Thanks and a Hat Tip to Marty R...
Consider the U.S. Black Hawk helicopter. Its engineers used conventional standards to construct their design. Those standards required that the design of workstations and equipment in the cockpit fit the bodies of 90 percent of users. In this case, the user population of the Black Hawk comprises Army pilots only, whose body sizes must fit into the existing aircrafts they fly. And here’s the problem: Fitting 90 percent of Army pilots doesn’t necessarily guarantee fitting 90 percent of Army personnel (or 90 percent of the U.S. population). A recent study of the body shapes and sizes of female pilots found that 90 percent could successfully reach all critical controls in the Black Hawk. However, in the general Army population, more than one-third of female soldiers and almost three-quarters of Hispanic female soldiers physically did not have the right size or shape body to fly a Black Hawk. The study did not examine men, but other research on variation among soldiers’ bodies would suggest that some subgroups of men might well also fall significantly outside the necessary range of body shapes and sizes. They could not have flown the Black Hawk if they wanted to. They were disabled by design.
Every technological design—every workstation, piece of safety equipment, computer, building, vehicle, etc.—must first imagine the bodies of its potential users. Yet current engineering design imagination and practice routinely exclude a variety of different kinds of bodies, including but not limited to people with disabilities. Only in a few explicit cases—and for a few specific kinds of bodily disabilities, such as those that require wheelchairs—are the bodies of people with disabilities reliably incorporated into the design imagination.