A Dozen Broken Links and a PDF From 2019

By Burt Brooks, Founder & CEO, PathAble

If you have ever tried to find disability services in an unfamiliar state, you already know the drill. A dozen broken links. A PDF from 2019. A phone number that rings to nobody.

I want to talk about why that happens, because the obvious explanation is wrong and the real one is more fixable than it looks.

The Information Almost Always Exists

The obvious explanation is that the information is missing. It usually is not.

Nearly every service a family is looking for is documented somewhere. A state agency has a page. A county office has a list. A nonprofit has a directory it maintains with real care. The waiver exists, the eligibility criteria are written down, the intake number is a working number.

What does not exist is any single place where those things sit together, in language a person can read, organized the way a person actually searches.

Because here is the thing about how families search. They do not search by agency. They search by problem. Somebody types what they need at eleven at night after a hard day, and the systems they are searching were built by agencies, for agencies, organized by which department holds the budget. A parent does not know that the thing they need is administered by a division they have never heard of, under a waiver with an acronym, in a department that does not have the word disability in its name.

The Handoff Between Sources

The dead links are a symptom of something more specific.

A county page links to a state program. The state reorganizes, and the URL changes. Nobody at the county is told, because nobody at the state has a list of who was linking to them. The county page is not neglected. It is simply pointing at a place that moved.

Multiply that across every agency reorganization, every rebranded program, every site migration, and you get the modern experience of looking for help: a directory that was accurate when it was written and has been quietly rotting ever since, maintained by someone who has eleven other jobs.

Then there is what happens when you cross a state line. Every piece of hard-won knowledge a family has is suddenly worthless. The program has a different name. The eligibility rules are different. The waiting list works differently. A family that spent six years learning to navigate one state starts over as a beginner, usually at the worst possible moment, because people generally move for a reason and the reason is generally stressful.

What We Built, and Why We Gave It Away

We spent a large part of this year building the thing we kept wishing existed.

The PathAble portals now cover every state and the District of Columbia, and go down to the county level across 3,143 counties. Plain language, organized by what a person needs rather than which agency owns it, with the front door for each state named explicitly. Over four hundred thousand documented resources.

No login. No paywall. No lead capture form standing between a family and a phone number.

I want to be honest about why it is free, because "we care" is not a satisfying answer and it is not the whole one. It is free because a directory that charges cannot do the job. The person who most needs it is the person least able to pay, and a resource that reaches only paying customers is not addressing the problem I left my career to work on. We make our money from organizations who hire us to fix their own systems. The directory is not the product. It is the thing the product exists to justify.

It is also not finished, and I would rather say that than pretend. Links rot on us too. Programs close. We built verification into the process because we knew from the start that a directory is a maintenance commitment, not a launch.

The Same Gap, Again

What strikes me about this problem is how exactly it rhymes with the others I keep writing about.

Nobody built a bad website. The county page is fine. The state page is fine. The nonprofit directory is fine. Each one, judged on its own, is doing its job responsibly.

The failure lives in the handoff between them, which no single one of them owns. It is the same shape as the gap a student falls into between school and adult services, and the same shape as the way documentation gets written for the system rather than the person. Every station works. The spaces between the stations are where people actually spend their time, and nobody is assigned to them.

If you maintain one of those pages, here is the smallest useful thing you can do this month: click every outbound link on it. Not audit it, not redesign it. Just click them. In my experience you will find two or three that go nowhere, and fixing those will do more for a family at eleven at night than a redesign would.

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