A key part of our initial review process is imagining how others may use the product differently than we do. But imagination and empathy can only go so far. In addition to talking and testing with other staff members, friends, and family, we need to actually test the products with folks who are living with disabilities or bodies that aren’t otherwise sufficiently represented on our staff.

In the fall of 2023, Wirecutter launched its Paid Tester Program to address this gap. In the months prior, we’d met with senior editors about what perspectives were missing from our coverage. The themes we heard across teams, from kitchen to tech to style to sleep, were that we needed representation of all kinds of people—those who use mobility aids like walkers or wheelchairs, those who are bigger, shorter, older, low-vision or blind, and those who have limited dexterity in their hands.

Since then, we’ve hired 10 paid, part-time testers who come into our office in Long Island City, New York, once a month and test with our experts. They’ve tested more than 80 products across the categories we cover—everything from mattresses to salad spinners to yoga mats.

Their input has made us think about different needs for certain products, such as vegetable choppers; our paid testers, some with limited dexterity, had high hopes for their accessibility, but overall found them difficult or impossible to operate. And it’s even made us reconsider long-standing conclusions about products like laundry detergent pods. Although they don’t clean as well as liquid or powder detergents, our tester in a wheelchair found them much easier to use.