2004 Summer Institute : Final Report

Tuesday, June 15, 2004 (evening)

To a public audience of approximately 60 at the University of Winnipeg's Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall, Alan Roulstone (University of Sunderland) described his experiences researching how technology has enabled people with disabilities in the workplace environment in the United Kingdom. His research throughout the 1990s culminated in the 1998 publication of Enabling Technology: Disabled People, Work, and New Technology (Open University Press). Roulstone described how research to do with technology and people with disabilities had, until the appearance of Enabling Technology, been conducted according to what is known as the medical model of disability. He explained that the medical model assumes that disability lies within the individual, whether it be in the body, brain, or both. The "bottom line" of this model is to correct the individual, to "fix" the disability by way of augmentative or assistive technology.

Roulstone was the first to apply a social model of disability to technology in his research. In contrast to the medical model, the social model of disability focuses on the need to change society, rather than the individual. The social model identifies the failure of mainstream society to respond to, acknowledge, accommodate, or include difference. Using the social model allowed Roulstone to identify social barriers such as negative attitudes and perceptions about disability, as well as policy barriers that people with disabilities have encountered in their experiences with enabling technologies in the workplace. Along with barriers, Roulstone highlighted the positive experiences that people with disabilities have had using enabling technology in the workplace. In closing, he emphasized the importance of acknowledging people with disabilities as experts about their own lives with respect to enabling technology and any other research related to disability.

• Alan Roultone's presentation

Response from Industry Perspective: Steve Jacobs (IDEAL Group, Inc.)

In response to Roulstone's talk, Steve Jacobs (IDEAL Group, Inc.) offered a positive perspective from industry. He suggested that approaching industry with either a social or medical model does not stimulate self-sustaining activity-rather, it addresses what he called a supply-push market force. He discussed how it is possible for industry to develop accessible technology using demand-pull market forces that are self-sustaining by creating a demand from within that would compel industry to develop more accessible, usable and useful information technologies not only for people with disabilities, but for everybody.

Jacobs argued that industry can look internationally to big emerging markets to see the crossover benefits of developing enabling technology. He offered many compelling examples of these kinds of crossover market opportunities, including:

• Screen reader technology for people with visual impairments has the mainstream market benefit of appealing to populations of people who cannot read.
• Plain language content for people with intellectual disabilities has the mainstream market benefit of significantly reducing the cost of translating content to other languages (because automated translation tools can translate plain language more accurately than complex language).
• Text captions on videos for people who are deaf have the mainstream benefit of allowing word searches of videos archived on-line.

Jacobs spoke with excitement and passion about the potential for effectively advocating to industry to make accessible, usable, and useful technology by addressing their very own "bottom line."