University of Maryland, Center for Information Policy and Electronic Government | pjaeger@umd.edu
[1] Vance, M. L., ed. Disabled faculty and staff in a disabling society: Multiple identities in higher education. New York: Association on Higher Education and Disability, 2007.
May + June 2009
[ 2] Jaeger, P. T., and C. A. Bowman. Understanding Disability: Inclusion, access, diversity, & civil rights. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.
I recently received an email from a doctoral candidate, in a field unrelated to my own, seeking career advice about the process of finishing a dissertation and navigating the academic job market as a person with a disability. Such a request is not that unusual in my experience, primarily because there are so few successful academics with disabilities. I recently contributed a chapter to an edited book on the unique career challenges of being an academic with a disability [1], and several of the chapter authors started a running joke about whether there were any academics with a disability who did not contribute to the book. Further, as only about 15 percent of persons with disabilities are born with them, the majority of academics with disabilities tend to be people later in their careers.
As a result, very few people with a disability go through the academic job market and tenure process. And many of those individuals, primarily for sake of survival in a career path based around perceptions of performance by one’s peers, opt to downplay their disability to the greatest extent feasible and believable. As part of this strategy, many academics with disabilities avoid researching and writing about disability to avoid marginal-ization. And others are simply steered away from studying disability by their dissertation advisors. In contrast, I have made equality of access for persons with disabilities a key part of my research, and my advisor even encouraged me do my dissertation on the topic. I have also been very open about my own disability in my scholarship when it was relevant—for example, the introduction of one of my books gives an overview of some of my personal adventures with disability discrimination during my education [ 2].
The striking part of the email I received was not the request for advice, but how the author intro-
duced himself. After mentioning his name, educational status, type of disability, and reasons for contacting me for guidance, this individual raised a hesitation—he was concerned that I might not be able to relate to his situation. His concern was not rooted in the fact that we have very different disabilities. Instead, he was concerned about the fact that he acquired his disability as an adult, whereas I was born with mine. He was focusing on whether my experiences might be relevant for him, as he anticipated that a person born with a disability and a person who acquired a disability as an adult would perceive, consider, and react to the challenges and discriminations posed by academia differently.
This point has considerable validity, not only in the context of academia, but also in many other contexts, including how one accesses information and communication technologies (ICTs). As the design of ICTs becomes more sensitive to the needs of all users, the pursuit of universal usability will need to focus on differences such as the one raised here. As has been noted many times, making ICTs accessible for persons with disabilities will go a long way toward making ICTs universally usable. While many streams of research have linked access to personal and perceptual factors, tying the insights from disability studies to factors related to age will be helpful in achieving intergenerational universal usability of ICTs.
Clearly, each individual has different skills, experiences, and challenges when it comes to using an ICT. However, careful consideration of users selected for the testing of an ICT is necessary to understand the potential barriers to use of that ICT. Testing of designs often ignores persons with disabilities. When they are included, their presence usually is limited to broad categories,
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