Disability Model Analysis

Overview

Argue for how a given technology, including your own, meets or fails to meet positive disability principles, including non-ableist language, emphasizing agency and control, and avoiding disability dongles

ABET Requirement

This competency meets the ABET requirement that you demonstrate:

An ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors

Best Practices

You should be able to summarize and critique accessibility projects, including your own, on the following concerns:

  • Is it being used to give control and improve agency to the intended clients?
  • How might this project perpetuate harm against those with marginalized racial or disability identities?
  • Is it prioritizing the design’s impact on the client community over the intentions of the designer?
  • Is it engaging with all aspects of participants’ identities, rather than oversimplifying by erasing part of who they are?
  • Is it addressing the whole community (intersectionality, multiple disabled people, multiply disabled people)?
  • How might this project balance what you gain by learning from clients by giving knowledge, tools, or other results back to the client community?
  • Does this project honor and uplift existing client community knowledge and practices?

Best Practices

  • Use the Design Justice Principles
  • Consider intersecting identities
  • Center marginalized communities
  • Emphasize client agency and control
  • Avoid “disability dongles” (solutions for disabled people created without their input)
  • Use non-ableist language
  • Address potential harms proactively
  • Avoid ableist assumptions about what disabled people need or want or are capable of (for example, are both design tools, and their outputs accessible? does the project increase control and agency, or do things for disabled people?)
  • Disability leadership or input into the early stages of the work to avoid the disability dongle scenario s Look beyond overly simplistic models of disability to address the whole community (intersectionality, multiple disabled people, multiply disabled people)

Depneding on your project, any of the following may also be relevant:

Rubric for this Competency

Excellent
Uses two or more principals correctly (including defining them and correctly explaining why they apply) and addresses at least two of the three additional points in a nuanced way
Competent
Uses at least two principals correctly and addresses at least one additional point
Not Competent
Doesn't accurately connect the subject to disability-related concepts

Typical Handin for this Competency

  • Define and explain two disability justice principles. For each, explain how the subject fails or succeeds to meet that?
  • Address the three additional points
  • Analysis of potential harms and mitigation strategies
  • [TODO: make more concrete or delete] Evidence of engagement with clients' whole selves intersectionally

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