SU Disability Abstracts: Technology and Disability

Disability is a long-standing area of digital inclusion finally emerging out of the shadows. In this article, we argue that a critical understanding of digital media from the perspectives of disability and intersectionality will offer generative insights for framing the terms and agenda of digital inclusion in the next decade. With a focus on the area of automated decision-making (ADM) in social and welfare services, we reflect upon the controversial 2015–2020 Australian government programme widely known as ‘Robodebt’ that recovers putative debts from support recipients – and we discuss implications for Indigenous Australians with disabilities in particular. We contrast the ‘Robodebt’ programme with explicit digital inclusion policy on disability in Australia, noting that such digital inclusion policy does not specifically acknowledge yet alone address ADM or other aspects of automation. Here, there is a major opportunity for overdue acknowledgement of disability and intersectionality to spur and shape an affirmative and just agenda on people with disabilities’ digital inclusion, ADM and other associated areas of automated technologies.

Conclusion: The study shows that although young persons are perceived as digitally native, they experienced challenges using ICT to engage with health- and social services. The poor fit of ICT combined with navigation- and accessibility issues, hinder engagement. However, ICT inhabit a potential to increase engagement, especially communication.

In the spring of 2020 many companies sent their employees home to work remotely in an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19. Without forethought or planning, an entire workforce was mobilized using digital assistive technologies to support remote working. Prior to this, these same companies had often claimed an “undue hardship” when asked to make these same accommodations for people with disabilities. Over a year later and much has been learned about the use of digital assistive technology to support remote workers. More importantly, for the first time, people with disabilities can come to the same table in their search for employment. Therefore, the focus of this report is a scoping review undertaken to answer the question: How does digital adaptive technology address barriers to labor market participation for people with disabilities?

Results showed that the students were active Internet users and were confident about online safety but parents were concerned about the risks associated with Internet use. Following taking part in a peer education project that focussed on Internet safety and specifically about risks of online radicalisation and extremism, the students understood possible links between grooming and online radicalisation and their teachers increased their understanding of the importance of digital engagement for their students.

Many people with intellectual disability experience digital inequality due to a lack of Internet access; this is known as the digital divide. Digital inequality is also apparent when people with intellectual disability have Internet access, but only use it for a small number of applications (e.g., watching videos and playing games). Recently, it has been suggested that digital inequality also occurs in situations where some Internet users are less likely than others to translate their online activities to offline resources, including educational outcomes and social capital. The extent to which people with intellectual disability are translating their online activities to offline resources has not been examined. We conducted a systematic and critical review using PRISMA guidelines. The search strategy terms “intellectual disability” and “Internet use” were used to search the databases: Scopus; Wiley Online Library; Psychiatry Online; Web of Science; CINAHL; and PubMed. Twenty-four studies were found, which described 53 types of Internet use, 48 risks of Internet use, and 28 benefits of Internet use. The data were identified thematically and categorized to facilitate comparisons. The most frequently reported types of Internet use were in the category of social media/social networking (23%), the most common Internet risks were in the category of emotional distress (24%), and the most often reported benefits were in the category of friendships and social connection (33%). The findings indicate that the benefits of Internet use for people with intellectual disability have received much less attention than the risks.

Content creators are instructed to write textual descriptions of visual content to make it accessible; yet existing guidelines lack specifics on how to write about people’s appearance, particularly while remaining mindful of consequences of (mis)representation. In this paper, we report on interviews with screen reader users who were also Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Non-binary, and/or Transgender on their current image description practices and preferences, and experiences negotiating theirs and others’ appearances non-visually. We discuss these perspectives, and the ethics of humans and AI describing appearance characteristics that may convey the race, gender, and disabilities of those photographed. In turn, we share considerations for more carefully describing appearance, and contexts in which such information is perceived salient. Finally, we offer tensions and questions for accessibility research to equitably consider politics and ecosystems in which technologies will embed, such as potential risks of human and AI biases amplifying through image descriptions.

There is an open call for technology to be more playful [5, 79] and for tech design to be more inclusive of people with disabilities [80]. In the era of COVID19, it is often unsafe for the public in general and people with disabilities, in particular, to engage in inperson design exercises using traditional methods. This presents a missed opportunity as these populations are already sharing playful content rich with tacit design knowledge that can be used to inspire the design of playful everyday technology. We present our process of scraping play potentials [4] from TikTok from content creators with disabilities to generate design concepts that may inspire future technology design. We share 7 emerging themes from the scraped  There is an open call for technology to be more playful [5, 79] and for tech design to be more inclusive of people with disabilities [80]. In the era of COVID19, it is often unsafe for the public in general and people with disabilities, in particular, to engage in inperson design exercises using traditional methods. This presents a missed opportunity as these populations are already sharing playful content rich with tacit design knowledge that can be used to inspire the design of playful everyday technology. We present our process of scraping play potentials [4] from TikTok from content creators with disabilities to generate design concepts that may inspire future technology design. We share 7 emerging themes from the scraped

This research explores published articles, websites, and incorporates the writer’s observations on how Assistive Technology (AT) has revolutionized what disabled artists can do better today. It provides resources and examples of integrating AT in art. Advances in AT and changes in  federal laws have propelled disability in the arts.

We invited accessibility researchers, industry practitioners, and end-users with disabilities to come together at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work conference (CSCW 2019) to discuss challenges and solutions for improving social media accessibility. Over the course of a day that included two panels and breakout sessions, the workshop attendees outlined four critical future research directions to progress on the path to accessible social media: tooling to support disabled people authoring content, developing more accessible formats/tools for new forms of interaction (e.g, Augmented and Mixed Reality), using communities to distribute accessibility labor, and ensuring machine learning systems are built on representative datasets for disability use-cases.

Increasingly, access to technology is a necessity if one is to participate fully in all life domains. Technology is critical to enable people with and without disabilities to live autonomous, self-determined lives. This article provides a synthesis of recent information concerning technology that might promote the autonomy of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, focusing on technology emerging from the field of applied cognitive technologies. To explore these issues, we provided a synthesis of the major theoretical perspectives pertaining to autonomy and self-determination, emphasizing the notion of autonomy-as-volition, and selected exemplary research findings that illustrate how technology can promote autonomy. There is clear evidence that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities can be supported to be more autonomous across multiple domains using applied cognitive technologies. In today’s ever increasingly technical world, access to usable technology is not simply a convenience, it is a necessity. If people with IDD are to be supported to live, learn, work, and play in their communities, they need to have access to cognitively accessible technology.

Rapid adoption rates of smart speakers and home automation and control devices, and predicted strong future growth requires ongoing research to understand and anticipate the needs of consumers with disabilities. This paper uses quantitative and qualitative survey research data to develop “personas” for consumers with one of six disability types – limited dexterity, limited mobility, low vision, blindness, hard of hearing, and deafness. Personas are research-based fictional characters developed to represent different user types that might use a service, device or other product in a certain way. They help designers and engineers understand user needs, experiences, behaviors and goals in a more personal way than lists of features and needs. The quantitative data show moderate rates of adoption of smart speakers (38%-54%) by all six disability types except deaf respondents (who have low rates of adoption), and substantially lower rates of adoption for smart-home devices (outlets, light switches, thermostats, etc.). Qualitative data reveal primarily five dimensions of feelings or impressions by owners of smart speakers and smart-home devices: fondness/enjoyment, inspiration/wonder, utility/convenience, usability/accessibility, and safety/security. From these data and our analysis one persona is summarized for each of the six disability types.