Planning with Disabilities in Mind: Incorporating Disability Studies into Mobi.AI's Technology
Tesla Wells
2025-01-21

IN A NUTSHELL:
We’ve all heard businesses aspire to accessibility and serving a diverse range of people, but how do we take these goals and integrate them meaningfully into our engineering process and product outcomes? In this technical explainer series, we look at how Disability Studies helps Mobi reimagine our engineering design process and create products that are useful to everyone. From the information that we collect in our database to how we customize recommendations, and from the business partnerships we cultivate to the scheduling algorithms we choose–we’re providing tools that enhance human capability.
Mobi is taking a forward-thinking approach to accessibility because we think the industry standards around designing tech to address disability need improvement. The dominant business model for creating technology for disabled people1 is “additive” design. That is, the technology targeting the impairment is layered on top of whatever product serves the non-average user well. An easy example is the addition of subtitles (the accommodation) over videos (the product that serves the average user). Though we have created many useful technologies with this methodology—especially when retrofitting older products—the approach is more often insufficient, especially when you’re making new technologies.
With additive solutions, we often only accommodate people who deviate from the “average” when there is extra time, resources, or the threat of a lawsuit. You can see this in the way subtitling, even though it is considered universally useful, is sometimes deprioritized/left for later until “funding is found” or a lawsuit is lost—and you can see it in how accessibility features are often the first thing to go with budget cuts or layoffs. Thinking of disabled users as an afterthought also causes us to miss opportunities for inclusive design from the start! This is particularly obvious in how buildings and infrastructure are designed—it’s much easier to make a location wheelchair accessible in the starting plans than to retrofit it after. Mobi wants to incorporate accessibility into our engineering process and into our product design so that non-average users are systematically included and considered part of our core userbase (fighting further disenfranchisement!).
To do this, Mobi, looked towards modern Disability Studies for inspiration. Instead of an “additive” paradigm, Mobi takes a “seeking abundance” approach towards product development. This means we see incorporating the needs or preferences of diverse people as a design opportunity (rather than as a secondary objective, after the “average user” has been addressed). When we’re setting requirements and intended function of our products, we’re thinking about how differently-abled people will want to interact with the product in different ways.
Books in MOBI’s office-library referenced for this piece:

The discipline of Disability Studies didn’t just offer us practical guides for designing for the disabled; the field also offers ways to synthesize together popular design theories, ideas about technology, equity/inclusion, and human experiences. For example:
- Most people who encounter human-centered design find the idea intuitive to the point of being obvious–of course, the person using a product should be actively involved in its design! However, disabled people have demonstrated time and again that their opinions and agency are not valued when addressing their own problems. Disability Studies has not only contributed greatly to the theory of human-centered design, but ties it into engineering ethics and equity/inclusion.
- Disabled people often rely on technology for daily survival. Many have complicated relationships with their assistive technology. It makes sense that they’d therefore have much to say about how humans interface with technology. Disability Studies has nuanced critiques of transhumanism and our concept of “cyborgs”. Mobi can learn a lot from this discourse as we try ourselves to design technology that expands human capabilities and designs for human-computer interaction.
- The social model of disability defines disabled individuals as people with impairments or limitations that are not often accommodated in daily life or society. When an impairment is not met it becomes a disability and can result in anything from a mild inconvenience to a life-threatening situation. Universal Design and Inclusive Design theory, developed in direct response to the variety in accommodation needs, not only explores design best practices for disabilities, but thinks about how we can personalize/individualize experiences.
- Much of modern AI is built off of “optimization algorithms,” which take specific desirable qualities and “maximizes” them. However, maximization taken to the extreme can be undesirable–either by maximizing for the wrong thing or ignoring complexity/nuance/interdependence of goals. AI companies must understand when to use optimization tools and when these tools have limitations. Disability Studies is particularly good at highlighting when aspiring to “optimized” or “superior” solutions can become problematic, and often gives alternatives.
Disability doesn’t take vacation. Travel can make an impairment more disabling due to variations in infrastructure, culture, and distance from personal community/support networks. When disabled people are preparing for a trip, trip scheduling and planning isn’t something that just enhances the experience. Planning is sometimes a necessary prerequisite for receiving accommodations. Often, planning becomes a burden, a deterrent, and something causes disabled people to not want to travel. Mobi believes planning around disabilities is one of the clearest use cases for our planning and scheduling products. Whether you need to find a blind-friendly museum, reserve a wheelchair-friendly van to the airport, or understand what time of the year is best to avoid wildfire smoke–our technology can help plan how you move through the world. We think building our tools with a “seeking abundance” approach refines our goals for product function and clarifies our performance standards. This is reflected in the information that we collect in our database, how we customize recommendations, what business partnerships we cultivate and the scheduling algorithms we’ve chosen.
Guides external to Mobi can best explain the UI/UX (user interface/user experience) accessibility standards Mobi references for our web design and interfaces—but we also want to show how multiple internal technologies at Mobi incorporate disability design into their implementation. To do this, we’re releasing a series of technical explainers highlighting three specific technical areas at Mobi where disability design is integral. The first, most immediate example is the making of a database that can meet the needs of disabled travelers. The second example is how we use our scheduler/router to help with itinerary development. And finally, we will explore how we build up user profiles and our recommendation capabilities so that we can make highly tailored recommendations.
1. Technology and design—as key factors in “access” for disabled people, play a large role in how disabled identity, culture, and communities are constructed. This series, therefore, both cites and discusses concepts about disabled identity, culture, and communities. In this context, we chose to use identity-first language when referring to disabled people and communities.
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