Living Disability Theory: Reflections on Access, Research, and Design

Research on access technologies (AT) tends to focus on a small number of diagnoses/impairments, primarily blindness, Deafness, mobility, and cognitive impairments. For example, when searching the ASSETS proceedings, of approximately 1500 papers 42% use the word “blind”; 40% use the word “cognitive”; 27% use the word “motor;” 14% used the word “Deaf”. Finally , only 10% of papers in the ASSETS proceedings use the words “chronic OR illness OR invisible.” Yet, disabled experiences rarely fall into these discrete categories, and thus complex disability is a primary subject of disability studies [30]. Critical race and disability studies ask us to burst contemporary vacuums and understand these injustices alongside western eugenic and capitalist histories. These have scientized and legalized the incarceration, sterilization, and murder of minoritized people including those who are Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), women, and particularly those living where these identities intersect with disability [17, 19, 20, 21, 32, 33, 57, 65, 68, 76, 77, 82]. As such, critical disability studies [48] has learned from feminism [26, 27, 39, 84], queer [39, 47, 64, 65], critical race theory [20, 63], and the disability justice movement [14, 17, 25], to destabilize ongoing obsessions with clear, static, decontextualized conceptions of disability.

As a central example, consider the experiences of people with chronic illness, such as those which are invisible and may co-occur alongside other invisible or visible impairments. It is undeniable that illness may come with egregious symptoms warranting medical care. However, other negative impacts exist from: conflicting information online [46] and prejudice like sexism and racism that lead to medical authorities disbelieving and abusing feminized and racialized “patients” [19, 53]. Writer Suzannah Weiss materialized associated consequences with a viral Twitter thread when she asked people with chronic illness how many doctors it took to get a diagnosis; it took her 17 [83]. As part of this expansion and resistance, scholars of complex disability and intersecting identity facets assert their lived experiences to imagine more open and flexible worlds. For example, queer, feminist disability studies scholar Alison Kafer has gained wide recognition for popularizing the term “crip time” to honor bodies that move at unpredictable speeds [39]. She contrasts this with assumptions that tasks can be completed in predetermined intervals. Similarly, disability Studies scholars Ruth Pinder [54] and Susan Wendell [84] have written their lived experiences with chronic illness and intermittent healing to demonstrate the fallacy of being either “sick” or “fit” [54]. They show how they can at once hold multiple, inseparable identities. This perspective conflicts with many workplace and government service eligibility requirements that diagnoses be clear-cut. We brought this attention to our histories, complexities, and fluidities in our self-study.

Disability theory has gained recognition in accessibility research. This was particularly notable when disabled disability studies scholar and anthropologist Karen Nakamura [50] gave the ASSETS 2019 keynote. To summarize the field's uptake of disability theory, we overview: (1) in-depth engagements with disabled people toward generative design thinking and (2) disability studies-informed theoretical contributions to accessibility research.

First, a body of work has examined the current practices of particular groups of disabled people, often scoped by impairment labels and culture [28]. This offers new ways of thinking about design and development from disabled perspectives [5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 16, 23, 34, 35, 36, 38, 41, 44, 55, 58, 59, 60, 74, 75, 79, 80]. While not exhaustive, and often not claiming to be doing disability theory, these examples embody one of disability studies’ important tenets: rooting research in the lived experiences of disabled people. For example, from studying an online community of blind parents to learn their co-reading practices with sighted children, Storer et al. [75] proposed that many technologies from smart speakers to audio and enhanced print books may uniquely benefit from the experimental but long-refined reading practices of blind and sighted co-readers. Storer et al. positions blind readers as experts whose insights may benefit mainstream technology design, rather than just a group underserved by book production. Similarly, in an echo of disability studies scholar Irving Zola's work [89], Lazar et al. synthesized a critical lens on dementia care and associated design through their ethnography of an assisted living home [41]. They push back on notions of “successful living” and forms of research participation which emphasize completing particular tasks or achieving design goals, and instead take note of all bodily rhythms and behaviors as forms of engagement and communication. This growing literature is an exciting indication that more accessibility researchers consider disabled people as experts in reimagining designs, and moving beyond expectations laden by narrow norms.

The second body of literature concerns disability studies-informed theoretical developments in accessibility and greater HCI research [8, 22, 25, 87]. For brevity and relevance purposes, we focus on the intersection that particularly informs our work—the connection between visibility, disability, and technology. Disability expressions are often negotiated differently depending on factors such as symptoms, perceived risk in disclosing, and what we need from our environments. One consequence of this is that much AT marks people as disabled based on stereotypes [55]. People often use or abandon AT as visible markers of disability while negotiating their self-presentation. For example, since many people are disbelieved when they share symptoms, assistive devices like wheelchairs are sometimes welcome because they legitimize “disabled” behavior. Similarly, stereotyped markers of disability status, such as the symbol denoting accessible parking spaces and restrooms, can help code surveillance technology use as acceptable when accommodating disabled people [22, 55].

While AT use can be beneficial, it can also do harm. Disabled people are regularly and inaccurately coded as unpresentable, and asked personal questions about their impairments [63], making being invisible enviable. For example, to avoid discrimination, some people keep disability hidden by preferring to use mainstream technologies customized to their needs. They may also use technology to access safe spaces which decenter normed expectations [22, 60]. Finally, some of the worst treatment of disabled people happens when someone appears nondisabled and becomes visibly disabled as they don AT. Examples include acquiring a stored wheelchair after disembarking a vehicle walking [22, 63], or in the reverse case, when a white-cane user is shamed when “caught” using a smartphone because its use is presumed to require vision [71]. Such moments, when practices do not meet expectations, can be missed by research that examines disability as a singular impairment. This growing body of literature, which we expand, demonstrates the importance of the contextualized and embodied lived experiences of disabled people, particularly in moments and places when they violate standardized conceptions of disability.

This research took place in four stages: (1) informal investigation, (2) reflexive planning, (3) formal data collection, and (4) inductive synthesis. In late 2018, Hofmann and Mankoff began an informal investigation into the role of disability theory in their own research. This was sparked by their lived experiences, which did not fit either the individual or social models of disability. This informal investigation took a number of forms (e.g., seminar discussions, false starts of new research, and countless derailed advising meetings) and included expanding the conversation to others. Specifically, Bennett and Kasnitz were recruited to this work as, respectively, an accessibility expert with a focus on disability studies, and an elder of the field of disability studies and anthropology and long-time collaborator in the effort to bring a disability studies perspective to accessibility research.

Ultimately, not finding traditional HCI methods adequate, we chose the critical inquiry method of duoethnography [51]. Through ongoing dialogue, we reconstructed our understandings of disability, academia, and technology by sharing and reflecting on our disparate experiences and by embracing the recognized methods of autoethnography or duoethnography—the elevation and formalization of ethnography that centers the ethnographer's life as subject (auto) or two ethnographers’ as paired mutual subjects (duo).

We co-developed a semi-structured interview, conducted between authors: Hofmann to Bennett and Mankoff; Mankoff to Kasnitz and Hofmann; and Bennett to Hofmann. We recorded our initial interviews and automatically transcribed them for further review. Following these interviews, authors wrote narrative reflections on the discussed topics and events. Each narrative sparked new memories and reflections which were discussed and documented in regular meetings.

As the meeting records, interview transcripts, and personal narratives collected, we began to analyze our experiences and inductively developed a set of themes. During this synthesis stage, additional memories arose and were added to the narrative set. This process was repeated until we reached saturation with respect to jointly developed themes. The themes centered on disability and our own experiences with and theorizations of, technology and accessibility research, guided by our in-depth engagements with critical disability studies.

We precede our findings with brief vignettes about our symptoms and social impacts to contextualize the sections that follow. These biographical moments and subsequent narratives include mentions of self-harm, and abuse by the medical industrial complex; we encourage readers to proceed with care.

Hofmann, The Fainting Goat: I am a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who jokingly identifies as a “fainting goat” because of my unexplained, undocumented , syncope (i.e., fainting) disorder. At 13 years old, I began to faint sometimes randomly and sometimes from audible and olfactory triggers. I adopted the term “fainting goat” after my pediatrician showed me YouTube videos of a particular breed of narcoleptic goats. In addition to the syncope, I have a history of migraines, anxiety, and PTSD which impact my cognition. In 2019, my symptoms worsened into prolonged fatigue, reduced mobility and balance, and acute tremors. Despite seeing medical experts across the United States, I still have no diagnosis or official documentation of my disability.

Kasnitz, Grounding Disability Studies: I am the anthropologist in the group. I am a senior organizer, mentor, and advocate for interdisciplinary disability studies and a founder and current Executive Director of the 40 year old Society for Disability Studies. My familial idiopathic generalized torsion dystonia (which looks like Cerebral Palsy) now affects all my voluntary movement and speech but did not appear until I was 9 and is still changing. I have negotiated a curvaceous path through paternalism and proffered brain surgery, contract labor and academic exclusion, to be a feisty 70 year old who speaks my mind, albeit through a human “revoicer.” I am still waiting for the right typing hardware/software solution to get ideas from my brain to others. Mankoff and I seem to meet to discuss disability and technology at least once a decade.

Mankoff, Illness vs Disability: I first claimed my disability identity as a graduate student dealing with a multi-year chronic condition in 1996. I am now a full professor at the University of Washington, having changed institutions three times since my graduate student days, and acquired a second major chronic illness in 2006. While I am open about my diagnosis and journey [24, 61, 72], my reasons for claiming the disability identity have been driven not by my personal experience of illness, but rather by barriers in access. Illness alone represents an ongoing negotiation with self and physicians, a journey to both acceptance and healing. A disability identity, on the other hand, represents a reason to claim the right of access, a reaction to moments such as not being able to open a door with a broken switch or not being permitted to attend a program committee meeting virtually.

Bennett, Contrasting Conditions: I am an accessibility researcher at Apple Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University. A blindness diagnosis at birth was acquired quickly, but my journey has been characterized by difficult decisions, abuse and judgment over the decades. In my first two years, my parents often faced inaccurate speculations by doctors of my capabilities and they advocated extensively for my right to an education. I had some usable vision until age 16 and I regularly visited specialists who implored acceptance of invasive medical interventions to preserve my remaining vision which I now characterize as abusive. I chose to forgo additional treatments at 13, as I believed I would become totally blind no matter what. Based on narratives I have read by people with similar vision impairments undergoing a similar trajectory of vision loss, I have since discovered my decision was educated and informed despite medical professionals’ dismissing me as irresponsible. Even still, being steeped in worldviews that total blindness is a universally negative experience meant I never talked about my transition to total blindness and accompanying negative mental health symptoms including prolonged depression, harmful ideation, and intense anxiety. The contrast between my blindness and mental health have been particularly stark since my transition into an academic setting, where I have obtained extensive training in nonvisual work and daily task completion, as well as transitioned from being blind but not disabled to proudly disabled, a change I credit my disabled friends for cultivating. Depression and anxiety remain intermittently acute, undiagnosed and poorly treated.

Ableism, defined by attorney and activist Talila Lewis, is “a system that places value on people's bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, colonialism and capitalism” [42]. Ableism can be internalized, overt, or implicit. Our reflections illustrate how ableism infiltrates our perceptions of ourselves as disabled people, the research we choose to do, and our daily experiences. Revising our own ableism has required us to be vulnerable and pay ongoing attention to our complicity in its perpetuation.

Often when creating AT, we assume a disabled user in an abstract standard disabled mold who can be accommodated to fit into a nondisabled world. The reality of a standard disabled experience, or a standard nondisabled experience, rarely plays out in practice.

4.2.1 Managing Visibility. Many accessibility researchers are familiar with the term invisible disability to describe the wide range of impairments that are structurally suppressed or not obviously expressed externally. What is less discussed is how living on a spectrum from total invisibility (i.e.passing) to overt exposure affects how disabled people find their way to a disabled identity and the technologies designed to support them.

When Hofmann declares her disability to justify what she needs, she is often denied since her disability is usually invisible. For example, the lack of a formal diagnosis led her to be discriminated against when requesting rightful accommodations. As a result, she often goes outside the systems designed to support disabled people to get what she needs. For example, “as an undergraduate, my university would not accept my doctor's loose diagnosis of ‘Orthostatic Syncope Disorder’ (i.e. fainting while standing disorder) as a reason to provide an accessible (air-conditioned) dorm room, even though heat significantly increases the frequency of my syncope episodes. Dorms were primarily assigned by major and Computer Science majors lived in the older Natural Sciences dorm. Computer Engineering students, alternatively, lived in the brand new and accessible Engineering Dorms. Without proof of sufficient need, I went outside the resources set for disabled students, and changed my major, temporarily, to access the accessible living space.” Despite fought-after and clear requirements that universities offer accessible housing as a reasonable accommodation, the invisibility or imperceptibility of Hofmann's disability provoked institutional ableism and forced her to solve access barriers for herself.

Figure 1. Picture of Mankoff's Daughter's Custom Cane. Mankoff's Daughters Cane, which reaches chest height, is propped against a neutral-colored wall. The staff-shaped cane gradually increases in thickness from bottom to top. It is adorned with a spiral cut into the cane's length, increasing in width as the cane thickens. From bottom to top, color transitions from a yellow pine to a deep, slightly green blue, and finally to a deep, slightly blue, green. The cane is engraved with the words ‘the caged bird sings of freedom’.

As researchers have noted [22], people with invisible disability and chronic illness may aim to prevent such discrimination by using assistive technologies. But as Mankoff transitioned to not only negotiating her own disability but also to beginning this journey supporting her daughter, taking up assistive technologies became about more than legitimizing asks for help [9, 56]. “I've worked hard to instill a disability-positive identity in my daughter. I got her a custom-made, beautiful, engraved cane in her favorite colors (Figure 1), which has garnered many enthusiastic questions about whether we made it and lots of praise. This cane is a success in my eyes: rather than people looking away/ignoring/ being afraid to say anything, they engage with her.” Canes present an opportunity to make the invisible visible for many with chronic illness, an opportunity to declare, to accept, and to support rather than to fix [56].

Like Mankoff's daughter, Hofmann has begun to make her disability visible by using a mobility-cane. Sometimes the cane is necessary to help her balance or to be turned into a one-legged stool, but often it is a tool to tell others when she is fatigued and needs to walk slowly or rest. But making her disability visible can sometimes create new barriers. For example, many public busses lower a ramp for people who the driver thinks cannot manage a step. Often, the bus emits a loud high-pitched alert sound. This can make Hofmann faint, so “when I approach the bus I have to do this awkward dance of hiding my cane from the approaching bus driver who may kindly assume I can't take the step, but also clearly reveal it to other passengers who may need to give me an accessible seat.” In these moments, Hofmann must make her disability both visible and invisible, perceived and ignored.

When a disability is not invisible or hideable, it complicates disabled peoples’ power to negotiate how others accommodate them. For example, Bennett's status as a blind accessibility researcher cannot be overlooked, sometimes to her detriment: “I avoid demos and posters at many conferences as I'm often drawn in, whether I'm interested or not, to exhibits that people think may interest me because they are ATs for blind people. Sometimes, I'm asked to share my opinion only to be told that I'm wrong or that I used the demo incorrectly. I know folks are well-intentioned; I understand how rare it is to happen upon someone, outside user studies, whom our technology is meant to benefit. But I don't wish to be a spectacle, and so I avoid these events, often costing myself opportunities to see interesting research.” Kasnitz offers another example, “because my impairments are visible, I constantly dodge proffered but unneeded accommodations and may never get a chance to ask for what I do need/ want from people who feel rebuffed. A waitress will bring me a paper cup of water that I can neither move nor pick up without crushing. She says, ‘now you don't need to worry about breaking a glass.’ I say ‘Thank You’ as I crush the cup with gusto. When offered a half a cup of coffee at a time to avoid spillage, I say ‘thanks, make that the top half.’ I can drink the top half without picking it up.” Because their impairments are not invisible, Kasnitz and Bennett may instead variously perform disability to get what they need or segregate themselves from environments where the perception of that disability is a hindrance.

Figure 2. Side by side pictures of Hofmann's Husband Making a cane next to Hofmann Posing with her cane in a wedding dress. In a workshop, Hofmann's husband wears safety goggles and a red bandana across his face at which blows sawdust. He lathes the cane by pushing a chisel up against a spinning block of wood with a clear, red, resin cylinder at its center. The resin looks like a giant jolly-rancher candy about the size of a 12 oz Starbucks cup (which was used to mold it). Hofmann poses on a rooftop balcony overlooking the Hudson river and the New York City Manhattan skyline centered on the one world trade center. She wears a white wedding dress and leans on the finished custom cane made by her husband, which is positioned proudly and purposefully to appear prominently in the image.

Interdependence [8, 49, 85] embeds access work in a larger context of relationships, disability identity expression, and shared creation and conceptualizing of disability. A significant, but relatively unexplored, piece of this is the ways in which disabled people and their allies and close companions relate to each other.

As other research in HCI has pointed out regarding the field's racism [52], injustice does not merely happen through discrete overt acts. Rather it is threaded through what we do, including our research, even when well-intended. Disabled people are not exempt from being ableist; we commit injustices to other disabled and marginalized people—even ourselves. We all identify moments when we had to rewrite our ableist assumptions and actions. Bennett did not transfer her experiences being patronized until Hofmann reminded her that she had a lot of experience detecting and responding to syncope triggers. Mankoff reexamined her ideas about disability when she was coded that way, and frequently confronts and learns from moments when she forgets, or fails, to accommodate needs of her disabled students and colleagues. Bennett's proud claim of disability identity and her ability to be out even in professional environments helped Hofmann expand what life experiences she understood as disabling. Kasnitz has had to learn to not feel put out when asked to give ASL interpreters screen real estate and to respond to the needs of sighted students who struggle to process visual text. We argue that naming ableism is necessary for its revision. Accepting this enables learning and growth to move past debating whether discrete acts are ableist, to revising them.

This action takes many forms: advocating for equitable treatment and access of our disabled colleagues, seeking-out and elevating the perspectives of disabled people in academic spaces (e.g., Deaf and disability studies scholars [13]), and redesigning systems and technology to address ableism instead of impairment. One way to approach this is to take a disability studies perspective, which centers the point of view of the disabled person. This gives a voice to disabled people and will require giving them power as well. Practicing disability studies can amplify questions about control, agency, and responsibility in research and technology design. It can mean designing technology that requests that others change to accommodate disabled people rather than requiring disabled people act more “normal.” Researchers of social accessibility already recognize AT does not operate in a vacuum; bystanders notice and code people, often based on harmful and inaccurate stereotypes [55, 70]. With disability studies, we may expand the territory of accessibility research by identifying that our work must support disabled people's need to both co-exist with an ableist society (to fit in or be socially acceptable) and to wholly reject that ableism (to demand a new society).

As we have argued, disability identities are multidimensional and complex. By designing AT one impairment at a time, we may make the problems we need to solve more tractable, but inflexibility may create new ones in the process. AT will be more robust and useful if it can operate in contexts where disabled people are not always recognized as disabled, may have more than one functional impairment, and/or where more than one disabled person exists. Consider Hofmann and Bennett's example of an accessible ramp on buses. While ramps and cautioning passersby when they are in motion meet a critical need to make public transit accessible to many, they create barriers for Hofmann who, sometimes, cannot take steps, but also cannot access the bus when there is a blaring alarm. What is seen as a universal solution to making public transit accessible, in our case, at once repaired and created inaccessibility.

Further, consider how segregating assistive technologies by diagnostic categories reinforces social structures that disenfranchise people whose impairments are multiple, undocumented, or otherwise do not fit into these categories. For example, by expecting a particular type of diagnosis, universities can exclude Hofmann from air-conditioned housing and force her to address her access needs through loop-holes. This example also illustrates how decisions of what/who counts as disability/disabled are spaces where oversimplification and bias occur. Hofmann's story shows how structural and individual bias can lead to disbelief and denial of a person's disability experience. The definition of “what counts” is a concern for accessibility researchers as well, and is visible in reviews that question whether something “is an ASSETS paper” as well as the choices we make as a community about what to work on.

There are transformative moments in interactions among disabled people when they realize the diversity, and sometimes conflict, of their collective experiences. Indeed, such moments scaffold disability justice recommendations to hold regular access check-ins and negotiations at events [37, 53]. Supportive communication and compromise may convert conflicts to moments for awareness, growth, and creativity across varied disability experiences. However recasting conflict as opportunity cannot ignore equity. This necessitates positioning power analysis as a process through which to decide how resources are distributed in times of conflict. Recall Bennett's choice to forego autonomous navigation when boarding buses with Hofmann to reduce the chance the driver will lower the ramp and thus activate an alarm. As technologists and researchers, we must be aware of our own power and how it affects and defines these conflicts. It may not be possible to create technology that is universally accessible, but we can consider how our technology enables conflict resolution in-situ. Consider whether a design is flexible and provides resources to disabled people to modify it to meet their needs. Recognizing the inevitability of conflict does not justify inaction; it creates opportunity for innovation.

Across our stories is the theme of connection. A connection with Kasnitz gave Mankoff the tools to accept and identify as disabled which she passed on to her daughter and Hofmann. Hofmann and Bennett's interdependence laid the groundwork for disability identity development. Hofmann and Mankoff's connections-through-designing custom canes with their loved ones demonstrate how technology can be a site for cultivating disability positive relationships and transforming technologies from shameful tools into embellishments of pride [56]. These stories not only relayed connections important to us, their retelling also strengthened the connections we have with each other and our disability identities. As such, we recommend storytelling as a critical method of inquiry in accessibility research, as others have [10, 52]. Often, methods for studying disabled people and technology isolate a particular context (e.g., a use case of a new technology, identification of specific access barriers). These specific contexts enable design refinements necessary for accessible design responsive to individual, unique needs. However, these methods often foreclose opportunities to understand how individuals connect. Such interactions, which may come out in storytelling, may represent moments of negotiating conflicts and personal growth generative for both AT design and for reworking ableism related to the way we approach the connections made toward advancing accessibility research.

When we examine disability beyond categories of impairments, it forces us to investigate different ways of engaging with disabled people. One highly effective method is to engage with activist/ culturally disabled communities led by and in the service of disabled people which often bring together people with a diversity of experiences [4, 18]. For example, Bennett recruits from and frequents cross-disability spaces which center those who are also queer, transgender, and/or BIPOC. However, the gift of diverse participation takes rapport. Access to these spaces requires prior engagement through event attendance, donations of time and resources, and authentic friendships. This engagement must be in the service of these communities, and not exclusively study recruitment. Indeed, as Bennett avoids people who pull her in for feedback she has not consented to provide, requests made in spaces which decenter predominant perspectives (academic, white, nondisabled, masculine) must be preceded with much listening and learning. A productive first step can consist of not excluding participants based on having multiple impairments, and thoroughly inquiring self-reports of demographics as others have recommended [66, 67]. As we believe our narratives as women with multiple disabilities have begun to demonstrate, disabled participants/ collaborators who live at the intersections of oppressions—both by having multiple impairments and multiple marginalized identities—may help us anticipate complexity and conflict and design for its negotiation [57, 67].

Often, accessibility research concerning relationships among disabled and nondisabled people aims to minimize or eliminate caregiving altogether. While caregiving remains an under-compensated, exploited labor plagued by ample injustices including racism, sexism, and xenophobia [53], a narrow focus by accessibility research to decrease its necessity frames disability as a burden on a relationship and negates a long tradition of research and policy development about self-directed formal and informal personal assistance services [29]. Our narratives demonstrate that relationships for both the disabled and nondisabled people involved can be powerful and positive [8, 11, 53]. When designing technologies that are situated in these caregiver relationships, a disability studies perspective can help us to ask questions about the value of particular care activities. Of course, human help, often skilled, is essential for some disabled people, and technology may play a role in easing taxing aspects of this labor. But certain activities, like those which help to cultivate pride in formal and informal caregivers and personal assistance could also be amplified with accessibility research. For example, both Hofmann's husband and Mankoff found joy and pride in the work of making and selecting a cane for disabled people they love. In this case, making as empowerment research is lost on Hofmann who does not need to be empowered to make; she does so regularly as part of her career. But making became an essential method for her husband to develop and demonstrate his ally identity. Widening accessibility research to espouse disability positivity more generally and strengthen allyship, as our stories show, will ultimately support the field's mission to increase access.

Finally, we recommend that accessibility researchers strengthen alliances with disability studies scholars. Whereas we have seen an uptick in the ways disability studies is recognized as a crucial lens for technology design [50], we push further toward meaningful and ongoing reciprocal relationships. Recall Kasnitz's concern that she and other disability studies scholars fear they know too little to reach out to accessibility researchers. Yet, among other things, we can learn from their long history of anticipating access needs and working out conflicts publicly and in-the-moment. As such, we conclude our discussion with recommendations based on reflections on Bennett becoming an unofficial disability studies scholar.

Departments should allow, encourage, and even expect new accessibility researchers to take disability studies coursework. Including disability studies in in-department curricula is an essential first step. Committing to the study through dedicated coursework often gives students much deeper dives into disability studies without the pressure to immediately connect their learning to solving design problems, as Mankoff et al. [45] recommended. Where graduate courses do not exist, Bennett has organized independent studies with disability studies faculty. Whether or not dedicated disability studies programs exist, disability studies learners will find relevant courses in many departments like English, American studies, anthropology, gender and ethnic studies, many taught online, or with self-study syllabi (e.g., Black Disabled Women [81]), and many useful resources by following relevant collectives on social media such as the Teaching and Learning Critical Disability Studies group on Facebook [3], and by joining the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) [68]. Though coursework can offer dedicated instruction, ongoing attention to burgeoning interests in disability studies will cultivate stronger relationships with the field. Finally, SDS hosts conferences with fees lower than ACM events and which support alternative and accessible forms of participation. SDS conferences offer multiple submission types, most of which promote discussion and are peer-reviewed as abstracts for future full papers.

At a structural level, in addition to requiring conference publications for tenure cases, we argue for the relevance of disability studies work to a professional portfolio. If your institution enjoys more resources than many humanities departments , recruit disability studies-oriented speakers and extend attendance invitations to disability studies-focused scholars and their communities. Similarly, ASSETS and other conferences featuring accessibility research might co-organize sponsored workshops and other forms of participation that explicitly draw together disability studies scholars and accessibility researchers like recent efforts by organizations including ASSETS [2] the AI Now Institute, Microsoft Research [86], and IBM [1]. We note that infusing workshops into our programming is not new; rather, we recognize these organizations as examples for their efforts to invite disability studies scholars and people with disability, and to offset costs to allow for attendance by people whose affiliations cannot sponsor them. We believe that citing disability studies research in our papers is an important but only a beginning step toward future, stronger alliances among our communities. Though the specificity of these recommendations may change, we argue that the types of involvement they symbolize may lead toward shared language and mutually-beneficial relationships among accessibility and disability scholars that could ripple into entrepreneurial and policy worlds.