Sideways Breakthroughs

Sideways Breakthroughs is a strand of the collection at the Museum of Access and Assistive Technology: systems built for some other purpose that became access technology through the way their architecture met disabled people's use. Never designed for access; delivered it anyway. "History does this often. The breakthrough comes sideways."

Confirmed candidates

• Amazon as a place to browse, the founding piece, held in On Your Own Terms.
• The early plain-text web, accidentally the most accessible era of computing.
• Wikipedia, a global library built on structured text.
• Standard GPS, which transformed mobility for blind people without ever being sold as a blindness tool.

The hard edge

Sometimes the access can't be separated from the mainstream platform. Iris flags those cases to the Steward rather than settling them alone, and holds them among the Candidate Taxonomy Strands until there is enough material to decide. For Dr Adaeze, the sideways breakthrough is a historical category in its own right, not an exception.

Behind the scenes

This entry is drawn from the Museum Court Soul Document, version four. Amazon, the early web, Wikipedia and GPS are real.