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  • Making Computers Accessible: Disability Rights and Digital Technology by Elizabeth R. Petrick
  • Meryl Alper (bio)
Making Computers Accessible: Disability Rights and Digital Technology.
By Elizabeth R. Petrick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Pp. vii+196. $49.95.

At first glance, print readers of Elizabeth R. Petrick’s Making Computers Accessible: Disability Rights and Digital Technology might not notice that on the book’s cover image, the digits typing on a computer keyboard are not fingers, but toes. Individuals without hands or arms, or with limited use of those appendages due to disabilities such as cerebral palsy, may employ any number of tools to alternatively control their computers. This includes electronic pointing systems operated by eye movement, sticks held in the mouth, and touch screens. There is no one input device that everyone can use, for example, to type a book review for Technology and Culture.

While contemporary personal computers allow hardware to work rather flexibly with software, this was not always the case. Petrick traces how, over the late twenty-first century, the U.S. personal computing industry—led by multinational companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, as well as smaller firms and entrepreneurs—designed and developed products to accommodate the needs of disabled computer users. Many of these product features, such as text enlargement and text-to-speech functionality, later became commonplace in technologies regularly used by people who do not identify as disabled.

Activists, both with and without disabilities, played a critical role in this shift and, Petrick argues, an active but underexplored role in the interwoven histories of computing, disability, and U.S. civil rights history. Petrick describes how an array of technologies coalesced to make personal computers accessible. This spanned political technologies (e.g., values and ideas about bodily variation), legal technologies (e.g., accessibility legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act), and social technologies (e.g., systems for information sharing, communication, and organization).

In both the introduction and conclusion, Petrick frames the view of disability and technology held by famed scientist and transhumanist Raymond Kurzweil, inventor of the first text-to-speech reading machine for the blind, as oppositional to the view primarily held by the coalition of actors that worked from the 1970s through 1990s to make computers accessible. While Kurzweil spoke publicly and widely of disability as an individual bodily deficit in need of fixing, and technology as a means of repair, many activists, developers, and users rejected normalization of individuals with disabilities as a societal goal. Moreover, they maintained that political infrastructures and corporate philosophies—inevitably at odds with one another at times—were also necessary for the cultural participation of those with disabilities. [End Page 1043]

Chapter 1 provides an overview of disability rights legislation and personal technology use by people with disabilities in the 1960s and 1970s prior to the invention of the personal computer. Chapter 2 follows the story through the early-to-mid-1980s, when the values of universality and augmentation embedded in early personal computing cultures, particularly in the Bay Area and U.S. universities, prompted tinkering, experimentation, and later, commercialization. Chapter 3 delves into corporate accessibility-related philanthropy and efforts to distribute resources among disability and technology groups through both local on-the-ground activism and early computer-based telecommunication networks. Chapter 4 situates the technological progress described in earlier chapters within the broader disability rights movement of the late 1980s, culminating in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Chapter 5 rounds out the book by exploring how software developers considered accessibility during a period of stabilization for the personal computing industry.

A strength of Petrick’s book is the way it incorporates theoretical and conceptual insights from science and technology studies, disability studies, and cultural and media studies. In addition, through careful archival analysis, she chronicles the start of constructive, but also contradictory, alliances among activist organizations such as the Disabled Children’s Computer Group and corporate initiatives such as Apple’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation.

The conclusion would have been enhanced with more critical connection to current issues of disability rights and digital technology. Networked information, media, and communication technologies have introduced new...

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