Digital Accessibility Ethics is a practical guide with an urgent goal: 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. This edited collection is written by 39 authors from 10 countries and one commonwealth, the majority of whom are disabled.
The editors and authors have over 600 years of combined accessibility and disability advocacy experience. They offer and apply an ethics lens that supports disabled people's right to fully participate in every facet of digital life. It is a lens that helps organizations reduce 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 the Digital Accessibility Ethics Framework: from gaming and smart cities to hackathons, procurement, and cybersecurity. From accessibility practitioner burnout, to robots, artificial intelligence, workplace software, aerospace, design, healthcare, open source, emergency preparedness, legal ethics, publishing, and much more.
This book is for leaders in all these fields. And it is for all 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 ourselves: who are we excluding when digital accessibility is ignored? 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.
An accessible digital version of the book will be available, upon publication.
