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Education: Accessibility and Race

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Our Fall CREATE Accessibility Seminar focused on the intersection of Race and Accessibility. This topic was chosen both for its timeliness and also as part of CREATE’s commitment to ensure that our work is inclusive, starting with educating ourselves about the role of race in disability research and the gaps that exist in the field.

  • A search of the ACM digital library for papers that used words like “race” “disability” and “Black” turned up extremely few results. Even when papers talk about both disability and race, they are often treated separately. For example, some provide information on what percentage of a certain group is in various categories without considering their intersection. A rare exception is author Dr. Christina Harrington, who has directly spoken to this intersection and was kind enough to make a guest appearance at our seminar.

Although we know this is only the first step in our journey toward racial justice, we learned some important things along the way.

“By the end of the seminar, we were sure of one thing only: This is a topic we could not do justice to in a single quarter. There is much more to uncover here, and much work to be done.”

student Momona Yamagami

  • The research topics we found, which included work on both disability and race-related factors, were more wide-ranging than disability alone, including transportation, e-government access, hate speech, policing, surveillance, and institutionalization.
  • Guest researchers joined in to share their expertise including Dr. Christina N. Harrington, from DePaul University, on community-based approaches to reconsidering design for marginalized populations; Dr. Karin D. Martin from UW’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, a crime policy specialist whose areas of expertise are monetary sanctions, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and decision-making in the criminal justice context; and Dr. Shari Trewin, IBM Accessibility Manager and Research Lead, on bias in artificial intelligence.

There is an important and growing body of critical literature on the topic. To touch on just a few of the books we read when preparing for the seminar, see DisCrit: Critical conversations across race, class, & dis/ability (Connor et al, 2016), Disability incarcerated (Moshe et al, 2014), and Disability Visibility (Wong, 2020).

“I appreciated the opportunity to talk about the intersection of accessibility and race because although we talk a lot about accessibility in this research area, we don’t really talk about how race and its intersection with other minority identities plays a huge role in who gets access and for whom technologies are made,” said student Momona Yamagami. “By the end of the seminar, we were sure of one thing only: This is a topic we could not do justice to in a single quarter. There is much more to uncover here, and much work to be done.”

Learn more about the accessibility seminar

Selected readings

Highlights from the full reading list: