Image description: An image of Haben Girma speaking at the event, a young woman speaking on a stage with her guide dog pictured. Image taken by Emily Flores.
Last week, Apple gathered disability leaders, advocates, artists, and creators at Carnegie Library in Washington, D.C. to mark 50 years of the company’s history in accessibility. The Deaf Puerto Rican performers who made history interpreting Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show headlined the night. Haben Girma spoke. Oscar-winning actor Troy Kotsur was in the room. And for a few hours, in one of the most storied buildings in the city, disability wasn’t a topic on the agenda. It was the point.
The evening was titled ’50 Years of Thinking Different’ — a philosophy that has guided the company’s accessibility work since its earliest days. When the first iPhone launched in 2007, it marked the beginning of a technological revolution. For blind and low vision users, though, a glass touchscreen with no physical keys meant the path in wasn’t yet clear. Apple’s answer came two years later: VoiceOver for iOS, the first screen reader built directly into a touchscreen phone. It set a new standard for what accessible technology could be.
That evening, the company paused to take stock of what that legacy has built, and where it’s going.
For those in the room, the feeling was hard to miss. “Being at the Apple 50th anniversary celebration event as a disabled person felt like the physical embodiment of disabled joy,” said content creator Sarah Todd Hammar. “Disabled attendees were all around the space, using their mobility aids, holding on to their service dogs, signing, and more. Being disabled was not only normal at this event but accepted and celebrated.”
That normalcy, so unremarkable in theory, but so rare in practice, was the whole thing. “It’s rare that we get to be in a room with so many other disabled folks. It’s even more rare to be in a room and at an event that has done its absolute best to be as accessible as possible. I felt so seen, and that we as disabled folks, mattered,” said content creator Spencer West, who also attended the event.
That feeling pointed to something much bigger than one company’s anniversary. It was a signal about where disability sits in culture right now — and how long it has actually been there.
Accessibility was never just a feature. It was always culture. Predictive text, first developed to help people with motor disabilities type more easily, changed how everyone types. Captions were built for Deaf viewers and are now how an entire generation watches video. The infrastructure of modern life was built, in no small part, around disabled bodies and minds, and the shift from seeing accessibility as a checkbox to understanding it as a source of cultural and technological innovation is one of the most important reframes of our time.
Roberta Cordano, President of Gallaudet University, the world’s only university designed specifically for Deaf and hard of hearing students, captured it in a moment she shared with Apple’s Senior Director of Global Accessibility Policy and Initiatives, Sarah Herrlinger during the evening. She spoke about how Apple’s Carnegie Library location had expanded what she called “the signing footprint” in Washington D.C. — the geographic reach of ASL in public life, which had long been concentrated near Gallaudet’s campus. Now, she said, it had grown outward into the city.
“One thing I find to be so important is how Apple, in particular this store, has greatly expanded what we call ‘The Signing Footprint’ here in the district,” Cordano said. “It used to have been the ASL signing district that was more near the borders of our campus, now we’ve seen that footprint expand [into the city], and our ability to grow it with it.”
It’s a pattern that holds across time and across industries. The tools built for and by disabled people don’t stay at the edges — they move to the center.
Which is why a night like this one matters. Not just as a celebration of what one company has built, but as a reminder of what disability has always contributed — to technology, to design, to culture at large. The disability community has never just been the recipient of innovation. It has been one of its most generative sources.
“In the midst of so much chaos in the world, it’s grounding to be surrounded by people within the disability community for a moment of celebration,” said Emily Ladau, disability rights activist and author of Demystifying Disability. “I really was overcome with emotion and a sense of pride in my identity as a disabled woman, especially knowing that we were at an event hosted by a company that continues to genuinely prioritize accessibility.”
