Exploring Disability Culture Through Accounts of Disabled Innovators of Accessibility Technology.

Disability culture celebrates the diversity disability brings. Its consideration of the positive aspects of the disability experience (community, solidarity, creativity) offers a contrast to many other framings of disability. Disability culture thus has the potential to deepen understandings of accessibility and inform approaches to the design and research of accessibility technologies. To explore this potential, we begin by presenting a preliminary synthesis of disability culture for the accessibility research community, based on works of disability studies scholars and activists. We highlight cultural processes of finding community and building solidarity, valuing disabled agency and knowledge, and rejecting ableist norms. To see how these cultural aspects might inform accessibility technology design, we studied accessibility technologies made by disabled people for disabled people - interviewing disabled innovators who had created and disseminated accessibility technologies. We asked these innovators to share their stories and reflect on goals and values they imbued in their innovations. We analyzed how cultural themes of belonging, knowledge, and creativity influenced their work. Our work highlights the potential of a cultural lens in aligning accessibility technology with disabled people's values as well as unearthing new directions for inquiry for the field.