A life-threatening encounter with AI technology convinced me that the needs of people with disabilities need to be engineered into our autonomous future.
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, …
AI Doesn't Fix Accessible Systems. It Depends on Them. — Anna E. Cook
Why AI depends on the foundation accessible design systems build — and how "AI will fix accessibility" is producing the opposite outcome at industry scale.
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.
Against Technoableism
When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want--nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual's problem rather than a social one. In a warm, feisty voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To forge a more equitable world, Shew argues that we must eliminate "technoableism"--the harmful belief that technology is a "solution" for disability; that the disabled simply await being "fixed" by technological wizardry; that making society more accessible and equitable is somehow a lesser priority. This badly needed introduction to disability expertise considers mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodivergence, and the crucial relationship between disability and race. The future, Shew points out, is surely disabled--whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.
Nothing About Us, Without Us: Disability Justice and AI
Intersectionality, ways that AI can support the disabled, and how we can win the race to make AI more inclusive.
Disability-Driven Development
Why AI is exposing design’s craft crisis
AI didn’t create the craft crisis in design — it exposed the technical literacy gap that’s been eroding strategic influence for over a decade.
#LiberatingWebinars: Disability Justice & Crip Technoscience: Racism & Ableism in AI
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, communication and quality of life of individuals with disabilities. This study presents a qualitative scoping review of 47 peer-reviewed articles published between 2018 and 2025, examining how AI has been integrated into assistive tools across domains such as mobility, communication, cognitive support, education and independent living. Specific AI applications include object recognition, gesture-based control, navigation assistance, emotion detection and natural language processing. The review highlights significant progress in personalization and real-time adaptation, while also identifying persistent challenges such as algorithmic bias, cost barriers, data privacy concerns and unequal access, particularly in low-resource settings. Ethical considerations and the need for inclusive, user-centered design approaches are emphasized. The study also underscores future research priorities, including standardization of development protocols, empirical evaluation of long-term effectiveness and policy frameworks to ensure equitable access. By synthesizing recent developments and critical gaps, this review contributes to understanding how AI can responsibly and effectively support assistive technologies, ultimately promoting more inclusive environments for people with disabilities.
HCDE Distinguished Lecture with Laura Forlano | Designing Consequences: On Living Well with Machines
Challenging Ableism: A Critical Turn Toward Disability Justice in HCI
A reflection on our learnings from the CHI 2022 "Dreaming Disability Justice in HCI" workshop, and why we continue to call for disability justice, despite the limitations of how we practice it within academia and industry.
Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Three Fresh Ideas
Human-Centered AI (HCAI) is a promising direction for designing AI systems that support human self-efficacy, promote creativity, clarify responsibility, and facilitate social participation. These human aspirations also encourage consideration of privacy, security, environmental protection, social justice, and human rights. This commentary reverses the current emphasis on algorithms and AI methods, by putting humans at the center of systems design thinking, in effect, a second Copernican Revolution. It offers three ideas: (1) a two-dimensional HCAI framework, which shows how it is possible to have both high levels of human control AND high levels of automation, (2) a shift from emulating humans to empowering people with a plea to shift language, imagery, and metaphors away from portrayals of intelligent autonomous teammates towards descriptions of powerful tool-like appliances and tele-operated devices, and (3) a three-level governance structure that describes how software engineering teams can develop more reliable systems, how managers can emphasize a safety culture across an organization, and how industry-wide certification can promote trustworthy HCAI systems. These ideas will be challenged by some, refined by others, extended to accommodate new technologies, and validated with quantitative and qualitative research. They offer a reframe -- a chance to restart design discussions for products and services -- which could bring greater benefits to individuals, families, communities, businesses, and society.
Anthropomorphism Is Breaking Our Ability to Judge AI
Tech Policy Press fellow James Ball asks, how should we interact with a technology designed to ‘speak’ with us on what appear to be human terms?
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.
Disability-driven Development
Disability-driven Development is a practice that reimagines computing from a disabled perspective.
The Curb-Cut Effect and the Perils of Accessibility without Disability
Inclusive Design 24 #id24
say eugenics, say it again
Why AI is exposing design’s craft crisis
tech isn’t the future it’s just capitalism faster
The Dunning-Kruger effect in accessibility - Craig Abbott