Hello and welcome to Curb Cuts! Allow me to introduce myself!

This website is wholly managed by literally one person: that’s me, Steven Aquino. I’m a lifelong disabled person (who copes with multiple conditions) and longtime freelance tech journalist based in San Francisco’s perpetually-foggy Richmond district. The site’s conceit is simple: it’s a blog about the intersection of disability and technology. I’m disabled, so I can write expertly and authoritatively.

I’ve worked nearly 12 years essentially running a newsroom of precisely one, covering accessibility and assistive technologies. I write about disability matters in technology, whether the usual hardware or software or other areas such as how disability and tech intersects with Hollywood, healthcare, politics, and much more. In a Journalism 101 sense, my coverage strives to hold truth to power by holding accountable those who create things that light up and make noise to make their product(s) accessible to everyone. In a social justice context, disability coverage in mainstream media is woefully inadequate compared to areas like race and sexuality. My work is but one humble attempt at moving the representational needle.

You can read more about me and my career on my portfolio site.

My byline has appeared in several leading publications over the years; they include TechCrunch, The Verge, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and numerous others. From 2020 to 2025, I was part of Forbes’ invite-only contributor network, writing a regular column as part of the outlet’s consumer technology vertical. Since April 2020, I published interviews with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Arthur creator Marc Brown, and Gallaudet University president Roberta Cordano.

My primary goal with running Curb Cuts is to bring more of my reporting “in house” so that I have full editorial independence on what (and why) something gets covered. Like technology, accessibility lies everywhere—without it, there would be no access. As to what a “curb cut” is, it’s the cut-out in sidewalks so wheelchair users can cross the street. Colloquially, the so-called “curb cut effect” references how tried-and-true accessibility aids in the physical world like curb cuts along sidewalks not only help disabled people, they help abled people easily get a stroller across the street.

For my purposes, the curb cut effect is a double entendre. For me, the “curb cuts” phrase is meant to show people that covering accessibility and assistive technologies deserves a permanent and utterly relevant place in mainstream technology news coverage.