Blind technology? How easy it is to design out social exclusion.

Blind technology?
How easy it is to design out social exclusion.

Until quite recently, designers, developers and visionaries did not see and therefore did not consider the needs of people who were not as able-bodied as themselves. In the early 1990s, when platforms like the World Wide Web emerged their creators were by their own admission, creating content for like-minded and equally gifted members of the technological elite. When AOL and others expanded the internet to increase the number of people using the web, many early users behaved like hipsters, looking down on the less proficient and capable 'newcomers' with disdain.

In the 3 decades since then, societies have become much more equal. But to what extent? Has it been accepted that design and technology must first notice and really see the needs of a broad cross-section of society, including invisible groups - in order to meet them?

Unfortunately, exclusionary attitudes - including discrimination against people with disabilities, have persisted to this day as cultural baggage.

For most of the time, our societies have favoured healthy and able-bodied people, if only through tools and ways of building. Stairs and landings were common elements of traditional architecture. If someone was unable to move efficiently, it was always seen in terms of their individual problem, never as a faulty construction choice!

It was only in the 1970s that an epochal change began, on a scale of the Copernican Revolution, in the traditional view of disabled people as handicapped. This new view was first published in 1976 by the Union of People with Disabilities Against Segregation (UPIAS).

"From our point of view, it is society that handicaps the physically disabled. Disability is imposed on our millions, so that we are unnecessarily excluded and isolated from full participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society."

A few years later, this way of thinking was called the social model of disability by the well-known activist and sociologist Mike Olivier in his book, 'Social Work with Disabled People'.

"The social model of disability is a groundbreaking idea.
In its view, people are disabled by barriers
created by a society blind to them,
rather than by their physical disability."

The social model has significant implications for those of us who create products, including in the virtual world. Every design and technological decision, has a profound impact on users. These can be small things, like adding subtitles when displaying video content, or a text alternative for published images. Increasingly, these small decisions can be introduced by automated tools.

However, major decisions and choices cannot be checked by bots, for example: should a new social media app have subtitles for deaf/hard of hearing users? Should the developers of a gaming console require two hands to operate it? Or is one hand sufficient, or perhaps none is needed?

Both examples demonstrate the enormous responsibility of those working in the design, programming, product creation and space surrounding us. Perhaps the most important question is:

'How many people are excluded by our product or service?'

- Gareth Ford Williams, 2022

Let's look deep into history, where the roots of ableism lie...

Ableism is actually the flip side of many of the values that are important in our culture. We place great value on productivity and efficiency, and have based our entire business culture on them. We value independence and self-sufficiency, even though this is impossible to sustain throughout an individuals' life. And society shows its dark face to those who do not fit its standards.

Beginning with the Enlightenment, a pseudo-science developed to define what normality is. People were measured with callipers, scales and other measuring tools in order to find the proportions of the ideal human being. The term normal began to describe anything that was close to average in proportion and ability.

An example? The Museum of Health in Cleveland, Ohio, commissioned a statue of an ideal woman (nomen est omen) named Norma - whose proportions were determined by averaging the measurements of 15,000 young (ahem) women. No man ever exactly matched these ideal proportions.

Another study was conducted on 4,000 airmen at Wright Air Force Base, in whom 140 different dimensions were measured in order to find the ideal cockpit size. As in the case of Norma, only the most ideal ones fitted into these dimensions.

What was next? In the 1920s and 1930s, the cult of normality went hand in hand with nationalism and the search for genetic purity. Eugenics, as it was called, was the quest to improve future generations by eliminating undesirable traits. For people with disabilities or other deviations from the norm, this meant forced sterilisation or placement in an institution.

The glass eye of medicine; the medicalisation of disability.

In the wave of this pseudo-science, anything that in some way did not fit into this idealised norm was given the label of abnormal, deviant or deviant. Those who deviated far from the ideal were seen as suffering from various illnesses, disorders or defects. These were treated as afflictions that required medical intervention through medication, surgery or confinement in an institution.

Mike Olivier and his fellow disability activists already recognised the very language of medicine separated from the direct experience of disabled people. In his work, he referred to the medicalisation of disability, which reduced an entire way of life to the jargon of medical ailments. This was the basis of what Olivier called the individual model, today called the medical model.

Were people with disabilities seen in this model? No. It looked at disability solely as a medical condition to be treated with medication or treatments. The person was invisible. No long-term adaptation or help in life, let alone social inclusion and acceptance. In the medical model, everything is binary, according to the diagnosis made by the doctor.

As if visible poster children, and the charity model.

Mike Olivier fought against another worldview that persists to this day: the charity model, in which people with disabilities are portrayed as helpless and worthy of pity. This view has become particularly popular among corporate philanthropy targeting specific impairments, exemplified by Jerry Lewis's TV show 'TELETHON'.

What did it look like?

For 40 years, on Labour Day weekend in the US, the Muscular Dystrophy Association held a 24-hour fundraiser. This marathon (telethon, because the fundraising was conducted by telephone) was a sentimental, corny event, during which Jerry Lewis would catch the cameras shedding tears and holding pictures of the adorable disabled children known as Jerry's Kids.

At one point in the 1973 broadcast, Lewis explained his "mission" this way - 'God gaffs it up, we fix it.' Unbelievable?

Yet activists and members of the disabled community hated the show and its host. It spread and reinforced stereotypes of people with disabilities as helpless due to illness and never did anything to improve their mobility, independence or autonomy: accessible public transport, housing, employment opportunities and other civil rights that society should provide for all its citizens.

The medical blindness of design and technology.

The medical model has influenced design more than one might imagine. Most designers envision assistive technology as a form of medical equipment and therefore focus only on solving a medical problem. A typical hospital trolley or a walker for an elderly person in a care home are great examples of such soulless design.

Mainstream consumer products, on the other hand, are designed to have qualities that could be named after Marie Kondo, i.e. beautiful, joy-inducing and with a meaning that would say something about their owner.

Changing the perception of the invisible visible

Moving beyond the medical model in design, we are making the invisible visible. In prosthetics, for example, there has been a trend to move away from artificial likenesses that mimic natural limbs and instead design plastic ones printed on a 3-D printer. The aesthetics of these limbs are reminiscent of a cyborg or Transformer, making them very popular with children, for example. Those wearing them are seen as cool, instead of experiencing violence or pity because of their illness.

We are witnessing the transformation of the nose-poking elitism of the 1990s to the more equal worldview of the 2000s. We are more than witnesses: we are participants, co-creators and responsible for a generation. We can see that several of the issues raised by Mike Oliver have been resolved in some way, e.g. new assistive technologies have emerged.

Unfortunately, new forms of exclusion have also emerged. To read a magazine in the 1990s, a blind person had to wait until a Braille version appeared in the library, or ask a sighted friend or neighbour to read it aloud. Now we have the Internet and readers. They have brought accessibility of content and a certain autonomy to many people. However, still sighted web developers tend to neglect to make their sites compatible with assistive technologies.

As you can see, while some problems are solved, new ones arise. However, as awareness grows, we are getting closer to the tipping point when we will be quicker to solve problems than to create new ones.

Let us be vigilant. Let us watch closely.