DrumBeat: Michael Janger’s blog about the Disability market

Legless Fashionistas

February 23, 2012

This isn’t about high fashion. It’s about athletes with missing legs, and how they keep fit and active with well-designed prosthetic legs and sneakers made by Nike and a leading prosthetics company, Össur. BBC News posted a story about Nike’s commitment to developing running soles for Össur’s prosthetic legs that can stand up to the rigors of running. Taken together, Nike and Össur’s products merge into a beautiful, clean design that also makes a fashion statement.

The most compelling passage in BBC’s article:

For the sportswear companies, there is also the attraction of a big and growing market, and possibly a positive image from being seen to “help” the disabled community.

“We’re the largest visible minority consumer group in North America,” says Kimberley Barreda, an adventure sports enthusiast and double above-knee amputee from Montana.

“We spend $770bn a year.

“I wish companies would turn down the glow of the self-manufactured halo and just admit they have discovered a ridiculously huge untapped market, and they would love a piece of it.”

A different article, from Smart Planet, delves into further detail about Nike’s sole and Össur’s prosthetic.

Tagged as: Paralympics, prosthetics

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Blind Entrepreneurs: Should Their Businesses Be Protected by Law?

February 22, 2012

This week, I came across two articles on my feed that illustrated the friction between two overlapping approaches in the disability market: protecting people with disabilities by law, and encouraging people with disabilities to be independent and work for themselves.

The first article is a recent press release from the National Federation of the Blind that called on the U.S. Congress to reject an amendment to H.R. 7 allowing commercial expansion at highway rest stops. Currently, the only commercial activity at these rest stops are vending machines operated by blind entrepreneurs under the Randolph-Sheppard Vending Facility Program, established by an Act of Congress in 1936. From the press release:

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “This amendment would threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of blind entrepreneurs in the United States who depend on revenue from rest stop vending machines. With an unemployment rate among blind Americans that exceeds 70 percent, such a move is deeply irresponsible, as these entrepreneurs will lose their businesses and be forced to rely on public assistance. We urge Congress to reject this ill-considered and reckless proposal.”

Yesterday, Bloomberg Businessweek published an interview with Urban Miyares, a blind and deaf Vietnam veteran who works with the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship on an initiative to train budding entrepreneurs who are blind or visually impaired. Titled, “Training the Blind to Run Businesses,” this article serves as an interesting counterpoint to the NFB’s press release. Miyares says,

One of the requirements [for success] is that we can’t be passive. Vision is presumed to be required for business, so if we have to compete on the same level as the sighted, able-bodied world, that means working more aggressively — and longer hours.

My average work week is 80 to 90 hours. It takes me an hour to read a Facebook page with voice-output software. But the alternative is staying home waiting to die, which is what I was told to do when I lost my sight. So entrepreneurship is a good choice, particularly because there are so few employment options for the disabled.

Protect? Or train? Or both? Not as simple as it sounds.

Tagged as: blind, Economic Model of Disability, entrepreneurship, visually-impaired

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It’s Not Ugly Design: A Disabled Blogger Makes A Case for Universal Design

February 21, 2012

With older baby boomers and wounded veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increasing overall demand for accessible homes, the case for universal design has never been made more clear.

s.e. smith, a social activist with a disability, wrote last week on her This Ain’t Livin’ blog that universal design “does not mean ugly design.” Universal design has not only enhanced accessibility, but also the aesthetics of design itself. She cites some solid examples and makes a case for universal design as a way to improve the quality of life, even for people without disabilities.

A provocative read that addresses some of the more common misconceptions about accessible design.

Tagged as: universal design

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Texting Without Bumping into Someone

February 21, 2012

How often have you experienced this? People who text while walking, bumping into other people, light poles, or, tragically, cars?

A prototype for a texting app for the blind, BrailleTouch, is making the rounds. Originally developed for blind people who would rather be more discreet than speaking into their iPhones in public during texting sessions, BrailleTouch might be an interesting, if unconventional, way for non-blind people to type away while keeping their eyes on what’s in front of them.

And learn Braille along the way.

Until then, peruse this guide to safe walking while texting. (And under no circumstances should you try texting while driving.)

Tagged as: blind, iphone, texting, visually-impaired

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We Are In A Mobile Bubble

February 21, 2012

The last two years have seen an unprecedented surge in mobile devices, spawning operating systems that work in the cloud, and hundreds of thousands of apps that follow wherever we go, anywhere and anytime. We, the users, have been the beneficiaries of this trend, which has greatly redefined culture as we know it. Even Apple did not buy a single TV advertising spot during this month’s Super Bowl, relying on free TV advertising generated by iPhone-carrying Giants and Patriots players recording their own football game.

People with disabilities have greatly benefited in the form of better access to products, services and content that were otherwise impossible or expensive to use.

Unfortunately, like the dot-com and housing bubbles before it, this free ride will not last. As CNN Money reports today, wireless capacity is dwindling while demand is still surging. At some point, something will give, and it will be higher costs as service quality erodes.

Many small and mid-sized companies that have staked their survival on the mobile platform – including those that developed apps specifically for people with disabilities – will cease to exist, as the inevitable industry consolidation begins, with wide implications for the users themselves.

Hold on to your horses.

Tagged as: disabilities, wireless

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Elderly People with Disabilities Want Dignity And a Sense of Control, Say SF Researchers

February 9, 2012

Researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco found that elderly people with late-life disabilities seek a high quality of life based on a sense of dignity and a sense of control. Although this study is somewhat limited – the sample was 62 participants in a day program for older adults on Medicaid – it is an essential piece of market intelligence for businesses that sell products and services to this growing population across the United States.

Not tiny hearing aids that you insert deep inside the ear canal to hear better – because you can lose them. And not the Clapper, either. Just products that give elderly people with disabilities, and for that matter all people with disabilities, a sense of control over their lives. It is a common theme that runs through every corner of the market of people with disabilities. They want nothing more than to have the same kind of access to the products, services, and places that those without disabilities take for granted.

And when one of those without disabilities grows older and experiences a disability for the first time – for example, loss of sight or decline in walking ability – he/she will lose the sense of control once taken for granted. Restoring that sense of control, and being treated with respect and dignity, is what a successful business does when marketing the products and services that address the customer’s disability.

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The Great Health Care Jobs Boom of 2012

February 6, 2012

An article in this week’s Bloomberg BusinessWeek on health care jobs makes an interesting case for businesses – which have traditionally focused on younger generations – to continue marketing to baby boomers as they have always done since the 1940s.

Typically, as a generation ages, marketers shift their focus to the generation’s offspring, adapting their advertising messages to the needs and likes of teenagers and twentysomethings as they grow into adulthood. This continues to, and should be, the case today. However, given the unusual demographics of the current U.S. population, with 25% of this country represented by people between 47 and 66, the heart of the postwar baby boom, businesses ignore this market segment at their own peril. Perhaps this is why Madonna, not Rihanna, headlined yesterday’s Super Bowl halftime show.

In the Bloomberg BusinessWeek article, health care jobs as a share of total employment increased from 7% in 1990 to over 11% in 2011. When the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that 1 in 4 Americans will be 65 or older by 2050, there is little question that more health care jobs will be created in the next two decades in response to increased demand for medical care, assisted home care, nursing, and surgery.

With 80% of U.S. personal financial assets controlled by baby boomers, the purse strings are held by people who make buying decisions on where to travel, where to live after their kids grow up, and what products address their growing list of age-related disabilities, not by those who are buying their first home or tuning in to contemporary music performers like Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga.

This creates a dilemma for marketers today: do they invest in those businesses with the highest customer lifetime value (teens and twentysomethings) or those with the highest revenue potential in the next two decades (those between 47 and 66)? The decisions will be based on the types of products the businesses sell, their position in the marketplace, and whether their products appeal to a specific generation, or across different age groups.

As more people work in health care jobs to accommodate up to 25% of the U.S. population through 2050, issues of medical care and quality of life inevitably come into play in the national discourse, influencing everyday Americans by keeping these issues top-of-mind as they work, shop and play. That is one aspect that businesses would do well to monitor as they market to the everyday American today.

Tagged as: Baby boomers, health care

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Is the Kindle Fire Accessible For the Blind? Not Yet.

February 2, 2012

An article published this week in About.com Disability by Charlotte Gerber, a person with a disability, provided an informative overview of the Kindle Fire as an “accessibility device for the disabled.” As with other e-readers like the Nook and iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire has given many people with disabilities the capability to read longform books without dealing with the accessibility limitations imposed by a physical book. Fonts are scalable, the devices are lighter and easier to hold than most physical books, and the book content is portable across devices. Gerber provides an informative list of pros and cons of the Kindle Fire, in the context of her own disability. However, given the title of her article – An Accessibility Device for the Disabled – the glaring weakness in the About.com review is that it does not address significant accessibility issues for blind and low-vision readers.

When the Kindle Fire was announced last fall, it came under withering criticism from blind consumers, including the National Federation of the Blind and the American Foundation for the Blind. Debra Ruh, the CEO of TecAccess, a prominent accessibility consulting firm, wrote this insightful article on the Kindle accessibility issues raised by blind readers.

It was pointed out in Ruh’s article that Apple has been more proactive than Amazon with providing accessible solutions for blind readers of its iPad and iPhone devices. Amazon instituted a text-to-speech feature in the second- and third-generation Kindle devices only in response to pressure from the blind – and did not include this feature in the Kindle Fire.

Since this topic hit the accessibility blogosphere last fall, I have detected little progress in the efforts by Amazon to improve vision-related accessibility on the Kindle Fire.

In “My Afternoons with Margueritte”, a 2010 movie from France, Margueritte, the elderly woman played by Gisèle Casadesus, asks Germain (Gerard Depardieu) to read books to her every afternoon. As they are both passionate about reading books, they enjoy their time together. Not revealed until later in the movie is that Margueritte has age-related macular degeneration – a common affliction which will become more prevalent as the huge baby-boomer generation ages. This was the reason Margueritte needed help from a younger person like Germain to read books to her.

If the Kindle Fire cannot take on the role of Germain in “reading” books to mature readers with vision issues, then other e-book devices will fill in the gap as the over-60 set reaches 25% of the U.S. population in the next two decades. It is not an issue of reacting after-the-fact to the needs of visually impaired readers, as Amazon was forced to do for its earlier-generation Kindles. If a significant portion of the U.S. population has a clear, identifiable disability, it behooves Amazon to incorporate the needs of that segment into the design of its next e-reader, and avoid permanent damage to its brand equity.

Tagged as: amazon, blind, ipad, Kindle, Kindle Fire, Nook

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Would The Blind Be Pinterested? An Interesting New Search Tool For The Disability Market

January 30, 2012

An adaptive switch interface for the Kindle DX showing two circular buttons connected by wire to the reading device.

This Kindle accessory for people with hand-movement issues was found on Pinterest.

After hearing my friends on Facebook gush about their newfound addiction to this fledgling online pinboard website called Pinterest, I was intrigued enough to check it out and see what all the hype was about. I spent 15 minutes there searching for stuff that spoke to my own passions: food, travel and photography. What I saw on Pinterest was immediately obvious and significant enough for me to say this: it will be The Next Big Thing on the Internet. Not necessarily the next Facebook with its one billion users, but it will be a force on the Internet nonetheless, on a level with eBay, Amazon and Paypal.

Why? Pinterest redefines the Internet search experience, and delivers new and lucrative opportunities for businesses to advertise their products and measure consumer attitudes toward these products.

From the perspective of someone who writes about marketing and business opportunities in the disabilities market, what does Pinterest mean for people with disabilities?

Yes, as I said, Pinterest will be the next Big Thing on the Internet. Or could be: I am not a fortune teller, and this assertion is highly dependent on the ability of Pinterest’s management to effectively guide and grow the company in the next five years. There will be competitors who could do a better job than Pinterest. Or I could completely overestimate the value of the online recommendation market and be proven wrong. Yet, at a very basic level, Pinterest provides a new and easier way for us to search for products recommended by people we know and trust. Marketers now have a new tool for measuring consumers’ attitudes toward their own products.

For people with any number of disabilities, it is a real adventure searching for products and services on the Internet that speak to their own unique needs. Type “wheelchair” on Google and you get a bunch of pictures of wheelchairs from different manufacturers, with different prices. Type “best wheelchair” instead, and the results include a mix of wheelchair review links, “top wheelchair” advertisements by companies who got smart about SEO (search engine optimization), and content farms that take advantage of the word “best” to generate advertising revenue for themselves.

Send word out on Facebook asking for the best wheelchairs, and some of your friends can give you recommendations. You are limited to that circle of friends, and they may not necessarily be the best experts on this topic. Try the same on Twitter, but it gets lost in a sea of tweets. There are resources on the Internet for searching for specific products to accommodate your disability, including Disaboom and Abledata. Yet, it takes time and effort to go through the information on these websites, and the results may not always be what you seek.

Pinterest is about keeping an eye on the things you like to follow. As a serious food cook, I found a fascinating recipe for brown sugar cookies, then another recipe for how to make the perfect pizza dough, and then ran into this very interesting concept for a hotdogopus. Similarly, for wheelchairs, there are boards on Pinterest about different types of wheelchairs. These boards are a work in progress, and not many people use Pinterest yet. But if this fledgling pinboard website is adopted by a large section of the mass market, those wheelchair boards, and other disabilities-related boards (for example, here, here, and here) are going to become a whole lot larger and more informative.

Unfortunately, Pinterest is not accessible to everyone. It is a visual pinboard, so people with blindness or vision issues are shut out of the experience. Screen readers for the blind look for “alt” tags in pictures on the Web that audio-describe what is in the picture. On Pinterest, the content in the “alt” tags is mostly used for other purposes, such as comments or identification of users – making the website useless for screen readers. This urgently needs to be addressed so that people with vision issues – an increasingly significant segment in developed countries with aging populations – can make full use of the online pinboards.

Pinterest is a potentially effective tool for marketers, enabling businesses to measure crowdsourced consumer sentiment toward their products, and use that information to deliver a better consumer experience. Facebook and Twitter only show the frequency of mentions of a product and its associated comments, but not necessarily whether people “liked” it or not because people can “like” negative comments (this McDonald’s hashtag campaign is a cautionary tale of a Twitter marketing campaign gone wrong). Google can move the most-visited product links to the top of a search results page, but, again, it does not measure whether people liked it or not. Although Pinterest’s “like” culture is one-dimensional (liking or pinning a product does not tell you much about why you liked it), until now there was no widely adopted, crowd-sourced platform for spreading buzz about a product.

It is still early in the game, and Pinterest could surprise or disappoint. But if what I saw today is any guide, I hold enough hope for this budding online pinboard website to improve the way people with disabilities seek out information about the products they want.

Tagged as: assistive technology, blind, disability marketing, Pinterest, social media marketing

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Using Advertising To Engage, Not Alienate, Consumers With Disabilities

January 26, 2012

Sign that says, "Waiting Room For Colored Only. By Order, Police Department."

Photo courtesy of CNN.com.

See the sign? As soon as I absorbed the meaning of this sign, I came across this thought-provoking quote in Bob Greene’s Sunday article on CNN.com: “If you’re not 50 years old yet, chances are pretty good that you never saw [this sign] in a public place.” Several decades ago, signs like “Colored Only” or “Waiting Room For Whites Only” were so commonplace that they were considered, in many Americans’ eyes, a normal, typical part of the nation’s landscape. Today, this story about a whites-only swimming pool sign in Cincinnati shocks and angers most people, and becomes a lead story on major media channels. It speaks volumes about how cultural norms have changed in the decades since Brown v. Board of Education and Martin Luther King, Jr. brought racial justice to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. For people with disabilities, we could be seeing the same cultural shift in society’s perceptions of this demographic and its contributions to society. To accelerate this shift, advertising has a crucial role to play in redefining longstanding cultural perceptions of people with disabilities.

In 2007, people with disabilities in the United States held an estimated $220 billion in discretionary income, or 13% of the U.S. total of $1.7 trillion. Yet “accepted” norms that cast this group in a negative light are still being observed in some pockets of American culture. This feeds into businesses’ perceptions that underestimate the economic value of this demographic.

As with the African-American population, efforts to redefine cultural perceptions of people with disabilities in more positive terms will benefit businesses seeking to tap the huge economic potential of this large demographic. And that would be a good thing for people with disabilities: they would have substantially more access to the products and services that are marketed and sold to the general population, and play a more active role in designing better products that accommodate their disabilities. And, ultimately, be more willing to pay for them.

As norms shifted over the decades in the direction of greater inclusion of African-Americans into the normal cultural discourse of this country, advertising messages helped advance this trend. So although racism still exists, most people speak out about racism in a way that serves to minimize the hateful messages coming from those who do not recognize or appreciate the basic civil rights of African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and other non-whites. These minorities collectively represent 35% of the U.S. population today, and in 2009, nearly 49% of babies born in the United States were non-white – a trend that could mean a “majority of minorities” in this country by 2050. Create an advertisement that is not inclusive of minority populations, and you risk alienating up to 50% of your target market.

Consider these three advertisements below, featuring African-Americans:

The Cream of Wheat advertisement on the left was produced sometime before 1950 – a time when stereotypes casting African-Americans in an unflattering light were fairly common in advertising. In the 1940s, Walter Mack, the president of Pepsi-Cola, was not impressed with the way African-Americans were portrayed in his company’s advertising, so he rolled out advertisements which were more respectful of this demographic. Although he left Pepsi-Cola in 1950 under controversy, he helped pave way for advertisements like the second one above, from the 1960s. The third advertisement is from the last few years, and shows how far the advertising industry has come along in casting African-Americans in more “normal” environments.

In 2009, an Utah driving safety organization published the advertisement below to warn drivers of the dangers of texting or drinking while driving. The person in the ad is the real thing: he suffered a spinal cord injury in a car accident and now uses a wheelchair.

In the small print of this ad:

Nothing’s cooler than the day you get your driver’s license. But as soon as you start driving stupid, it’s not so cool anymore. Texting, using your iPod, racing, thay all fall under the category of stupid. And dangerous. So before you get behind the wheel and try to prove how cool you are, here’s a little harsh reality: Nothing kills more Utah teens than auto crashes. Not fazed? Okay, how does the thought of spending the rest of your life in wheelchair grab you? Look, every year far too many Utah teens go from cool to crippled in a blink of an eye. So if you are one of those drivers who think they have something to prove, you can start shopping for your wheelchair now. And hey, if you think that‘s harsh, wait until the day you roll it into school.

The person in the wheelchair met a fate that no one wants, as we all agree. Yet in the advertisement’s text are some code words: “go from cool to crippled in the blink of an eye,” or “wait until the day you roll it into school.” In other words, being a person with a disability is less cool than one without.

Contrast the Utah driving safety ad with this Nike advertisement of world record Paralympic holder Oscar Pistorius (read full text of ad here):

The advertisement speaks to Pistorius as a person. Not someone with a disability, or an athlete, but as a human, real person.

As the Nike and Pepsi posters above demonstrate, we as a society today are not ready to return to the times of the Cream of Wheat ad. More businesses today understand the value of an advertisement that does not alienate, but engages and excites a large demographic.

When people with disabilities are becoming a larger group relative to the population of the United States – as the huge baby boomer generation hits retirement age – they are going to have a greater role in the national dialogue. By placing advertisements which are inclusive of people with disabilities, preferably without discussion (as this month’s Target ad demonstrated), this market will not only be culturally engaged, but motivated to contribute with their wallets. Businesses that recognize this early on reap the rewards of including this large demographic – and remain competitive in an U.S. economy that will be weighed down by the pressures of increased Social Security payouts, higher health care expenses, and changing preferences of an increasingly older population.