Persons with Disabilities
and Intergenerational
Universal Usability
Paul T. Jaeger
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,
