IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020 - 41

bleism (discrimination in favor of nondisabled people and against disabled
people1 ) impacts technological
imagination. Like sexism, racism,
and other types of bigotry, ableism works in insidious ways: by
shaping our expectations, it
shapes how and what we design (given these expectations), and therefore the infrastructure all around us.
And ableism shapes more than just the physical environment. It also shapes our digital and technological
imaginations - notions of who will "benefit" from the
development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the ways
that those systems are designed and implemented are a
product of how we envision the "proper" functioning of
bodies and minds.
This article is divided into three parts. The first part
explains what ableism is and how it warps our beliefs
about what it is to be disabled. This section also explains
reactions against a medicalized approach to disability,
which informs some approaches to disability design,
drawing from cases of design for disability that reflect
implicit ableism. The second part of this article turns to
ableism in technological development more broadly. It
gives overviews of several case studies illustrating ableism in technological development and tech enthusiasts'
lack of interest in listening to disabled people's ideas
about and experiences with technology and disability. I
will also unpack the concept of technoableism, a specific type of ableism around hyped and emerging technologies. This section examines the larger issues that
influence how people imagine (or neglect) disabled bodies and minds when they set out to design new technologies. The third part turns to specifics, examining news
coverage of AI and design, focusing on specific technological developments that extend ableist bias into emerging areas of design. This section discusses the
relationship between disability and aging and examines
home-based AIs aimed at an aging population, particularly the design of the interfaces between these AIs and the
humans who are supposed to use them.
The ableist attitude that disability is always a negative
and always an individual problem extends into our ideas
about and designs for the ideal future. By considering
the relationship of minds and bodies to communities
and infrastructure, and by examining how ableism and
technoableism currently affect our narratives about the
world, we can anticipate and prepare for our technological futures as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning
are sought as technologies for disability.

1
In this paper, I use identity first language (disabled person) instead of person first language (person with a disability). I identify as a disabled person.
Other authors have written about this choice. See: [8], [26], [27].

MARCH 2020

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Ableism
Many people see their disability not as a tragic event but as
an important identity or experience in their lives. Common
disability tropes - which depict disability as pitiful or
shameful, as punishment for sin or wrongdoing, as obstacles to overcome, or as laziness or fakery - obscure the
real experiences of disabled people and the sources of our
frustrations. Ableism is a preference, explicit or not, for
bodies and minds that are nondisabled and the resulting
negative attitudes toward disability and disabled people.
Ableism shapes our expectations and perceptions. These
preferences (which may be obvious or subtle) against disability and disabled people are made manifest in the built
environment and in the structural and social norms that
shape daily life. Like other forms of bigotry and bias, such
as racism, sexism, classism, and transphobia, ableism is a
form of prejudice or bias.
Ableism underpins those practices and environments
that exclude disabled people from community life (either
intentionally or through poor planning and design), that
discount first-hand accounts of the experiences of disabled people (often positioning nondisabled people as
experts about disabled people), and that marginalize, or
inhibit the contributions of, disabled people (for example,
through teaching no disability history or teaching stories
that perpetuate the notion of disabled exceptionalism).

Moving Against the Medical Model
While there are multiple models for how we might understand the interaction of bodies in the world, work in disability studies over the past thirty years has moved
against the dominant model of disability, the medical
model, which explains all disability as biological impairment. As historian Kim Nielsen [32] explains, "This framework considers disability to stem from bodily-based
defects and tends to define disabled people almost exclusively by those diagnostic defects (and supposedly nondisabled people by their lack of such defects" [32, p. xiv].
In this model, the appropriate response to disability is to
try to rehabilitate, cure, fix, or otherwise alter the individual; when cures or fixes are not available, it pushes people who are disabled to perform, to try to pass for
nondisabled.
In the medical model of disability, all impairments,
whether bodily or mental, are individual problems to be
addressed. The medical model's focus on individuals
detaches people from the larger context in which disability
is constructed and deployed, and in which it must be
understood. The medical model ignores the contexts, histories, identities, and social factors that have shaped the
category of disability, instead pushing ideas of cure and
proper performance back on individual disabled people.
As phenomenologist disability studies scholar Tanya Titchkosky [45] explains it, "[i]ndividualized conceptions of

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