Digital Accessibility Ethics

Disability Inclusion in All Things Tech

de Lainey Feingold, Reginé Gilbert, Chancey Fleet, Adrian Roselli

Digital Accessibility Ethics is a practical guide with an urgent to help end tech exclusion of 1.3 billion people across the world with disabilities. The book introduces the first Digital Accessibility Ethics Framework – an action-oriented, three-part tool designed to influence, change, and disrupt patterns of exclusion with values, actions, and questions. 39 authors from 10 countries and one commonwealth, the majority of whom are disabled, apply this Framework across technologies, sectors, and countries. The editors and authors – with over 600 years of combined accessibility and disability advocacy experience -- aim to build a world that recognizes disabled people’s right to fully participate in every facet of digital life. And to offer organizations an ethics lens to help eliminate the financial, legal, privacy, safety, and other risks and harms of disability exclusion. Through stories, recommendations, strategies, and other guidance, the book looks at a wide range of topics through an ethics from gaming and smart cities to hackathons, procurement, and cybersecurity. From accessibility practitioner burnout, to robots, artificial intelligence, aerospace, design, healthcare, open source, emergency preparedness, legal ethics, publishing and much more. This book is for technologists, educators, students, marketers, policy makers and everyone who has ever posted on social media or sent an email. It encourages us to stop and ask who are we excluding by our actions? Who are we harming, what are we risking, by our decisions? As the world grows more digital, as AI is marketed everywhere, and as the number of people with disabilities continues to grow, there has never been a more urgent time to expose, explore, and act at the intersection of ethics, disability, and digital accessibility. Digital Accessibility Ethics offers a roadmap to show us the way.