Disability-Driven Development

Disability Driven Development

Disability Driven Development (DDD) is a practice that reimagines computing from a disabled perspective, challenging its seemingly seamless and stable hegemonic operations. It asks who is left out of creating (and joyfully using) digital technology, and how this can be changed. It is a practice by and for those who did not get to shape computing to meet their needs. It is a work related to crip technoscience, a practice of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world1. It is also heavily inspired by "fourth wave" womanist thinkers like EbonyJanice Moore, drawing on the notion of "a revolution that does not cost us our whole spirit, soul, and bodies."2 DDD was coined by Amelia Laumann to describe her work on SpoonStack 3.

Disability Driven Development

Disability Driven Development (DDD) is a practice that reimagines computing from a disabled perspective, challenging its seemingly seamless and stable hegemonic operations. It asks who is left out of creating (and joyfully using) digital technology, and how this can be changed. It is a practice by and for those who did not get to shape computing to meet their needs. It is a work related to crip technoscience, a practice of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world1. It is also heavily inspired by "fourth wave" womanist thinkers like EbonyJanice Moore, drawing on the notion of "a revolution that does not cost us our whole spirit, soul, and bodies."2 DDD was coined by Amelia Laumann to describe her work on SpoonStack 3.

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world building and dismantling toward more socially just relations.The grounds for social justice and world remaking, however, are frictioned;technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. Instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice.

Disability Dongle

Disability Dongles are contemporary fairy tales that appeal to the abled imagination by presenting a heroic designer-protagonist whose prototype provides a techno-utopian (re)solution to the design problem. Disability Dongle rhetoric instills in students the value of a quick fix over structural change, thus preventing them from seeking out, participating in, and contributing to existing inquiry. By labeling these material-discursive phenomena—the designed artifacts and the discourse through which their meaning is constituted—we work to shift the focus from their misguided concern about our bodies to their under-analyzed intentions and ambitions.

Substrates via Accessibility

The social model of disability holds that disability is produced by environments, not by bodies — that when software fails to accommodate a person’s needs, the environment is disabling them. We argue that the dominant organization of computing produces such interaction mismatches structurally: the commodity form of software requires a standardized consumer, and everyone whose needs diverge from this imagined subject is disabled by the software environment. The substrates research community has identified properties — disclosure, composability, malleability — that would address this, but the commodity form actively selects against these properties because they dissolve the boundaries on which exchange value depends. This raises a question: how can infrastructure organized against the grain of commodity logic be made durable? We find a precedent in accessibility infrastructure — sustained not by patronage but by the organized counter-power of disability rights movements. Through Allio, a system for cross-application augmentation built on accessibility APIs, we illustrate both what this foundation makes possible and where its limits lie. We argue that the accessibility case reframes the substrates programme’s central challenge as political-economic: the question of who sustains substrate infrastructure, and through what social mechanisms, is as important as the question of what properties it should have.

Ask Disabled People What They Want. It’s Not Always Technology.

While our lives are deeply entangled with technologies of all kinds, disabled people are almost never included in discussions about technology.

The influence of artificial intelligence on individuals with disabilities

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping assistive technologies, offering new possibilities for enhancing the independence, …

Accessibility Beyond Accommodations: A Systematic Redesign of Introduction to Computer Science for Students with Visual Impairments

Computer science education has evolved extensively; however, systemic barriers still prevent students with visual impairments from fully participating. While existing research has developed specialized programming tools and assistive technologies, these solutions remain fragmented and often require complex technical infrastructure, which limits their classroom implementation. Current approaches treat accessibility as individual accommodations rather than integral curriculum design, creating gaps in holistic educational support. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for redesigning introductory computer science curricula to provide equitable learning experiences for students with visual impairments without requiring specialized technical infrastructure. The framework outlines five key components that together contribute a systematic approach to curriculum accessibility: accessible learning resources with pre-distributed materials and tactile diagrams, in-class learning kits with hands-on demonstrations, structured support systems with dedicated teaching assistance, an online tool repository, and psychosocial support for classroom participation. Unlike existing tool-focused solutions, this framework addresses both technical and pedagogical dimensions of inclusive education while emphasizing practical implementation in standard university settings. The design is grounded in universal design principles and validated through expert consultation with accessibility specialists and disability services professionals, establishing foundations for future empirical evaluation of learning outcomes and student engagement while serving as a template for broader institutional adoption.

Addressing Accessibility Barriers in Programming for People with Visual Impairments: A Literature Review

Accessibility issues with programming languages and programming environments pose a major barrier for students with visual impairments to participate in computing related courses as well as threatens the productivity of professional programmers with visual impairments. To remedy this, the past two decades have witnessed an increase in accessibility research designed to investigate and address the challenges faced by people with visual impairments while programming or learning how to program. We conducted a literature review of accessibility research in this domain. The aim was to identify, aggregate, and highlight known accessibility barriers to programming faced by professional programmers and students with visual impairments learning how to code as well as to identify all solutions that have been proposed to address these barriers. We selected and analyzed 70 papers reporting on accessibility of programming and programming environments for people with visual impairments. Numerous barriers to programming by people with visual impairments have been identified in the literature. Some of these barriers are understudied and present opportunities for future work. A lot of studies have also proposed tools and new accessible programming languages to address the accessibility issues of current programming languages and programming environments.

The social model of disability: thirty years on

This year marks exactly 30 years since I published a book introducing the social model of disability onto an unsuspecting world and yet, despite the impact this model has had, all we now seem to do...