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

This place is managed by a single 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. This website’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 running a newsroom of precisely one reporter, covering accessibility and assistive technologies. I write about disability matters in the technology industry, 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 things like race and sexuality. My work is my 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 many leading publications over time; 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 posted interviews with former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Arthur creator Marc Brown, Gallaudet University president Roberta Cordano, and others.

My primary goal with Curb Cuts is to bring my reporting “in house” such that I have complete editorial independence on what (and why) something gets covered. Like technology, accessibility lies everywhere—without it, there would be no access. Accessibility and technology are inextricably tied. As to a “curb cut,” it refers to the cutout in sidewalks so wheelchairs can cross streets. Colloquially, the “curb cut effect” references how tried-and-true accessibility aids in the physical world like curb cuts benefit not only people with disabilities, they help abled people 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 convey two things: (1) accessibility is for literally everyone; and (2) accessibility and assistive technologies is more than deserving of a permanent and utterly relevant place in mainstream technology news coverage.