A couple weeks ago, my mom said she wished she didn’t have to have a phone because of all the spam she gets.
I agreed, but for a different reason.
For me, the phone is often harder to use. Small screens, touch gestures, mobile-first layouts, and apps designed around visual scanning can all become physically and cognitively exhausting. A lot of the time, I wish I could just use my computer.
AI holds a lot of promise for disabled people. For anyone operating a body or a mind in manual mode, these systems can act as a literal cognitive prosthetic. They handle the execution logic that standard environments take for granted; they summarize mountains of dense text, automate multistep system tasks, and keep things moving forward when your own internal CPU cycles are completely saturated. If you’ve got a limited energy pool, the idea of offloading your executive function to an intelligent system isn’t just a gimmick. It’s a baseline accessibility requirement.
The productivity advice says: use a second brain. Pick a note-taking app, capture everything, link ideas, review weekly. Build a system and trust it.
I’ve tried most of the popular options. Notion collapsed under its own visual complexity. Obsidian’s graph view is a spatial nightmare for someone with topographical agnosia. Roam required too much upfront structure on days when I have nothing left for structure. Apple Notes doesn’t persist across my fragmented hardware setup.
There’s no community that accepts my whole stack. Every space I enter runs me through a filter. Sometimes I get bounced on the disability check. Sometimes on the faith. Sometimes on the AI. I built Hermes Agent because I had nowhere else to go.
I never know whether I should lead with my disability profile. The social cost is high regardless.
Sourcing Note: The examples in this article are not hypotheticals. They come from my own captured daily logs, technical sessions, and lived experiences. For a plain-language breakdown of the physical mechanics behind my diagnoses, see my Human Terms summary.
There’s a model of disability that feels mathematically tidy and is almost entirely wrong.
It goes like this: a person has Disability A and Disability B. Their overall difficulty is therefore $A + B$. If we build an accommodation for A, we’ve reduced the total load to just $B$. Progress has been made. The spreadsheet balances. Everyone goes home feeling useful.
The modern tech industry is built on a specific promise: buy into one ecosystem, and your digital life will effortlessly sync.
But that convenience is a privilege. When you live with blindness, multi-system chronic illness, neurodivergence, and topographical agnosia (a spatial processing disability that prevents my brain from forming mental maps, making it as easy to get lost in a complex software menu as it is on a physical street), brand loyalty is a luxury. You can’t choose a platform simply because it integrates well. You choose a platform because it allows you to function. You have to constantly weigh the cognitive load of one operating system against the screen reader reliability of another.