Digital Log

    Csep-590B-Lec-1

    Accessibility Technology

    Accessibility technology often makes things better for everyone. Consider:

    • typewriter, initially made for a blind person to write more legibly.
    • speech recognition / text to speech, initially for disabled people

    Models

    • medical model: a disability is a personal attribute (to be fixed or ameliorated)
    • social model: a disability is a social or environmental attribute (how do we fix society?)
    • postmodern model: a disability shouldn't be fixed, but celebrated as human variation

    Language

    • We will mix identity-first: "disabled people" and people-first "people with disabilities" terms.
    • Avoid victimization: "stricken with", "suffers from", etc.
    • Avoid differentiating via "normal", or "able-bodied". Prefer "non-disabled".
    • Avoid "assistive" technology; this terminology is able-ist.
    • Avoid hero complex trope.
    • Avoid thinking of disabled people as inspiring.

    Centering Disability Rights in design

    • Process principles:
      • Design informed by disability justice and disability studies.
      • Making space for disabled voices
      • Tested thoroughly before wasting disabled time.
    • Outcome principles:
      • Centering agency and control.
      • Addressing intersectionality within disability and with other identities
      • No segregation
        • Avoid advances in one version and not another

    Ten principles of Disability Justice

    1. Intersectionality we are many things, and they impact all of us
    2. Leadership of the most impacted
    3. Anti-capitalist politics: resist conforming to "normative" levels of productivity in capitalist culture
    4. Cross-movement solidarity: join forces with other movements for a larger united front
    5. Recognize wholeness: disabled people are people
    6. Sustainability: pace ourselves
    7. Cross-disability solidarity: isolation undermines collective liberation
    8. Interdependence: we help meet each others' needs, rather than depending on top-down state solutions
    9. Collective access: shared responsibility for our access needs; balance autonomy while being in a community
    10. Collective liberation: no body or mind left behind; only together can we accomplish the required revolution