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Assistive Technology

Assistive Technology Must Address Extreme Poverty and Support Local Content

Disability is Relative: Physically and Culturally

Yasmina Sekkat

Today, I approach the issues of disability and accessibility in the case of education in developing countries from the perspective of someone who grew up in Morocco with a visual impairment. While I led a privileged lifestyle, which allowed me to attend a private school, the concept of accessibility and accommodation remained rather foreign to me for most of my schooling. The differences between various disabilities aren’t as nuanced as they are in the North American context.

The relative concepts of accessibility and accommodation

In Morocco, you were either blind or deaf, but not visually impaired or hard of hearing (except if you’re older and in that case, you either turn up the volume of the TV or radio and have people speak louder). From my experience, there were no in-between categories.

I was fortunate enough to attend an American international school, where the classes were small enough to get individual attention and the teacher’s approach more adaptable to its students needs. If I had gone through the French or Moroccan system, I would have drowned in the myriad of students and been forgotten by unconcerned teachers.

That’s not to say that the public system is void of caring teachers or successful students, but rather that the challenges that students with disabilities face in such impersonal settings make the student’s job more difficult.

I never thought of myself as disabled because I wasn’t raised to think of it that way. The words, “disability”, “accessibility” and “accommodation” didn’t really become a part of my vocabulary until I moved to North America. When I was diagnosed, my father, who was an ophthalmologist, asked one of his French colleagues what to do. The colleague told him to mainstream me. And that’s what they did. I was raised to think of all I could do, not what I couldn’t do.

So when I found out, at 17 that I couldn’t drive, as naive as it may sound, I was devastated. Until then, my visual limitations were my own to work around. This was different. While I probably knew on some level that it would never happen, I’d grown up looking forward to driving. Until that moment, no one had ever had that discussion with me because it wasn’t part of the language.

Accommodation and the stigma that goes with it

After moving to Canada for school, I discovered the wonders of accommodation and the stigma that goes with it. While you may think that accommodations would be a godsend, an opportunity to jump on, it took me a couple of years to feel comfortable asking for what I needed and not thinking, well, I don’t really need this or that, I can manage. Adapting to accommodations isn’t always as straightforward as you would think, especially if you’re not used to them.

My father once told me the story of a mother who came with her child for a consult. When he told her that her child had albinism, the mother became upset and never came back. The mother eventually came to her senses and did what was right for her child’s education, but the point is that cultural aspect of enabling kids and adults with disabilities to learn isn’t just about the physical access, it’s about the culture too.

When most think of disability, they think of it in terms of extremes. To be disabled is to be in a wheelchair or being unable to see light. They don’t think of the spectrum on which your impairment can reside. While the nuances of ability are better delineated in North America, they don’t always seem to be applied in technology.

It’s great to have accessible technology designed for learning, but if the accessibility options aren’t integrated on basic products, than who will use them? Never mind that much of the technology is unaffordable (even in Western terms), the cultural barriers won’t help the implementation. A magnifying glass is one thing, but when you get into electronic technology, I think that they need to have multiple uses. A CCTV can be very helpful, but who has that kind of money and who wants to be seen using one?

Also, there is no excuse for technology not having integrated adaptive features. And adaptive features doesn’t mean Text to Speech. In the U.S. for example only 12 percent of legal blind children use Braille, that’s down from 50 percent in the 1960s, the rest use the vision they have to interact with their world. It’s easy to say, “Well this product already exists, so use it”, but if you’re not an auditory learner, how much does it really help? Why aren’t there more options to change the contrast or font size on a screen?

So here’s a question, is it easier to change culture or change technology?

I’d vote for the technology because a lot of it already exists. Perhaps highly priced and restricted by IP, but changing culture requires bigger strategies that require more expertise than any one ICT4D organization can offer. Cultures differ from region to region and country to country, but the disabilities don’t. Whether you’re albino in Morocco, Canada or India, the challenges you will face will, for the most part be the same.

I’m not sure what research has shown about the varying cultural takes on disability, but I think it’s something that should be looked at.

Written by Yasmina Sekkat on March 1, 2010 in Assistive Technology.
Tagged: accessibility accomidation Canada Disability mainstreamed Morocco stigma Yasmina Sekkat | Trackbacks