Let’s explore four things

physical and sensory disabilities
cognitive disabilities
disability concepts
disability experiences

But first, why do we care about these four things?

physical and sensory disabilities, including blind and low vision, deaf and hard of hearing, motor impairments, speech impairments, and other physical disabilities
cognitive disabilities, including memory, problem solving, attention, thinking, reading, linguistic and verbal comprehension, math comprehension, visual comprehension, and digital affinity
disability concepts, including temporary, permanent, and situational limitations, and the spectrum of ability
disability experiences, including the need to watch videos and hold meetings with self-advocates and family members, videos or meetings with representatives of advocacy organizations, and videos or meetings with engineers and scientists who have worked on accessibility

Why do we care about these things? If we’re practicing user-centered design, we need to understand something about our users. Of course, it’s easier to understand your users if you understand yourself and understand the way you look at things outside of yourself.

How do we think of disability?

Do we think of situations?
Do we think of medicine?
Do we think of social constructs?

What viewpoint do we bring?

parking space with wheelchair icon painted on

Physical and sensory disabilities

This image shows an ATM keypad with braille on each key. This is a commonly provided accommodation since the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

Physical and sensory disabilities include blind and low vision, deaf and hard of hearing, motor impairments, speech impairments, and other physical disabilities. Pictured is a Braille pinpad, allowing a blind user who understands Braile to enter pin number in an ATM. Braille literacy has declined in the US, by the way. In 1960, 50% of legally blind, school-age children in the US could read Braille. In 2015, this number may have been 8.6%, according to the annual report of the American Printing House for the Blind. Wikipedia’s article on Braille reports that the reasons are varied, including constrained school budgets, technological advances, and different philosophical positions on educating blind children.

Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ATM_keypad_with_braille.jpg

Motor impairments

Cognitive disabilities

such as those giving rise to some Special Olympics events, some of whose participants are pictured at right

Cognitive disabilities include memory, problem solving, attention, thinking, reading, linguistic and verbal comprehension, math comprehension, visual comprehension, and digital affinity. Digital affinity is a new concept championed by Gregg Vanderheiden at the University of Maryland. Briefly, it posits that some people lack talent for working with digital artifacts and that these people are severely disadvantaged in a world requiring digital interactions.

Image source: https://dotorg.brightspotcdn.com/e6/03/9312b9e844d19ee8d24ac9a002c3/what-is-intellectual-disability.jpg

The Special Olympics was created in 1968 to provide sports and community to people with intellectual and physical disabilities. It is a separate organization from the Paralympics, which is held in tandem with the Olympics.

Spectrum of abilities

A matrix of sketches of people with permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities in touching, hearing, seeing, and speaking

Disability experiences

Disability experiences include the need to watch videos and hold meetings with self-advocates and family members, videos or meetings with representatives of advocacy organizations, and videos or meetings with engineers and scientists who have worked on accessibility.

Image source: https://design-justice.pubpub.org/pub/cfohnud7/release/2

We need to educate disabled designers, so that your design team includes them. The next best thing is for designers to communicate with disabled people and people who have thought a lot about disability. There’s a spectrum of communication ranging from reading to video to direct experience, and a spectrum of people who have thought about disability in different professions.

“Nothing About Us Without Us” is a commonly used phrase by disability advocates. It was first popularized in the 1990s during the disability rights movement. It was created to explain that part of disability rights is including disabled people in legislature, media, and more, to provide more representation for the disabled community.

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Understanding Disability

Let’s explore four things

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