#mistermiserybox

Nice choices

Assistive tech is a giant topic that we’re going to be exploring a lot more in the future. In general, the disability community is 100% for assistive tech, but there’s a lotof conversations in various communities about how certain technologies arefunctioning and interacting with ableist expectations. There’s way more goingon than I can do justice to here, and I need to do a lot more reading, but afew things worth thinking through (in no particular order):

Everyoneuses assistive tech. Stairs are an assistive technology for people who can’tsimply jump to the next story. Phones are assistive tech for people who can’ttalk loudly enough to be heard in another city. Coats are assistive tech forpeople whose skin isn’t thick enough to keep warm in the snow. Windows areassistive tech for people who can’t just see through walls. Glasses areassistive tech for people with less than 20/20 vision. Shoes are assistive tech, etc. etc. Theonly reason these things aren’t generally viewed as assistive technology isthat nearly everyone uses them instead of just a minority of disabled people,and they have thus become normalized.

There can be a big difference between technologies that you control outside your body, andtherapies that change the body itself. Your agency and your bodily autonomytend to be treated in different ways with assistive tech than with medicaltherapies.

Justlike any treatment, sometimes assistive tech aims to help you navigate theworld more easily, and sometimes it has more to do with making you “normal.”For example, I’ve seen discussions among people with mobility baseddisabilities about being pressured into technologies that help them walkupright, when wheeling is much more convenient and a better option for them.

Sometimes assistive tech can take away important parts of disabledidentities. For example many in the Deaf community advocate against cochlearimplants because they treat deafness as a problem to cure and cut people offfrom deaf culture, languages, and pride. In this way, assistive tech can beused as a form of “eugenics” to erase disability from our society. This hitscloser to home when we start to think about the relationship between cochlearimplants and “anti-stuttering” devices like speech easy. In this regard, why we are using assistive tech is acrucial question and one that can help navigate tricky terrain.   

Ableiststructures are always an issue, whatever techniques you use to navigate them. Sometimesassistive tech wouldn’t be needed at all if the world were just designed moreinclusively. There is a growing, and related, literature on “universal design” that discusses making social structures inherently accessible to everyone.

Manydisabled people consider their assistive technology a part of themselves andtheir bodies. It is usually extremely personal. People who use wheelchairssometimes compare strangers pushing their chair to picking them up and carryingthem—ie. not okay.

Denyingsomeone assistive technology is always a form of ableism and discrimination.

So with all thatsaid: go for it. If these apps are helpful for you when you teach then keep onusing them (not least because this is your job, and we all know how ableistemployment situations can be). You’re probably in a great position to thinkthrough how this tech is interacting with your own views on your voice andstuttering pride, and we’d love to hear some of the conclusions you come to.

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We live in a messed up, ableist world that treats...

Wouldn’t you agree that consenting to some speech therapy and having pride in ones stutter need not be mutually exclusive?