As a former engineer and designer for Apple and others, I am well aware of how products are designed and developed. The best designers and engineers are passionate about usability and rely upon user experience to make design decisions but the community of disabled users rarely has a direct voice in design AND where usability by the disabled is concerned, it is typically an after-thought or add-on feature. That is stifling progress in America as well as around the world.

     As a selected delegate to the 2010 National Council on Disability's summit in Washington, DC, I went with the objective of serving as a liaison between these two communities and while there, was so inspired, I offered to "take a letter" to these makers from the large group of disabled users at the conference and so "we" made this film on the spot (cloud and crowd sourcing, as it were).

     Usability by the disabled population is generally an after-thought or an add-on feature. Products are designed for 80% of users and the disabled are not included in that 80% in spite of the fact that a growing population of veterans and seniors in the US alone is fast changing the user profile of that 80%.      Film is a key tool in usability engineering at top technology companies and nothing is more convincing than personal experience especially when it is made so immediately accessible to so many all over the world. It is one thing to write about or describe in words accessibility problems or issues but a moving picture is worth many thousands of words especially in the 21st century. THIS film, though, was made in a way that is unusual, innovative, and unique: 1. It was done spontaneously and on the spot in a hallway 2. It was shot entirely on cell phone and edited on a laptop in a hotel room 3. Closed-captioning was done over the internet by people thousands of miles away who still have not personally met each other 4. Nobody got paid to do any of this (the filmmaker remains unemployed)      Accessbility will change when the people using these tools has a voice at the table. If this film says anything it says that we the people of the disabled community are not waiting for an invitation. "Change does not start at the top; it starts at the bottom" ~ President Barack Obama