Many items enjoyed by people of all abilities were originally designed to help people with disabilities. Here are some inventions you may use every day that were originally for the disabled community.
Kat Lister
, May 17th, 2021 09:49
In our monthly subscribers only essay, Kat Lister discusses how finishing her first book and a year of being locked down alone steered her towards buying a typewriter, only to discover these machines are going through something of a reversal of fortunes. Homepage photograph: the author s portrait of her own Olivetti Valentine
Kat Lister
When I was a child I would often fall asleep to the sound of metal typebars hammering on paper. The
clack clack clack of words in motion. A cacophony of heavy blows and jabs that ricocheted from wall to wall like linguistic bullets; scudding and darting, banging and crashing in the room next door to mine. Space was scarce in the small terrace house where my family and I lived in the late 1980s. Consequently, my father s writing bureau was lodged in the only quiet nook he could find: the postage stamp-sized workstation was sandwiched tightly between the far corner of my parents bedroom and the wooden frame of th