“It’s a basic human right to enter a place like anybody else,” says Sasha Blair-Goldensohn. This simple ideal can seem maddeningly out of reach for wheelchair users in America’s largest and most expensive metropolis. But for Blair-Goldensohn, a 48-year-old software engineer from New York City, it’s the driving force of his life.In 2009, Blair-Goldensohn lived in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and used the subway on the daily commute to his job at Google’s Chelsea office. With a doctorate based in artificial intelligence and natural language processing from Columbia University, Blair-Goldensohn was working in AI when it was still a behind-the-scenes tool.“The first project that I worked on when I came here was about how Maps handles reviews,” he says. “A restaurant might have 3,000 reviews and want to be able to throw all of them into the AI blender and have it pop out a summary: ‘People say this place has great soup dumplings, really long lines and it gets super crowded.’”Though his work at Google touched on its Maps technology, he wasn’t thinking much about the actual route-finding features — how people get from A to B. That changed one morning while he was walking through Central Park to catch the subway and a 100-pound tree limb fell on him. The limb fractured his skull and he sustained a T5 spinal cord injury.Recovery and rehab was lengthy and full of setbacks, but after a year and a half he was ready to return to work. His experience was eye-opening. Blair-Goldensohn’s Manhattan commute was hampered by a Metropolitan Transportation Authority system that, more than 30 years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, still lacked wheelchair access in nearly 75% of commuter train stations.Subway elevators were frequently broken down, further limiting mobility and inclusion. “You are either stuck on the inside or the outside,” he says. “In one situation, at least you are on the surface, but you realize there’s no way home because the elevator is shut down for who knows how long. In the other situation, you are several flights of stairs down and you have to rely on strangers to carry you out.”
Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/Alamy Live NewsBlair-Goldensohn and other activists protest outside of an inaccessible subway station at New York’s Museum of Natural History in 2017.
Education of an Advocate
After years as a nondisabled commuter, Blair-Goldensohn got a firsthand education on an inconvenient truth: that New York City has one of the best subway systems in the U.S., but only if you can navigate stairs. The idea that one of the world’s richest cities — a center of finance and trade, with more skyscrapers than one can count — couldn’t make its rapid transit system inclusive was so outrageous it spurred Blair-Goldensohn to action.In 2014, he started an online gallery of subway failures and invited other New Yorkers to contribute. The images show Blair-Goldensohn and other wheelchair users in front of gated-off elevators, elevators with “out of service” signs, and an amputee climbing a set of stairs while a passerby helps carry his wheelchair. They show parents with strollers confronting the same obstacles, older women with canes holding precariously onto escalator handrails, and an incident where the New York police and fire departments had to rescue five preschoolers and their teacher from a broken elevator. Blair-Goldensohn says the elevator there “breaks constantly.” It’s at the same station he was headed to when the tree limb fell on him.The gallery illustrates how frequent and widespread the problem is. Inaccessible subways make reliable commuting impossible for disabled New Yorkers and dangerous for many others. Along with the gallery, he began writing letters and opinion pieces in New York newspapers, highlighted by a 2017 New York Times opinion piece chronicling his experiences as a disabled commuter and outlining how everyone benefits from better accessibility.At the same time, he stepped up his advocacy by working with legal nonprofit Disability Rights Advocates to bring a class action lawsuit. Blair-Goldensohn served as one of the plaintiffs alleging violations of the New York City Human Rights Law due to the subway system’s inaccessibility. It took six years, but in April 2023, a judge approved a final settlement compelling the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to budget for and “add elevators or ramps to create a stair-free path of travel [in] at least 95% of the system’s currently inaccessible subway stations by 2055.”It was a huge win for accessibility in New York City. “The great thing about Sasha is his unwavering determination and vision,” says Emily Seelenfreund, DRA’s lead attorney on the case. “Various folks wanted to settle for less. Sasha knew there could be more. He didn’t want to settle for pretty good — he wanted to settle for how it should be.”
Blair-Goldensohn looks for inclusive opportunities everywhere, including the New York City Marathon.
Back At His Day Job
Over the years, there have been many attempts to create mapping programs detailing the accessibility of the built environment. All have run into the same problem: scale. For accessibility information to be useful, it needs to be thorough and widespread. The amount of data needed to make an accessibility map useful is enormous.That kind of data takes a major player. Lucky then, that a software engineer working for Google — which has the No. 1 free mapping-program in the world, with over a billion monthly active users — was blossoming into an accessibility advocate. When Blair-Goldensohn returned to work, it quickly became clear that his skillset, position and insights into what information people with disabilities want were a great match.Ever since, he has been expanding the boundaries of accessibility information displayed in Google Maps. In 2017, Google released an update allowing users to detail accessibility features of locations they visit. Maps now shows whether a destination has a wheelchair-accessible entrance, indicated by the ? Icon, as well as accessible seating, restrooms and parking. In 2018, Blair-Goldensohn spearheaded an effort to show wheelchair-accessible routes on public transit.Christopher Patnoe, head of accessibility and disability inclusion in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, appreciates his colleague’s genuine commitment. “Sasha’s desire to change the world comes from his own frustration and a desire to fix it. It’s all about the work to make change, with no pretense,” Patnoe says. “He’s frustrated that [progress toward inclusion] is too slow — but he never gives up.”Blair-Goldensohn praises his employer’s commitment to accessibility. He said the tech giant’s Accessibility and Disability Inclusion Week has expanded to a whole month. In 2022, Google opened its Accessibility Discovery Centre in London. Headed by Patnoe, the facility is a space where Google’s engineers and developers work alongside people with disabilities to research, develop and test assistive technologies and make existing products more accessible. It’s also become a hub for other companies and organizations learning how to make their products and services accessible. Patnoe says 2,700 visitors from outside Google have toured the facility and discussed inclusive design, and Google plans to open six more accessibility centers across Europe.Working in a place that values inclusion has been a gratifying experience for Blair-Goldensohn. He says that during ADI month, Google CEO Sundar Pachai sent out a video companywide, and the accessible-places feature on Maps was the first thing Pachai mentioned. “I thought, ‘That’s my project, that’s our team — we did it,’ and I was so proud and grateful to be part of something that has input from people around the world,” says Blair-Goldensohn.
Human + Robot = Accessibility Magic
Google Maps relies on its users to provide data on everything from business features to route timing and navigation details. Ahead of this summer’s Paralympics, Blair-Goldensohn’s team has been meeting with Paralympic athletes to educate them about the accessibility features on Google Maps and document their experiences using the service in a foreign country.He says his team wants “to tell the story of Maps and how it makes it easier to get around Paris. We’re not only talking the track, velodrome and Paralympic venues, but how to get around the city’s bistros, nightclubs, museums. We want to look at tools for how you plan a visit to an unfamiliar city. We will document it and share it back with Google.”According to Blair-Goldensohn, the future of accessible mapping will have more details on routes. Just like Google Maps can toggle to map the journey via car, public transit or on foot, it is evolving to include routes that are 100% wheelchair accessible.To make sure the data that users generate is accurate, Blair-Goldensohn is reaching back into his AI tool bag. “AI can be really helpful and in ways that you wouldn’t maybe expect around accessibility, but not always in a gee-whiz, flashy technology way,” he says. “For instance, we use machine learning to resolve ambiguities based on data. Like, if there’s a bar where users gave four ‘yeses’ saying it’s accessible, one ‘no,’ but the merchant reports ‘yes,’ what should we do? In order to referee these things in a principled way, we use [machine learning] to determine the probability based on past examples, and if the next three votes are all ‘yes’ — mark it accessible.”Blair-Goldensohn said that if Google Maps plots and reviews 40 million places around the world, it needs AI to look at trends and other statistics to say, for example, there’s a 96% probability that a place is accessible in its present condition. Without AI, thousands of people would have to analyze millions of spreadsheets.The work Blair-Goldensohn is doing is based on his experience as a wheelchair user and is in response to the needs of people with disabilities. But just like functioning subway elevators also make travel safer for parents pushing strollers, he hopes the accessibility features his team develops can make travel better for a wide range of people.For instance, he points to spoken walking-directions, originally developed for blind/low vision users. In a big city — with noise, cyclists, traffic, trains, distractions — it’s safer and more efficient for everyone to listen to directional instructions instead of staring into their phones when crossing busy streets. The feature wasn’t developed for wheelchair users either, but it’s a whole lot easier to keep pushing when a friendly computer voice is telling you where to go instead of having to stop and swipe at your phone every few blocks.For Blair-Goldensohn, whose work revolves around universal design, it’s hard to understand why you would do things any other way. To him, working toward a world that can be accessed by everyone, benefits everyone. “Solidarity is powerful,” he says.
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