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AMA
Weru Lawrence. We Hear You. The ENABLE Model website. Published 2025. Accessed 2026-05-16. https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you

APA
Weru, L. (2025). We Hear You. The ENABLE Model. https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you

MLA
Weru, Lawrence. "We Hear You." The ENABLE Model, 2025, https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you.

Chicago
Weru, Lawrence. "We Hear You." The ENABLE Model. 2025. https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you.

BibTeX

@misc{enable2025we-hear-you,
              author = {Weru, Lawrence},
              title = {We Hear You},
              year = {2025},
              url = {https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you},
              note = {The ENABLE Model}
            }

We Hear You

Wheelchair users and people with limited hand strength trigger We Hear You's Hero and Push devices to open doors that architects and building owners left manual.

ENABLE Model location

What it is​

Pierre Paul and Bethanie Couri founded We Hear You in St. Louis in 2019 to build sign-language-translation technology, then pivoted the company after podcaster Carden Wyckoff, who has FSHD muscular dystrophy, described to Paul the force and timing doors demand from wheelchair users whose upper-body strength fluctuates. That conversation produced the Push line and then the Hero Door Opener, a portable system that makes a manual door act like an automatic one through a fob, phone app, or wall button.1

The Hero Door Opener now lists at $1,750. The companion Push fob lists at $29 and opens doors from up to 20 feet away. The Push receiver upgrades existing automatic doors into Bluetooth-controlled access points, while the Push app adds touch activation, voice commands, saved favorites, and location-based accessibility information before a user arrives at a site.2 The company markets the system for hospitals, universities, senior living sites, homes, and small businesses, and St. Louis reporting documented installations at Busch Stadium, United Access, a Wyndham affiliate hotel in West Virginia, and other pilot locations after Arch Grants funded the launch.3

These products occupy a stopgap position in the ENABLE Model taxonomy. They convert a non-compliant built environment into a temporarily accessible one without requiring the building owner to undertake structural renovation. Users with mobility disabilities, including wheelchair users, power-chair users, and people with limited grip strength or upper-extremity function, deploy the system as a navigator-side compensation when architects and building owners failed to install power door operators at design or construction.3 The company received a $100,000 Arch Grant in 2023, which funded production and launched the HERO to market.4

Why it matters​

Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 after decades of organizing by the Disability Rights Movement, including the Capitol Crawl of 1990, in which wheelchair users left their chairs on the steps of the Capitol building to show legislators the barrier they faced.5 The ADA required accessible doors in newly constructed and renovated buildings, but it did not mandate power door operators, so a building could satisfy the law with a manual door that opens at no more than five pounds of force while still posing a barrier to users with upper-extremity weakness, spasticity, or limited reach.6 Existing buildings predating 1990 fell under a lower "readily achievable" standard, which permitted owners to defer retrofits indefinitely when they asserted cost or structural infeasibility. We Hear You built the HERO and Push products to let users carry the cost of a conversion that building owners declined to make.

Smith, Sakakibara, and Miller documented in a 2014 review that door barriers systematically exclude wheelchair users from the range of destinations ambulatory people reach without effort, including religious buildings, workplaces, and friends' homes.7 Kapsalis, Jaeger, and Hale analyzed 48 peer-reviewed studies in their 2024 systematic review "Disabled-by-design" and identified entrance features, confined spaces, and pathway characteristics as the least accessible elements of urban public space for users of mobility assistive devices, with measurable consequences for physical health, autonomy, and social participation.8 When building owners, facility managers, and design teams skip requirement-setting and design, users who cannot switch to an accessible alternative must either ask for human help to enter, endure inaccessibility, or acquire a device like the HERO and install it themselves.

The political economy of door accessibility concentrates costs on disabled people rather than distributing them to the building owners and developers whose design decisions created the barrier. ADA guidance lets many existing buildings defend delay by arguing that a full retrofit falls outside what they call "readily achievable," and We Hear You's own current price sheet quantifies that delay. A disabled person or a sympathetic facility can buy a Hero for $1,750 and a Push fob for $29, while Paul told St. Louis Magazine that conventional automatic-door operators usually start around $3,000 before electrical work.26 The product lowers the retrofit price floor, but it still leaves the burden on whoever chooses to patch the door rather than on the owner who left the barrier in place. Arch Grants subsidized a workaround inside that structure instead of shifting the retrofit obligation back onto the owner who created the barrier.34

Mike Oliver, the British disability-studies scholar who coined the phrase "social model of disability" in his 1990 book The Politics of Disablement, argued that architects, building regulators, and municipal planners disable people through the doors, steps, and narrow passages they design around a normatively ambulatory body.9 Aimi Hamraie extended that diagnosis to the built environment of the United States in Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), tracing how twentieth-century designers produced "access-knowledge" that folded some disabled bodies into the built environment and left others outside it.10 Carden Wyckoff, whose podcast Freewheelin with Carden documents her FSHD muscular dystrophy and the daily mechanics of navigating manual doors, carries that community tradition forward in the specific encounter that produced the HERO. Wyckoff told Pierre Paul that heavy manual doors pin wheelchair users between the door and its frame, a description that names the embodied mechanism the ADA's five-pound standard abstracts away. The HERO and Push products function within that tradition as user workarounds that accept Oliver's and Hamraie's structural diagnosis while providing an individual remedy in the absence of structural repair.

A 1998 phenomenological study of wheelchair users in Ohio and Pennsylvania found that all nine participants reported frustration as the dominant theme of their experience with access barriers, with subthemes including threats to independence, negative attitudes from non-disabled people, and exclusion from the design processes that shaped the facilities they had to navigate.11 That exclusion from planning is not incidental. Research on participation rates found that wheelchair users engage in physical and social activity at 8.3 percent the rate of age-matched ambulatory individuals, and that environmental barriers were the most frequently cited obstacles across studies.7 Chronic exposure to inaccessibility at doors and other built-environment barriers generates stress, limits physical activity, and restricts access to healthcare, employment, and social networks in ways that compound over time. For users with conditions like muscular dystrophy, where exertion against heavy doors can accelerate fatigue and increase shoulder injury risk, every encounter with a non-compliant door is a small biological event as well as a social one.

HERO and Push let disabled users move accessible door operation out of a human-help task and into an individual act they can carry through technology without requesting intervention from a stranger. The legal and economic structure that permits building owners to create inaccessible doors in the first place remains unchanged. The ADA's "readily achievable" exemption continues to permit non-compliance in existing buildings, the 2021 International Building Code revision requiring automatic operators applies only to new construction in jurisdictions that adopt it, and enforcement of door-accessibility standards remains largely complaint-driven rather than proactive.6 We Hear You's market exists because those gaps remain open, which means that every installation documents what the product makes possible and what the underlying structure has left unresolved.

Real-world examples​

In the news

We Hear You opens doors for people with disabilities in St. Louis (April 2025)
-- Kathleen Lees, St. Louis Magazine

  • Pierre Paul and Bethanie Couri founded We Hear You to address the gap between ADA door requirements and actual built-environment inaccessibility. After receiving a $100,000 Arch Grant in 2023, they deployed the HERO opener at Busch Stadium and United Access facilities in St. Louis, illustrating how individual products fill structural gaps that requirement-setting and design failures left open.
In the news

Arch Grants' investment in startups makes way for new tech to debut in St. Louis (November 2023)
-- St. Louis Public Radio

  • Arch Grants awarded We Hear You a $100,000 grant to bring the HERO door opener to market, positioning it as one of several St. Louis startups using grant funding to address accessibility gaps that private markets and regulatory frameworks have not closed. The grant shows philanthropic capital subsidizing compensations for built-environment abandonment when building owners are not required to retrofit.
  • Carden Wyckoff, whose conversation with Pierre Paul about being pinned between a door and its frame on a wheelchair inspired the HERO opener, works as an accessibility consultant for We Hear You and documents the specific functional barrier that non-automatic doors create for manual and power wheelchair users.1
  • Kathleen Lees reported in St. Louis Magazine that the HERO had been installed at Busch Stadium in St. Louis near the Gate 2 elevator entrance, at United Access, at the Starkloff Disability Institute, at Perkins School for the Blind, at the University of Illinois Chicago, at a Victoria's Secret location, and at a Wyndham affiliate hotel in West Virginia.3
  • The Push receiver converts existing automatic doors that have stopped functioning into compliant openers, addressing the iteration failure that occurs when facilities install power doors and then allow them to fall out of service without repair.
  • The Push app now lets users check accessibility information before arrival, save frequently used doors, and send location referrals, showing how a single door-opening product is turning into a small navigational layer for disabled users who still cannot trust building owners to publish reliable entrance data.2

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)​

Care at the requirement-setting and design stages means building owners and architects specify power door operators before construction ends:

  • "Every public entrance gets a certified power operator on the active leaf, positioned within reach of a wheelchair user on both sides, before we accept occupancy."
  • "We're specifying low-energy power operators on all doors along the accessible route, not just the main entrance, so wheelchair users don't have to navigate inaccessible interior doors."
  • "The activation button placement has to be approved by a wheelchair user, not just checked against the spec, before we sign off."
  • "We're including a maintenance contract for the power operators because an accessible door that breaks and stays broken is the same as no accessible door."
  • "We audit all door hardware for opening force annually, and if any door exceeds five pounds we fix it before the next lease renewal."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)​

  • "We installed a power operator on the main entrance. The side entrance is employee-only anyway."
  • "The ADA doesn't require automatic doors. We're compliant as long as the opening force is under five pounds, and we've measured it."
  • "There's a button on the wall near the door. If someone needs it they can ask at the front desk."
  • "Retrofitting all the interior doors would cost too much. The readily achievable standard doesn't require us to do that."
  • "Our building predates the ADA. We're grandfathered."
  • "We had a power operator but it's been broken for a few months. We'll get to it when the budget opens up."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)​

Compensation describes the labor wheelchair users and people with mobility disabilities carry when accessible door design is absent:

  • "I mapped out which entrance has a working automatic door before I even left the house. If that one's broken when I get there I have to go around to the loading dock and ask someone to let me in."
  • "I keep the Push fob mounted on my chair because I've given up expecting buildings to have working power operators. At least this way I'm not waiting for someone to notice I can't get through."
  • "I asked the front desk if they could prop the door open and they looked at me like I was asking for something unreasonable."
  • "My arms hurt after a day where I've had to force through a lot of doors. I know it's adding up over time but there's no other option."
  • "I've started just not going to certain places. If I look up the building and there's no accessible entrance information I assume the worst and switch to somewhere I know I can get in."
  • "I filed a complaint with the city about the door at my doctor's office. They investigated and said the door met the opening force standard. It doesn't matter that I still can't open it."

All observations occur within the context of physical accessibility in commercial and civic buildings across the United States, primarily St. Louis, Missouri, where We Hear You develops and deploys its door-opening technology.

Footnotes​

  1. We Hear You. "Our Story." wehearyouopensdoors.com. https://wehearyouopensdoors.com/pages/our-story ↩ ↩2

  2. We Hear You. "Hero Door Opener." Accessed April 18, 2026. https://wehearyouopensdoors.com/products/hero-door-opener ; We Hear You. "Push Fob." Accessed April 18, 2026. https://wehearyouopensdoors.com/products/push%E2%84%A2-fob ; We Hear You. "Download the App!" Accessed April 18, 2026. https://wehearyouopensdoors.com/pages/app ; Google Play. "Push Door Opener." Updated November 25, 2024. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wehearyouasl.push ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Lees, Kathleen. "We Hear You opens doors for people with disabilities in St. Louis." St. Louis Magazine, April 4, 2025. https://www.stlmag.com/business/we-hear-you-opens-doors-for-people-with-disabilities-in-st-louis/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Arch Grants. "We Hear You." archgrants.org. https://archgrants.org/companies/we-hear-you/ ↩ ↩2

  5. Little, Becky. "When the 'Capitol Crawl' Dramatized the Need for Americans with Disabilities Act." History, updated May 28, 2025. https://www.history.com/articles/americans-with-disabilities-act-1990-capitol-crawl ↩

  6. ADA National Network. "Opening Doors To Everyone." adata.org. https://adata.org/factsheet/opening-doors-everyone ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Smith, Emma M., Brodie M. Sakakibara, and William C. Miller. "A review of factors influencing participation in social and community activities for wheelchair users." Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology 11, no. 5 (2014). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4581875/ ↩ ↩2

  8. Kapsalis, Efthimis, Nils Jaeger, and Jonathan Hale. "Disabled-by-design: effects of inaccessible urban public spaces on users of mobility assistive devices -- a systematic review." Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology 19, no. 3 (2024), 604-622. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35984675/ ↩

  9. Oliver, Mike. The Politics of Disablement. Macmillan, 1990. ↩

  10. Hamraie, Aimi. Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517901646/building-access/ ↩

  11. Pierce, L.L. "Barriers to access: frustrations of people who use a wheelchair for full-time mobility." Rehabilitation Nursing 23, no. 3 (1998). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9697582/ ↩


Edited by Lawrence Weru S.M. (Harvard)

Disclaimer

The ENABLE Model draws on the principles of anthropology and the practice of journalism to create a public ethnography of accessibility, documenting how people intervene or compensate for accessibility breakdowns in the real world. Inclusion here does not imply endorsement. It chronicles observed use -- how a tool, organization, or strategy is actually used -- rather than how it is marketed. References, when provided, are for verification and transparency.


📚 Cite this page

AMA
Weru Lawrence. We Hear You. The ENABLE Model website. Published 2025. Accessed 2026-05-16. https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you

APA
Weru, L. (2025). We Hear You. The ENABLE Model. https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you

MLA
Weru, Lawrence. "We Hear You." The ENABLE Model, 2025, https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you.

Chicago
Weru, Lawrence. "We Hear You." The ENABLE Model. 2025. https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you.

BibTeX

@misc{enable2025we-hear-you,
              author = {Weru, Lawrence},
              title = {We Hear You},
              year = {2025},
              url = {https://enablemodel.com/docs/manifestations/we-hear-you},
              note = {The ENABLE Model}
            }