All Technology is Assistive Technology
From: Thoughtful Design – 09/20/2013
By: Sara Hendren
Six dispositions for designers on disability
All technology is assistive technology. Honestly – what technology are you using that’s not assistive? Your smartphone? Your eyeglasses? Headphones? And those three examples alone are assisting you in multiple registers: They’re enabling or augmenting a sensory experience, say, or providing navigational information.
“Assistive technology” implies a separate species of tools designed exclusively for those people with a rather narrow set of diagnostic “impairments” – impairments, in other words, that have been culturally designated as needing special attention, as being particularly, grossly abnormal. But are you sure your phone isn’t a crutch, as it were, for a whole lot of unexamined needs? If the metrics were expansive enough, I think the lines around what’s designated as assistive would start to get blurry pretty quickly.
Read the entire article at: https://medium.com/thoughtful-design/a8b9a581eb62