From Assistive to Accessible Technology: Ensuring Access and Inclusion

• In Event: Including and Excluding (Dis)ability

Abstract

The potential of technology to connect people, to provide access to education, commerce, employment, and entertainment has never been greater. Technology is often assumed to be liberating—making up for social, educational, and physical barriers to full-participation. Less visible are ways technology contributes to social exclusion. Technology privileges particular ways of being, which are grounded in normative, social, cultural, and economic practices, further reified in the design, manufacture, marketing, and implementation of technology. In this paper, we explore some of the ways that technology creates unexpected and under-critiqued (Lanier, 2010) forms of social exclusion for people with disabilities and propose new ways of thinking about accessible (as opposed to assistive) technology, informed by disability studies in education.

Authors

• Beth A. Ferri, Syracuse University

• Alan R. Foley, Syracuse University