Drones do all sorts of things now. They can spray fertilizer, fly over fields to check on crops, and find areas of land that need more nutrients. They also deliver packages and take stunning aerial photos and videos.
But what if you wanted to fly a drone without using your hands? Christopher Hills, who has cerebral palsy, has wondered about this his whole life. He can’t use his hands, but with special switches and head-tracking controls, he can fly a drone very accurately. For years, he’s been developing an iPhone app that allows disabled people to fly drones just by moving their heads and using switches. Hills imagines a future where someone sitting in a movie theater might see an amazing aerial shot, and never know it was filmed by him.
Making drone technology accessible is no longer just a workaround or a side project. It’s becoming its own way of thinking about design, starting with a simple question: What if anyone could fly?
Standard drone controllers are designed for nondisabled people. Accessible controllers are the opposite. People can operate the drones using head movements, eye gaze, switches, or voice commands. Head-tracking systems, like the ones Hills uses, respond to small movements. If you tilt your head left, the drone turns left. Tilt it forward, and it goes up. A single switch can start or stop the drone. Two switches can change the speed or the camera angle. The controls might sound basic, but the results are amazing: smooth turns, slow camera movements, tight circles which produce cinema-quality shots.
The next step is controlling drones with smartphones. Instead of needing special equipment, accessible drone apps use the sensors already in phones: gyroscopes for head movements, voice recognition for commands, compatibility with switches for people with limited mobility, and eye-tracking. Accessible flight doesn’t need expensive gear. It just requires a phone, which millions of disabled people already use.
Accessible design also benefits other people. Hands‑free control is great for filmmakers who need to manage several devices at once. Switch controls are useful for cold weather when wearing gloves, which makes using joysticks difficult. Head tracking is easy for beginners who find traditional controllers hard to use. Making drones more accessible leads to simpler, more elegant, and accessible technology that benefits everyone.
Hills is part of a growing number of disabled creators who aren’t waiting for the industry to catch up. They are building the future themselves. And the future they are creating is about more than just access. It’s about creativity, independence, and joy.
He talks about the feeling of lifting off. It’s the moment the drone goes up, and the world opens up. For many disabled people, that feeling is rare. Flying, even through a screen, is liberating.
His app is still being improved, but the idea behind it is already bigger than the technology itself. It challenges the idea that disabled people are just spectators rather than creators. Hills envisions a world where disabled filmmakers use drones easily. Where a stunning image of a coastline or a slow pan across a field isn’t remarkable, it’s just a beautiful image.
Maybe that’s the whole point. The most effective accessibility is the kind that’s part of the design. Making things accessible helps people be more creative, explore new things, and be more independent.
Sources:
“Christopher’s Drone App Aims to Open the Skies to Aspiring Filmmakers with Disability.” UniSC News, University of the Sunshine Coast, 2 Sept. 2026, https://www.unisc.edu.au/about/unisc-news/news-archive/2026/september/christophers-drone-app-aims-to-open-the-skies-to-aspiring-filmmakers-with-disability.
Cho, Renee. “How Drones Are Advancing Scientific Research.” Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, 16 June 2017, https://lamont.columbia.edu/news/how-drones-are-advancing-scientific-research.
“Drones.” College of Arts and Sciences, Western Michigan University, https://wmich.edu/arts-sciences/drones. Accessed 3 Sept. 2026.
Garcia, Jérémie, et al. “HandiFly: Towards Interactions to Support Drone Pilots with Disabilities.” Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’19), Association for Computing Machinery, 2 May 2019, pp. 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312957.