The Business of Digital Disability

Abstract

The paradox of disability and inclusive information technology is considered. If we are now possessed of greater knowledge about disability and design, why is accessible and inclusive technology so difficult to bring about? Is it because inclusive technology is not profitable, and so unattractive for businesses and unsustainable as an industry? Or is the answer more education and awareness? This paper seeks to reframe dominant approaches to disability, information technology, and policy, by offering a thesis centred upon the power relations of disability and the crucial role played by disability's cultural and social constitution. In explaining and testing the theory, we look at case studies from telecommunications, mobile phones, and the Internet.

Keywords:

• access
• digital technologies
• disability
• equity
• inclusive technology
• information and communications technologies
• Internet
• telecommunications

Notes

NOTES

1. For the other author of this article, Christopher Newell, international travel to participate in scholarly colloquia is an extremely expensive, fraught with difficulties, and exhausting affair, highly dependent on the health care systems and policies of the host country, the practices of the airlines, and the approaches of conference organizers.

2. We note that the contemporary emphasis on the power of consumers assumes financial resources, yet the implications of this for work and employment have not yet been given the attention they deserve. If people with disabilities are excluded from the workplace by virtue of the fact that they cannot access the tools of work, then it is clearly difficult for them to be transformed into “consumers” and a “market.”

3. For further discussion of the research approach and methods and the report's user study, product analysis, and industry studies, see http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/2004/online_newmarketplace.htm#sectionb.

4. Our thanks to an anonymous reviewer for a number of helpful observations on the role and nature of standards.

5. In our contrasting discussion here we are mindful of the problematic, dynamic, yet intensely invested categories of “Deaf” and “Blind”, and the entire vexed taxonomic enterprise of knowing the truth of a person via an impairment label (for a discussion of this see the opening chapter of Goggin & Newell, 2005a).