Anti-Ableist Technologies

Anti-Ableist technologies are not just accessible so that disabled people can also use them, but actively intervene into systems that exclude. Ableism is a form of structural discrimination that is built on the belief that there is a good and normal, meaning: nondisabled, way of being human. Anti-ableist technologies work in resistance to (techno)ableism as their locus of intervention lies in systems that discriminate, and as such, they engange play, subversion, irony, disabled inventiveness and solidarity.

In this talk, we start from the ground up by discussing key terms: access, technoableism, and anti-ableism. We then introduce projects by fellow disabled makers and our arts-design practice that challenge ableism, and bring forth anti-ableist approaches. One example is our project ACCESS SERVER, a prototype for an email server that anonymizes, collects and financially compensates access requests that disabled people send to cultural institutions. To engage the community hands-on, we will hand out a worksheet for our projects ACCESS POINTERS which can be folded into an arrow and used to literally point out access barriers.