40 Big Ideas

Summary

Assistive technology helps everyone, including people with disabilities, communicate and navigate the world. It made this list of big ideas because it has shaped a large portion of our lives, through advances in personal computers to smartphones and smart home devices. It’s important to talk about how not all people with disabilities have access to the technology they need most and the support to use it. And as the use of artificial intelligence grows, it will be important to make sure it addresses our needs.

Assistive technology (AT) belongs in any list of big ideas because technology is around us everywhere. We even used it to conduct the conversation behind this article, from thousands of miles apart. We organized our dialogue around four questions: Why did AT make the “Top 40”? Which moments in AT’s history have accounted for the biggest changes for people with disabilities? What excites us about the future? What worries us?

We used a transcript tool and guided a large language model to summarize our conversation and create a first draft of this piece. That choice underscores our main point: technology isn’t a side note to modern life; it’s part of how many people communicate, manage tasks, and navigate our world. Looking back, several milestones shape the present. Typewriters and adapted keyboards opened writing and office work to many who had been shut out. Personal computers brought information access into homes. Tablets and smartphones made communication and navigation mobile and more flexible. For people with intellectual and other developmental disabilities (IDD), there have been some areas where access lags, particularly in the areas of cognitive accessibility of information. As these tools entered mainstream use, the distinction between “assistive” and “ordinary” blurred, and programs began talking about “enabling technologies”— tools designed for anyone to use, not only disability-specific devices.

A clear example is home control. Systems that operated switches or doors were once specialty (and expensive) products. Today, many smart home functions are off the shelf. When a device is the same one others want to use, adoption tends to be easier, and costs often drop. This has expanded access for people with IDD, including apps that support cognitive accessibility and provide coaching and reminders in home and work settings.

How we plan and judge success matters. When supporting someone, it helps to consider a set of concrete questions: What supports are needed? Can technology help provide them? Do you have access to the AT you need? Does it work for you in daily life? Access and effectiveness are not the same. Making the second part real requires attention to fit, training, and follow-through—not just delivery. Adoption also takes practice. We’ve both seen situations where AT was provided with good intentions but little support, and it went unused. Across IDD service systems, staffing gaps push programs to look to AT as part of the answer. As we noted in our dialogue, the issues with the workforce continue to be a real struggle, and people are looking to AT to fix that problem. Technology can extend support, but it isn’t a drop-in substitute for human help. It requires a new bag of tricks for the person receiving supports and for those assisting them. Planned, individualized follow-up is essential so tools like remote monitoring or wayfinding apps aren’t misused, abandoned, or—worse—putting someone in harm’s way. A through-line for us is leadership by people with disabilities. People should be at the table early—defining needs, shaping design, and planning rollout in the settings where tools will actually be used. Training and paid roles matter; lived experience should guide choices about features, learning formats, and measuring success, including measures of equitable access to AT. We acknowledge that artificial intelligence will continue to evolve and become more commonly used as part of AT. As that happens, it will be important to keep AT ordinary and usable; pair access with fit, practice, and follow-through; and design policies that can flex to local and individual realities. That’s how this big idea will continue to play an important and valuable role in supporting people with IDD.