IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 14

Book Review
problems of postwar " social adjustment " resulted in
an unequal allocation of benefits on the basis of race
and gender: while white veterans used subsidized
resources to design their independent " paraplegic
home, " nonwhite veterans had difficulty obtaining
a mortgage from lenders to buy a house in the
first place.
To further unpack Williamson's reflective insights
of this book, I appreciate her analytical claim that
" disability itself could be seen as a product of
design. " In other words, design constitutes the very
practice through which certain bodily differences
become problematized by material and technical
interventions. The book wonderfully entices the
reader to contemplate how disability is not experienced
in the same way by all people and why, as the
history unfolds, only particular aspects of disabled
peoples' experience is recognized-by the congress,
designers, and experts-while the rest is rendered
invisible or inconsequential.
As Williamson mentions in the Introduction,
besides war and disease, modern factories have
produced impairments: worn-out workers with
missing fingers, bent spines, and other injuries. Yet,
in the various access projects of the 20th century
presented in the book, such as the GI Bill, the suburb
polio community journals, Nugent's Division
of Rehabilitation-Education Services at the University
of Illinois, the Independent Living Movement at
Berkeley, and the ergonomic " Universal " designs,
the working-class laborers simply disappear from
the picture as a concerned collective. Shedding light
on this absent presence, Williamson takes pains to
reveal the intransigent American idea that the disability
becomes relevant only through a consumer
body-an individual user who has the capacity to
shop around, pay for, or make adjustments to the
different accessible designs marketed as " options. "
However, can design itself be a broader and more
inclusive project beyond the realm of the consumer
culture? Why foreground accessibility rather than
affordability? Williamson wonderfully traces the
historical moments where these questions could be
(and indeed had been) debated and, as unresolved
tensions, still haunt American people's imaginations
of access today. Rejecting taking both " disability "
and " design " as valid rubrics, Williamson strives to
open a black box that is of significance to readers
looking for " best practices " of access.
14
To begin with, the book is a must-read for contemporary
disability activists in the United States
and internationally. By presenting the highly contested
sites of accessible world-making practices
and their mixed consequences, Williamson reminds
activists of the importance of attending to the very
material and technical conditions that make design
possible-who is doing the work of design, with
what intentions, knowledge claims, and resources,
in what process, and with which stakeholders in
mind. Due to the scope of the book, Williamson limits
her research of access to the " physical " usability
of architecture, infrastructure, and products. However,
the kind of design sensibilities she masterfully
introduces can also be productive for contemporary
disability activists engaging with digital and information
technology. For example, instead of celebrating
speech recognition and automated captions as an
efficient access elixir for online meetings, we could
question what kinds of new barriers or disability they
impose on people-people with language processing
issues, people in noisy rooms, and people who
do not speak or speak with accents.
To professional designer-cum-technicians, Accessible
America vividly illustrates the ethical and political
implications of design projects to their target
users. While postwar " rehabilitation " programs rely
on an expert-driven model in which abled-bodied
gurus train students to " overcome " disability in the
" real world " through technical gadgets, such onesided
paternalistic practices belonged to the 1950s.
Disabled people, with varying degrees of technical
knowledge and motivations, can become active participants
in tinkering with objects, creating their own
access, and challenging the existing sociotechnical
arrangements that they see as unfit. It is also problematic
to hide disability as an unfavorable market label,
as is implied by Williamson's analysis of the claims
about " universal " design in the 1990s. Reading this
book will offer design practitioners a new lens to interrogate
their professional activities and their relations
with people of varying bodily experiences.
Last but not least, I read Williamson's book as a
helpful tool to better understand the uniquely American
(read: individualist consumerist) genealogies of
access. Working on the issue of a " barrier-free society "
in China as a student from the " global south, " I
am used to the narrative of learning from the United
States and its ADA model as a generalizable " best
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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