That’s what we’re trying to figure out, and we need your help to do it.
Last weekend at the NY Abilities Expo, we sat down with a lot of you. We listened. And one thing came through loud and clear: almost nobody we talked to was managing just one thing. People had layers — a mobility condition and chronic pain, autism and a sensory processing disorder, ADHD running alongside anxiety, low vision plus a hand tremor that made certain “accessible” tech actually pretty inaccessible.
That’s why a device with rave reviews from one person might not work for you at all. It’s also why so many of you came out to the expo in the first place, because reading about something only gets you so far, and actually getting to touch it, try it, and talk to the person who made it can be the most powerful way to know if it’s right for you. The Abilities Expo gets that, and it’s part of what makes it such a special space.
The match matters. The match between you, your conditions, your environment, your priorities, and the tool itself is what makes something actually useful in real life. And right now, outside of a few weekends a year at events like this, finding that match is exhausting.
You know the drill. There are so many questions and no real place to get the answers. Will it fit my specific needs? Do people actually like it once they get it home? Will it hold up to the terrain in my community? Will insurance cover it, and if not, can I afford it? Is there something better I haven’t even heard of yet?
So most of us piece together answers from scattered Reddit threads, outdated forums, manufacturer websites that all sound exactly the same, and the slow trial-and-error of buying things that don’t end up working. Good tools stay hidden. Bad ones keep getting recommended. The gaps that matter most don’t get the attention they deserve.
We want to change that.
Meet the Assistive Technology Chat.
It’s a survey, but it’s designed to feel more like a conversation than a form. We ask about what you’ve tried, what’s working, what’s frustrating, and where you wish something existed that doesn’t yet. Your answers feed into a free resource we’re building: a place where someone can come in with a real, layered situation and actually find tools that fit.
Are you a wheelchair user with chronic pain who also lives with low vision? A parent of a child with multiple co-occurring conditions, trying to find tools that work for all of them? An occupational therapist whose clients keep asking questions you wish you had better answers to?
That’s exactly who we’re building The Disability Tech Index for. It works like a chat. You describe your situation in your own words — your conditions, your environment, what you’re trying to figure out — and it surfaces the tools most likely to actually fit, pulled from a database of thousands of disability-focused solutions and grounded in what real people have told us works (and what hasn’t). Less guessing. Less wading through generic top-ten lists. More like asking someone who’s been there.
And to build it well, we need to hear from you. Everyone who helps shape it by taking the survey gets first access when we launch later this year.
A quick note on who we are and why this is free.
We’re CPARF, the nonprofit behind the technology accelerator Remarkable U.S. We work with startups building things for the disability community, and over the years we’ve collected a database of thousands of disability-focused solutions. We’ve seen up close how hard it is to find the right one.
We don’t think a resource like this should ever cost money. The people who need it most shouldn’t have to pay to figure out which tool works, and the people who could afford to pay shouldn’t be the only ones with good information. So we’re building it free, and keeping it that way.
But we can only do this well if we hear from people who’ve actually lived it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no AI that can replace it. There’s just the work of asking and listening.
Take the survey.
→ Take the Assistive Technology Chat: www.disabilitytechindex.org
It takes about 10 minutes. Your input genuinely shapes what we build and who we build it for.
And as a thank-you, anyone who takes the survey through the Abilities Expo link this week is entered to win a $200 Visa gift card. Short survey. Long-term impact. Possible gift card. Not a bad trade.
