FAQ
Questions people ask us.
How the Index works, what it costs, and what happens to what you tell us.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. No subscriptions, no premium tier, no payment required.
Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation (CPARF), a nonprofit that supports research and innovation in disability technology across the disability spectrum. The database itself was shaped by hundreds of people in the disability community who shared their experiences with us.
We don’t take money from product makers to be listed, ranked, or recommended. No ads or affiliate links. The work is funded by the foundation and philanthropic support. If you’re a philanthropic funder interested in sustaining this work, you can email our fundraising team at giving@cparf.org.
Because what counts as “the best wheelchair” depends entirely on who’s using it, where they live, how much they can spend, and what they’re trying to do. A few questions move us from a generic list to something actually useful. You can share as much or as little as you’d like.
Take it as a well-informed starting point. The database is curated and reviewed, but products and prices change constantly. Sometimes we’ll also mention something that isn’t in our database yet — we’ll say so clearly when we do, and you should treat those details as unconfirmed. Always confirm details with the maker, your clinician, or someone who already uses the product before deciding on something important.
No, and this matters. The Disability Tech Index shares information to help you explore options; it does not give medical advice, and it is not a substitute for a doctor, therapist, clinician, or other qualified professional. Nothing here is a diagnosis or a treatment recommendation. Please talk with a qualified professional before making decisions about your health, safety, or care — especially anything involving medical devices, mobility, or medication. If you think you may be having a medical emergency, contact your local emergency services right away.
We’ll tell you if we can’t find a good match. Those misses are some of the most valuable things we collect. They tell us what to add next, and they show where the community is being underserved.
Our team uses conversation data to spot trends. Your chats aren’t connected to your name or email — those are stored separately, and when we read conversations, we don’t see who wrote them.
We keep conversations so we can learn from them: that’s how we spot what’s missing, decide what to add next, and build the case for funding the tech people actually need. We don’t sell them, we don’t advertise against them, and there’s no tracking on this site. The chat is powered by AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI — your messages are sent to them to generate replies, but your name and email are not.
If you’d like your information removed, email info@disabilitytechindex.org and we’ll take care of it.
Yes. A profile lets you pick up where you left off, and we’ll email you when a new option that fits your situation is added — you can unsubscribe from those any time, in one click. (Chats you have without a profile aren’t saved to an account, so create one if you’d like to come back to them.)
Of course. Family members, caregivers, clinicians, educators, employers, and friends use it for people they support all the time. If you’re a professional supporting multiple people, you can keep multiple profiles in one account.
The Foundation has maintained a database of disability-focused products and services for eight years. Recently we’ve expanded it well beyond products to more than 4,000 entries in all. That now includes services, funding programs (grants, government assistance, and other funding pathways), and the low- or no-cost hacks people actually use, alongside the products. Every entry is reviewed for accuracy, and anything we couldn’t verify was flagged and removed.
Yes. We designed and tested with screen readers (VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS) and keyboard-only navigation from the start. The site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. If something doesn’t work for you, we’ll fix it — email us at info@disabilitytechindex.org.
There’s a “Report an issue” button at the top of the chat. A person reads every report, and we make the changes accordingly.
Yes. The best source of new entries is what people tell us they were looking for and couldn’t find — or products and hacks you know about that we hadn’t found ourselves. Using the index makes the next person’s search easier. This is part of the research you agree to when you sign up: if you share something we didn’t know about, we get to use it to make the database even richer.
Yes, please do. Use our company portal to add a new product or update an existing listing for your brand. New submissions go through the same review as every other entry — there’s no fee to be listed, no paid placement, and no advertising. (You’ll verify an email on your product’s own domain so we know it’s really you, and a person on our team reviews everything before it goes live.)
Still stuck? Email us at info@disabilitytechindex.org — a person reads every message.