SAN FRANCISCO — Something as simple as getting a Covid-19 test can be complicated for Joshua Miele, a principal accessibility researcher at Amazon. Miele is blind. When he got his rapid test results at the STAT Health Tech Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, the clinician handed a sheet of paper with his result not to Miele, but to a sighted STAT reporter standing beside him.
That is just one example of the erasure people with disabilities face when seeking health care, especially when that care is unrelated to disability, he later told the audience at the Commonwealth Club.