Dr. Victor Pineda Talks Championing Disability Inclusion, Accessibility As Innovation In Interview

Dr. Victor Pineda and I share a common (if cynically accurate) bond between us: We both were born into worlds undesigned for us.

“That’s the case for a lot of us who identify as people with disabilities,” Dr. Pineda said to me earlier this month in an interview via videoconference. “The challenge becomes ‘Do we give up and say we don’t belong in the world or do we empower ourselves with the tools to not only fit [in society] but reshape it and exert our own agency and eliminating barriers in the full participation of all people?’”

Dr. Pineda is yet another name to add to my long and ever-burgeoning list of people I’ve interviewed over the course of my journalistic career noteworthy enough to have their own Wikipedia page. Dr. Pineda, born in Venezuela and diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy as a young child, is a renowned disability rights activist, social development scholar, and social impact entrepreneur who’s president and founder of the eponymous Victor Pineda Foundation. On its website, the organization states its mission as “[accelerating] inclusive innovation with organizations and communities around the world” with the vision of building spaces “where we all belong in a future that leaves no one behind.” The Foundation’s goal is to make disabled people feel “valued” by having equal access to opportunity and living their lives with dignity.

Dr. Pineda, who also serves as executive director of the Center for Independent Living and featured in the 2021 Amazon Prime Video documentary Unconfined, explained many in the disability community recognize the world isn’t the way it is because of natural order or survival of the fittest. Sociologically speaking, he told me, people have created “unnecessary barriers” that disabled people must hurdle—again, because the world was not intended for people who have disabilities. The primary way disabled people access things nowadays, particularly in this technologically-rich age, is via accessibility and assistive technologies.

The phrase “accessibility is for everyone” is often thrown around by those in the industry, and for good reason no doubt, but Dr. Pineda was keen to emphasize the crucial point—one he characterized as “really underreported”—is the idea that most of technology’s earliest adopters are, in fact, disabled people. Those in the disability community, he said, lie at the “center of every major innovation technology we have experienced today,” citing the rise in prominence of popular digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri as coming to fruition in large part because Blind people needed access to audiobooks and algorithms were developed to assess noise. Likewise, the inverse of that, speech-to-text technology, was created such that quadriplegics could use their voice to operate their computer(s). Moreover, early word prediction software, Dr Pineda said, was leveraged by Stephen Hawking in an effort to “anticipate words and letters when he was writing his books.” Even hot topics like artificial intelligence can trace its lineage back to the disability community, with Dr. Pineda telling me the technology was first intended for alt-text to help Blind and low vision people understand imagery.

“We need people to really understand that the assistive technology of today is the mainstream technology of tomorrow,” Dr. Pineda said.

When asked about how society’s perception of disabled people has changed over time, Dr. Pineda said the transformation has happened much in lockstep with technology’s advancements. A long time ago, discrete assistive technologies for disabled person were (and remain) niche and exorbitantly expensive. As such, the “mainstream” computers of yesteryear were not built with much, if any, accommodation for disabled people because “we were not considered,” Dr. Pineda said. In contemporary times, however, the tides are slowly but surely turning such that more and more companies, across myriad industries that intersect with tech, are taking a decidedly more empathetic and inclusive approach to building technology. (A few minutes perusing the annals of my reporting for this column should prove confirming of that notion.)

Dr. Pineda praised captains of industry Apple and Microsoft, to name two examples, in their tireless work in making their products accessible to the disability community. This change, he added, has come in waves: not only is accessibility becoming more of a focal point due to inclusivity, but so too because of regulatory and, frankly, business concerns in terms of capturing more marketshare. Another reason, Dr. Pineda proffered, is innovation. In keeping with the general theme of our conversation, accessibility truly is a hotbed for innovation in the tech industry.

“Accessibility creates long, robust products and services,” Dr. Pineda said. “[It] drives innovations [which] not only drive regulatory compliance and market demands, it creates components in the digital infrastructure that lend themselves well to AI and augmented reality and emergent technologies… accessibility becomes good practice.”

Looking towards the future, Dr. Pineda riffed the disability community’s motto of “nothing about us without us” by saying quite pointedly “the new generation is nothing without us.” Yet he wasn’t being braggadocious or condescending; his statement indeed has a practical message hidden within—one I’ve trumpeted on social media forever.

“What that means is, we’re part of every community, every society, every race, every culture,” Dr. Pineda said. “We’re everything from doctors to consumers to students to parents and more. We’re everywhere.”

Expounding on his sentiment, Dr. Pineda said disability inclusion isn’t about a “small group of people.” It’s about “respecting, representing, and enhancing the future all of us.” Technology, he said, can act as an equalizer and accelerator; it can push “every human and every organization to do more.” Tech, he went on to say, helps every person, regardless of ability, to chase their “hopes, dreams, and aspirations.”

“Humanity has a lot to gain, but all of us together have a lot to lose if we get this wrong,” Dr. Pineda said of furthering the cause of disability inclusion societally vis-a-vis technology. “We have a lot to gain if we get this right. My vision is a world that unlocks human potential by empowering every person here to be part of this great leap forward.”