We did not yet have the Americans with Disabilities Act. But disabled people existed and lived in New York City and wanted to get around, and that was knowable. Excluding people with disabilities might not have been intentional, but including them could have been, and it wasn’t. The result was—and remains—that a lot of people could not use the subway. What if there had been people with disabilities at the table where design decisions were originally made? This is the same question a lot of up-and-coming technology developers are grappling with.
