Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
native speakers or those who express themselves in a foreign tongue, people
of diverse racial heritages and different ethnic identities, and individuals with
those physical or intellectual or emotional anomalies labeled “disabilities.”
The democratic trend in North America for the past half-century has been
to increase the inclusiveness of participation of diverse kinds of people in
social and political practices and, by doing so, to improve equitable oppor-
tunity for them. Congress and state legislatures in the US (and courts in
Canada) are altering how people with disabilities are conceptualized, decree-
ing that individuals do not become noncitizens just because they function
atypically and prohibiting social arrangements that treat them as outcasts,
denying them opportunity. The UN Convention on the Rights of People with
Disabilities is evidence of how widely this trend has spread. As of this writing,
144 nations have become parties to the Convention.
8
What does full social participation for people with disabilities involve?
First, people's different functional modes must be equally embraced, which
means abandoning the standard of normality that privileges typical ways of
functioning over unusual ones.
9
While medical professionals aim at restoring
patients to functional modes and functional capacity typical of the human
species or a familiar subset of humans, engineers prosper professionally by
developing a wide repertoire of different functional solutions and offering their
clients whichever best suits the situation. Typicality in mode of functioning is
not necessarily a value when it comes to designing technology that performs
effectively in atypical conditions, and especially in straitened or deprived
circumstances.
What follows from this first point is the necessity of civic and commercial
organizations flexibly responding to diversely functional people rather than
serving only those with species-typical functionality. Building accessibility
into technological advances is an especially important requirement of justice.
The adverse effect of the telephone's invention on employment of people who
are deaf is a well-known example of injustice resulting from technological
change. Deaf people were evicted from the workplace by the change from a
mainly visual to a mainly aural mode of business communication.
The recent shift back from aural to visual communication, as emailing
replaced telephoning and face-to-face speech, threatened a similar result for
people who are blind. This was not a technological problem, as the develop-
ment of voice output of electronic texts followed fairly soon after the means
for sending and receiving such texts were widely marketed. There are vari-
ous accounts of how, in a relatively short time, normal business software was
made accessible so that screen reading software works well.
10
8
See the webpage of the Convention's Secretariat [
9
] for the latest information on global
activity to achieve equitable social opportunity for people with disabilities.
9
The ethical imperative that promotes this goal is discussed in [
11
].
10
For two sides of the story, see [
8
] on the American Federation of the Blind webpage,
and [
3
] on the Microsoft webpage.
