Race, Disability & Technology

CREATE is leading a cross-campus initiative to increase awareness of — and research in — the intersection of race, disability, and technology.

The RDT initiative provides funding for research projects that deeply engage with this intersection and explore how race and disability together impact the experiences, outcomes, technology needs, and opportunities available to people of color with disabilities.

Recent activities

March 2025 newsletter: Reports on our first round of funded research projects that support diverse secondary school classrooms, multilingual captioning, and the use of AI tools in speech-language therapy for culturally and linguistically diverse children. Also: upcoming events, accessibility news, and reading suggestions.

Inaugural newsletter: What is – and what isn’t – happening in research at the intersection of race, disability and technology. We spotlighted a community partner working specifically at that intersection, and an app to reduce misunderstandings during traffic stops. And reading suggestions. 

At a 2023 panel discussion and an earlier CREATE Accessibility Seminar, conversations referenced lectures and books that have interrogated topics such as the intersection of Race and Technology; and Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory. Out of these came initial ideas on research topics.

Research topics

The RDT initiative addresses the need for more research that explores how race and disability together impact the experiences, outcomes, technology needs, and opportunities available to people of color with disabilities.

Biased institutions

People with disabilities are over-represented in police encounters and in the prison system, and technology plays a role in this. From biased algorithms to surveillance technologies used to track people before they are even convicted, there are racial and disability based disparities in the criminal justice system. How do these systems interact? What novel systems and technologies can improve this?

Relevant Readings:

• Chicas Talk Disability 6: Police Interactions with People With Disabilities
• Understanding the policing of black, disabled bodies

Youth

Disability, combined with race, plays a troubling role in many aspects of the school experience. From the “school to prison pipeline” to impacts on higher education access, this intersection is critical to study. How can educational technologies, and technology education, both broaden their remit to address these issues and their intersection?

Relevant Readings:

• A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention
• Crippin’ Jim Crow: Disability, dis-location, and the school-to-prison pipeline” In Disability incarcerated

AI & fairness

How do ableism and race interact to impact AI ableism and biases? In what contexts is AI applied where these concerns intersect? How can innovations in algorithms and data address this? For example, speech recognition and speech based device control can be problematic from both a race and a disability perspective, failing to recognize accents of all sorts, as well as dialects. 

Relevant readings:

• Disability, Bias and AI
• Talking with Tech AAC Podcast: Kevin Williams & Lateef McLeod: Black AAC Usmer Perspectives on Racism and Disability.  YouTube at Timestamp | Transcription _{^{(UW NetID required)}}
• Designing for intersectional, interdependent accessibility

Healthcare

How do both race and disability combine to impact ML based healthcare? How can we change health technologies and experiences to address this? Digital disparities as well as access are both important to consider here. Further, recent changes in access to services such as abortion combine with disability and race to put these intersecting populations at high risk.
Relevant Readings:

• Challenging Invisibility, Making Connections: Illness, Survival, and Black Struggles in Audre Lorde’s Work _{^{(UW NetID required)}} in: “Blackness and Disability” Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions. Pages 47-74; Yun, Tae-Jung, et al
• Using SMS to provide continuous assessment and improve health outcomes for children with asthma
• ACM SIGHIT 2012; COMPOUNDED DISPARITIES: Health Equity at the Intersection of Disability, Race, and Ethnicity

Governmentality

How does racial bias and ableism impact algorithms used by the government for homeless service provision, policing, healthcare service provision and health equity, and more? How does this affect disabled people in liminal spaces, such as the use of surveillance on migrants and asylum seekers? How does the risk of disclosing disability impact immigration status among people of color, for example? What new algorithms and technologies can address this?

Relevant Reading: Financial Inequality: Disability, Race and Poverty in America

Online access, ableism and racism

Online life is becoming an increasingly important aspect of everyday experience. Yet both ableism and racism are an ongoing challenge in these spaces. How do they intersect? From image and video descriptions to avatar representations to hate speech, what does it mean to reconsider this experience in ways that question who is included?

Relevant Readings:

• Bennett et al: “It’s Complicated”: Negotiating Accessibility and (Mis)Representation in Image Descriptions of Race, Gender, and Disability, ACM CHI 2021

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Read about the CREATE Race, Disability & Technology Call for Proposals

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