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The Curb-Cut Effect

By Peter Lloyd

If we're lucky, that is, if we don't die young, we're all going to be disabled. Oh, if you can't read this, try increasing the font size on your browser.

The point is, every invention or innovation that helps include people who are missing one of their faculties or abilities helps everybody.

Riding my bike down the curb cut, out into the street, I thank the Americans with Disabilities Act. I've just come from a meeting where I had to use the freight elevator in order to get my bike up to where I had to meet. There are not bike racks outside, so I'm already getting just a sampling of what it means to be left out, forced to take the other way around.

On the way into the building, however, I used the button that opens the lobby door, as I wheeled my bike inside. Thanks again to those who insisted on that aid to access. Parents crossing the street with their baby buggies know what I'm talking about. So do skateboarders, rollerbladers, and folks on segways.

Home builders get requests for accessible homes from people who are not yet disabled. Not because they know they may be less mobile someday, but because accessible homes come comfortably wide open, generously roomy, and easy to navigate. Cruise ship operators get requests for accessible cabins from able-bodied passengers for the same reason.

Web administrators, web designers, and web merchants are learning that a good chunk of the population already has trouble accessing their sites. By making commerce more accessible, they get more shoppers. When they make help-wanted forms more accessible, they find more uniquely able employees.

With all this in mind, inventors, innovators, and creative people in marketing, hospitality, human resources, and the like should immediately see the huge opportunities on the horizon. Invent, innovate, and create with greater accessibility in mind. There's an ever-growing boom of customers about to arrive.

And the rest of us will thank you, too, while we're still able.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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