Some positive tech of 2017: helping blind people navigate, cryptocurrencies for charity, fighting hiring bias with AI, helping immigrants navigate laws, more
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the Times' year-end counterweight to 2017's dominant tech narratives: a roundup spanning four domains — navigation tools for blind users, cryptocurrency charitable giving, AI used to fight hiring bias, and tools helping immigrants navigate laws. It ran across two editions at the turn of the year, and the format proved durable enough that the paper repeated it for 2020 with coverage of tech helping during COVID-19, wildfires, and Black Lives Matter.
The accessibility item matters most in hindsight: the navigation tools highlighted here were early entries in a category that later drew scrutiny, when automated accessibility tools popularized by AI advances and legal pressure on companies were reported to be making websites harder for blind users to navigate.
First-order effects
- Blind and low-vision users gained navigation tools in 2017 whose mainstream potential — indoor and personalized navigation — was significant enough to warrant its own follow-up examination in dedicated coverage of navigational apps.
- Charities accepting cryptocurrency in 2017 opened a new donation channel, while recruiters adopting AI bias-fighting tools changed how hiring screens were built.
Second-order effects
- The accessibility push, driven by AI advances and new legal pressures on companies, scaled automated website overlays — and by 2022 many blind users reported those same tools made sites harder to use, forcing vendors of such tools onto the defensive.
- Crypto-based charitable giving pulled nonprofits into questions of custody and asset volatility they had not faced with traditional donations.
Third-order effects
- Accessibility has been shifting from bespoke hardware toward automated software layers, a transition whose costs — per the 2022 reporting — fall on the very users the tools claim to serve.
- The annual 'positive tech' roundup itself became a structural fixture: each year-end list sets a public benchmark for which deployments count as socially beneficial, shaping how companies frame their impact work.
The trend: Tech-for-good roundups have become an annual genre, but the accessibility arc shows deployment outpacing validation — automation scaling faster than usability testing with the disabled users it targets.