Complaint as a Tool of Design: What is Really Happening in Accessibility Lawsuits
August 26, 2021
—Bess Williamson
When writers ask whether lawsuits represent “profiteering” or “justice,” they leave out several possible alternatives.
Category: Disability Studies
In National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Familiar Messages about Design as a lever for Disability Rights
October 19, 2018
By Bess Williamson
A quick dissection juxtaposing two images of disability in American workforce promotion, focusing on the history and visual design of two advertisements
October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month – but what about “women’s work” and the labor of care?
October 1, 2018
—Christina Crosby
The intersection of disability and work is complex, as the work of care necessary to prepare a disabled person to go out into the world is done behind closed doors, often by workers whose labor is often undocumented, unseen, and undervalued.
Available, Accessible, Usable
March 28, 2017
—Elizabeth Ellcessor
Creating accessible spaces, technologies, and content often entails augmenting, altering, or otherwise working around the assumption that all users will have a “normal” able body.
More Than a Symbolic Change: iOS 10 and the Accessible Icon Emoji
September 7, 2016
—Elizabeth Ellcessor
The revised accessibility symbol emoji introduced in iOS 10 is not the familiar static wheelchair symbol. Its inclusion demonstrates how art and activism can influence culture, industries, and policies with major implications for access and participation in broader society.
What Makes a Story
February 2, 2016
The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read by Michael Bérubé is out today! This excerpt appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education…. READ MORE
Michael Bérubé on Humans, Superheroes, Mutants, and People with Disabilities at TEDxPSU
October 27, 2015
Click here for more from TEDxPSU. Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University. In 2012,… READ MORE
Ferguson, race, and the disability politics of the teen brain
May 5, 2015
In an article published on Somatosphere this week, author Julie Passanante Elman discusses race, disability, and the volatile teen brain. Read an excerpt from the essay below—and be sure check out more from the website’s… READ MORE