Disability Awareness/Identity

What language should I use to talk about people with disabilities?

Refer to a person's disability only if it is relevant to the conversation. Avoid negative descriptions of a person's disability. For example, "a person who uses a wheelchair" is more appropriate than "a person confined to a wheelchair," which is both inaccurate and negative in tone; people who use wheelchairs are not “confined” to them, they are empowered by them with the gift of mobility.

Many people with disabilities prefer language that mentions the person first and then the disability. They consider, for example "A man who is blind" preferable to "a blind man.”

Cornell Tech Course on Interaction Techniques: A Promising Practice in Normalizing Disability in a Technical Course

Shiri Azenkot at Cornell Tech teaches a class on interaction techniques (e.g., text entry and scroll bars). When designing the course, she considered her constraints (time, curriculum requirements, and expectations) and how her course might compare to similar courses across institutions. Rather than including accessibility in the course with an “accessibility lecture,” where she covered everything about accessibility in one short lecture, Shiri chose to integrate disability throughout the course.

Industrial Design Studio Projects: A Promising Practice in Teaching Students the Value of Engaging Users with Disabilities

As part of a design project in a sophomore Industrial Design studio class at the Georgia Institute of Technology, students completed a project on assistive design. The objective of the project was to apply user-centered design strategies to design a product to meet a specific need for a user with a disability. Each student was required to identify potential barriers in a given scenario and then to design and fabricate a working product prototype to address the barrier.

Multisensory Engineering Experiences: A Promising Practice for Preparing Students for College

The 2016 Engineering Experience for High School Students with Visual Impairments or Blindness at North Carolina State University (NCSU) aimed to prepare students with visual impairments or blindness for college by engaging them in engineering activities, identifying assistive technology that may help them navigate college life, and introducing them to mentors.

The Center for Emergent Materials: A Promising Practice in Training Faculty to Mentor Undergraduates with Disabilities in Research

The Center for Emergent Materials at The Ohio State University works to recruit students with disabilities for their Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program through EntryPoint! and the Ohio STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) Ability Alliance (OSAA). In internships, students engage in experimental and theoretical research in physics and materials science. Part of their training is working with sophisticated lab equipment.

How can service animals be safely included in lab classes?

Students with disabilities should be allowed to bring their service animals into the lab, although they may choose not to. There are a variety of strategies that ensure that service animals can be safe in lab classes. Because service animals are well trained they tend not to pose a safety hazard to others.

To ensure a service animal and classmates are safe, you may want to consider the following issues.

Making Design Reviews Accessible to Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Participants: A Promising Practice in Engineering Education

Design reviews are a common part of engineering education practice. In design reviews, students or student teams present their work to their classmates, instructors, and sometimes a panel of users or external experts for feedback and commentary. This practice gains formative feedback from multiple perspectives on a student’s project to ultimately strengthen both the project and the student’s communication and technical skills as engineers.

How do neurodiverse and neurotypical software engineers differ in the workplace?

Research findings comparing the experiences of neurodiverse employees with neurotypical employees at a large company revealed differences between the two groups. In the study “neurodiverse employees” were defined as individuals with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and/or learning disabilities. “Neurotypical” employees were defined as individuals without one of these disabilities.

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