Disability Dongle: Another Thinking Tool for the Technoskeptical Toolbox
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by Shannon R. Drabek, Erin O. Kaniewski, Gabriel J. Millane, Emily R. Ruvoli, and Natalie L. Shaheen
This post is the result of a semester of collaborative learning in an undergraduate access technology (AT) course in the department of Special Education at Illinois State University. One of the goals of the course was to employ technoskeptical critique to evaluate AT developed for blind/low-vision (BLV) people. Throughout the semester, we evaluated BLV AT using the questions in the Civics of Technology curriculum and the Disability Dongle construct (Jackson, 2019). In this post, we suggest that other social justice-oriented educators expand their technoskeptical critiques to include the question: is this technology a disability dongle?
Below we provide a brief overview of Jackson’s (2019) Disability Dongle construct, sample Disability Dongle evaluations of BLV AT, and a few suggestions for incorporating the idea of Disability Dongles into technoskeptical practice. Before digging into Disability Dongles, we share our individual and collective positionality.
Positionality
Four of us (Drabek, Kaniewski, Milane, and Ruvoli) are sighted preservice teachers of disabled students and Shaheen is a blind professor. Milane identifies as a man and Drabek, Kaniewski, Ruvoli, and Shaheen as women. Finally, all five of us are white.
We also feel it is important to note that we use identity-first language (i.e., BLV people) throughout this post because Shaheen has taught us that the BLV community prefers this language convention (see Riccobono, 2020).
Disability Dongle
Liz Jackson, a disabled designer, originally proposed the term Disability Dongle as a mocking response to the exploitative practices of numerous designers and technologists. In a tweet, Jackson defined a Disability Dongle as “A well intended elegant, yet useless solution to a problem we [disabled people] never knew we had” (2019). A few years later, Jackson and colleagues (2022) expanded on this definition further characterizing Disability Dongles as techno-utopian fairy tales that are carefully crafted to:
1. cast nondisabled designers as heroes,
2. devalue disabled knowledge, and
3. make nondisabled people feel like a disability-free future is possible.
In the 2022 piece, Jackson and colleagues offered several examples of disability dongles: smart glasses that “help” autistic children act more neurotypical by making eye contact; a stair climbing wheelchair, and augmented reality captioning glasses.
Thinking Technoskeptically Together
At the start of the semester, we read various pieces about Disability Dongles (e.g., Jackson, 2019; Jackson et al., 2022) and discussed how we could evaluate whether a piece of BLV AT was a disability dongle. Together we developed a list of 10 evaluation prompts, which were informed by what we read:
1. What “problem” is the technology trying to solve?
2. Is that a “problem” disabled people actually have?
3. Is the technology attempting to circumvent a symptom of inaccessibility or does it address inaccessibility directly?
4. How, if at all, were disabled people involved in the development of the technology? Did any disabled people serve in a leadership role? Were the disabled people compensated?
5. Is the technology actually accessible to the intended disabled audience?
6. Who is cast as the hero in the promotional materials?
7. Do the promotional materials perpetuate misinformation about disabled people?
8. Are the promotional materials accessible to disabled people?
9. Did the technology come to market?
10. Is the technology affordable, particularly to disabled people on fixed incomes?
After developing an understanding of Disability Dongles, we put our knowledge to work and evaluated one piece of BLV AT each week. We gathered information about the week’s AT to kick off each technoskeptical thinking session. Shaheen shared a promo video and other relevant background about each AT. Shaheen used the 10 prompts above, and the five original technoskeptical questions, to guide our in-class conversations.
Below, we recount, in truncated form, our in-class conversations around two quite different BLV ATs: Braigo and Aira. Braigo was a prototype Braille embosser developed by a teenager, which received a lot of press but never came to market. Conversely, Aira is a mobile app that provides remote visual interpretation and has been on the market for almost a decade.
Braigo
Shaheen: What “problem” is Braigo trying to solve?
Ruvoli: Bannerjee, the inventor, claimed that Braigo solves the problem of BLV people not being able to produce Braille on the go.
Shaheen: Is that a “problem” BLV people actually have?
Ruvoli: I’m not sure. But in the news story, Ed Ross, a developer at Intel, said that BLV people cannot check their phones or read the newspaper like sighted people can. The story implied that the best way for BLV people to access digital content is by printing it in Braille on a narrow strip of paper using Braigo.
Shaheen: Interesting. Most of the BLV people I know access their phones using a screen reader, which presents the on-screen text in either computer generated speech or digital Braille. And BLV people have been accessing the newspaper in various accessible formats via NFB Newsline since 1995.
Drabek: I think the blind person in the story, Henry Wedler, also said there wasn’t a way to produce Braille on the go.
Shaheen: I know, I caught that too. And I wonder what Wedler is talking about. I happen to know him, and I know he is knowledgeable about the AT available to BLV people. So, maybe they took his comment out of context? Or maybe he means something very specific by “on the go” and that isn’t conveyed in the news story?
Millane : So, to you, does Braigo seem like an efficient way to produce Braille on the go?
Shaheen: Not particularly. But I’m having a hard time understanding what it might mean to produce Braille more “on the go” than we already can with Braille embossers. The Braigo might be smaller than a Braille embosser, but it still requires another device to generate Braille and it can only produce a single line of text, which isn’t helpful.
Ruvoli: Seems like Braigo doesn’t solve any problems BLV people have.
Shaheen: Yeah, that is my assessment too.
Shaheen: Ok. So, how, if at all, were BLV people involved in the development of the technology?
Ruvoli: From the research I did, I learned that Bannerjee used a one person focus group, specifically Wedler, to provide feedback on Braigo.
Shaheen: Yeah, it is common for developers to view BLV people as a monolith and think it is sufficient to engage just one BLV person.
Based on our conversation in class, we concluded that Braigo is a Disability Dongle for 4 reasons: (1) it does not solve a problem that BLV people actually have, (2) diverse BLV people’s perspectives were not included in the design process, (3) the product never came to market, and (4) the promotional materials cast the sighted inventor as a hero.
Aira
Shaheen: What “problem” is Aira trying to solve?
Kaniewski: BLV people not having access to environments and materials. The promo video focused on school.
Shaheen: Right. The world (schools included) is built for the sighted majority, and thus is frequently inaccessible to BLV people. Aira is trying to bridge the gap between the frequently inaccessible world and BLV people’s access needs. That gap is a real problem BLV people have, particularly in school.
Ruvoli: But is Aira the right solution to that problem? I mean the root of the problem is inaccessible spaces and materials. Shouldn’t we fix the root cause and eliminate the gap instead of building a bridge?
Kaniewski: Yeah, if Braille, accessible digital textbooks, and tactile graphics were widely available, BLV students wouldn’t need Aira to access their schoolwork, right?
Shaheen: Right.
Drabek: Then why did the company spend all the time and money developing a bridge instead of fixing the root problem?
Shaheen: I don’t know for sure. But I do know that the social change required to fix the root problem is slow. I suspect the developers felt their time and money was better spent creating a digital bridge than engaging in years of social change.
Drabek : Speaking of money, can we talk about how much Aira costs?
Kaniewski: Yeah, it is really expensive; $26 for 15 minutes of Aira service.
Millane : That’s not affordable, at least not for college students.
Shaheen: I agree the price is steep. And that $26 rate is after Aira’s contribution. They use some of their profits to reduce the cost of the service for BLV people. So, we’ve hit the affordability question. Let’s talk about heroes. Did Aira cast themselves as the hero in the promotional video?
Ruvoli: Yeah, I think you could interpret Aira to be the hero in the video. The video ends with the student saying “because of Aira I’m able to do more.” So, maybe the narrative is that Aira is saving BLV students from a life where they would do less?
Shaheen: Excellent catch. The hero narrative in this video is much more subtle, in my opinion, than in the Braigo video we watched a few weeks ago. And, that “because of Aira I’m able to do more” statement raises another concern for me, particularly for children and young adults.
I worry about the impact Aira has on young BLV people’s self-efficacy—what they believe about their abilities. After using Aira for an extended period, young BLV people could conclude that their success in school is the result of Aira, not their unique set of skills and knowledge. I want young BLV people to know how to use technologies, Aira or otherwise, in service of their goals and to be confident that if their technologies glitch, or otherwise disappear, they have the skills and knowledge to succeed with whatever tools are at their disposal.
Kaniewski: So, do you know BLV people who use Aira?
Shaheen: Loads of them.
Millane: If a bunch of BLV people use Aira, can we call it a Disability Dongle?
We never came to a consensus about Aira’s Disability Dongle status. In class, we discussed our concerns about the cost and marketing, as well as data privacy. Those concerns had us leaning towards calling Aira a Disability Dongle. But when we learned that many BLV people use Aira we questioned ourselves. We think BLV people’s thoughts and experiences with AT should be weighed more heavily than sighted people’s, and we are all sighted (except Shaheen).
We did, however, all agree that we, as teachers, need to address the social change that the Aira developers avoided. We need to create inherently accessible environments and materials—especially at school—so BLV people’s access needs are met by design.
Classroom Applications
There are two key points at which we suggest teachers apply the Disability Dongle construct in the classroom: (1) before incorporating AT into their practice or students’ lives and (2) when assigning design or engineering challenges to students in their STEM classes. When presented with a new AT, teachers can use the Disability Dongle idea to critique how an AT might impact their disabled students’ learning experiences. Teachers could employ the questions above to determine if the AT is likely to facilitate disabled students’ learning or if it is just another harmful techno-utopian fairy tale.
Many of the Disability Dongles Jackson discussed are the result of class projects. STEM teachers can prevent the proliferation of Disability Dongles when they create design and engineering challenges for their classes by taking two actions. First, teachers can avoid design prompts that objectify disabled people and position nondisabled student designers/engineers as saviors. Second, teachers can teach their students to think technoskeptically, including the question: is this technology a disability dongle?
We enjoyed learning to think technoskeptically in our AT class and we are grateful to the Civics of Technology community for furnishing thinking tools to guide our learning. Finally, we hope other pre- and inservice teachers will consider adding the Disability Dongle thinking tool to their technoskeptical toolbox
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the four other students who were in our class: Maddie Kikke, Sierra Richardson, Max Stroesser, and McKenna Williams. Though they were unavailable to co-author this post, our peers contributed to our collective learning.
References
Jackson, L. [@elizejackson]. (2019, March 26). Disability Dongle: A well intended elegant, yet useless solution to a problem we never knew we had. Disability Dongles are [Post]. X. https://twitter.com/elizejackson/status/1110629818234818570?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1110629818234818570%7Ctwgr%5E7cc120ab91adcce97c2b6367ea0cf530008e8137%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.castac.org%2F2022%2F04%2Fdisability-dongle%2F
Jackons, L., Haagard, A., & Williams, R. (2022, April 19). Disability Dongle. Platypus: The CASTAC Blog. https://blog.castac.org/2022/04/disability-dongle/
Riccobono, M. A. (2020). Language, action, and destiny: The lived experience of the organized blind movement. National Federation of the Blind. https://nfb.org/resources/speeches-and-reports/banquet-speeches/language-action-and-destiny-lived-experience