2.2 Disability Theory
A significant factor in the perception and study of disability is ableism. Simply, ableism is oppression of, and prejudice against, disabled people. Ableism operates on the assumption that one way of being is ‘normal’ and disabled people, through difference, are inferior (Trybus et al., 2019). Ableism insists that anyone existing outside the socially constructed norms of intelligence, productivity, or physical ideal is not able, and therefore inferior (Shew, 2023). Ableism operates on the assumption that able-bodied and disabled are oppositional states of being, whereas disability advocates note that disabled people may be disabled and able-bodied simultaneously depending on context, condition, and environment (Withers, 2012). Additionally, ableism ignores the reality that non-disabled people are only “temporarily able-bodied” (Ferleger & Boyd, 1979) and will eventually through age, disease, or accident experience the mismatch between design and human function that society labels as disability. Ableism can manifest in many forms whether institutional, attitudinal, or policy-based but ultimately results in ignoring, silencing, and erasing disability and disabled people (Kikabhai, 2022). A significant factor of ableist thinking is that all disabled people are dependent on others and in contrast non-disabled people are independent (Titchkosky, 2011; Withers, 2012; Freeman, 2015; Alyass, 2024). In fact, almost no one, regardless of impairment, is truly independent; as Sarah Hendren writes: “all people, over the course of their lives, traffic between times of relative independence and dependence” (Hendren, 2018, p. 140). Ableism chooses to ignore certain assistance that many people are dependent on while insisting that any other form of help is a sign of weakness. For example, many Canadians are dependent on municipalities to shovel sidewalks and clear streets of snow simply to navigate their neighbourhoods or commute to work. This form of assistance is not seen as extra or labelled as dependence. Basic assistive technology, such as eyeglasses and contact lenses, is so ubiquitous it would be outlandish to consider them a specialized form of assistance. Society is selective of what difference is acceptable and what requires an asterisk, if it is to be included at all. Disabled people are “just enough unlike others so as to secure a unique version of help, and just enough like others to be recognized as a valid form of participation” (Titchkosky, 2011, p. 45). This mindset is intimately tied to the categorization of certain types of help being labelled accommodations as discussed in section 2.1.3. Certain types of help, according to post-secondary institution, must be proven, documented, and segregated (Alyass, 2024).
Of specific interest to the accessibility of digital learning materials is the idea of technoableism. This specific brand of ableism believes that technology has the power, and the moral imperative, to eliminate disability (Shew, 2023). Technoableism often manifests as futuristic exoskeletons, wheelchairs that climb stairs, and skull implants to ‘cure’ disability. One ‘transhumanist’ argued in 2015 that “we should be repairing disabilities, not sidewalks” (Istvan, 2015). Technoableist thinking envisions a world without ramps, closed captions, or alt text by using technology to “normalize disabled people, to make us ‘overcome’ our disabilities” (Shew, 2023, p. 32). While AI-assisted image transcription and optical character recognition tools may immensely help disabled students, those advancements do not excuse the creation of inaccessible digital learning material and do not absolve responsible parties from creating and choosing inaccessible content. Technology can assist people, but technology is not a method to cure disability, an act which does not need occur in the first place. As prominent disability justice activist and scholar Eli Clare (2017) argues in Brilliant Imperfection, an ideology of curing disability “centered on eradication . . . always operates in relationship to violence” (p. 28). The violence of eradicating disability is unnecessary, unwelcome, and inhumane.
Disability studies exist in large part because “not all people, after all, need to assert their status as human” (Titchkosky, 2011, p. 22). Ableist societies and structures delineate, ever so finely, who is and isn’t to be included and excluded. Even in supposedly inclusive environments, such as post-secondary institutions, disability remains excludable and an exception. Academia has a long history of studying disability, often through extraction rather than inclusion.
2.2.1 Models of Disability
The study of disability and disabled people has been largely centred on how disability is defined. Disability was historically viewed through the charity or tragedy models in which disability was to be pitied and disabled people were considered burdens. These perceptions of disability as a problem have historically been addressed by eugenics (Withers, 2012). How society understands disability has a profound impact on the relative inclusion of disabled people.
Medical Model
The medical model of disability could be considered the first serious study of disability as the charity and tragedy models became less acceptable in the early to mid-20th century. The medical model focuses on the functional limitations imposed on individuals by the symptoms of their medical diagnosis. Essentially, the medical model examines how a person’s disability restricts their ability to complete activities and contribute to the economy; the medical model individualizes disability as a defect of a person (Titchkosky, 2011). In 1980 the World Health Organization (WHO) used the medical model to defined disability as “any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being” (p. 28). In an academic context, accommodations that require medical documentation and assume functional limitations of an individual based on diagnosis rely, at least in part, on the medical model of disability. A 2020 study of 42 Canadian universities’ accommodation policies “contain overtly medical language” (Saltes, 2020). By employing a medical model, post-secondary individualizes disability by labelling students as in need of fixing instead of the institution or curriculum and places the burden of access on students (Edwards et al., 2022). The medical model relies on significant assumptions about disabled people and places undue burden on disabled people without considering the social and environmental conditions that limit people’s access. By 2011, the WHO had updated its definition of disability to “a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which they live” (2011). This definition represents a basic version of the social model of disability.
Social Model
The social model of disability focuses on the impact of society on individuals rather than the supposed deficiency of an individual. Prejudiced expectations of normalcy contribute significantly to the marginalization of disabled people; however, the social model argues that disability is a social phenomenon produced by the intersection of bodies, identity, and societal expectations (Titchkosky, 2003; Hosking, 2008). While a medical model of disability emphasizes the individual’s inability to do things as expected, the social model posits that disability is caused by inaccessible design and that cultural expectations are an intrusion on people’s lives (Titchkosky, 2003). The social model works to undo the harms of the medical model which problematized disabled people’s existence and drew attention away from the problems of a world designed to exclude (Shew, 2023).
The social model of disability first arose from a rejection of the medical model. Nearly a decade prior to the 1980 WHO medical definition of disability, the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation in stated 1972 that:
Our Union rejects entirely any idea of medical or other experts having the right to tell us how we should live, or withholding information from us, or take decisions behind our backs . . . We already know what it feels like to be poor, isolated, segregated, done good to, stared at, and talked down to – far better than any able-bodied expert. (p. 5)
The same group wrote in 1976 that “disability is a situation, caused by social conditions” (p. 4) and “imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are isolated and excluded from full participation in society” (p. 20). The Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation asserted that “disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society” as “it is society which disables” (p. 20). The social model emphasizes the intersectionality of disability and the necessity for disabled people to have autonomy over their own lives.
The social model also argues that people are not disabled by impairments but by barriers in society and culture (Oliver, 2013). This paradigm emphasizes societal oppression as the cause of disability, not individual impairment; people are “disabled by society not by our bodies” (Altman, 2001; Shakespeare & Waston, 2001, p. 5). The social model defines impairment as the functional limitations of an individual while disability is the oppression imposed by society (Withers, 2012); because “a person with a disability only feels she is disabled when confronted with discrimination” (Pfeiffer, 2002, p. 5). Societies have preferred and designed for people with certain bodies and minds and privileged certain forms of engagement ensuring others who don’t conform to narrow definitions of normal are labelled disabled (Dolmage, 2017). The social model of disability, by removing the medical emphasis, redistributes responsibility for increasing accessibility to everyone (Trybus et al., 2019). However, the social model alone doesn’t ensure complete accessibility and inclusion. Instead, the social model changes the emphasis on where reform needs to occur (Shew, 2023). Where disability is caused by the interaction between bodies and environments, Titchkosky (2011) states there is no value in asking how to ‘fix disabled people,’ retrofitting existing spaces, or providing accommodations. Instead—as Titchkosky agues—considerations of reimagining, and redefining normalcy (and the supposed benefit of normalcy) are key to progressing toward more inclusive experiences. Against Technoableism author Ashley Shew notes there is no one normal type of brain, only a “culturally constructed fiction” that prefers to place one over another; any suggestion that there is one normal way of being is no more valid that insisting there is one normal ethnicity, gender, or culture (2023, p. 81). By focusing on society, the social model posits that “a disability may be a better display board for the weaknesses of a cultural system than it is an account of real persons” (McDermott & Varenne, 1995, p. 327).
Where the social model works to “accept and value disabled people as equal integrated members of society” (Hosking, 2008, p. 8) significant work remains to reduce the barriers that cause exclusion and disables people’s ability to participate. In our case, the cause of disability, according to the social model, is the creation and choice of inaccessible digital learning material. The digital environment—whether an eBook, learning management system, or distributed document—creates the barriers that disables students.
Minority and Legal Models
The minority model is closely related to the social model, potentially different only in the names initially applied in the United States and Great Britain, respectively (Shakespeare & Watson, 2001; Williams, 2001). The minority model rejects the medical model of disability but emphasizes the similarities between disabled people and other oppressed groups segregated based on supposed differences such as race, ethnicity, gender, or age (Hahn, 1987). The Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation noted that disabled people, along with “black, ex-prisoners, [and] unskilled workers” are the first to be laid off and “be cast on the scrap-heap when it suits the needs of the economy” (Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation, 1972, p. 2). Legal scholars cited the American Constitution’s promise of equality to extend to “blacks, women, homosexuals, children, prisoners . . . the elderly, the so-called disabled” (Ferleger & Boyd, 1979, p. 742). The legal model of disability insists that disability is a problem caused by lack of access to legal rights and that the most effective way to include disabled people is through enforced legislation and public policy (Trybus et al., 2019). The legal model is aligned with elements of the minority model in emphasizing the necessity of equal treatment of disabled people under the aegis of human rights. However, as discussed below, decades of accessibility legislation have not meaningfully improved the accessibility of digital content. The legal model may be a useful lens but does not consider the cultural and sociopolitical experience or the identity of disability that the social and minority models centers (Altman, 2001). This positionality is also explored by Indigenous scholars who consider the disproportionate diagnosing of Indigenous children as ‘disabled’ and examine disability as a colonial construct that conflicts with Indigenous conceptions of community and perpetuate colonial assimilation practices (Ineese-Nash, 2020). The social and minority models portray disability as a natural characteristic of human existence, not a defect in individuals (Dunn & Andrews, 2015). Understanding how disability is studied and perceived is an important step to understanding what works, and what has not, to tangibly improve the lives of disabled people.
Affirmative Model
The affirmative model of disability emphasizes positive social identities for disabled people. The affirmative model is in direct opposition to the tragedy and charity models of disability that claim disability is something to be pitied. The affirmative model builds on the social model’s “liberatory imperative” and efforts toward full active citizenship and equal rights (Swain & French, 2000, p. 569). Where “the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident” the affirmative model of disability argues that disability is not to be feared or eradicated, but celebrated (Kafer, 2013, p. 3). The affirmative model puts forth a vision where not only are societal, attitudinal, and structural barriers removed but differences of race, sexual preference, gender, age, or impairment are celebrated (Swain & French, 2000, p. 580). Within Canada’s cultural mosaic, disabled Canadians are a long way from being included, let alone celebrated.
Radical Model
The radical model of disability expands the social and minority models, emphasizing how the concept of disability is used as a deliberate tool of oppression. The Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (1972) noted that:
despite the creation today of such an enormous [economic] capacity, which could help overcome disability, the way this capacity is misdirected means that many physically impaired people are still unnecessarily barred from full participation in society.” (p. 1)
A.J. Withers, in the book Disability Politics and Theory (2012), outlines how the radical model argues that disability is equated to deviance and used to stigmatize and punish divergence from the norm. The radical model also galvanized the intersectionality of disability and the need for unity and common action amongst oppressed groups (Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation, 1972; Withers, 2012). The oppression and marginalization of disabled people, interlocked and overlapping with other forms of oppression, are used to obtain and maintain power through false dichotomies of superiority and inferiority (Withers, 2012). The radical model challenges conceptions of normalcy and how categorizing people, especially disabled people, allows “the supremacy of the norm” (p. 98) to ensure that “disability is not actually about those of us who are disabled; it is about those with the power to call us disabled” (p. 107). Disability is determined by cultures that privilege certain forms of communicating, moving, thinking, or being that facilitates others to be suppressed, oppressed, and not valued; “societies . . . value certain modes [of communication] more than others . . . one mode may be foregrounded and others not” (Jewitt & Kress, 2003, p. 2; Dolmage, 2017). Where a preference for one mode of access exists, many are sure to be excluded.
Critical Disability Studies
Critical disability studies became an increasingly popular lens for scholarly disability work starting in the mid-2000s (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009). Critical disability studies build on the social model of disability and centers disabled people with a focus on improving their social conditions (Hosking, 2008; Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009). Critical disability studies employ deliberate political action to transform society to include disabled people as equal, fully integrated participants (Hosking, 2008). According to an overview of critical disability theory, the approach considers the major models of disability with an added emphasis on the multidimensionality and intersectionality of disability (Knox, 2024). Critical disability theory values diversity, the right to self-determination for disabled people, the lived experience of disabled people, and a critical analysis of perceptions of normalcy and language that pervades society. Critical disability theory culminates in a call for transformative politics that facilitates and advocates for progressive changes that foster autonomy, equity, and inclusion of all (Knox, 2024). Richard F. Devlin and Dianne Pothier’s Critical Disability Theory argues that disability is a question of power, politics, and citizenship rather than individual pathology. Devlin and Pothier (2006) argue that liberalism “conceptualize[s] disability as misfortune, and privilege[s] normalcy over the abnormal” (p. 2). Critical disability theory treats disability as a relational, political, and structural phenomenon rooted in power and institutions rather than individual deficiency. Disabled people are dis-citizens systematically denied access and participation, governed through charity, and devalued through accepted norms of productivity. Devlin and Pothier argue that ableism pervades institutions and governments as liberalism treats accommodation as exception. Critical disability theory, the authors posit, requires an anti-necessitarian understanding of society (and labour) that rejects productivity as the measure of a person’s worth.
Critical disability studies, particularly in post-secondary education, focuses on criticism of accommodations as exclusionary and inequitable (Cook-Sather & Cook-Sather, 2023). Critical disability studies positions students as experts on their own experience and provides “agency in the negotiation of the production of the spaces in which they learn” (p. 10). While accommodations currently dominate higher-education’s approach to disability, critical disability emphasizes an equitable approach to access. Critical disability theory recognizes that multiple methods exist to benefit all learners and that centering discussions of access needs in place of accommodations, acknowledging students as experts, understanding positionality and power, influencing peers and institutional practices and culture to move away from ableist views, and engaging meaningfully with disabled students and their experience are essential to meaningful progress. A critical disability view of post-secondary education may appear radical, even improbable; but given the number of disabled students and the unsustainable model of academic accommodations, post-secondary education needs radical change.
2.2.2 Disability Research and Methodology
The definition of disability greatly impacts the study of disability. Modern disability studies emphasize a social model of disability to ensure the methodology of disability research “involves scrutinizing not bodily or mental impairments but the social norms that define particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations” (Minich, 2016, p. 3). Minich strongly asserts that disability studies have evolved from the medical model and moved away from the insistence of fixing disability to the real work of fixing society (2016). This is largely in response to, as Mike Oliver (1992) notes, disabled people “increasingly analys[ing] their segregation, inequality and poverty in terms of discrimination and oppression” which led disabled people to “see research as a violation of their experience, as irrelevant to their needs and as failing to improve their material circumstances and quality of life” (p. 105). This violation contributes to the existing oppression disabled people experience. Disability studies do not seek to contribute knowledge to the status quo’s management of disabled people or to enhance the power and prestige of disciplines responsible for the appropriation of disabled knowledge and the oppression of disabled people (Titchkosky, 2011).
While research about disabled people has purported to be for disabled people, critics argue that research is dominated by able-bodied researchers which produces studies that are exploitative, oppressive, and do not represent disabled people (Inckle et al., 2023). Assuming a social model of disability or approaching disability with a critical lens does not solve these issues but greatly contributes to undoing the harms of prior research. The legitimacy of disability studies research, particularly from the perspective of disabled people, relies on avoiding exploitation and unequal practices to ensure findings and outcomes directly benefit the lives of disabled people. Incorporating inclusive design into disability studies ensures disabled people are included, involved, and influence the better practices of others. Only by including and empowering those who are denied access can we improve access.
A common reprise in the disability (and other oppressed) communities is the idea of ‘nothing about us, without us.’ Disabled people do not want research done on them or decisions made for them without active participation and autonomy. The application of the phrase in the disability community was most famously codified by James I. Charlton’s 1998 work Nothing About us Without us in which he cites South African disability leaders using the phrase, who themselves credit Eastern European disability advocates. Kat Holmes (2018) includes the Latin translation “Nihil de nobis, sine nobis”, which lends credence to the origin story presented by Charlton (p. 74). Nihel de nobis, sine nobis may be a version of Nihil novi nisi commune consensus, Latin for “nothing new without the common consent” from a 16th century Polish statute (Senate of the Republic of Poland, 2024). Ensuring the inclusion of disabled people in research is essential to the ethos of ‘nothing about us without us.’ Applying inclusive design principles, particularly centering the experience of those excluded from existing designs to the creation and curation of digital learning materials, presents a powerful commitment to this ideal.
2.2.3 Access
The evolution of disability studies is an important consideration in any research involving disabled people. In the context of digital learning material, focusing on access rather than impairment ensures fixes are focused on the problems that restrict access, not individuals. That intentionality is not to downplay the identity of disabled people or the importance of their lived experience. Focusing on access ensures that inclusion is the priority of the research without becoming bogged down in empty provocations or performative philosophical debate. In The Question of Access, Tanya Titchkosky argues that access is not about technical fixes or accommodations, but a question of understanding how society and organizations decide who belongs (Titchkosky, 2011). Discussions of inclusion and accessibility often only occur when exclusion and access are already perceivable. Like how “a person with a disability only feels she is disabled when confronted with discrimination” (Pfeiffer, 2002, p. 5), “inaccessibility can be perceived when access starts to become a question” (Titchkosky, 2011, p. 62). Lack of access, as Titchkosky argues, is naturalized using language such as ‘this building wasn’t built with wheelchair users in mind’ to present exclusion as reasonable, natural, and justifiable. Access, or the justification of inaccessibility are often addressed through bureaucracy and temporary, or consumptive, access.
Accommodations are an example of consumptive access that allows people to enter a space or access a text, while transformative access questions the construct of allowing (Dolmage, 2017). By creating and choosing accessible digital learning materials, instructors could remove at least one barrier to allowing. Post-secondary institutions publicize commitments to equity and diversity but in practice treat disability as a problem that can be excluded, segregated to compliance efforts, or deferred to future-focused plans and policy timelines but excluded from everyday practice (Titchkosky, 2011). A nuanced, more refined consideration of disability focuses on a “mismatch” between people’s needs and the environment’s affordances (Holmes, 2018; Trybus et al., 2019). When the environment, in this case digital learning material, prohibits access by design, there is nothing wrong with the users. There are, however, significant issues with the material. When required readings, audio and video material, websites, digital learning platforms, library resources, and digital communications are not accessible, some are excluded.
