Human Censored Design
Thank You For Your Feedback Loop is a monthly newsletter that will share previously unpublished reporting and analysis on the elite capture of disability movements.
Kat Holmes and the late August de los Reyes came into cahoots after she “heard de los Reyes talking about this idea that Microsoft should be aspiring toward universal design.” Holmes was Microsoft’s principal design director at the time and de los Reyes was “running design for Xbox.” The two bonded over a seemingly shared mission – and in time and collaboration with others, “hit upon a vein of design thinking [...] dubbed inclusive design, it begins with studying overlooked communities, ranging from dyslexics to the deaf. By learning about how they adapt to their world, the hope is that you can actually build better new products for everyone else.“
De los Reyes believed the methodology would “change the way products are designed across the industry.” Microsoft distilled its take on Inclusive Design into three rudimentary principles; recognize exclusion, learn from diversity, and most notably “solve for one, extend to many” in order to make “great products for the greatest number of people.”
These principles and some other corporate logics can be found in the Inclusive 101 Guidebook portion of Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit. Touted as the brains behind the methodology, Holmes became the industry media darling who spearheaded the development of what the non-discerning now believe to be “her inclusive design toolkit.” There was no such recognition for de los Reyes. Even Microsoft’s own acknowledgements section on the last page of its guidebook does not credit, thank, or even mention him.
August de los Reyes’ erasure mirrors the manufactured OXO Good Grips origin story, in which Sam Farber noticed his arthritic wife was struggling to peel a carrot, so he decided to make an easier peeler for her to use. All it took was a phone call to Sam’s often nameless wife to learn the concept for kitchen utensils with an ergonomic grip had been Betsey Farber’s all along. This is what Inclusive Design was created to systematize — the extraction of disabled ideas, and now it seems one of its earliest targets may also have been one of its creators.
August de Los Reyes had just landed his dream job as the head of design for Xbox when a spinal injury disabled him. His new barrier-filled world compelled him to advocate for a greater focus on accessibility within Microsoft. He did what many corporate-oriented disabled activists did at the time and continue to do, and attempted to reason with Microsoft by making the business case of the curb cut effect — which refers to the slopes that are cut into sidewalk curbs for wheelchair users, that become useful to skateboarders, and parents with strollers, etc.
The logic of the curb cut effect is not “a mantra from the disability community” as Microsoft has since attempted to claim. Sure, many disabled people adopt the logic of the curb cut effect, because we hope we can get our needs met if we can satiate the growth-at-all-costs mindset of powers that be. But the reality is curb cut rhetoric didn’t derive from disabled people at all. The research of Elizabeth Petrick, associate professor of history at Rice University shows that curb cut rhetoric was “deployed by computer engineers, as a metaphor to persuade stakeholders (often, their employers) to invest in making personal computers accessible.”
In 1988, one of those computer engineers, Greg Vanderheiden received a “federal grant from the National Institute on Disability Rehabilitation and Research (NIDRR) to look into how Windows could be made more accessible to people with disabilities” after years spent trying to alert blind computer users about the impact a shift from text based MS DOS to a future graphical based Windows OS would have on their livelihoods.
The grant was issued to The Trace Center, the accessibility research and development program Vanderheiden established at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to Greg Lowney, who would eventually become “Microsoft’s first Director of Accessibility” and founder of Microsoft’s Accessibility and Disabilities group, The Trace Center reached out to Microsoft “to see how we could work together on this, and because I was the senior program manager for Windows at the time, it naturally fell into my role.”
The work Lowney and Vanderheiden embarked on came to a head in 1994, when the impending arrival of Windows 95 threatened “vocational extinction” for blind computer users who had previously been liberated by MS DOS. Because “few anticipated that the changeover from DOS to Windows in the mid-1990s would be so sudden and so widespread,” Vanderheiden and Lowney “lobbied hard [...] to get the access features built into the operating system as standard components.”
Unsuccessful in their efforts, Lowney’s strategy shifted to mediating Microsoft’s disregard of blind computer users who “feared that they would be “relegated to the technological backwaters of society.” But, because one of the parties in the dispute was his employer, he lacked the neutrality essential to a meaningful mediation. Lowney’s belief that “to truly motivate commercial organizations we must continually demonstrate the benefits accessible design provides to all users” reflects the mindset of a diplomat who encourages the responsible party to feel good about new choices without accounting for the harm they’ve done.
Lowney’s diplomacy was predicated on achieving an ideal level of energy from both sides, which is why, as he was attempting to motivate the lesser energized Microsoft, he wrote to the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science:
"Windows has probably done more than anything else to earn Microsoft the enmity of the blind community. Microsoft has been both hated and feared by many people because we were promoting a graphical operating system without making sure that it could be used by people who are blind, and the results have been disastrous for many people."
This statement aimed to lower the temperature by providing the appearance of remorse. However, it was written on behalf of Microsoft, not by Microsoft itself. This pantomimed admission of guilt produced the illusion of reconciliation, compelling those who have the most at stake to cooperate with those that have already caused them harm. The disabled people on the outside would have had no motivation to appeal to the business interests of Microsoft. They were in crisis, and “Microsoft was virtually impossible, because they weren’t listening.”
Blind computer users were “unable to get access to the decision makers at Microsoft [...] and whenever pressure from access advocates did begin to rise, their efforts were short-circuited by assurances from Microsoft that better access was coming.” So they took a different tack, and began considering federal laws that might compel Microsoft to address the inaccessibility of Windows 95; the ADA, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Technology Related Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities Act. Ultimately, as Vanderheiden reflected, “progress was on again and off again until, with increasing pressure from the disability community, it made its way into the system.”
Why Microsoft ultimately relented was never made known, but the negative publicity and the threat of state and federal embargoes likely forced their hand. In the years that followed, Microsoft embarked on a PR campaign to repair its image. By 1999, Microsoft was describing “ramps cut into curbs” as an exemplar of assistive “technologies [that] have been refined to the point that they’re ready to be marketed to mainstream audiences.”
This timeline is important when considering the extent to which de los Reyes’ activism some two decades later factored into Microsoft’s Radical Bet On A New Type Of Design Thinking. This was the title of a Fast Company profile of de los Reyes that claimed he proposed the curb cut as a metaphor to Microsoft. This is not something de los Reyes could have done unless Greg Lowney had been excised from Microsoft’s PR-driven history of “Making Technology Accessible to Everyone” – an erasure that has since been compounded by link rot.
Microsoft seems to have been both-sidesing de los Reyes by facilitating his Fast Company profile while also omitting him from the toolkit’s credits. It can be difficult for disabled people to discern whether we’re being erased or tokenized. His unique position as a disabled user as well as a Microsoft insider meant he was navigating both forms of appropriation at the same time.
During this time, Microsoft kicked off an Inclusive Design challenge at their 2015 Design Expo, because “designing for people with permanent disabilities can seem like a significant constraint, but the resulting designs can actually benefit a much larger number of people.” They used the example of OXO Good Grips, which “were initially designed for people that suffer from arthritis, but later became widely popular.” The emphasis is ours, because the but points to a broader dehumanization of disability that extends beyond what de los Reyes was experiencing.
Microsoft encouraged participants to “consider situations that leave you in a temporarily disabled state, such as being in a foreign country.” Incredibly, Betsey Farber was in a foreign country when she prototyped her idea with French modelling clay, though France seems to have no other bearing on her story. The ergonomic handle wasn’t just something she mentioned in passing. This was something she pursued and developed using the knowledge she had acquired through her decades long career as a reputed architect. She brought skill and taste to her process, inspired by Shaker aesthetics. Her prototype looks strikingly similar to the Oxo Good Grips handle that came to market.
There is no professional affiliation, accomplishment, or status legit enough to counteract the myriad rhetorical devices used to position disabled creators as disabled users. What could Betsey have said or done to correct the record? She was probably the only person who saw this for what it was, and she wasn’t just telling her untold story, she was telling an untold story. What sort of misconceptions did she find unnecessary to correct at the outset and how did established disability tropes steer the truth into the myth it became? Revoking consent is hard. Especially in the 90s. Lest we forget that the person who became the protagonist of her story was her spouse.
While there seems to be no end to the rhetorical methods available to undermine disabled creators and contributors, the stories they shape are extremely limited. The trope of the savior spouse isn’t just limited to Sam and Betsey Farber. In the Fast Company profile of de los Reyes, the reporter referred to Kat Holmes as his work wife, even “though neither of them would see it this way.”
In the same way that Sam became the protagonist of Betsey’s story, Kat was the authority in August’s profile. The lede photo may have featured de los Reyes. His disability origin story may have been the article’s opening story. He may have had a point. But Holmes made the point: “The point isn’t to solve for a problem,” such as typing when you’re blind, said Holmes. “We’re flipping it.”
The “flipping it” was a rhetorical shift from ‘and’ to the ‘but’ we emphasized five paragraphs ago when we copy-pasted “designing for people with permanent disabilities can seem like a significant constraint, but the resulting designs can actually benefit a much larger number of people.” However slight the conjunction flip was, it didn’t happen in error at Microsoft’s 2015 Design Expo. The claim can also be found verbatim in the Inclusive Design Guidebook as well as Microsoft’s developer blog, where it was listed as one of the “driving principles behind inclusive design.”
In de los Reyes’ Fast Company Profile, Holmes claimed they were “reframing disability as an opportunity,” but the opportunity of disability “to motivate commercial organizations” was the entire point of the Curb Cut Effect. Microsoft’s ‘solve for one, extend to many’ mandate differentiated itself from its Curb Cut Effect and Universal Design predecessors by positioning disability as the muck that designers must subject themselves to in order to access the enduring fruits of the golden goose. It had the effect of granting permission to resourced folks to capitalize on human suffering rather than motivating them to address it.
Before it does anything else, the Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit establishes “a shift in our mindset, methods, and behaviors” by encouraging practitioners to reflect on ways they have “benefited from solutions that were originally designed for someone with different abilities.” Practitioners then “put this mindset into action,” through the performance of empathy, because “empathy is an important part of many different forms of design.”
Similar to the weaponization of therapy-speak to manipulate and coercively control others, systematized empathy manufactures a rapport used to foster intimate discourse. The marriage between Sam and Betsey, as well as Holmes and de los Reyes manufactured workplace matrimony show how close relations can make it difficult for the person being cajoled to retain their agency. Systematized empathy hinges on a reverence and deference to the good intentions of the person inhabiting the role of designer in order to get lesser resourced, lesser institutionally supported individuals on board with the extraction of our ideas and contributions.
Particularly tantalizing to the designerly imagination are the ways disabled people hack existing objects and systems for our own purposes. The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit uses empathy to prowl for these moments of disability ingenuity, because “the insight is in the adaptation.” There is no mention in the toolkit about resourcing individuals who have ideas worth pursuing, because the toolkit creates and justified conditions for laying claim to the only earning potential beyond labor that the most vulnerable among us disproportionately share.
Contained within the toolkit is the Persona Spectrum, a “quick tool” that helps designers determine which disabled hacks can scale along “a spectrum of permanent, temporary, and situational scenarios.” The exaggerated proportions of the Persona Spectrum’s Chibi style avatars that represent Microsoft’s “continuum from permanent disabilities to situational impairments,” along with their tableau of accouterments – such as a computer, a cast, or a cocktail shaker – creates, in the words of Baudrillard, “a world completely cataloged and analyzed, then artificially resurrected under the auspices of real” in order to satiate Microsoft’s growth at all costs agenda.
The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit popularized norms about disability inclusion that when teased out, become taboos. It doesn’t just sacrifice the one for the many. It also exploits misconceptions about representation in order to locate and select whichever one can be used to neutralize, undermine, bury, and censor the many. There are three primary methods embedded within Inclusive Design power grabs, and they often work together to achieve something more resembling Human Censored Design:
Simulation
Microsoft developed its Inclusive Design Toolkit during a moment in time when the established practice of disability simulations was falling out of favor. A paper published in 2017, titled Crip for a Day: The unintended negative consequences of disability simulations, found that “simulating disabilities promotes distress and fails to improve attitudes toward disabled people.” Rather than confront the dehumanizing consequences of relegating disabled people's expertise to that which can be learned through mimicry, Microsoft instead took issue with the format, describing “simulating different abilities through blindfolds and earplugs” as “misleading.”
Microsoft similarly problematized fictional personas as “often contain[ing] a compilation of “average” characteristics that, put together, actually represent no one.” The toolkit’s Persona Spectrum solution “highlight[s] opportunities to create solutions with utility and elegance for many people.” In a blog post titled ‘Kill Your Personas,’ author Margaret Price, a self-described “founder of Inclusive Design at Microsoft” – probably because her name can be found in the acknowledgements section of Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit – details why Microsoft decided to kill the singular persona. Readers may notice a theme here: Microsoft took the one persona with the stereotypical traits and expanded it to many personas in order to equip designers with, as they claim, a repository of human motivations.
The logic of the Persona Spectrum would not have held up if Microsoft had more accurately located the problem of fictionalized personas in the idealized respectable disabled person personas conjure to reinforce a problem the designer wants to exist (even if that problem doesn’t exist). That’s because the Persona Spectrum’s analysis of motivations does not extend to the motivations of the designer.
According to Price “the business case of persona spectrums” requires “gathering real insights from real people who share the motivations we’re designing for.” Those real insights, which take mere moments to communicate, may take a lifetime to glean. Because the dichotomy of motivations that exists between the designer and the disabled user conveniently conflates our objectives with a willingness to freely offer feedback in order to capitalize on our ideas and contributions, the opportunities the Persona Spectrum supposedly highlights are not extended to the individuals who provide the insights.
Instead, disabled users are caught in the tentacles of the very logics that led Baudrillard to develop his theory of hyperreality: The thing being represented does not depict reality, but rather, creates it. In his words, “territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory.” This is why Microsoft couldn’t take issue with simulations writ large, because the Persona Spectrum is as much a simulation as the traditional disability simulations and fictional personas it purports to address.
As early as 2016, when disability scholars began writing papers to bring existing critiques of disability simulations into the academy, they proposed representation as an antidote to simulation. In Simulating Others' Realities: Insiders Reflect on Disability Simulations, the authors argued for "the importance of disability representation" in response to “participants' collective questioning of their absence from the design and implementation of disability simulations.”
But when interpreted through the frame of postmodernist critique, “it is precisely in being represented by the dominant culture that [subjugated] groups have been rendered absences within it.” This is according to the gone-too-soon art and culture critic, Craig Owens who was “extremely wary of any claim that representations are politically representative of those whom they purport to represent.” For Owens, the person or thing being represented was never simply a presence, but instead became “a system of signs which always substitute for a nonpresence.” In Human Censored Design, the substitute for a non-presence is the token.
The Token
“On October 19, 2024, 50+ participants gathered at [the School of Visual Arts] MFA Interaction Design Studio in New York to create over 150 sketches for key accessibility terms.” The so-called Accessible Iconathon was facilitated by The Noun Project, which bills itself as “the world's most diverse and extensive collection of icons and mission-driven photos.” Disability:IN, Canva, as well as “DEI and accessibility consultant Jake Hytken” curated a list of corporatized referents – such as disability inclusion and inclusive design – that participants were tasked with visually defining.
In Noun Project blog post, Representing Disability with Jake Hytken, Jake Hytken prostylized “you should see it as your professional obligation – and a necessary method of design activism – to collaborate with the people living the authentic experiences you aim to represent.” He took the sentiment even further, chastising designers for “not doing your job if you’re not consulting with the person you hope to represent.”
And yet, a photo contained in the subsequent Noun Project blog post hyping the Accessible Icon collection centered was Hytken, a white male wheelchair user with a service dog. He was surrounded by students as they intently gazed upon a wall of sketches. Missing from the picture were the dozens of accommodations depicted in the Accessible Icon Collection that were not his own. This is what Craig Owens meant when he wrote of “establishing identity between the representer and the represented.” Was Hytken expected to represent the entirety of disability? Or is it that he “no longer [signifies] anything other than himself.”
When the Accessible Icon collection launched, it was criticized for, of all things, failing to create accessible icons. The collection, which was inspired by Microsoft’s black and white Chibi-style figurines, but rasterized into the style of western road sign pictograms, were found by many to be visually indecipherable. There was immediate frustration about the hypocrisy of an Alt Text icon when the icons did not initially contain any. In response to one critique about the complexity of such small images, the CEO of Noun Project dismissed the criticism in a now deleted post on Reddit, by confirming by explaining “these were developed with [...] a consultant with a lot of experience in this space.”
Feedback Design
Feedback Design is an inclusive design adaptation that took root to compensate for the proceduralized nonpresence of individuals who are being centered, included, accommodated, and represented. As we wrote in our last piece, Feedback Design pantomimes a process of accountability in order to extract complaint as feedback.
Feedback Design is a process that begins by determining what is actionable, and any complaint that can be invalidated is not. The token is a first line of defense, as their presence is used to legitimize the way things are done. Whatever can’t be shielded by the token then gets divided into two categories; structural issues and surface issues. Structural issues are often so extensive that they call into question the entire premise of the thing being critiqued. Of note here is the structural nature of the inaccessibility of the icons in the Noun Project’s Accessible Icon collection.
One person commented on social media “My mom has a bad sight (presbyopia) I asked her what she saw and she couldn't even see them, and when I showed them bigger she didn't understand the idea behind some of them (even with the captions).” A Senior Designer on Reddit wrote “one of the icons in this set is for Alt Text and that also got me wondering what the alt text for these might actually look like; if I need a paragraph to describe an icon, that's a failure.”
Because these comments were critiquing structural issues, they were not actionable. What was the Noun Project going to do? Abandon the collection and start over? That’s not an option when project partners are funders. So the Noun Project responded in a now deleted post on Reddit “Hey, thanks for the feedback. Totally hear you. Icons come in many styles, shapes, and forms. I would say the amount of detail that surpasses the allowable threshold for what is or is not an icon is subjective.” Attributing the Senior Designer’s critique to his feelings rather than his expertise allowed the Noun Project to dismiss that which is structural to frivolity.
There was another critique that arose at the outset, and that was the Noun Project’s failure to add Alt text to the Accessible Icon collection and surrounding media. Embedded in this critique was the sheer hypocrisy of visualizing something that is not visual, Alt text, turning it into an icon, and then failing to make it accessible to screen reader users. Because Alt text can be added retroactively without changing the visual reader’s experience of the collection, it was quickly addressed. Often when surface issues are addressed, the hope is that the action taken in public will bury the inactionable structural issues that persist.
Human Censored
Institutionally sanctioned toolkits fail to bring about their stated aims because they are created to resource those who obtain, rather than carry knowledge. As Jean-Francois Lyotard writes in The Postmodern Condition, competence is no longer defined by criteria such as “true/false, just/unjust, etc.” but rather, “Is it saleable?”
The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit robs those it includes by treating disability as a high value commodity to be acquired and controlled. The unassailable best practices it promulgates for those with inadequate knowledge also proceduralize justice. It's something Owens would have described as the “subordination of substance to form.” He was summarizing Baudrillard:
“difference itself becomes an object of consumption, and the agenda of serial production becomes apparent: to carefully engineer and control the production of difference in our society.”
Rather than produce some idealized procedure for "inclusive" (and morally satisfying) design, and rather than signaling some idealized virtue of disability acceptance, projects influenced by the Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit serve to reinitialize resourced designers to augment power.” Adherents free up corporations to continue streamlining the world rather than ever submitting to the revolutionary transformation these human censored practices hint at.
[We would like to thank the subscriber and the anonymous donor who made the writing of this piece possible.]
We will keep our writing freely available, as we advocate for access in all its forms. Paid subscriptions support our writing outside of institutional structures of power.