with various disabilities, including autism, can be sensitive to.

• Anthony Zhou:

  So a lot of times, things like light, sound, smell, we don't quite notice them in our daily lives, but they can be quite harmful to other people. So it's just a way to quantify those things and make recommendations to the university based off of those measurements.

• Cat Wise:

  They hope to share the data they gather with University officials and make an app people can use to navigate or change classrooms.

  Amaan Jogia-Sattar, University of California, Berkeley, Disability Lab: And then this is really something that would have the potential to validate students' concerns about like lighting conditions. They would be able to see that, oh, maybe something that I'm experiencing, there's data to back it up.

• Cat Wise:

  The lab, founded in 2018, is a place where people, most of whom identify as disabled, come together to research and work on projects aimed at improving accessibility.

  One in four people in the U.S. live with a disability, yet many products and spaces are not built with them in mind. Lab founder Karen Nakamura and associate director Nate Tilton say they encourage members to be unashamed and hack their spaces on and off-campus.

  Karen Nakamura, Founder, University of California, Berkeley, Disability Lab: The world is built for certain type of people, and recognizing that its built to allow certain people to move without any issue throughout the world and succeed, and it's not built for others.

• Cat Wise:

  In his second year at Berkeley, Tilton entered a classroom that was too tight to maneuver in his wheelchair. So he had to listen to the lecture facing a wall. On another occasion, when using his walker, Tilton struggled going up a hill on campus.

  Nate Tilton, Associate Director, University of California, Berkeley, Disability Lab: I ended up having to go to the E.R. because the hills just aggravated my disabilities quite a bit. But if the signage would have told me that there was an accessible route through some of these buildings that connected, that could have been avoided. But I had no idea.

• Cat Wise:

  Those experiences inspired him to create the Radical Mapping Project, a crowdsourced navigation app designed to help students with disabilities get around campus.

• Nate Tilton:

  This is not just unique to Berkeley. This is something common to a lot of campuses, where there's a lack of signage, there is a lack of understanding that accessibility just goes beyond a checklist.

• Cat Wise:

  In an e-mail to the "NewsHour," a U.C. Berkeley communications official said: "The campus understands that despite the general accessibility of classrooms, some classrooms present access present access barriers to disabled students."

  The official also provided a Web site link, including campus maps related to disability access.

  Skyler Bennett, University of California, Berkeley, Disability Lab: Particles can't get in.

• Cat Wise:

  On another side of the lab, Skyler Bennett is working on a easily replicable air respirator.

  In California, and throughout the West, many people use tight-fitting masks like N95s when the air quality is poor due to wildfires, but those masks can be especially difficult to wear for some disabled people.

  Air is coming in through the filters, becoming clean, and then going into this plastic bag and then into the mask.

• Skyler Bennett:

  Breathing through the tube. Yes, it's pretty cool.

• Cat Wise:

  Low-cost design is key to the lab's work.

• Skyler Bennett:

  The cost of respirators tends to be in the thousands of dollars. This one, we made for 20 bucks.

• Cat Wise:

  Nearly 18 percent of America's disability community lives in poverty, and many products designed for them are expensive. Workers with disabilities are paid 74 cents for every dollar paid to their nondisabled coworkers.

• Karen Nakamura:

  Many of the products that are being designed for disabled people, they're incredibly expensive. A power chair could easily be the cost of a small car.

• Cat Wise:

  Tilton says, in addition to creating affordable products, the Berkeley lab is a space for disabled people to find community.

• Nate Tilton:

  When I found this lab, it was just one of those things where it's like, hey, it's OK to be who you are and really understand and embrace your identity as a disabled person.

  Joshua Miele, University of California, Berkeley, Disability Lab: That is a nice temperature.

• Cat Wise:

  As a freshman at U.C. Berkeley in 1987, Joshua Miele also found a space to be himself.

• Joshua Miele:

  It was the first time I had been in a community with people with disabilities who I liked and respected and who I could emulate and be proud of being part of. And it was an extraordinary shift in my identity.

• Cat Wise:

  He often had someone read his physics textbooks aloud while he took notes in braille. Now he's an adviser to the Berkeley disability lab, and an accessibility researcher at Amazon, where he helped develop Alexa's Show and Tell feature.

• Speaker:

  Alexa, what am I holding?

• Cat Wise:

  Designed to help blind and low-vision customers identify common items.

  So, what are some of the questions that you start to first ask when you are in the process of designing a new product or making modifications to an existing product?

• Joshua Miele:

  I ask myself, what — what is the problem I'm trying to fix? Who is — who am I trying to fix the problem for? And how are they going to use this on a day-to-day basis?

• Cat Wise:

  He's spent his career designing accessible tools for people with disabilities, like this set of tactile maps for every station in the Bay Area rapid transit system compatible with an audio smart pen.

  Miele says, while he enjoys inventing, people with disabilities shouldn't have to spend extra time or labor to complete daily tasks.

• Joshua Miele:

  There's a tax on people with disabilities, and it's a tax of time. And it means that there is — for any given thing that you want to do as a person with a disability, there's a good chance you will have to put in more effort, do more work, take more time to do that thing than someone else would have to do.

• Cat Wise:

  Miele says the key to creating accessible products is including people with disabilities in the process.

• Joshua Miele:

  We know what we need, and that's why it's essential that people with disabilities be not only — not only consulted, but be tightly woven into the process of developing and designing and producing the tools that we use every day to do the things we want to do.

  The biggest shift that we still are grappling with is to get rid of all of the assumptions and preconceptions we have about people with disabilities, what they can and cannot do, and what their place is in society.

• Cat Wise:

  Back on campus, Nakamura says she wants the lab to be a bridge between the Bay Area's tech industries and Berkeley's disability communities.

• Karen Nakamura:

  All the large corporations are realizing that they are amassing power and that, if they don't start to think through the ethical, political, legal issues, someone else will.

  Our goal ultimately is to create a community in which disabled people really feel empowered to take control of their lives and take control over all this technology that's seeping into everyone's surrounding.

• Cat Wise:

  For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Cat Wise in Berkeley, California.

• Amna Nawaz:

  And, online, we have more from researcher Joshua Miele on making tech that is both useful and delightful for people with disabilities.

  That is at PBS.org/NewsHour.