Alas, people with disabilities are not generally rich.

https://disabilitycompendium.org/sit...nualReport.pdf

In thirty states, the employment percentage gap between those with a disability and those without
was 40 percentage points or greater; only three states showed an employment percentage gap less than 33.3 percentage points.

Doing sensible things to help close that gap would seem to benefit us all.

I think he's saying if we were a rich (first world) nation, with plenty of engineers (edumacated people) we could...

Well we are and we have, but why waste resources(money) on improvements for a minority, when we could use those resources to increase the resources of the ruling class by exporting jobs, destroying small business, and keep enough unemployed to maintain a pool of minions at our beck and call?

Yeah, I was thinking about the efficiency of universal design over each (unemployed) person buying a better chair. I met a rich dude with a couple super chairs. He has one that he can hunt out of which is pretty sweet.

We don't give them more capable wheelchairs because we don't want to see them on our front doorsteps, interrupting our lives, to sell us something, collecting for charity, doing surveys; or, politicking. There's enough of a problem with ambulatory people doing that. They'll need background checks, testing and licensing, wheelchair registration, and age restrictions. New laws will have to be passed to regulate what they're allowed to do with more capable wheelchairs and they'll have to volunteer to do a hitch in the new minion corps.

Then they'll be more like us. We don't want to create just another elitist segment of the population. Those who are already elitists and can afford better wheelchairs on their own probably don't want uppity minions with better wheelchairs trying to mingle with them anyway. Won't somebody think of the wheelchair dependent elite!

ADA compliance isn't cheap. It may be that a million climbing chairs is cheaper than all of ADA compliance.

Makes you wonder how that coverage didn't make it into Obamacare.

No wonder at all, the wheelchairs are the domain of the medical equipment suppliers who along with the drug pushers, doctors, and insurances companies, formed a formidable force to overcome. There was a lot of horse trading to get the bill passed, but instead of future improvements in subsequent sessions of congress it became a war zone.:(