Digital Ableism and Why it Matters

Source: Access guide

Technology has huge implications for our everyday lives, but particularly for disabled people, technology has both enabled access to resources and meaningful social interactions, but has also exacerbated long-term structural problems. Below, you’ll find some of the pain points faced by the disabled community as it relates to technology. 

Defining Digital Ableism: discrimination that takes place through apps, websites, and online services.

 

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What are the Pain Points?

1. Algorithmic Bias and Accuracy Issues

   • To predict the likelihood that patients will recover from COVID-19, some hospitals have adopted algorithmic modeling. For disabled people, this may accelerate practices that cut them off from care or decrease the likelihood that they will be seen as patients worth saving. 

   • Implication?

     • This is particularly harmful to disabled people, as a community of people that are already experiencing medical discrimination. 

2. Contact-tracing and Surveillance

   • Recently, the rise of Contact Tracing Apps apps have been used to surveil people’s physical proximity and rate of covid infections.
   • However, these apps can harm disabled people by over-identifying or under-identifying its users and targeted population, and unfortunately, these apps can easily abuse forms of monitoring and surveillance to create false reassurance that they would actually slow the spread.
     • Over-identification: flagging too many false positives creates the likelihood that people will ignore notifications
       Under-identification: failing to adequately account for possible transmissions and exposures, even for people who are definitely infected

   • Implication?

     • Disabled people are often forced to give up their privacy/identity to receive access to basic services, support and accommodations. Some examples include welfare, elevator and accessibility access to buildings. Thus, the use of Contact Tracing Apps is one example of the ways covid-19 data can be used to weaponize further discriminations for disable people.

3. Digital Divide

   • Disabled people are disproportionately affected by the digital divide, as many are less likely to have access to broadband wireless or devices capable of internet browsing and using web-based content. This affects Black, Native, and low-income disabled people more than others. 

   • Implication?

     • As our society is transforming into an increasingly virtual world, disabled people (particularly Black, Native, and low-income populations) are experiencing drastic decrease of opportunities. 

4. Online Accessibility 

• • As of 2020, a whopping 98 percent of all web content fails to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which is the international standard for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. 

1. • What are some of the guidelines?
     • Content can be inaccessible to screen readers, refreshable Braillers, eye tracking, or other adapted technologies. 
     • It could also mean that content is inaccessible to people who rely on captioning, need to resize images and text, or have cognitive and language-based disabilities. 

   • Implication?

     • This means that basic (but important) public health information and news updates are inaccessible to disabled people. Other forms of information and online resources such as government assistants, remote work and even games are also inaccessible to disabled people. 

      

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What can we do?

Source: Access guide

Main Takeaway:  Tech Policies must understand the social, environmental, and political factors that have put disabled people, especially multiply marginalized disabled people (i.e. Black, Native, Low-Income) in economically disadvantaged positions. Understanding the contexts in which disable people, particularly, disabled people of color and disabled queer and trans people, experience technology is vital to combatting digital ableism. 

Action Items 

1. Educate yourself and spread the word
2. Conduct Needs Assessments for your intended audience and community
3. Include Closed Captioning for virtual events/screenings
4. Use emoji reactions/chat function to expand communication
5. Offer virtual opportunities for events/professional development/remote work when possible

 

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Additional Resources

• Access Guide
• Access Guide Flow Page