Tech reporters are a dime a dozen, but disabled tech reporters are few and far between.
Update 4/7: Added a new paragraph on accessibility joining discrete tech beats.
Earlier this week, I was notified I “wasn’t selected for an interview” for a job.
The position was at a major national news organization, a newspaper. The job, which I applied for many months ago, was reporting on a major tech company I know intimately well, one that has been covered extensively for this column. Given my years of experience—a full decade in journalism come next month—and body of work, I felt good about my chances of at least scoring an initial interview.
Nope.
What this latest “thanks, but no thanks” experience—it isn’t the first time to happen—puts in plain view is the majority of editorial powers-that-be and recruiters who run big newsrooms do not value diversity and inclusion as fully as they believe they do. The disability community is the largest group of marginalized people on this planet, the one group anyone can join at anytime. Yet technology coverage, at least at mainstream outlets, continues to eschew much, if any, meaningful reporting on accessibility and assistive technologies. It’s viewed as too niche for a broader readership or not something editors necessarily want to cover.
Therein lies the issue. Editors should want to cover it. It’s eminently newsworthy.
There is zero reason, for instance, an accessibility-oriented review of Apple’s latest and greatest iPhone couldn’t run alongside the run-of-the-mill generalized take on the device when Apple seeds embargoed review units every September. Disabled people read the news too; it’s perfectly logical to assume a person with motor delays would be interested to know how the new iPhone feels in the hand. Likewise, when Apple introduced the iPhone 14 Pro and its nifty new Dynamic Island feature last fall, it would’ve been informative for someone who’s visually impaired to know whether the functionality is worth an upgrade. Yet there’s nothing like this for disabled people in today’s mainstream tech coverage.
The journalism industry has a problem with disability reporting, and it isn’t limited to technology. Just this week, there was a story written about the Department of Justice coming down on the city of Chicago for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act due to not having accessible traffic lights for Blind and low vision pedestrians. What stands out here is not merely the violation itself or that the DoJ would come down about it—it’s the fact the lede refers to low vision and visually impaired people as being “sight-compromised.” The way in which the mainstream media, often by well-meaning yet clearly out of their depth able-bodied reporters, covers disability is cringeworthy. The results are almost always awkward. If it’s not some human interest story about a disabled person overcoming the “obstacle” that is their own bodily makeup, it’s a legitimate news item like this marred by laughingly bad language. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
For the technology media in particular, the lack of consideration for atypical speech when critiquing the new HomePod is a sign reviewers must be better at looking at products more holistically and inclusively. Expecting your average reviewer to suddenly become an expert on assistive tech is unrealistic; what is realistic, however, is expecting said reviewer to at least acknowledge accessibility’s adjacency. To wit, it shouldn’t be a stretch to maybe mention that, in the HomePod’s case, someone with a speech delay may have trouble communicating with Siri and thus using the device. It’s a very real use case that can make smart speakers, as a product, feel exclusionary to a not-insignificant swath of people.
In response to my tweet on the aforementioned article, disabled journalist Kristen Parisi, who is a wheelchair user, summed up the solution: “Every newsroom needs disability reporting training. And disabled reporters,” she said.
I can count the number of disabled journalists I know on one hand, including Parisi. The point is not to hire a disabled journalist simply because they have a disability; that would be tokenizing. The salient point is to hire disabled people to staff newsrooms because we know of which we write. It should be about knowledge and expertise. As Monica Chin noted in a story from last summer on this issue—she interviewed me for the piece—accessibility stories are oftentimes relegated to freelancers or to staffers who aren’t well-versed in the subject matter. While there’s nothing wrong with an abled person writing about disability, surely there’s nothing better than disabled people writing authoritatively on disability.
To hide behind excuses like resources or readership or focus is a cop-out.
Think of it this way. If news organizations can employ reporters to cover artificial intelligence and social media, amongst other things, as bespoke beats, there is no reason they couldn’t follow suit for accessibility and assistive technologies. It’s a choice, conscious or not, that misses out on reaching a lot more readers. Technology is so entwined with daily living that it’s disingenuous to ignore disability’s impact on it. For that matter, the entirety of this column—all three years of it thus far—could handily make up its own beat at some outlet.
Recently, the World Economic Forum shared a statistic in which they reported of the 90% of corporations who espouse their ostensible commitment to furthering DEI efforts, a meager 4% of those companies actively included the disability community in said efforts. It’s a sobering reminder of how ignored and cast aside disabled people are, not to mention pathetic on the companies’ part. In a similar vein, if newsrooms are able to devote resources to other aspects of social justice reporting—not to mention the intersectionality of communities—they surely can do the same for disability. On tech or otherwise, disability should be prioritized.
In the end, not getting an interview is disappointing—but that isn’t what ultimately gnaws. It isn’t sour grapes. It isn’t what truly matters. What’s truly bothersome is the tacit acknowledgment that my lived experiences, and by extension, my journalistic expertise, is seemingly unvalued. Put more broadly, the rejection sent yet another signal that the way disabled people use technology is not important enough to want to investigate and share with the world. It’s disheartening. Worse still, it reaffirms the notion that anybody who proclaims themselves a DEI champion but leaves out disabled people—even unwittingly so—should seriously reconsider their stance and aspire to do better in the future.
