Accessibility

For this blog post, I read the two articles “Albeist Architecture” which was about accesibility for disabled people and “The Technological Gap” which was about access to technology for poorer people. In the first case, “access” means the ability for disabled people to go about their business just like any other person without feeling hassled or insecure. This is a major considerartion as about one fifth of the whole population in the word is disabled in some way, shape, or form. Architectural barriers have played a large role in disabled people feeling marginalized. Due to previous laws, it was difficult to come up with solutions to accesibility but now it is possible to build structures that are more friendly to disabled people. An example of bad design is in airplanes which keep getting rid of leg room to save costs. However, if they spend more money on leg room they will open themselves to a larger market which could lead them to making more revenue. Some soutions need to be found on the political end so that parties can make decisions faster. In the second article, accessibility refers to access of technollogy to poorer households in the US. A lot don’t have access to high speed internet and a third don’t have smartphones while all the rich households do. The solution suggested is for the givernment to directly provide subsidies to poor households so they can buy new technologies and decrease the technoogical gap. This places an emphasis on younger people so younger people can use these technollogies to learn skills to put themseleves in a better position for later. This solution is similar to the airplane solution for more legroom. If airlines do not have money for them they could potentially be subsidized by the government. While these solutions are noble, it can not be the answer top everything. Using subsidies for everything would just increase the tax burden on everyone else to the point where it would be unfair that people have to give away a major portion of their income no matter how hard they worked for it. So a line must be drawn at some point and solutions should not involve taxing higher income people any more. Governments could relocate funds from the budget in order to provide subsidies, case in point would be the United States’s government which dedicates an absurdly large amount to the military ,which seems quite useless.

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